Marta Farion: Chicago's ambassador to Ukraine (11/20/05)

Marta Farion: Chicago's ambassador to Ukraine

CHICAGO - It has now been 10 years since Marta Farion was appointed by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley to head and rejuvenate the Chicago-Kyiv Sister Cities Committee. Shortly after returning from a visit to Kyiv with Mayor Daley, the energetic ambassador to Ukraine from Chicago shared her impressions of the exchange. She offered the following observations about her Chicago Committee and the Chicago mayor's visit to Kyiv, as well as her personal impressions of the Orange Revolution's aftermath.

I am more tired today than I can remember, but I'm very proud of what our Chicago-Kyiv Committee was able to accomplish in the past month. Mrs. Kateryna Yushchenko's visit to Chicago came at about the same time we were working on arranging Mayor Daley's trip to Kyiv. In fact, Ukraine's first lady came to Chicago just a few days prior to Mayor Daley's departure for Kyiv, and our Sister Cities Committee was called upon to both organize the broad outlines and also handle the details of both visits.

I've now been the chair of the Chicago-Kyiv Sister Cities Committee for 10 years, and it has been a very exciting time of my life. Our committee has done some really interesting exchanges over the years - we've hosted events with poets, musicians, artists, doctors, environmental specialists and government officials. On one recent occasion, we hosted a banquet and rally to honor Vitalii Klitschko the day after he became world boxing champion.

Our Kyiv Committee is regarded as one of the most active among Chicago's 25 sister city committees, but I cannot remember a year when the pressure of this position was so intense. And it started last April, when we were asked to assist the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations to host President Viktor Yushchenko's visit to Chicago, which involved another huge organizational thrash.

But I don't mind the work, because I think that we have accomplished something important for both the United States and Ukraine - both Chicago and Kyiv have now established a trust and warm friendship that precedes any future relationships.

Ukraine's first lady in Chicago

This last visit to Chicago by Ukraine's first lady was important, and I think it was organized and managed with the dignity that it deserves. Mayor and Mrs. Daley hosted Kateryna Yushchenko in the city of her birth, to which she had returned to accept an award from the University of Chicago.

While she was here she also attended the Women's Summit, where she delivered an excellent, substantive and interesting speech to an audience of 400 top professional women on the role of women in Ukraine's history.

During her Chicago stay, she also visited the high school she attended, the Ukrainian National Museum, the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America, major hospitals and St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Church, where she laid a wreath at the Great Famine Monument.

Her visit last month was coordinated by our committee together with the Consulate General of Ukraine, and our committee member Lida Truchla arranged for the first lady's institutional medical contacts and programs.

Mayor Daley's visit to Kyiv

Our Chicago mayor finally going to Kyiv was tremendously important to me. It is something that I'd been quietly promoting for many years. I believed that it was important to complete the international, inter-city reciprocity because Kyiv Mayor Oleksander O. Omelchenko had already been to Chicago several times, as had many of his mayoral deputies.

My dream project for Chicago's Kyiv Sister Cities was making this mayoral visit to Kyiv happen.

In accompanying the mayor for all those days, I learned something very interesting about Mayor Daley - that he is a cosmopolitan man who is interested in the larger world's cultural histories and political problems. His curiosity about other nation-states reflects his awareness of Chicago's own remarkable melting pot of different ethnic interests in the city's many neighborhoods.

And I was struck by Mayor and Mrs. Daley's reaction to Kyiv. They were both impressed with Kyiv's architectural beauty and that so many historical sites are being preserved with appropriate attention. They both also commented about the cultural sophistication of the Ukrainian people and Kyiv's vibrancy, which is reflected in the city's attitude toward social change, and they noted the political involvement and interest of educated, hospitable young Ukrainians.

It is apparent that Mayor and Mrs. Daley have developed a genuine affection for President and Mrs. Yushchenko - an obviously warm relationship that undoubtedly began with President Yushchenko's visit to Chicago last April.

Like the rest of us, I think that Mayor Daley was touched and moved by the events at Kyiv's maidan (Indepdence Square) last winter - those long, hard days and difficult cold nights of the Orange Revolution that inspired the larger world.

My impression is that Mayor Daley is especially admiring of President Yushchenko, and sympathetic with Mr. Yushchenko's political difficulties because he appreciates the large problems that Ukraine now faces in rebuilding a cruel and totalitarian system into a free, democratic and open society.

Cultural differences in official style

This particular official visit reminded me again of something a little anthropological that I've noticed over the years in arranging all these exchanges between Chicago and Kyiv - the clash of styles in the way that Ukrainian and American officials conduct themselves.

It seemed to me that the Ukrainians were sincerely impressed with Mayor and Mrs. Daley because they were disarmed by the Chicago mayor's unpretentiousness, his friendly and unassuming personal style without the behavioral and symbolic trappings of power that are so common in Ukraine.

In this respect, I think that the Ukrainians found Mayor Daley's sincerity refreshingly novel - entirely without the pompous "vlada" or "nachalstvo" that Ukrainians still see all the time.

When I informally confided this personal observation to Mayor Daley on the flight out of Boryspil, he laughed and shrugged - and asked if I'd heard any more news in the past few hours about how Chicago's White Sox were doing in baseball's world series.

The color orange

That wonderful hue between red and yellow which came from Kyiv's maidan has, I regret to say, disappeared. As the political symbol of Ukrainian hope, orange is gone. I am afraid that last winter's orange enthusiasm has been replaced in most Ukrainian hearts and minds with the previous shade of grey uncertainty and disillusion with promises made. This is what people told me.

And you can see it - outside of Kyiv's continuing bustle and hustle of crude displays of privilege and power, the daily lives of ordinary Ukrainians are unchanged. My sense of the situation is that a great many more Ukrainians have concluded that fundamental change in their everyday lives is impossible, that the essential character of government in their country will never be significantly altered. This is what people told me.

But this is not to say that nothing has changed. There is now certainly more press freedom than before, and the days of governmentally controlled mass media seem over.

But while Ukrainians acknowledge and welcome a new era of media freedom, they also seem to have returned to yesterday's collective cynicism - perhaps because they can now see more clearly how political enemies become friends with unexpected arrangements inspired by political expediency at the continuing cost to ordinary people.

Ukraine's new press transparency may have only made the differences between the country's rich and poor more visible, and the vested interests of competing parliamentary factions more obvious.

I didn't want to burden Mayor Daley on the long trip home with the weight of Shevchenko's nagging question posed so long ago: 'When will we get our own Washington?" He wouldn't have had an answer either.

But I am not entirely pessimistic, having seen at least some sparks of progress over the past year. I do believe that Ukraine has finally turned its course toward steadfast reform and that neither shifting winds nor seasonal storms will alter its ultimate destination.

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