Ukraine’s Best Friends

In late August in the beautiful city of Chernivtsi the next regular International Congress of Ukrainian Studies will take place. I personally always look forward to this event taking place every three years, but it has a deeper meaning for Ukraine and Ukrainians as a nation. People who dedicate their careers to studying a country tend to have an affection for it; why else spend one’s life like that? The foreign members of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies are overwhelmingly persons of Ukrainian descent who were either born or found themselves abroad. Until independence, most could not come here, but they found a way to serve a land that had almost faded into the mists of memory by studying its history, literature, language, folklore, or any of the other many aspects of its life, long banned under the Soviet regime as bourgeois nationalism, narrow ethnographism, or some other suitable epithet. In general, those of us who studied East European history, whether of Poland or Bulgaria, took it as a special trust. We knew not when the day would come, but we all knew that there would be a day when our work in whatever language would be able to play a role in helping those, from whom their sense of self had been or was being taken, to decide for themselves who they were, where they came from, and where they were going.

My colleagues in Ukrainian studies, like the Ukrainian diaspora as a whole, try to understand why Ukraine could not follow the path of Poland, Hungary, or the Czech Republic into Europe and the West. Are The Ukrainians any worse than their neighbors?

My colleagues struggle with this question and I with them. We will talk and learn from each other, but I already know what I will say: prewar Soviet Ukraine went through such a discontinuity in its historical development that the young lions of the 1920s executed Renaissance who thought they were building a new world had far more to work with than the former dissidents who thought they had won something in 1991. As Ukraine prepares to celebrate the jubilee of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky and by extension other architects of the 1972 General Pogrom of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, one can only wonder about people like me and my colleagues. We saved what we could and now find it difficult to figure out for whom.