Ambassador Shcherbak delivers eulogy (07/21/02)

Ambassador Shcherbak delivers eulogy

Below is the text of the eulogy for Roman Oliynyk-Rakhmanny delivered by Dr. Yuri Shcherbak, ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of Ukraine in Canada.

Today we are ushering a great Ukrainian on his final journey. Roman Oliynyk-Rakhmanny, a person of heroic destiny and prophetic talent, was one of the most brilliant figures of 20th-century Ukraine.

On this day of grief and parting, we still are unable to completely grasp the magnitude of the loss that has taken us by surprise. For Roman Rakhmanny was a unique phenomenon in Ukrainian politics, literature and journalism. His works comprise a monumental and tragic encyclopedia of the Ukrainian struggle for independence - a dazzling collection of ideas, hypotheses, predictions, facts and names.

Without a doubt, Roman Oliynyk-Rakhmanny was and will remain in our history as a figure of the Ukrainian Renaissance. But, in contrast to the writers of the executed Renaissance, Roman Rakhmanny refused to become a victim of the Communist regime. He entered the battle against the Red "Horsemen of the Apocalypse." His mightiest weapon became the word, and his heroic struggle in the ranks of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army gained him immortality.

Although Roman Rakhmanny's works embraced a variety of themes and forms, they were united by a single passion, one fiery love - love for Ukraine and the desire to see his beloved native land within the family of free European nations.

Ukraine is more than just a topic - it is the body and blood of Rakhmanny's creativity. He crafted the conception of a global Ukrainian identity and achieved renown through his profound reflections on what it means to be a person of the Ukrainian civilization in the contemporary world.

Ukraine - her past, present and future - always remained at the center of his concerns. The title of Rakhmanny's three-volume collection of works, "Ukraine of the Atomic Age," which was awarded the Shevchenko State Prize, became symbolic. Ukraine's atomic age means the menace of the Cold War and the catastrophe of Chornobyl. It is not merely the perils of radiation, but the dangers of assimilation and homogenization of Ukrainians in an increasingly globalizing world.

Roman Rakhmanny was a prophet and a state-builder. He was constructing an independent Ukrainian state even in the days when few believed in such a possibility. His building materials were words, ideas and dreams - seemingly weak and ephemeral materials for building a state. But they turned out to be everlasting ones.

Together with Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Ivan Bahriany, Roman Rakhmanny was one of the first Ukrainians in the diaspora who came to believe that "a real base exists in the Ukrainian SSR for Ukrainian activists who long to implement Ukrainian policies."

More than half a century ago, Roman Rakhmanny wrote prophetically about the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of free national states on the ruins of the Red Empire.

Despite all his sufferings, Roman Rakhmanny was a happy man. He lived to see Ukraine become an independent state and occupy a worthy geopolitical place in the world.

Today I am appearing here not only as the ambassador of the new and independent Ukraine and a political activist and statesman, but also as a Ukrainian writer and member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine. Grief fills the hearts of all Ukrainian patriots, for whom the name of Roman Oliynyk-Rakhmanny is inscribed in gold letters in the history of Ukraine and in the heroic chronicle of Ukrainian writing.

I wish to express my most heartfelt sympathies to the family members and friends of the deceased.

May Roman Rakhmanny rest in peace. May his soul abide in the Ukrainian heaven, so that he may see and hear what is happening in Ukraine. May his memory be eternal.

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