Director of "Living History" laboratory in Lviv details his work (11/03/96)

Director of "Living History" laboratory in Lviv details his work

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - Viktor Susak, academic director of the "Living History" laboratory at Lviv University's Institute for Historical Research (IHR), is now back home, sifting through the hours, indeed days, of taped interviews he gathered over the course of October 1995 to June of this year in an oral history project.

In eight months, Mr. Susak conducted 50 interviews with members of 12 extended families as project manager of an effort known as "Ukrainian Canadian Families in the 20th Century: Continuity and Discontinuity, Social Trajectories and Inter-Generational Relationships."

Having met in Toronto, this writer visited Mr. Susak in Lviv in late August, as Mr. Susak struggled with the huge quantity of material he has assembled in order to turn it into a work of scholarship. A modest and generous-minded scholar, Mr. Susak said he hopes the interviews he conducted will both set a precedent and prove to be a gold mine for sociologists and historians like him.

With a barely audible high-pitched voice and mild manner, Mr. Susak seems an unlikely figure to revolutionize any field, but his work represents a shift from the overly broad, collectivist perspective mandated by the Soviet regime, to the exclusion of everything else.

"In the Soviet Union and in Ukraine, to this day the accent has always been on society, on the generality, and the individual always had to be considered as a smaller element in a greater mechanism - a participant or a witness of events," Mr. Susak said.

"We were taught to go from the global to the individual, and only then to observe how the nuts and bolts behaved in the greater mechanism," added the scholar.

"You'll still get arguments from most of the academic hierarchy in Ukraine over focusing on individual experience, and in that sense, perhaps I'm already much more Western in my approach."

Mr. Susak definitely has Western connections.

His present project is a joint effort of Mr. Susak's institution and the Toronto-based Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO), whose director is Prof. Paul Magocsi, also the holder of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. It was funded in part through a grant making the Lviv-based researcher the MHSO's 1995-1996 Harry Gairey Visiting Scholar to the Multicultural History Society of Ontario.

Toronto's Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center (UCRDC) also has been an important player in the effort. In fact, it all began three years ago when Mr. Susak met the UCRDC's Dr. Iroida Wynnyckyj, a researcher also closely affiliated with the MHSO.

As Mr. Susak tells it, Dr. Wynnyckyj was working with Lviv University's faculties of philology and history, delivering lectures on the methodology of interviews. During one of Dr. Wynnyckyj's visits to the IHR, they met through Dr. Yaroslav Hrytsak, the institute's director, and began discussions about the present project.

The project's concepts and focus

Mr. Susak said he subscribes to the classical British school of oral history, and his mentors are Dr. Rob Perks, curator of the Life Stories Collection at the British Library's National Sound Archive in London, and Dr. Paul Thomson, whose book "The Voice of the Past" is considered the bible of family studies.

In accordance with the family studies method, Mr. Susak said, it is desirable for people to talk about their life experiences and the experiences of other members of the family. People are encouraged to talk about their grandparents, their ancestors, their roots, what happened to them.

In this fashion, an interview contains the essential elements of "I, my family, my society."

Also an object of study is the formation of popular myths about historical events. Thus, respondents' veracity isn't the issue, it's what they say. Mr. Susak quoted Dr. Perks - "Memories are mixtures of facts and opinions."

Mr. Susak said that most oral history collections have a central conception: the focus on life experience; how their paths in life were shaped by events, by what has come to be known as "history."

"Such interviews are a very rich, complex source that can be used by a wide variety of scholars - linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians," the IHR "Living History" lab director said.

For the "Ukrainian Canadian Families in the 20th century" project, subjects were chosen primarily from clans that emigrated during or soon after the second world war, the so-called "DP's" (displaced persons). Mr. Susak said the project title's reference to the entire 20th century is justified because although D.P. families were selected, many of them had relatives who had come to North America in earlier waves of immigration, and some had even returned to Ukraine before leaving for good.

Mr. Susak said he was often criticized for having too narrow a focus, that only the story of displaced persons would be highlighted, and that there would be too much repetition. But this turned out not to be the case at all.

"The expectation was that most situations would be repeated - join Plast or SUM, send your kids to school, become professionals, and so on," Mr. Susak said. "In fact, while the selection was made with a certain type of family in mind, the variety of experience reported justifies this step."

An activist background

Mr. Susak's own path to Canada is fascinating in itself. In the spring of 1989, Mr. Susak became one of the co-founders of the Lviv branch of Memorial, the organization dedicated to the remembrance of the Soviet regime's victims and the regime's crimes, while a student at the Institute of Social Studies of the Ukrainian SSR's Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Ukrainian Studies, whose director is Dr. Yaroslav Isaievych).

He traveled throughout the country, but concentrated on western Ukraine, gathering eyewitness testimonies about the seemingly endless morass of Stalinist, Khrushchevite and Brezhnevite atrocities.

Asked about his work in the field as a Memorial researcher, Mr. Susak recalled, "Initially, I was overwhelmed with rage and emotion. Then I worked like a dentist locating a decayed tooth, extracting information. 'Aha, right, they murdered your sister, very good, that's good information, very useful,' and I began distancing myself."

He added, "But then, the lifelong experiences of people struck me as just as interesting, if not more, than simply their testimonies about specific horrendous acts. That's when I started to reflect more on what we were doing, and what methods should be used. I started reading Prof. Thomson's and Dr. Perks' books, then writing to them.

"Thus it was that I arrived at my conviction that the life history, biography, life story, life path, of concrete people must be at the center of research."

"But it was difficult to take that step - to move from a general conception of history, of a Ukrainian movement or society, that one built a model of from the pieces of people's testimonies - to put that aside and instead concentrate on the life paths of people," he explained.

The activist meets a Western scholar

In August 1991, Mr. Susak received a letter from the Moscow branch of Memorial saying that Dr. Perks, the secretary of the British Oral History Association, would be arriving to see the impact of the momentous political changes for himself.

"Dr. Perks was looking to tour Ukraine," Mr. Susak recalled, "and it so happened that I was collecting testimonies about the repressions suffered under the regime, and so I served as his interpreter and guide. We witnessed exhumation of Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) graves, mass graves from NKVD (Soviet Internal Police)."

Having done considerable work in gathering oral histories of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church in the catacombs, from the fall of 1993, Mr. Susak served as deputy director of the Institute of Church History at the Lviv Theological Academy, under Dr. Borys Gudziak from the fall of 1993 to early 1995.

After serving as an administrative advisor to Prof. Hrytsak in the formation of the IHR at Lviv University, Mr. Susak joined its full-time staff as a research associate and academic director of its "Living History" lab.

In September 1994, Mr. Susak was the principal organizer of an international conference on "Methods and Methodology in Oral History and Life Story in Social Research" at Lviv University.

Among those Mr. Susak managed to attract to the conference, was Prof. Daniel Bertaux, a noted French scholar (author of the study "Biography and Society," a landmark textbook of sociological research) who founded the method of "social genealogy," and is now another mentor to the Lviv researcher.

In May 1995, Mr. Susak was in England at the invitation of Dr. Perks, at the University of Bristol, to participate in a conference on religious affairs "Talking about Belief: An Oral History of Religion"

After a few months to finalize particulars of the "Ukrainian Canadian Families" project, the Lviv-based researcher arrived in Toronto in October 1995 and met his supervisor at the MHSO, Dr. Gabe Scardelatto, who is head of the society's research programs.

Mr. Susak also worked closely with Prof. Wsewolod Isajiw, a UCRDC board member and a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, who served as Mr. Susak's principal advisor during his stay in Canada.

Praise for Canadian research

Mr. Susak had high praise for Prof. Isajiw, saying that the Toronto-based academic had a unique ability to view interviews from the specific perspective of the Ukrainian experience and in terms of the broader Canadian context.

Oral history is among the most stressful fields of research, Mr. Susak said, because often a scholar must probe into some of the most sensitive aspects of a family's life, and examine inter-generational attitudes. He said Prof. Isajiw was "inestimably helpful" in dealing with such crises.

"He's a true sociologist," Mr. Susak said, "he's very tolerant of any phenomenon society might present, even the most drastic, and tries to provide a dispassionate assessment of it."

Both Dr. Wynnyckyj and Prof. Isajiw introduced Mr. Susak to the UCRDC's large collection of audio and video tapes of testimonies about World War II, the famine of 1932-1933, plus the general diasporan experience throughout Europe, North American and Oceania.

"In terms of Ukraine, this is the richest collection relating events to individual lives," Mr. Susak said. In his estimation, it is comparable to those held by the British Library in London, the Yad Vashem Collection in Israel and the Holocaust Museum's collection in Washington.

Parallels and differences

One of the project's sidelines was work with Dr. Nadia Luciw, at the Institute for Teacher Development in Toronto, with whom he discussed teaching children the rudiments of genealogy.

In one project Dr. Luciw described to Mr. Susak, pupils were asked to match their family's histories with a chronological grid of major political events to produce an instant study of the impact of such events on their families.

This teaches pupils and students at all levels to understand people, to learn how their personalities are shaped, and to learn which events shape their lives.

Mr. Susak commented that children in Canada are taught to communicate their views, form groups and associations. "In Ukraine, we face a very different situation - in school, we are taught and shaped by people who are, generally speaking, very poor communicators. They can be very wise and knowledgeable, but that's often not enough."

"There is also a much greater inter-generational rift," the IHR scholar said, adding that this rift is reflected in the society at large: public opinion is rarely consulted in order to arrive at policy.

Mr. Susak said he hopes the project will be part of a process whereby the severed limb of consciousness, of experience, that Ukrainian émigrés represent is reattached to the body of experience that lives and has lived in Ukraine.

For Mr. Susak, an interesting parallel between Ukraine and Canada was that both the displaced persons' generation of immigrants and those who remained in Ukraine faced fundamental problems in integrating with society.

Society was regarded as the enemy, and the family was the fortress against the enemy. Individuals sought how best to isolate themselves.

"In Ukraine," Mr. Susak said, "this is a legacy of the Soviet regime, but we can't lean on that crutch forever. One of the principal questions facing researchers, and our society, our polity as a whole, is: 'How can we get people to communicate?' "