The Joys of Life

Life has its vicissitudes, and this writer, when being trained as a historian of East Europe and Ukraine, never dreamed that he would live here, speak a language other than English at home with his wife, teach political science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, or become involved in journalism. Yet, in the last decade these are the things that have come to define my life, and I have to admit that fate (more precisely, God) has been very good to me.

Even before coming here, when it became clear that Ukraine was in the process of becoming independent, I shocked some people in the emigration when I said at one conference that the Ukrainian cause they had so long fought for was dead. It had been supplanted by a real country, which would have a host of problems to face. Nobody quite understood the precise nature of those problems at the time, but it was already obvious that the state and society here would have to face problems that would in turn create a situation fundamentally different from what anyone could have expected at the time. I have written about those problems more than once, but in the decade I have lived here I have seen tremendous changes, some for the better, and some not. I still remember the gray Khreshchatyk of the Soviet era, when it seemed like they rolled up the sidewalks at sunset, the morning spectacle of the changing of the guard at the former Lenin Museum in all its goose-stepping glory, and the Brobdingnagian Lenin glowering down on Lilliputian workers as he dominated what was then October Revolution Square. Now this has all changed: Khreshchatyk has been completely redone, lit by neon advertising signs, spiced with stores and diversions most locals can ill afford, and open to those with the energy and money to take advantage of it until the wee hours. The Lenin Museum has become the Ukrainian House. One can stop off for a bite at McDonald’s, after one strolls past the redesigned Independence Square where Lenin and his proletarian masses have been replaced by a patina-green woman clad in something made to look like gold. When I teach my students, I often have to explain to them things about Leninism and Soviet realities that their parents took for granted. The young simply do not know the world their parents grew up in, and perhaps that in itself is a sign of progress. There are things that they have to know in order to understand the problems inherited from a world that is truly gone with the wind, but they now have the opportunity of trying to understand it without being distorted by it.

Progress is, of course, a relative concept, and nowhere is this truer than in contemporary Ukraine, a country still struggling to find its feet, but which seems to be making its way slowly but surely.

There is no time I feel this more intensely than with my students. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy had what ironically turned out to be the good fortune of being closed down in the early nineteenth century and revived after independence. This meant it could do without the dead weight of such ideologically driven subjects as scientific communism and political economy, which still cripple the intellectual processes in so many other universities from the Soviet period where the Department of Political Science was founded “on the basis of” the Department of Scientific Communism and staffed with many of the same people who all too often continue to do things as closely as possible to the way they always did. Having put two step-daughters through other universities, I can contrast and compare the cronyism, favoritism, and outright corruption that I have often seen elsewhere with what I see where I have been privileged to teach. My students are indeed the best and the brightest, some merely ambitious, but many truly idealistic and determined to make this country a better place for themselves and their posterity. My colleagues and I try our best to arm them for the uphill struggle they will inevitably face with the closest we can come, given the current realities here, to a Western liberal arts education. And where I see what some of my former students are now doing, I have no doubt see that we are succeeding. Even if pride is one of the seven deadly sins, I cannot help it when I see what they do at least in part armed with what we who have taught them have been able to give them.

I am hard put to say what has given me more joy, the students I teach or this newspaper, which provides me an intellectual home shared with some of the best journalists and minds in Ukraine. It has given me friends for life and colleagues I deeply respect. It has given me a forum where I can reach thousands every week and through which I can also play my own part in trying to make things better by attempting to add my own understanding from what at times seems a different planet to that of those who understand things I probably never will, if only because I was not born here. Everyone sees the problems and limitations of this nation, which often seems to be groping half blindly toward what remains for most an incompletely understood Europe, as unknown and alluring as Khvyliovy’s beautiful commune on the far side of the hill. Yet we all do what we can. What we at this newspaper are doing is as a rule very good and from time to time truly outstanding. Again, I hope the Good Lord will forgive me my pride.

Actually, I can say without exaggeration that I owe this newspaper my life. Last winter I went through a series of operations and lay for a month in intensive care. Here they call it reanimation, which tends to suggest that anyone brought there is already dead and if anybody comes out other than feet first, it constitutes a major victory. In any case, my wife likes to remind me that thanks to my coworkers I have no American blood left: it is now about 60% Ukrainian, 20% Russian, and 20% Jewish. I must admit that trying to be an intellectual without at least some Jewish blood has always been something of a handicap, one that I have now been able to overcome.

My greatest joy, of course, remains my Ukrainian wife, but on this topic I can only defer to the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, who took his wife’s maiden name as his own middle name and then bequeathed it to their son, Jan Garrigue Masaryk. “I love my wife very much,” he once said, “but I don’t make a big deal out of it in public.”