Visits to Ukraine: a sign of the times (02/20/05)

Visits to Ukraine: a sign of the times

Mary V. Beck, a native of Ford City, Pa., spent her high school years studying in western Ukraine (1921-1925), where her immigrant parents had sent her at age 13 to acquire knowledge of her ancestral homeland.

Dr. Beck did not return to Ukraine until 1963. While on an official visit to Germany and Austria as a councilwoman of Detroit, at the invitation of the mayors of Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen and Munich, as well as Vienna, she took the opportunity to also visit Kyiv, which had been off bounds to her as a former student in Ukraine, as well as Lviv.

In Kyiv, she was not accorded an official welcome but did meet with and was interviewed by representatives of the Association for Cultural Relations with Ukrainians Abroad, known as the Ukraina Society. In Lviv, meetings were arranged with members of the Lviv City Council, as well as with a group of writers, composers and academics from Ivan Franko State University.

As a sign of the times, her visit to Ukraine was marked to a large degree by official restrictions and negative press; the latter, best illustrated by a much-publicized incident, whereby the handful of soil that she took from the burial mound of Ukrainian's greatest poet and national bard, Taras Shevchenko, as a sacred memento to be brought back to the United States, was declared a "theft," or criminal act, in Visti z Ukrainy (News from Ukraine), a weekly newspaper published by the aforementioned, Association for Cultural Relations with Ukrainians Abroad, which in the 1960s was known for its propagandistic articles as well as diatribes against so-called Ukrainian "bourgeois nationalists" in the West, as well as in the Russian publication Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette). The earth from the mound was later incorporated into the cornerstone of the Taras Shevchenko monument that was unveiled in Washington in 1964.

Upon leaving Soviet Ukraine, en route to the United States, Dr. Beck addressed the Ukrainian community in Vienna in what constituted the first chance to speak out openly and freely of her experiences. As part of her address, she noted frankly that "there is neither freedom nor independence in Ukraine."

Upon returning to the United States, Dr. Beck spoke out about her experiences and impressions, making front page news not only in the Ukrainian diaspora but in the U.S. press. Dr. Beck became a much sought after speaker, with numerous engagements in North America.

A further reverberation of her outspokenness was that Ukrainian tourists from the West who subsequently traveled in Ukraine would find themselves confronted with clippings of Dr. Beck's various speeches, presented in encounters by people from the Ukraina Society who made a point of making their displeasure known.

Throughout her career, Dr. Beck spoke out about the terror and brutality of the Soviet regime in Ukraine during the Stalinist years, the Famine-Genocide of 1933, and such issues as political and cultural repression amid a general policy of Russification.

- Ika Koznarska Casanova

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