“Plastun” tournament

Providing Ukrainian youth with a patriotic sports upbringing is a very acute and high-priority problem. The sad fact is that the state has shifted almost the entire responsibility to grade schools, ignoring a number of other options that would foster the younger generation’s physical level and world perception. This is also rather flimsily reflected in documents issued by the Ministry for Youth Policy. It seems that a number of governmental agencies don’t have the time to get around to this problem, although there is much talk about the introduction of national military-sports games, contests, expeditions, and other activities. These projects are only infrequently carried out on the initiative of civic organizations, mostly in the western regions of Ukraine, where echoes of the popular Plast movement of the 1920s-1930s still resonate. Ironically, Ukrainian youth tempered its national self-identification in emigration, in Plast camps that mushroomed during summer vacations in Canada, US, Germany, France, Belgium.

Hence the intense interest surrounding the “Plastun” Tournament of Honor that took place recently on the grounds of the Kyiv Circus. This youth competition was organized by the “Plastun” Physical Culture Development Fund whose goal is to revive the glorious Ukrainian patriotic sports traditions and restore old Cossack principles to education. After all, scouts, known as plastuny, were members of elite units of Cossack troops whose history is rooted in the distant past, the age of the Kyivan Rus’ princes. Plastuny were not only hereditary warriors, they were also carriers of the national traditions of military honor, valor, and skill. The body of acquired plastun skills is known historically as vedy; this knowledge made one skilled in hand-to-hand combat and a top-notch scout. The glory of the Cossack scouts spread from the Sich beyond the Danube to the Black Sea Cossack host of the Kuban River region. One of them, Petro Koshka from Podillia, gained renown in the Crimean War. The Russo-Japanese war and later World War I was a real test of the Plast movement. Perhaps the stories that were handed down in the family of Mykhailo Zaslavsky, the founder of the Plast Fund, whose grandfather was a plastun with a battalion during the First World War, spurred him to hold this contest. This event is the first step toward reviving the glorious traditions of the young and valiant Cossacks. The general meeting of the “Plastun” Physical Culture Development Fund passed a decision to elect President Yushchenko as its honorary president.