Which National Colors Shall Fly in Ukraine?

James Mace's article, "A Land in Blood" (The Day, No. 42), aroused in me not only memories of one of the most dramatic pages of our national history but also personal reminiscences and feelings.

When the author was director of a US hybrid Commission on the Ukraine Famine, I was already working as a TASS correspondent in New York. We were both in America but on different sides.

On an American assignment lasting many years, I traveled from Kyiv as the first RATAU correspondent at the UN. In Moscow this status was eliminated, but the Ukrainian SSR Embassy to the United Nations gave to me a substantial part of its work. The campaign to uncover the genocide by the Stalinist regime against the Ukrainian peasantry in 1932-33, undertaken by the Ukrainian Diaspora, brought forth fear and loathing in Kyiv. "Trade union" meetings were continuously accompanied by announcements that "we must regularly prepare analyses and discoveries on the so-called Ukrainian famine." And then the task was always assigned me.

This put me in a morally sensitive position. How was I to act and still preserve my conscience and self-respect? Taking into consideration the intellectual level of the puppet Ukrainian SSR Embassy, it is not difficult to understand that there was little understanding of what analysis is. The only thing the representatives of the Party nomenklatura elite in America were interested in was there personal comfort and that each day all the necessary papers were signed. I also sent my daily teletypes to Kyiv, a flood of articles, commentaries, and interviews from Radio Liberty or Voice of America without any of my own commentary  - I suspect more epistolary output than the rest of the Ukrainian Embassy put together.

At that time there was a total taboo on the topic of the famine in Kyiv. Such information was always accompanied by the inscription "for official use" and was restricted to the highest officials of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

I recall how in the materials I repeatedly sent to Kyiv there was always the name of James Mace. He seemed to me a respectable old man, and I was absolutely amazed when I recently met him in the editorial offices of The Day, seeing an emotional and rather young workaholic.

Now the American historian James Mace has raised what is for Ukrainians the most relevant and painful question. Do the Ukrainians, whom the great Ivan Franko characterized as spineless, have a historical memory? Are they capable of pondering the heavy legacy of the past, make use of their last historical chance, and cut through to find their own national and human pride? Can they help the world to know and respect them?

Of course, it is simpler to pretend to be offended and blame Europe, of which we are the geographical center, for the fact that they do not want to admit us even as an associate member of the European Union, or, to put it simpler, into the civilized world, or to vent our ire at wealthy America that it does not want to jealously embrace Ukraine, the world's most beautiful beggar.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington is off the beaten track, far from embassy row, where even Chad has its place. This is not difficult to explain: the Soviet empire fell apart much later than the French, British, or Portuguese ones, and independent Ukraine came into the world some decades later, weaker, and more less capable. To say that the flag of independent Ukraine flies in Washington would be an exaggeration. After New York I worked for a long time as ITAR-TASS correspondent in the US capital and saw a strange sight. Each morning, taking my grandson to school, I saw on the embassy a gray flag. Had it faded from the Washington rain, or had no one simply ever taken care of it? If I had not already known what the national colors of Ukraine were, I would never have guessed from that flag that they were blue and yellow.

Among the security personnel were persons who could not for the life of them speak Ukrainian. Their mixtures of Russian and Ukrainian were comical (cherhovy dezhurny slukhayet'). One friend from the embassy told me about this, and at first I thought he was joking. Then I went there, and saw that he had quoted her word for word.

On the level of most Ukrainian diplomats' knowledge of English and of America there is little to say, or, for that matter, of elementary human worth. Russian Ambassador to America Lukin and the other CIS ambassadors have a weekly get-together in the Russian Embassy. On that day there is a line, the plurality of which is made up of Ukrainian diplomats bringing cheap Stolychna vodka and hearty laughter to their Russian colleagues and the latter's staff. True, their impoverished, barely alive state paid for their gas, so they could afford to waste it.

Every Wednesday our boys were always in their places in the Russian Embassy and with extraordinary powers of observation. However, I seldom saw them where Ukraine's vital interests lay: in Congress, where the important questions are decided legislatively, or in the think tanks, where American public opinion is shaped. If they appeared there, it was only as spectators, sitting sadly on the sidelines.

In Washington it suffices to rub shoulders with a Baltic diplomat and immediately be inundated you with well-argued answers. By their accent and manners, it is clear that they are representatives of the Diaspora. Our diplomats have neither the ability nor desire to defend the interests of the state they represent. Independent democratic Ukraine operates according to the old Soviet principle: with rare exceptions diplomats are selected, not for their personal abilities or professional level, but according to whom they belong to for a few years of shopping and comfortable life.

The Ukrainian-American community did a great deal financially and organizationally to assist Ukraine's inexperienced diplomacy to find its feet, but its efforts so far seem in vain. Its deep disillusionment, which supplanted the euphoria of independence, is wholly understandable. I can also count myself a member of the Diaspora, for I also lived for twenty years away from Ukraine, mainly in the US and Russia. Today's Ukraine appears to me a land of puffed up bureaucrats, hungry beggars, and homeless children.

Pavlo Movchan has rightly said that what we have is but a "universal system of stage props under the conditional name of Ukraine." Only the red flag has been changed for a blue and yellow one. And we know not whether even that is permanent. What future awaits Ukraine? In eight years it has still not found its place in the world or its path of development. "Other peoples also have their complicated histories, but one must admit that in the twentieth century Ukraine went through real hell, which can be called genocide," wrote James Mace in his article. "But other peoples try to understand what happened to them." And what of us?

Thanks to the efforts of the Ukrainian Diaspora in the United States, the Famine became known in the West. True, not as much as the tragedy of the Holocaust, but American President Bill Clinton recently issued a proclamation to the American people about our own dramatic tragedy.

Meanwhile, in independent Ukraine little is done officially to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Holodomor. Today the social background is against it: complete impoverishment of the people in the absence of real socioeconomic reforms and building a state.

James Mace's article can be taken as a lesson for Ukraine's future or as a test of how Ukrainians will at last become themselves. The world knows more than one fighter for Ukraine's rights: Robert Conquest, author of The Harvest of Despair which first showed the West the criminal nature of the Communist regime in Ukraine, Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's sole influential and unwavering friend of independent Ukraine, joined by James Mace, who has dedicated nearly twenty years to the Ukrainian cause and now lives and works in Kyiv. By an irony of fate, not a drop of Ukrainian blood runs through his veins.