A Chronicle of the Ukrainian Diaspora
September 15 will mark the 110th anniversary of the first issue of Svoboda (Freedom), by far the oldest Ukrainian newspaper still being published in the world. Now being read not only in the US but all over the word, it has been coming out regularly for 110 years. Founded and first edited by emigrant priest Hryhory Hrushka, Svoboda is now being published by the Ukrainian National Association.
The newspaper’s logo quoted Taras Shevchenko’s words, “Learn, my brothers...” Father Hrushka called on emigrant readers to be united, self- respecting, and nationally conscious in their new land, and not to forget their own heritage and the brothers and sisters persecuted in the old land. He wrote in the first issue on September 15, 1893:
“Truth alone can give us freedom. It is indisputable that freedom can be won only by people who have found the truth, become aware of their dignity and rights given by God and nature, who shaken off the yoke of spiritual ignorance and corporeal oppression, and thus become the free masters of their own land and actions, and have boosted their power, knowledge and wealth.”
These words have remained the newspaper’s motto for the past 110 years.
The newspaper was one of the very few media outlets that focused on the manmade famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, on the UPA’s liberation war in the 1940s-50s, and on Ukrainian dissidents in the 1960s and seventies. Svoboda ’s pages carried the works of the 1960s generation inspired by the Khrushchev thaw as well as reports on the arrests and internal exile of many of them. In the past fifteen years, the newspaper has always noted Ukraine’s every step towards self-sufficiency and independent development. That wherever they live Ukrainians carry Ukraine in their hearts is to a large extent the result of Svoboda ’s efforts.
All through the years of its existence, the publication has never betrayed the principle that Ukrainians have the right to independence, the principle editor Hrushka laid down on September 15, 1893: “We, Ruthenians, must ask ourselves why Germans, Frenchmen, and Americans are free and affluent nations, while we, poverty-stricken in a rich and fertile land, bow to alien gods, sacrifice our bloody sweat and labor to a foreign master, and starve to death.”
Among thousands of the Svoboda contributors was Ivan Franko as a political and fiction writer. The newspaper printed his original articles and short stories because many readers were not in a position to buy his books. Svoboda’s 110-year experience can also be viewed as a chronicle of the Ukrainian diaspora, especially in the United States.
I want to add my personal greetings and congratulations to my many friends at the Ukrainian diaspora’s newspaper of record. Svoboda, its English language counterpart, The Ukrainian Weekly, and the Ukrainian National Association, which sponsors them both, have together done more than any other institution to help Ukraine and to provide a sterling example to this damaged nation of what can be done when people organize themselves for the cause of this land of ours that is still not quite our own.
