The New Pathway: The First Five Years

 
Seventy-five years ago, on October 30, 1930, the first issue of Novyi shliakh/New Pathway was published in Edmonton.  To mark this historic anniversary, we are republishing an abridged version of a 1936 article in which the newspaper’s founding editor, Michael Pohorecky, discusses the early days of the publication and the political landscape of the Ukrainian community in Canada after the First World War.

 Could you provide me with some details about the history of Novyi shliakh and tell me why, five years ago, you set off to publish a new newspaper even though there were several older Ukrainian publications serving our reading public in Canada?
I will put it to you this way: If there were no Novyi shliakh or some other newspaper in Canada that propagated the idea of maximal Ukrainian nationalism, the expression of which is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, then the Ukrainian population of Canada would represent nothing of value to the Ukrainian Nation, especially in regard to its liberation struggles.”

Are you saying that Novyi shliakh saved the Ukrainian population of Canada for the Ukrainian Nation?
No, but I will state that over time it was able to create the base for the establishment of a Ukrainian nationalist organization, the Ukrainian National Federation (Ukrainske natsionalne ob’iednannia), which at this time is unquestionably showing itself to be the main force in saving local Ukrainians from national and spiritual weariness, the swampy waters of party affiliation and sectarianism, and denationalization—we can now talk about such a phenomenon among Ukrainians in Canada. Moreover, it makes them active Ukrainians, self-respecting people, and a valuable and helpful factor in the Ukrainian liberation action that the OUN is leading in Ukrainian lands.

As for the old Ukrainian newspapers in Canada, I value them for their work until around 1928–9. I value them as any intelligent farmer who now works with a mechanical plow values the sokha (the wooden plows of old), for, had there not once been wooden plows, we would not have mechanical plows today.

Our old, non-nationalist press is truly an old wooden plow, a national sokha, which for years with lesser or greater success and lesser or greater good for the Ukrainian nation ploughed the outer reaches of the wide national expanses of national work. The work of our old press in Canada and all the old nationally minded groups, without regard for their religious affiliation, was principally cultural and educational. Both the press and the organizations that gathered around it did not have a broader all-inclusive national programme.  They did not have any clear national principles, and in the realm of a Ukrainian political outlook, they were always minimalists, or—as we say—opportunists. Working their small plots, they would argue with neighbours who might have crossed onto their turf and teach their people not to shun their own, to remember that they were Ukrainian—but to not go overboard with this because non-Ukrainians “do not much care for that,” and so on. It was like this almost to the end of the Great War.

After this a Ukrainian State was formed on both sides of the Zbruch River. This fact stirred up a feeling of national identification in the furthest reaches of the soul among Ukrainian society in Canada, and it began to think deeply about Ukrainian matters.

Then tragedy struck: the fall of the Ukrainian State. This tragedy beat down Ukrainian society spiritually not only in the Ukrainian Lands but also among the Ukrainians beyond their borders, including those in Canada. A feeling of powerlessness and anaemia possessed the Ukrainian masses regardless of where they were found. And later, as you know already, came the period, which can be called the time of “the journey of Annas to Ciaphas,” from the Great Powers to the “all-powerful Union of Peoples.” The wandering, the beseeching, the begging, the moaning—Canadian Ukrainians also felt this period painfully. At the same time those who had lacked the strength to stand—Ukrainian military personnel who had shunned death on the field of battle or from typhus in the quadrangle of death or while in Polish or Muscovite captivity—began to return to their homes with a burning pain in their hearts, the pain of conquered and humiliated heroes. But they never lost their militant spirit, the spirit that led them into battle during the Chortkiv Offensive while miserably armed, barefoot, underdressed, hungry, and exhausted and earned them a brilliant victory over a powerful, modern, military enemy. They engaged the enemy on the field of battle, knowing full well their strengths and weaknesses, and decided to fight on against the occupiers of the Ukrainian lands, exerting themselves in a revolutionary manner and paying back in equal measure.

Then the Ukrainian Military Organization (Ukrainska viiskova orhanizatsiia, or UVO) was formed, and it started gathering together the best sons of the Ukrainian nation. I can assure you that it was only because of the fear of it that the Poles in Western and the Red Muscovites in Eastern Ukrainian Lands began talking about some “co-existence” and making minute concessions with the bankrupt and spiritually corrupt so-called politicians who represented the “official” Ukrainian leadership. Until Ukrainian national revolutionary forces, linked together by UVO, began to put fear into their enemies, they dealt only with Ukrainian apostates such as Yatskiv, Tverdokhlib, Zatonsky, and others. But when they became a real threat, they started very generously and cleverly discussing “in a friendly manner” with the fathers of the Ukrainian people, such as Dmytro Levytsky, Antin Krushelnytsky, and their like. They called upon the “scientific” and “educational” work of Ukrainian scholars and cultural workers in “Ukrainian institutes” in Krakow and Warsaw as well as various “Ukrainian universities” in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other locales.

Harnessing the “Ukrainian fathers” to their cart, our enemies thought that the children would run alongside them. All the same, that did not transpire. In the Ukrainian political realm two opposing camps formed: opportunistic and nationalist-revolutionary—one of compliant minimalists, the other of revolutionary maximalists. One was led by “the fathers,” the other by the “stupid children,” who were former members of the Ukrainian Army and idealistic youth.

A part of the Ukrainian forces, former Sich Riflemen and Cossacks of the Ukrainian Army, ended up outside Ukraine immediately after the fall of the Ukrainian State or were later forced to emigrate to foreign countries because of political or material circumstances. A substantial number went to Canada. They formed the Ukrainian War Veterans’ Association (Ukrainska striletska hromada, or USH; aka the Ukrainian Riflemen’s Association). They started gaining the sort of influence within Ukrainian-Canadian society that UVO had in the Old Country. The old nationally-minded groups in Canada took stock of their leadership, which could best be likened in spirit to the spiritually-dead “fathers” of the Old Country, noticed the considerable influence of the Riflemen, and then retired to the comfort of their small holdings—safety and business first. And so they began to play a two-faced role: ostensibly they agreed with the USH, but underneath they attempted by all means possible to undermine its authority within Canadian society as well as sympathy to the Ukrainian national-revolutionary camp and its activities in the Old Country.

This took place before the Pacification by the Poles in 1930.

Until that time the USH or its individual members had only infrequent opportunity to speak out to the Ukrainian community in Canada on the pages of the of the local so-called nationalist press, to present it with the idea and actions of the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism in the Fatherland, to call upon it to aid the liberation activity. And, after the previously mentioned events, the Ukrainian nationalist voice could no longer find any space on the pages of that press.

From that time the old local press and the leadership of the old organizations began a peculiar opportunistic form of politicking, which in Ukrainian is referred to as political deception. They present themselves to the community as Ukrainian patriots or even fellow nationalists, but in truth they are petty, self-serving, businessmen tending to their stomachs’ interests on their meagre holdings.

I blame neither them nor their press. They are not strong enough to accept Ukrainian nationalism. They are has-beens, worthy of some merit—perhaps in a picture—for their cultural-educational work in the past. All the same, there is no place to fit them into the present life and activity of the Ukrainian Nation. They lack the strength to be reborn spiritually, to think and act in a nationalist manner—old wooden plows that have served their purpose well enough but are not practical in this era to work the broad expenses of fields in which mechanical plows turn the fallow ground.

This was the main reason for the emergence of Novyi shliakh. We needed a voice that would speak to the Ukrainians in Canada, that would speak sincerely, nationalistically, that would clearly and lucidly present them our National Truth, our New Nationalist Pathway to Freedom. We needed a press. Without it the wide-scale national work that had been planned and divided into portions would be impossible. And we needed a spiritual renaissance of our local Ukrainian society, which in the recesses of its soul has a healthy embryonic Ukrainian nationalism, which has been suppressed only by sundry small-minded and sectarian garbage. And in this way Novyi shliakh started coming out.”

Source: “Piat Lit,”

Kalendar-Almanakh Novoho

shliaku na 1936 rik,  pp. 151-168.

Translation: Andrij Makuch.

Andrij Makuch is the research coordinator for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) Ukrainian Canadian Programme.