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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

OPINION

23 February, 1999 - 00:00

The state is, of course, a good thing, and any people, they say, is doomed
without it. But if the people do not feel they are a united nation, then
their state is nothing, a ghost, a phantom, that may be abolished by a
stroke of the pen of some new "father of the people."

Ukraine lacks unity. Even the omnipresent poverty of our current misfortune,
dubbed a time of reforms, has not created the idea of the people's unity.

Instead, the rudiments of the totalitarian epoch, when Ukrainians were
stratified as "the toiling masses" and "decadent intelligentsia," "Stakhanovite
shock workers" and "enemies of the people," etc., have been supplemented
by an artificial division between East and West in our political rhetoric.

However, one need not be terribly highbrow to understand that what we
need is not strife but ideas to bring us together, capable of knitting
together a disoriented mass 52 million strong into a single whole, which
the sagacious goosenecked political scientists might call, without falsehood,
a Ukrainian community.

It would be wrong to say that nothing is being done in this respect.
But, as experience shows, the efforts of the Kyiv Dynamo soccer team and
battling brothers Klychko are not enough. What we need is action by our
official leaders, the highest of whom happily asserts that the national
idea has not worked, despite the fact that no one has ever approached it
(renaming the luggage carriers used in shuttle and bazaar trade from Kravchuk
wagons to Kuchma carts is difficult to call a national or any other kind
of idea). Others, closing ranks at rallies, teach people to chant syllable
by syllable such catchwords as har-mo-ny and u-ni-ty while simultaneously
squabbling over the tiniest corner of their party bailiwicks. Still others,
already rehearsing the role of a new fathers of their nation, state that
Ukrainian Insurgent Army veterans should be paid pensions by the German
Bundestag.

Of course, the former Communist Party elite is in good humor: they feel
cheerful, for they have provided for themselves enough to last their grandchildren.
However, the descendants of the Bolsheviks could also turn to the Vaterland,
for it is widely rumored that it was from there that a sealed train brought
to Russia their leader to make a revolution. But we digress.

It is not really clear at whom such statements are aimed. If veterans
of Stalin's NKVD secret police and the Trans-Baikal Front in Siberia, then
they and their descendants are unlikely to become the esteemed challenger's
helpers in building a Ukrainian state. And it is this kind of state that
such potential leaders aim to build, if we go by their statements. The
most active state-building element are none other than those "Westerners,"
"Galician riffraff," and "Bandera nationalists" who not so long ago hit
one passionate lady named Vitrenko with potatoes and did not begrudge her
even their eggs, while meeting teary-eyed their visiting President (it
makes no difference whom, so long as he is Ukrainian) with flags unfurled
and the traditional bread and salt. If this President also tries to string
together a couple of Ukrainian words, they can even forget to ask about
their year-long wage and salary arrears.

In the East it is more difficult. But they who live there are also Ukrainians,
and if one does not outrage their social dignity by reducing them to the
level of livestock and stray dogs, while pointing their hypocritical finger
at "independence," then the thirst for national and historic justice will
reach eastern hearts as well.

That the rehabilitation of Ukrainian insurgents is such an act need
hardly be said, for it is less than normal to fail to recognize heroism
and an error to dub the armed struggle in Western Ukraine banditry (have
you heard songs about racketeers? I never have, but there are hundreds
of songs about the UPA insurgents). For that struggle, whether somebody
likes it or not, is in the focus of the emotional energy half the nation.
Passive non-acceptance of it by the other half is only the result of the
ideological assault our people so long endured.

Also mistaken are some nationalist arch-revolutionaries bent on canceling
Victory Day on the grounds that this is an "alien" holiday, as was the
whole Second World War. There may be a grain of truth in these assessments,
but then what of the deaths and blood, heroism, and sufferings of millions
- I stress: millions - of Ukrainians who were neither imperialists nor
traitors? The point is who took advantage of all this. But speculations
that everything was in vain is an irresponsible hint which involuntarily
makes you want to take a rotten tomato in hand.

Self-respecting peoples proclaimed their national reconciliation long
ago and, having put common symbolic crosses over the graves of their Nationalists
and Republicans in Spain along with those who fell fighting for the Home
Army and People's Army in Poland, channeled all their creative energy into
boosting their own living standards. True, Ukraine also found a place at
a cemetery for German invaders, where gray-haired Fritzes and Hanses lay
flowers to their comrades-in-arms almost side-by-side with Great Patriotic
War veterans. At the same time, the flame of protracted Ukrainian strife
is artificially being kept burning by adding the fuel of brand new malice
and old lies.

The problem is that no one seems to care. For the ruling elite, UPA
(Ukrainian Insurgent Army) is something incomprehensible, if not inimical,
for this abbreviation doesn't look like IMF or APC (agro-industrial complex).
For the Communists (except for Borys Oliynyk) it is also as plain as day.
And it is also not urgent for national democrats, for, against the backdrop
of UPA's noble quest, their actions look like belly-rubbing at the trough.

This is why it was so important which of the most well-known Ukrainian
politicians is able at last to raise his voice to end the ruinous strife
that gnaws away at our society's spirit and body and to raise the issue
of restoring historic justice. It would be an act worthy of not simply
a man elbowing his way to the political Olympus but a leader capable of
cementing the electorate into a nation.

And a leader like this has been found. It matters not that he is a former
general of the KGB and not, say, a former prisoner of conscience. This
makes still more weighty his statement on the necessity to rehabilitate
UPA combatants. This is a strong step of a presidential candidate, a step
that shows not only his courage but also his far-sightedness, that he understands
what understood my artillerist grandfather, a participant in defense of
the Caucasus, talking about UPA militants: "They went through more than
we did..." Yet no one seems able to knock this into the wooden heads of
some of our politicians.

This is a highly promising step in the direction, if you like, of understanding
the nation's collective ego's need for positive values. And from it can
flow actions, not to satisfy everyone instantly, but to at least bring
about the beginning of the end of our epidemic of mutual distrust and distaste.

Yes, people need positive values. They need faith in themselves. They
need victories, including those at the elections.

By Pavlo VOLVACH,

 Zaporizhzhia

 

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