Open letter from creative intelligentsia (10/31/04)

Open letter from creative intelligentsia

Following is the text of an open letter from representatives of Ukraine's creative intelligentsia.

Dear Fellow Countrymen:

Most of us have no connection to politics. But today, when the fate of Ukraine (and the destinies of each one of us!) is being decided for many years into the future, we cannot, and indeed have no right, to remain silent.

Not so long ago we were certain that independence for Ukraine would mean not only the well-being of its citizens but also the burgeoning of culture and the formation of a society composed of free and spiritually wealthy people. Unfortunately, reality has shattered our expectations.

The point is not just that the preponderant majority of Ukrainians still lives in poverty and lawlessness. Ukrainian literature, film, music performance and everything that is loftily termed "culture" have also turned out to be completely without any rights. In this kind of state the authorities do not have a single clue about the significance of culture in the life of the nation, for Russian pop entirely satisfies their spiritual quests.

However, the worst thing is that most recently fear is once again creeping into people's souls. Today they are often afraid of speaking freely, in case they lose the very last things in their possession - work and a piece of bread. Instead of a cozy European home with its attendant prosperous life and respect for the law, once again we are being offered Eurasian spaces with their eternal evils, barbarity and despotism.

We realize that the road along which the current state leadership has been leading us is the road to nowhere. That is why we want changes and expect that the elections on October 31 will bring us these changes. Therefore, we absolutely reject the candidate proposed by the current government, which is promising us "continuity of the political course," and hence the spiraling growth of bureaucratic arbitrariness that goes unpunished and the progressive spiritual and moral decline of Ukraine.

Recently we acquired another piece of evidence indicating that Viktor Yanukovych's victory in the elections will be a national catastrophe for Ukraine. After promising to grant state status to the Russian language, the government's candidate in fact passed sentence on the Ukrainian language, which even in the circumstances of official "unilingualism" actually remains in the backyard, so to speak, squeezed out of the publishing, media, audio and video markets in its own state. The Russian producer has almost complete sway over all these spheres, which are strategically important for national self-identity. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine what Ukraine will look like under conditions of official "bilingualism."

At risk is a thousand-year-old culture of a great European people, who struggled for centuries for their liberty, lived through wars and genocidal famines, mass repressions and forced deportations. Still, they managed to bestow on humanity Oleksander Dovzhenko and Les Kurbas, Maksym Berezovsky and Mykola Lysenko, Solomia Krushelnytska and Ivan Franko, Taras Shevchenko and Lesia Ukrainka. Today they want to ultimately divest us of the very underpinnings of a nation's identity - its culture and history, its memory and dignity. Only a pitiful, semi-colonial Third World dictatorship will remain of Ukraine, a faceless marketplace for cheap labor and cannon fodder for use by the criminal authorities.

Therefore, today we have no right to give away a single Ukrainian vote to Yanukovych. Wishing a good, honorable life for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, we should, regardless of our political preferences, rally around Viktor Yushchenko, who is the only one today who has a chance to vanquish the candidate of the criminal government.

We believe in Ukraine's democratic, European future. However, we can help to advance this prospect only if we take a conscious stand in the elections on October 31.

Oksana Zabuzhko
Oleh Skrypka
Maksym Strikha
Dmytro Pavlychko
Maria Burmaka
Sviatoslav Vakarchuk
Ivan Malkovych
Yevhen Stankovych
Maria Stefiuk
Yuri Illienko
Taras Polataiko
Maryna Romanets
Yarema Polataiko
Oleksa Romanets

NB: The list of signatories is ongoing.

Translated from the original Ukrainian by Marta D. Olynyk.

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