One can understand its special features by visiting the Leaders Among Us photo exhibition that opened April 18 in Kyiv’s L-Art Gallery

The pictures made by well-know photographers Oleksandr Hliadielov and Vyacheslav Mayevsky portray nine of our compatriots, while the terse texts accompanying the exhibits explain the logic of the selection: the photo exhibition is dedicated to people who know what to do with freedom, which means to make a choice and assume personal responsibility for it. Their life, like that of all of us, has been clearly divided into the periods before and after independence. All those depicted admit they would have never been able to do in the USSR what they have devoted their lives to now. For example, former actress Larysa Vysotska has now founded and runs the Khmelnytsky rehabilitation center for drug abusers; composer Karmella Tsepkolenko, who used to write avant-garde musical pieces only for her own consumption, has now organized in Odesa the Two Days and Two Nights international festival of new music; sports school principal Borys Lytvak has founded a rehabilitation center for physically handicapped children, and former school teacher Oleksandr Chumakov is now a Roman Catholic priest who has organized his Serene House, a shelter for homeless children. As we know, the American dream is the concept of an equal- opportunity society in which even a carpenter can become president. The Ukrainian dream is something fundamentally different: it is not accidental that the exhibition includes not a single photo of a politician, a laurel-crowned dignitary, or a self-styled prophet. No sky-high heroes, only everyday people of our time, who really are changing our life for the better. The exhibition has been arranged as part of a project called Changed Faces Facing the Changes. The purpose is to explain the positive experience of Ukrainian independence both to Ukrainians themselves, disappointed with their own abilities (it is planned to show the exhibition throughout Ukraine), and to foreigners who so far associate our state with such words as Chornobyl, corruption, poverty, and crime.