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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Lukyanenko Gives Test

26 June, 1999 - 00:00

After our recent meeting Levko Lukyanenko told me something
very interesting. He had been invited by former Russian fellow prison inmates
to visit Perm in the Ural Mountains. He saw that they had set up a museum
commemorating the victims of totalitarianism. Remarkably, a large section
was dedicated to Ukrainian dissidents and prisoners of conscience.

Unfortunately, these people remain spiritual dissidents in today's Ukraine.
Have you ever seen Levko Lukyanenko, this genuine intellectual and philosopher,
on any of Ukraine's television channels? Is the fact that this living legend
is never given air time not a real test of the Ukrainian regime's soundness?
Precisely because of such attitudes toward people rating places in the
nation's ethical pantheon during their lifetime one can only assume that
the regime in Ukraine is not Ukrainian, and not by any ethnicity, but simply
because it is not aimed at providing normal living conditions for Ukraine's
people.

In Moscow - which many of our patriots refer to as "imperial," sometimes
driven by emotion and other times with reason - a monument to Andrei Sakharov
was unveiled recently. And we all know what it cost the Crimean Tatars
to erect a monument to General Petro Hryhorenko.

Russia is now, albeit with great effort, ridding itself of many vestiges
of the past. By a whim of fate Ukraine has turned into the last bulwark
of all the worst things inherited from the Soviet Union and empire. However,
this year offers us a crucial opportunity to finally turn the historical
vector of Ukraine's development in the direction leading to a better future.
For this reason it is especially important for us to hear those whom 25
years in Soviet prison camps could not break and who have not been deceived
by the past several years of false freedom.

Look up the Persona column for the Lukyanenko interview.

 

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