PERSPECTIVES: The fertile soil of your own traditions (07/29/01)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The fertile soil of your own traditions

On May 13, 1933, with famine raging in the countryside and thousands of Ukraine's cultural figures in prison, 39 year-old Mykola Khvyliovy invited some friends to join him in his apartment in Kharkiv. He told them he wanted to share a statement about the dismal situation in Ukraine.

Khvyliovy, a devoted communist since 1919, was a person of considerable prominence. A highly regarded writer, he was also the unofficial leader of the cultural renaissance that had blossomed in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. When Khvyliovy published his first book of short stories in 1923, the country had just concluded a bloody decade of world war, revolution and famine. Millions had lost their lives in those inter-related catastrophes.

With peace and stability finally at hand, Khvyliovy began boldly mapping a strategy to lift Ukraine's culture from her provincial status, which he and others attributed to generations of Russian oppression. Writing in literary journals he helped found, his two-fold prescription was encapsulated in the slogans: "Away from Moscow!" and "Face the West!"

"For art," he wrote, "it can only be Europe."

Once Ukrainian culture was unleashed, everything else would follow, Khvyliovy maintained. Ukraine, situated at an historic crossroads, would initiate an "Asian Renaissance" that would synthesize elements of both East and West. Under his moral leadership, filmmakers, playwrights, painters, writers, poets and scholars took up the challenge and created daring, exciting works full of revolutionary optimism and pride in their nation's revival.

This was the era that gave birth to the films of Alexander Dovzhenko, Mykhailo Boichuk's school of art and the linguistic experiments of countless poets and other writers. The political leadership in Kharkiv complemented this cultural renaissance with a Ukrainianization policy in the country's work sites and schools.

At the same time, Joseph Stalin was maneuvering in Moscow to assume total power in the Soviet Union. By 1929 he had consolidated his grip and with the First Five-Year Plan initiated the policies that would make him synonymous with evil. With collectivization and the war against "bourgeois nationalism," Ukraine entered a period of horror that defies description. In addition to a government-induced famine, the most creative, sensitive people were being killed for their work in the cultural renaissance that Khvyliovy had helped launch.

By the spring of 1933 when Khvyliovy's friends gathered at his apartment, Ukraine had become one big concentration camp, a charnel house of unimaginable proportions. That morning, Khvyliovy greeted his guests and asked them to wait a moment so he could go to his study for the statement. There, he put a gun to his head and blew his brains out. On the table lay a letter protesting the party's terrorist policies.

It would be to no avail. Stalin was firmly in charge, and Ukraine vanished as a factor in world culture. The artists who followed Khvyliovy's inspiration were either killed or ended up as party hacks. Their works were burned or buried in the archives of the Secret Police. Those who survived or came later learned to avoid all topics that might deliver them to the torture chambers or labor camps. That applied across the board: people learned to keep their thoughts to themselves. Even more frightening, they learned to have no independent thoughts at all.

Fast forward to June 23: Pope John Paul II stands on the tarmac at Boryspil International Airport in Kyiv and tells his hosts that "Ukraine has a clearly European vocation" and again speaks of her "unique vocation as the frontier and gate between East and West." This was a theme he would repeat throughout his five-day trip.

A week after the pope departed for Rome, NATO Secretary General George Robertson arrived in Kyiv. At a conference there, he spoke of Ukraine playing "a pivotal geostrategic role" making it "a key to ensuring Europe's long-term stability." Last year, President Bill Clinton communicated the same message when he chose Ukraine as one of four countries to visit on his last trip to Europe. Earlier this year in Warsaw, President George W. Bush reiterated that point: "the Europe we are building must include Ukraine."

Sixty-eight years after Khvyliovy made that dramatic statement in his apartment in Kharkiv, the world is finally seeing Ukraine on his terms - as a European nation. To be sure, the pope sees Ukraine in religious-spiritual terms; the NATO general secretary and the U.S. presidents in geopolitical terms. For Khvyliovy, it was culture that mattered most. Ukrainians, he felt, first had to define themselves through artistic expression to lay the foundation for their country's role as the bridge between East and West.

Ukraine today is clearly a deeply troubled society. During his visit, the pope immediately put his finger on the root cause of those woes: "Under the oppression of totalitarian regimes such as Communism and Nazism," he said, "the people risked losing their national, cultural and religious identity; they saw the destruction of the intellectual elite, the custodians of the nation's civil and religious heritage."

Pope John Paul II paid tribute to this lost elite when he visited the mass grave in the woods near Kyiv where 200,000 victims of Stalin's Terror lie buried. Later the pope prayed at Babyn Yar, where the Nazis gunned down an equal number of Jews and other victims. Those who lie there were murdered precisely because they were Christians, because they were Jewish, because they were assertively Ukrainian.

The corruption, lack of initiative, materialism and denatured character of so much of contemporary Ukraine has its origins in evil political ideologies. As someone who ministers to the soul, the holy father knows instinctively that Ukraine's problems are spiritual and moral as much as they are physical and structural. Fortunately, he did not come to Ukraine to merely lament the past and point out the obvious. Boarding the plane back to Rome, he offered a prescription for what ails Ukraine: "it is into the fertile soil of your own traditions that the roots of your future stretch!"

As Ukraine prepares to celebrate her 10th year of independence, it's inspiring to see her move from the despair of the Soviet era to the optimism and energy the 81-year-old pontiff brought with him. Ukraine's tradition is rich, and the future for her as the potential gateway between East and West is boundless.

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