COMMENTARY: International Congress of Ukrainian Studies held against the odds (09/29/96)

COMMENTARY

International Congress of Ukrainian Studies held against the odds

by Yaroslav Bilinsky

PART I

KHARKIV - For four days, August 26-29, the third International Congress of Ukrainian Studies, met in the capital of Slobidsky Kray, which is also the ex-capital of the Ukrainian SSR (1920-1934).

"Kharkiv Has Drawn Scholars from Australia to Japan," proclaimed the first-page headline in the regional newspaper Slobidsky Kray of August 29.

Citing Prof. Iaroslav Isaievych, president of the International Association of Ukrainian Studies and director of the Lviv-based Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the paper proudly noted that over 600 scholars from 24 countries had participated in the congress.

(The reference to Australia and Japan in the headline is an elegant Ukrainian rendering of "A to Z," for in the Ukrainian alphabet "Avstraliya" was the first foreign country, and "Yaponiya" or Japan, the last.) Solid scholarship apart, it was a public event to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Ukrainian independence in almost completely Russian-speaking Kharkiv.

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As anyone who has put together a scholarly gathering knows, there is an organizational underside to all the long speeches and papers. Didn't Napoleon say that an army marches on its stomach? What follows is an unofficial and completely unauthorized account by an active participant (paper-giver), who had no organizational responsibilities. Readers of The Ukrainian Weekly may accept it with the proverbial grain of salt, for I have tried to bring out things that are of broader than purely academic interest. Yes, in the end the congress was a great success; but initially the odds were stacked heavily against it. And some of the shadows ought not to have been there at all, or should have been lightened, immediately.

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As requested by the extremely efficient and genuinely helpful Dr. Zenovia Sochor, associate professor of government at Clark University and one of the two scholarly (i.e., executive) secretaries of the IAUS, this writer submitted a paper proposal for the Kharkiv Congress by September 30, 1995, which was accepted by MAU's President Isaievych on December 20, 1995.

Unpleasantness No. 1 followed soon thereafter. In the early spring of 1996, just after I had obtained a commitment of funds from my university, the University of Delaware, a "whispering campaign" began in Ukraine; it reached my colleagues and me via the State of Illinois and a knowledgeable librarian of Congress. Rumor No. 1 had it that the Congress had been cancelled altogether for lack of funds in Kyiv and lack of political support in the Kharkiv city and oblast administrations. Rumor No. 2 said that the congress would be held - not in Kharkiv, but in Kyiv.

Unpleasantness No. 2: As soon as I had picked up my railroad ticket in Kyiv to go to Kharkiv, a member of the Kyiv intelligentsia, with good ties to national democratic politics, asked me: "What on earth are you going to Kharkiv for? Kharkiv is thoroughly polarized, with Russians holding the upper hand." My interlocutor hinted very broadly that true Ukrainian national intelligentsia and culture were to be found only in Kyiv - who in his right mind would even temporarily leave Kyiv for Kharkiv?!

I bit my tongue and decided that I would not mind the Kyiv intelligentsia giving themselves the airs of Parisians, provided only that they did not start imitating the Muscovites and the St. Petersburgers. The Russians' contempt for Ukrainian independence is almost palpable. This, of course, does not faze most Americans, especially those who discovered Ukraine only in 1994. They continue to regard the Russian intelligentsia as great democrats. But a surprising number of Ukrainian Ukrainians in Kyiv do the same. I have had an earful (and a bellyful) of factually plausible but, oh so demoralizing, accounts of "the most intelligent Ukrainians" having stayed in Moscow in 1991 to support Boris Yeltsin against Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma.

Monday, August 26, was the opening day of the Congress in Kharkiv. It drizzled, rained drizzled again, all day long. We emerged from the Kyiv night train and did not quite know what to do. Finally I recognized Prof. Isaievych, with his small name tag, as well as the sentimental favorite of the congress, the intellectually vigorous but physically frail Prof. George Y. Shevelov.

Dr. Shevelov had started his academic and public career at Kharkiv University in the late 1930s. He "came home" to flowers and embraces from his now middle-aged disciples and admirers, ostensibly to give a paper at the congress.

Equally happy was the president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, Prof. Assya Humesky, who teaches Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan. Friends of her late father, a Ukrainian poet and public figure who had lived in Kharkiv, were dedicating a memorial in his honor, a ceremony to which all the participants at the congress were invited.

My train compartment-mate, however, was less ecstatic. Prof. Orest Subtelny, an American citizen teaching in Canada and the author of the standard history of Ukraine, had vainly spent part of the night trying to persuade the congress organizers to let him speak the first day of the Congress, for he had already bought a return plane ticket from Kyiv for the next day.

Prof. Subtelny had long ago advised the program chairman of his tight schedule, at the time when organizers had solicited from participants any requests for special treatment. But, though the historian had gotten the impression that his request would be honored, when the program was finally established August 20, it was clear that it had not been taken into account - of which, somehow, Prof. Subtelny was not notified in time. For a while it started raining heavily, almost cats and dogs, and I had my share of dark thoughts. Would the program chair have given the same treatment to a distinguished professional colleague from Germany or Japan?

Prof. Subtelny's contribution to Ukrainian historiography is paramount, but does he not suffer from being a "diaspora Ukrainian," for whom the establishment Ukrainian Ukrainians hold a great deal of affection, much familiarity - and contempt. Prof. Subtelny briefly registered at the congress, but did not stay to present his paper.

Buses drove our entire group to Yaroslav the Wise National Juridical Academy (henceforth: law school), where the registration and all the sessions were held beginning the second day of the congress. (The buses were a feature of the congress that were both necessary and worked pretty well - if, by osmosis, you learned where they would be stationed and where they would be going. The marking on the buses was very artistic but somehow indistinct, which did not help an American visitor and even confused native Kharkivites, whose regular city buses used nearby spaces for regular stops.)

Registration at the law school was bedlam. Over 100 people at one time lined up inside or just outside a stiflingly hot room, without any clear idea where they should go and what they should do to pick up their registration packets and be given provisional hotel assignments. At one time, the desperate registration staff requested the "Canadian delegation" to please leave the room because there were so many of them that the room was overcrowded. Only when the room was partly cleared did one notice that there was a single desk for the large "Ukrainian delegation" [from Ukraine] and separate desks for Canadians, Americans, West Europeans and Israelis.

An interesting and somewhat misleading organizational premise of the congress was that the individual paper-givers belonged to "country delegations." On the one hand, one saw the somewhat resentful Ukrainian Ukrainians, many of whom had not been paid their academic or institutional salaries for seven months or longer, who wanted to participate in the congress and who were finally able to do so with Ukrainian government subsidies, but who were almost discriminated against in hotel assignments and excessively long lines for railroad tickets. On the other hand, there were the favored "foreigners," who paid their own way or most of their own way in dollars, etc., and who got better treatment from the service personnel.

Apart from the Chinese, the "foreigners" did not represent their governments, but independent professional associations within their countries. But to impress the government of Ukraine and the media, the congress organizers used the polite fiction of "country delegations," with only country names printed on badges and in the official program. This did not facilitate collegial discussion, unless you broke the "country barrier" by exchanging business cards or attended individual sessions, in which the narrower institutional affiliation of the participants were announced by the session chairmen during the introductions.

I will spare the reader the details of the "foreign delegates' " search for hot water, from hotel to hotel. Some were successful, and some were not. But, to quote British political scientist Andrew Wilson, the newly appointed senior reader in Ukrainian studies (for Americans, an associate professor with tenure) at the University of London: "Four days of cold showers makes you feel grungy."

Almost pre-independence style, there were official greetings from a huge presidium at the opening session in the Kharkiv Opera Theater, followed by several substantive speeches, and then a good part-classical, part-popular, part-folkloric entertainment program. The line-up of country association chairmen on the "presidium" was very impressive. One of the most noticeable was the chairman of the Chinese Ukraine Research Circle in Beijing, Dzian Chianbing, who had come despite the diplomatic flap between Ukraine and the People's Republic of China over Kyiv University's giving an honorary doctorate to a high official, the vice president no less, from Taiwan, during what was purportedly a purely private visit. As befits the representative of a major power of over a billion people, Dr. Chianbing spoke in Chinese, with his remarks being translated into Ukrainian by a charming Chinese woman interpreter.

On the other hand, an unnecessary shadow was cast on the presidium by the inadvertent absence of Prof. Wolf Moskowitz of Israel. Prof. Moskowitz was not only a vice-president of IAUS and chair of the Israeli Association for Ukrainian Studies, he also turned out to be the most resolute defender of speaking Ukrainian, and only Ukrainian, in Kharkiv - even to his American colleagues. (A linguist, Dr. Moskowitz could easily have spoken English, Russian, whatever, but he chose to speak Ukrainian.) Since I happen to think that there is a deep organic connection between Israel and independent Ukraine, I found Prof. Moskowitz's absence from the presidium particularly inappropriate, but mistakes do happen, and in all the confusion Prof. Isaievych may have honestly thought that Prof. Moskowitz was not present in the hall. In any case, Academician Isaievych publicly apologized.

One of the three substantive or scholarly opening addresses was by Kazuo Nakai, professor of social and international relations at the University of Tokyo, who in nearly flawless Ukrainian brilliantly analyzed "Independent Ukraine in the Contemporary World." He was critical of Russia's policy toward Ukraine; among other things, he characterized President Boris Yeltsin's policy toward the "near abroad" (from 1992 to date) as a restatement of the "Brezhnev Doctrine" of 1968. I only wish I had thought of that.

Later, a strikingly pretty, long-legged television reporter from Ukrainian Channel No. 2, who introduced herself as Svitlana, told a group of us foreigners - or not-quite-foreigners - that Dr. Nakai, a disciple of Prof. Omeljan Pritsak of Harvard University, saw to it that year-in, year-out, six or seven Japanese students took up studying Ukrainian subjects at the prestigious Tokyo University.

Somewhat earlier, a middle-aged Ukrainian Ukrainian, who did not wear a name tag, but carried a very important-looking big briefcase, grumbled aloud that he did not mind a Ukrainian presentation with a Japanese accent, but the speaker had not provided any new "kontseptsiya" or conceptual framework. I wanted to tell him how in the 1960s American political science had spent much time and intellectual energy in the vain pursuit of a grand theory to end all small theories - the equivalent of his "kontseptsiya" - but, frankly, I was tired and found his briefcase too intimidating.

Yaroslav Bilinsky is professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware.

CONCLUSION