Turning the pages back... January 30, 2000 (01/30/05)

Turning the pages back...

January 30, 2000

Five years ago we reported that Ukraine officially commemorated the historic events of 1918 and 1919 with Unity Day celebrations on January 22. The celebrations were relatively quiet and modest as the country officially remembered the declaration of independence by the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) in Kyiv on January 22, 1918, and the union of its government with the Lviv-based Western Ukrainian National Republic that followed exactly a year later. President Leonid Kuchma had declared January 22 a permanent national holiday in January 1999, several days after the 80th anniversary commemorations of the 1919 Act of Union.

The turnouts in 2000 at various regional and local observances were low, and the ceremonies simple and short for the most part, especially in the southern and central oblasts, but that did not upset Yurii Bohutskyi, President Kuchma's advisor on internal politics, who commented: "No normative act automatically creates a tradition. This comes with time. But it is a beginning, and in time customs and traditions will develop."

The most extensive Unity Day observances took place in Kyiv. President Kuchma and a delegation of government officials, including recently appointed Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, First Vice Prime Ministers Yurii Yekhanurov and Mykola Zhulynskyi, Minister of Foreign Affairs Borys Tarasyuk, Minister of Internal Affairs Yurii Kravchenko, as well as Second Vice-Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Viktor Medvedchuk, began the day with wreath-laying ceremonies, first at the Taras Shevchenko monument and then at the Mykhailo Hrushevsky monument.

An academic roundtable took place at the Teacher's Building, which in 1918-1920 housed the Central Rada of the UNR. The official celebration culminated with a gala ceremony at the Kyiv National Opera House that evening. There, First Vice Prime Minister Zhulynskyi expanded on the theme of the day and emphasized that for Ukrainians unity is the paramount objective. "We are obliged by the great and tragic lessons of our history to be in unity; in political, spiritual and social unity, in linguistic unity, and to make it the consolidating force of the entire Ukrainian nation," stated Mr. Zhulynskyi in his keynote address.

The largest public commemoration in Kyiv took place around St. Sophia Square and along Volodymyr Street, which might be called "monument alley" for its half dozen statutes representing figures from the past 1,000 years of Ukraine's history. Nearly 2,000 people joined hands in a "human chain" that stretched two kilometers from the Shevchenko Monument and passed by memorials to Hrushevsky and Bohdan Khmelnytsky onto Mykhailivsky Square, where statues of St. Olha and Ss. Cyril and Methodius stand.

The chain commemorated not only the 81st anniversary of the union of Ukraine's lands in 1919, but the jubilee of an earlier human link, constructed from Lviv to Kyiv 10 years ago in which 3 million people took part. The 1990 chain organized by Rukh is considered one of the seminal events that consolidated the will of the Ukrainian people for a sovereign and independent state. The 2000 human chain and a public meeting that followed on St. Sophia Square were organized by the splinter Ukrainian National Rukh Party, led by Yurii Kostenko. However, Hennadii Udovenko's National Rukh of Ukraine Party also participated. Mr. Udovenko's Rukh, the Reform and Order Party and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, also organized a commemoration near the statue of St. Volodymyr the Great that overlooks the Dnipro River. Some 200 took part in a symbolic union of the three parties' political forces.

Source: "Unity Day marked for first time as official holiday," by Roman Woronowycz, Kyiv Press Bureau, The Ukrainian Weekly, January 30, 2000, Vol. LXVIII, No. 5.

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