PERSPECTIVES: Millennium reflections (12/26/99)

PERSPECTIVES
by Andrew Fedynsky

Millennium reflections

When you're writing a column called, "Perspectives," it's hard to ignore the calendar creeping from 1999 to the year 2000. There's an obligation to look back at the past 1,000 years of Ukrainian history. A millennium, though, is such an impossibly wide canvas. Think of it: a thousand years - 40 generations. From Volodymyr the Great to President Leonid Kuchma - and everyone in between. As an American, I have a much shorter frame of reference. Columbus, after all came to the New World only 500 years ago. As a Ukrainian, on the other hand, I participate in Christmas and Easter rites whose origins go back to the Bronze Age. Now there's perspective! What the heck ... let me give it a try.

The first thing you can say is that after 1,000 years, Ukrainians have survived. The trident that once identified the coins of Kniaz (Prince) Volodymyr the Great is now engraved on the banknotes of independent Ukraine and painted onto the wings of supersonic fighter jets and trans-Atlantic passenger planes. Getting to this point, where Ukrainians can freely use their national symbols, has been the central drama of their history for the last 800 years. Imagine: eight centuries - that's how long it was that the Ukrainian people in one form or another struggled for a state of their own.

A thousand years ago, in A.D. 1000, Ukraine must have been a bustling place.

Located at the crossroads of the north-south trade route that linked Scandinavia with Byzantium and from there south to the Baghdad of "1,001 Arabian Nights," Kyiv was destined to become a cultural, political, religious and commercial center whose only European rival was Constantinople. Only years before, the semi-barbaric Volodymyr had cast off paganism and accepted Christianity, replacing animal and human sacrifice with the sacrifice of the Christian mass. Throughout his empire, Volodymyr mobilized architects, quarrymen, builders, artists, priests, monks and missionaries to construct and decorate churches, baptize people, teach them religion and hold regular services. It was all financed from profits from the sale of honey, wax and wheat. You still hear faint reverberations of that long-ago public works program in the frescoed walls and mosaic domes of churches that dominate Kyiv and dot the landscape of Ukraine.

Geo-strategists will tell you that geography is destiny, and the same location that made Ukraine the center of a trading empire also brought with it incessant war. Located as they were on the edge of the vast Eurasian plain that begins in Mongolia and ends at the Carpathian Mountains, Volodymyr and his descendants had to fight off nomadic peoples like the Pechenihs and Mongols. Volodymyr himself was descended from warriors and invaders. Like England's William the Conquer, Volodymyr's ancestors were Norsemen. According to legend they came to Kyiv and struck a deal with the local farmers and merchants to protect them from invaders in return for tribute and status. In time, the Vikings were absorbed into local society. Helga became Olha; Valdemar became Volodymyr. Jaroslav, Bohdan and Oksana were home-grown.

It took a couple of centuries before the relentless military pressure from the east proved too much and in 1240, Kyiv was devastated by the Golden Horde. Not unlike the American story of the Alamo, the defenders of the city made a heroic last stand at the fortified Cathedral of St. Volodymyr, but to no avail. For the next 750 years most Ukrainians were slaves of one kind or another. Ukraine's more powerful neighbor to the west, Poland - buffered from the Mongol onslaught by the Carpathian Mountains - harnessed Ukrainians into ever-more cruel and arbitrary serfdom. As for the Mongol Tatars who had sacked Kyiv, they settled in the Crimea, where they ran a slave market that provided labor for the Ottoman Turks. Much as the Mongols had done to Kyiv in 1240, the Ottomans captured Byzantium in 1453. They renamed it Istanbul and made it the capital of their empire. One of the slaves taken by the Tatars to the market in Crimea, was a beautiful Galician girl, Roxolana, who ended up in the harem of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. There she poisoned all the other heirs to the Sultan's throne, leaving only her own son, Selim, who went on to rule one of the greatest empires in history. Others were not so lucky.

Needless to say, Ukrainians did not like having their daughters become harem girls or their sons chained to an oar lock on a Turkish galley. Trapped between Polish serfdom and Tatar slave raids, free Ukrainians organized themselves into a dense force, the Zaporozhian Kozaks. Ensconced safely on an island in the Dnipro rapids, the Kozaks established a lifestyle that in many ways characterizes the way Ukrainians see themselves: boisterous, spontaneous, irreverent, undisciplined, full of energy, full of fun. These horsemen invented the low stepping and high-flying dances that Ukrainians love so much. The painter Ilya Repin captured it perfectly in his painting, "Kozaks Writing a Letter to the Sultan." The quintessential Ukrainian song - the mournful "duma" and robust dances - are also from this era.

And so is "The Cause": Polish landlords had the power of life and death over their serfs. What is worse, in the midst of the Counter-Reformation, they tried to force their Catholicism on a staunchly Orthodox people. Fed up with injustice and mistreatment, the serfs periodically rose up in rebellion with the goal of immediate and bloody revenge on the hated Polish masters and Jewish overseers who administered their estates. The greatest of the rebellions was in 1648 when Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky organized an army of peasants and Kozaks. The fury of the wave he raised reached the approaches of Warsaw itself. "By the will of God," Khmelnytsky said in wonder, he had driven out the Poles and became the "independent ruler of Rus'."

Six years later, he signed a fateful treaty with Russia and Ukraine's history became, if possible, even more violent and tragic. People summed up this complex quarter century of politics, slaughter, intrigue and fire with a single word: "Ruin."

In 1687, Hetman Ivan Mazepa reached a comfortable accommodation with Tsar Peter I of Russia and began cleaning up after this disaster. Many of the buildings we admire in Kyiv today were built under his leadership. Like a lot of Ukrainian leaders, Mazepa ran a strictly pro-Russian policy, integrating his people into the growing Empire and deferring on all major decisions to Moscow's will.

Then in 1709, at 65, when most men think of retirement, Mazepa joined Sweden's warrior king, Charles XII, in a war against Muscovy. The fateful battle of Poltava relegated Sweden to the second rank of European nations and set the course for Russia to become a world power.

As for Ukraine, a new word was coined: "Mazepite," an advocate for Ukraine's separation from Russia. The word was synonymous with traitor. Anyone who even hinted at "Mazepa-ism" was shut off from a career in the empire and risked imprisonment. In 1920, the word evolved into "Petliurite" and in 1941 it became "Banderite," but it's always meant the same thing. Now that Ukraine is independent and has successfully conducted five national elections, I think the word can be retired. It served the cause well.

Mazepa's defeat put the very existence of Ukraine in serious doubt. The Kozak stronghold on the Dnipro River was leveled; a separate Ukrainian administration was abolished. Even the word "Ukraine" was discontinued in favor of "Little Russia." There was one more peasant revolt, by Ivan Gonta in 1734. Like the others, it failed. As a cautionary lesson, Gonta was skinned alive before a crowd of his supporters who were forced to watch. To enhance his agony, authorities poured salt on his throbbing wounds.

The young serf Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) grew up hearing wandering minstrels sing about the Kozaks and the peasant revolts. As a young man, he miraculously gained his freedom and as a budding painter won entrée into the comfortable Russian gentry. Instead of enjoying the good life, he invited imprisonment and exile, choosing instead to write magnificent verse about the injustices of serfdom and the past glories of his people. Addressing his countrymen - "The Dead, the Living and the Not Yet Born, Ukrainians in Ukraine and outside Ukraine" - he outlined a blueprint for independence. "Rise up and break your chains," he said. "Sprinkle freedom with the evil tyrants' blood."

And that's what eventually happened, although an awful lot of the blood shed was Ukrainian. The century following Shevchenko's death in 1861 was uncommonly violent. Both world wars were fought on Ukrainian soil. Millions of soldiers and even more civilians were killed. World War I moved seamlessly into a declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1918, followed by an appalling civil war that ended with the catastrophe of Bolshevik rule. They presided over three massive famines: in 1921, 1932-1933 and 1946. The one in 1932 was deliberately engineered. Imagine: 1,000 years after Volodymyr the Great abandoned human sacrifice, Stalin laid 7 million corpses on the altar of communism. To add salt to the collective wounds, he ordered the destruction of churches that had survived the Mongols in 1240.

From 1941 to 1944 Ukrainians endured another devastating world war fought on their soil. People were forced to choose between Stalin and Hitler - between Satan and Beelzebub. Many chose neither and went to the forests to fight yet another civil war, this one lasting until 1950. Only in 1991 were the people of Ukraine able to declare independence and officially certify that the god (communism) is dead. The mummy of the prophet, Lenin, still lies in state at the Kremlin. Disposing of the corpse, though, is Russia's problem, not Ukraine's, which has plenty of problems of its own.

The newly re-elected president, Leonid Kuchma, will be the last Ukrainian leader of this millennium and the first one of the 21st century. At his inauguration last month, he waved a hetman's bulava (mace) and took his oath on a 700-year-old Ukrainian Bible. President Kuchma seems to have a healthy sense of history and an understanding of the country's problems.

He's also aware, I'm sure, that Ukraine isn't only for Ukrainians. Volodymyr himself - whose trident identifies the uniforms of Ukraine's army - traced his ancestry to Norsemen. Today, the country has many nationalities - Russians, Jews, Armenians, Poles, Greeks, Tatars - 25 percent of the population is non-Ukrainian. It's interesting, therefore, that 90 percent of Ukraine's voters in 1991 supported independence. Their confidence has been justified: the country gets high marks for its tolerance and respect for ethnic differences. That bodes well for the future.

And so Ukrainians have survived for 40 generations - through famines, massacres, invasions, abject slavery and mass immigration. Throughout the decades and centuries, through some of the most difficult conditions imaginable, the rituals, customs, practices and habits - everything we summarize in the single word "tradition" - have been passed down in an unbroken chain from mother to daughter, from father to son, from generation to generation, for 1,000 years. If you listen carefully you can hear echoes and if you look in the right places, you'll see reflections from 10 centuries in the life patterns that Ukrainians instinctively adopt, whether they're in Ukraine or the five continents of the diaspora. I've seen the designs; I've heard the melodies.

I've witnessed girls weaving wreaths on St. John's Eve in July, following a custom that goes back to when people worshipped lightning and the sun, and the forests were full of wood nymphs and goblins. I was once among the young men leaping and squatting at a wedding to the rhythmic clapping of giddy guests, unconsciously retracing the macho steps of Kozaks long ago, who danced amidst their horses, burning off energy and gearing up for battle. Listening to the Ukrainian Bandura Chorus, I hear the distant laments of slaves at the market in Kaffa, filtered through 20th century audio speakers. I've walked in the 1,000-year-old shadows of buildings in Kyiv - the ones that survived the fury of the Mongols and the malevolence of Joseph Stalin.

President Kuchma presides over a bloody land with cemeteries everywhere, many of them haunted by hidden, half-remembered and still unspeakable crimes. He has an unenviable task. He is asked to heal the nation and set it on a course of prosperity. Through an accident of the calendar, history will inevitably compare him to Volodymyr the Great, who presided over Ukraine exactly 1,000 years ago.

May God bless President Kuchma and grant him the wisdom, the strength and good fortune in the new millennium to set an example that those who follow will find hard to exceed.

Happy New Year everyone!

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