The Knight of Truth About Ukraine

Last Thursday, our esteemed colleague, pioneering researcher of the Holodomor Manmade Famine, prominent scholar and publicist Prof. James Mace was laid to rest at the Baikove Cemetery. Hours before that, his colleagues and friends — journalists, historians, public figures, and writers — gathered for the civil funeral ceremony at the Teacher’s House in Kyiv to pay their last respects. Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma, Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk, and the Foreign Ministry offered their condolences to the family and friends of Prof. James Mace.

Poet Lina Kostenko recalled one of James Mace’s first televised appearances in Ukraine, when, asked what key should be used for Ukraine’s history, he said, “The key to Ukraine’s history is a key to Pandora’s box.” She feels that James Mace was looking for this key to Pandora’s box not to open it, for, to quote Lina Kostenko, “all the misfortunes have been already released onto Ukraine,” but to drive all those misfortunes back into the box and lock them tight. Leader of the Our Ukraine bloc Viktor Yushchenko said that James Mace researched one of the most tragic pages of Ukraine’s history, “because he understood clearly that history is in fact what is stored in our memory”.

During the civil funeral ceremony, speakers stressed the need to continue Prof. James Mace’s research of the Holodomor and, to quote Stanislav Kulchytsky, “make the international community finally face the obvious facts.” Proposals have been voiced to name the future Holodomor Research Center in the honor of James Mace and publish in a separate book his articles carried by The Day and translated in The Day’s Ukrainian and Russian issues. As it became known later, the Ukrainian Federation of America has set up the James Mace Memorial Fund to study Ukrainian Holodomor in 1932-33. Yet, to quote Politychna Dumka [Political thought] Editor-in-Chief Volodymyr Polokhalo, we will remember James not only for his scholarly efforts but also for his indefatigable and energetic aspiration to do good to our country, and not only to the country in general but to its every individual; “for him there were no little Ukrainians; for him all were normal and civilized Ukrainians in the upper case.” To quote Kyiv-Mohyla Academy National University President Vyacheslav Briukhovetsky, “he felt he was the kind of Ukrainian who might still appear in Ukraine someday.” Mr. Briukhovetsky recalled that James was the first foreigner to come to the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in the early 1990s and say, “I would like to work here.” “An American wearing first jeans and later shorts was wandering around among the buildings of the then Higher Naval Political Academy... This was a true shock for the world that surrounded us at the time.” And if this world has changed it is, among other, due to James Mace.

Meanwhile, one of Ukraine’s first dissidents, Yevhen Sverstiuk, said the following about James: “We are paying our last respects to a beloved foreigner, who came to be known here as the Knight of Ukraine, meaning the Knight of Truth about Ukraine... He Settled in Ukraine at a time when so many of her children were fleeing this country... I think he had been driven here by his natural inclination to tell and research the truth, and this truth has made him a great man.” As Yevhen Sverstiuk put it, Ukrainians are yet to fully realize the extent of their loss. “And this loss will gradually sink in, because Mace was one of Ukraine’s best representatives. He was the voice of Ukraine’s history in the world.”

All one can add is that he was the voice of not Ukraine’s history alone but also of its present both inside Ukraine and out. His voice will remain with us forever, for the words of James Mace, which he has left in his books, articles, and notes of his Kyiv-Mohyla Academy students, are the best monument to the remarkable author he had been.