8th Annual Ukrainian Best & Worst List 2010

By Oksana Bashuk Hepburn

Almost everyone has a favourite list this time of year - best movies, books, persons of the year, etc.  For the 8th year running, here is my 10 BEST and 10 WORST list comprised of governments, individuals, publications and organizations which had an impact - for better or for worst - on the global Ukrainian community in 2010.

10 BEST

1/ Ukraine’s Kyiv Appellate Court - for finding Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav
Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavlo Postishev, Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, and Mendel Khatajevych responsible for Holodomor, the genocide starvation of some 10 million Ukrainians; and then President Viktor Yushchenko for calling for the creation of an international tribunal on Communist crimes.  

2/ Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper - for showing Western states how to deal with Ukraine’s threatened democracy; raise trade issues without compromising democratic values.   

3/ Independent-minded Ukrainian journalists - for ongoing resistance to pressures undermining objective reporting, in particular, their decision to boycott Mychailo Checherov, Party of Regions, for lying about its members beating-up four opposition deputies in parliament, and Reporters Without Borders for monitoring and warning against the decline.

4/ FOX Media and Glenn Beck - for global exposure of atrocities committed by Communist regimes including Holodomor, in the series Holocaust: Live Free or Die.

5/ President Viktor Yanukovych - for reversing his position on Holodomor by partially reinstating the information on the president’s website in response to citizens’ pressure; a good sign in a democratic leader.

6/ Patriarch Filaret, Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kyiv Patriarchate - for mounting a robust 1021anniversary of Christianity celebration as an antidote to the Ukrainian state’s Moscow Patriarch-adhering-orthodox-only event with Russia’s religious and political hierarchy in attendance. 

7/ Vera Fermiga - for using her considerable global vantage point as an Academy Award nomination actress to cheer her Ukrainian roots.

8/ Rev. Dr. Borys Guidziak, Rector, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv - for documenting the state’s intervention in the right of assembly creating a world-wide reaction to limitation on freedoms imposed by the government.

9/ Commentators like Evhen Sverstiuk, Alexander Motyl and Askold Lozynsky - for providing opinion leadership on important yet underexposed issues vital to Ukraine as well as global peace and security. 

10/ Timothy Snyder, Yale University Historian - for shedding much needed light on the horrific toll of WWII in Ukraine and the gargantuan evils of two dictators equally responsible for the crimes, in his book “Bloodlands: Between Hitler and Stalin”.

10 WORST

 1/ ‘Patriotic’ Ukrainians - for failing to deliver a pro-West president by denying Yulia Tymoshenko the 5% needed to beat pro-Russia’s Viktor Yanukovych, in particular, members of then President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party, women voters, and the so-called “elite” including writer Oksana Zabushko who wasted her vote and served as an example for others by voting “for no one”.

2/ Former President Viktor Yushchenko - for ensuring the elections of a pro-Russia president by endorsing constitutional changes three days before the vote, urging voters to invalidate their ballots by voting “for no one”, and relentlessly undermining the pro-West contender Yulia Tymoshenko including calling her “the worst mistake of my presidency”.

3/ Kharkiv Agreement - for legitimizing a pro-Russia rather than a what-is-best-for-Ukraine option including the 25-year extension of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and dropping NATO membership consideration.

4/ Dmitriy Tabachnik, Minister of Education, Science and Sport - for reverting to blunt Sovietique governance minimizing Soviet abuses, dismissing Galicians as being non-Ukrainians, and changing history texts to favour Russia’s world view. 

5/ President Viktor Yanukovych - for failing to dismiss anti-Ukrainian ministers who openly spread discord among citizens, act as the fifth column for Russia, and humiliate Ukraine globally. 

6/ Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill - for ‘bad guest in Ukraine behaviour’ by mixing politics and religion, preaching reunification of Ukraine with Russia, and demanding a name change to Hetman Ivan Mazepa (anathema to Russia’s past and current czars) Street .

7/ Western states, in particular France and Germany - for consistent refusal to bring Ukraine, the largest European country, closer to the West via NATO and EU thus granting carte blanche to Russia hegemony in the neighbourhood, a tenet central to its “One  Russia World”.

8/ Michael Ignatieff, Canada’s Liberal Leader of the Opposition - for ongoing faux pas with the Ukrainian Canadian electorate starting with slurs in his little book followed by an inadequate apology, a no-show at their half-million attendance festival in Toronto, and no appointments from the group to his shadow cabinet of “critics”.

9/ The decision-makers at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights - for singling out two groups for preferential treatment thus undermining the experiences of others suffering human rights abuses. 

10/ Canada’s former Ambassador to Ukraine, and later Russia, Christopher Westdal - for undermining Prime Minister Harper’s defence of human rights in Ukraine and thus one of the central pillars of Canada’s foreign policy.         

AND

A special citation for President Vladimir Putin - for turning Russia into a bad neighbour lately sniping that Russia did not need Ukrainians to win WWII. If he keeps up with the antagonism, he may find himself on the BEST list next year as Ukrainians wake up en masse to the nastiness behind the “big brother” faade particularly those with family members in the Soviet Red Army who fought from Berlin to Stalingrad, that’s most of the population!  

Oksana Bashuk Hepburn is an international commentator and editor of a quarterly magazine.