Passing the Torch

By Volodymyr Kish

For most of my life Ukraine was a distant, almost mythical place.  What little I knew of it came from the romanticized recollections of my parents, supplemented by the somewhat distorted and selective history implanted upon us by the idealistic and nationalistic teachers at Ridna Shkola.  As for its inhabitants, my only images were grainy black and white pictures that we would occasionally receive from our relatives in the selo, showing the never-smiling, grim faces of peasant folks whose hard lives were so graphically etched onto their faces.  Sending a letter or receiving one from relatives in Ukraine took a matter of months, with the sure knowledge that “Big Brother” was watching and reading everything written.  From time to time, we would see Soviet propaganda pictures in the papers or magazines attempting to paint a much rosier picture, but we all knew that it was nothing more than Communist spin mastering. 

Above all, Ukraine was a “cause” – it was a country occupied and oppressed by a cruel invader and it was our sworn duty as Ukrainians to do all we could to liberate it from centuries of repression and slavery.  Countless Ukrainians had died for the “cause” and the torch had been handed down to us to continue the struggle.  And continue it we did, whether it was through the maintenance of the Ukrainian language, culture and traditions in the Diaspora, protesting Soviet wrong-doings or contributing to the various liberation funds.  Although we never gave up hope, few of us thought we would see Ukraine free in our lifetime.

As it turned out, the omnipotent Soviet system was afflicted with terminal political osteoporosis, and over the course of a couple of years in the late eighties and early nineties it collapsed like a house of cards.  Ukraine was finally free and Ukrainians were finally masters in their own house, or so it seemed at the time.

Starting in the early nineties, I began visiting Ukraine on a frequent basis and eventually wound up living there for a number of years.  Ukraine’s liberation was no longer a cause, but a reality and I came to realize that there was much more to Ukraine than the clich images I had formed growing up in the Diaspora.  Ukrainians too, quickly took advantage of their freedom and the opening of both physical as well as psychological and virtual borders to catch up with the rest of the world, to the point where Ukraine in a virtual sense became no further to me than say Quebec.

It has probably been at least a decade since I have sent a letter to Ukraine.  I now communicate on a regular basis with my various friends, relatives, acquaintances and other contacts by phone or e-mail.  Over the recent holidays, I called most of my relatives in Ukraine through my computer using a most useful piece of communications software called Skype.  Virtually all my relatives, even the poor ones in the village have cell phones, and I can call those from my computer using Skype.  For my birthday on Christmas Eve, my cousins in Zhokva called me through Skype and sang Mnohaya Lita to me over the Internet.

As I type this, I have a Facebook window open that tells me that my friend Lidia Wolanskyj who lives in Yaremche spent Christmas in Sambir, that Myron Spolsky is in Vorokhta waiting for snow to fall so that he can go skiing, and my cousin Bozhena in Brest, Belarus is having a fine Christmas with her family.  My cousin Sviatoslav who is a priest in Kryvij Rih, sent me an MP3 file of his church choir singing Christmas carols.  I have better contacts with people in Ukraine than I do with most of those I know in Canada.  The point is that Ukrainians are now irreversibly plugged into the global community and fully aware of how the rest of world functions. 

Ukraine is no longer that distant, mythological place it used to be, but a very real country with very real people just like us.  Their problem is that they are neophytes when it comes to running a country within the current global economic reality, and are having serious issues in making democracy and a free market system work after having endured almost a century of Communist brainwashing.  In biblical terms, it is akin to the Israelites wandering in the desert for some forty years before they were able to plant roots in The Promised Land. 

Hopefully, it won’t take forty years for Ukraine to build a stable and democratic nation state.  What is obvious though is that it is now their cause and we in the Diaspora have passed the torch on to them to realize the dreams of our common ancestors.  The onus and responsibility now lies with them.  They have the unqualified opportunity and freedom to choose their future, and that starts in a couple of weeks with the Presidential elections.  Let’s hope they make the right choice.