1_January 6, 2002 - The Ukrainian Weekly

32 THE UKRAINIAN WEEKLY SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2002
No. 1
2001: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
Borys Tarasyuk (second from right), former foreign affairs minister of Ukraine, delivered the inaugural Bohdan
Bociurkiw Memorial Lecture on November 2. With him (from left) are: Dr. Zenon Kohut, director of the
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies; Vera Bociurkiw, widow of Dr. Bociurkiw, a renowned political scientist
and specialist in Ukrainian Church history; and Serhii Plokhy, director of the Church Studies Program at CIUS.
Ukraine, 40 percent of whom are already top managers.
They are already in all of Ukraine’s major cities.”
Dr. Budzan noted that IMI-Kyiv has raised roughly
half a million U.S. dollars, constructed a building frame
with roof and windows, and received City Council
approval for a 50-year land lease. Most importantly, he
said, the Free Enterprise Foundation for Eastern Europe
(FEFEE) was established, which is a tax-exempt U.S.
foundation able to raise funds. This foundation will be
able to support the immediate completion of IMI-Kyiv’s
construction.
Memorial lectures
• When Ukraine became an independent state in 1991,
it was believed by some that the young country would
quickly manage to shed the negative political and economic
legacies of Soviet rule and begin to integrate more
closely with the West, especially with the European
Union (EU). Events of the past 10 years have shown,
however, that Ukraine has largely failed to reorganize its
economy and political system, while Western countries,
especially those of the EU, have not developed comprehensive
and steadfast policies to encourage Ukraine’s
eventual integration into European economic, political
and security structures.
These were some of the main conclusions reached by
Dr. Oleksander Pavliuk, director of the Kyiv center of the
EastWest Institute, who delivered this year’s Shevchenko
lecture, “A Challenging Decade: Ukraine and the West,
1991-2001,” on March 8 at the University of Alberta in
Edmonton. The annual Shevchenko Lecture is sponsored
by the Ukrainian Professional and Business Club of
Edmonton and organized by the Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies (CIUS).
Dr. Pavliuk divided the decade into four distinctive
periods that reflect the evolution of Western attitudes and
policies toward Ukraine. The first, from 1991 to 1993,
was a period of neglect, when the West’s attention was
focused largely on Russia, while Ukraine was viewed
with skepticism and suspicion. Next came the period of
support, 1995-1997, which was characterized by
Ukraine’s increasing cooperation with the West. This
included both political and economic support. In 1998-
1999 came a period of Western frustration, when optimism
as to Ukraine’s commitment to economic reform
began to fade.
The fourth period of Ukraine’s relations with the West
may be characterized, according to Dr. Pavliuk, as the
beginning of Western disengagement. Although assistance
was promised to the Yuschenko government,
Ukraine was essentially left alone to deal with its problems.
“The lack of trust in Ukraine and a good portion of
skepticism that had accumulated in Western capitals in
previous years hit hardest the government that deserved it
least and at the most inappropriate time,” he concluded.
• In commemoration of the 140th anniversary of Taras
Shevchenko’s death, the Shevchenko Scientific Society,
Prosvita-Lachine, and the Ukrainian Canadian
Professional and Business Association of Montreal hosted
a talk in Ukrainian by Prof. Jaroslav Rozumnyj on the
subject of the use of the word “Moskal” in Shevchenko’s
poetry, and the subsequent commentaries on this word
during the Soviet era which define it as “soldier” or
“tsarist officer,” but never “Russian” or “Muscovite.” The
lecture was held at the Ukrainian Youth Center in
Montreal on March 16.
Based on newly available material about Shevchenko,
Prof. Rozumnyj of the University of Manitoba advanced
the thesis that Shevchenko’s decision to use the word
“Moskal” with its ethnic designation of “Muscovite” was
a conscious political choice stemming out of the poet’s
anger at Russia’s domination and oppression of Ukraine.
He stated that in using the term “Moskal” the poet was
reflecting the prevalent “anti-imperial attitude amongst
the (under-privileged) Ukrainian population,” as well as
his own “anger and judgment about the conduct of
Russians in Ukraine.”
• Prof. Natalie Kononenko spoke on March 16 about
the rituals of marriage, birth and death as they are practiced
in the villages of central Ukraine today. A professor
of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of
Virginia, and president of the Slavic and East European
Folklore Association. Prof. Kononenko delivered the
15th annual Ivan Franko Memorial Lecture, co-sponsored
by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of
Ottawa and the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and
Business Association of Ottawa.
Prof. Kononenko described traditional rituals – the
ones contained in published sources and in archival manuscripts.
Then she explained how rituals were transformed
in the Soviet era when religion was banned and
paying homage to Lenin, the Communist Party and the
Soviet state was mandatory. Lastly, she described contemporary
rituals, using information from her own fieldwork.
This year marked the 15th anniversary of the Ivan
Franko Memorial Lecture series, an annual public lecture
by noted scholars in Ukrainian studies from Canada and
abroad. Co-sponsored by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies
at the University of Ottawa and the Ukrainian Canadian
Professional and Business Association (UCPBA) of
Ottawa, the series has helped raise the profile of
Ukrainian studies and raise awareness of Ukrainian matters
in Canada’s capital. Named after one of Ukraine’s
greatest creative minds, the lecture was instituted by the
UCPBA and Carleton University in 1986 upon the initiative
of Prof. Bohdan Bociurkiw and graduate student
Ivan Jaworsky.
• “It is impossible to understand the history of the
Soviet Union without acknowledging the role of
Ukraine,” said Andrea Graziosi, a professor of contemporary
history at the University of Naples (Federico II). In
fact, it is essential to recognize the central role played by
Ukraine and Poland in the critical events of Europe in the
20th century. Prof. Graziosi spoke at Harvard University
on April 2 at the invitation of the Ukrainian Research
Institute to deliver the Vasyl and Maria Petryshyn
Memorial Lecture.
In Ukraine the period 1917-1921 was characterized by
a number of state-building efforts, and the region was not
only a battleground, but also a site of competing ideologies.
The upheaval in Ukraine, according to Prof.
Graziosi, forced Lenin to think in national terms – thus
the creation of a “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” as
opposed to Ukraine becoming an autonomous part of an
all-Russian federation.
Another period of Ukrainian state-building followed in
the context of the Soviet Union, in which Marxism was
used as a tool for building national states. That statebuilding
was not allowed to develop beyond the 1920s; it
was challenged by Stalin, who ultimately induced the
horrendous famine of 1932-1933 to impose his will. The
greatest modern catastrophe suffered by the Ukrainian
people, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, deserves more
attention from historians. “I am convinced that contemporary
historians will not understand our century until
they are able to internalize what happened in Ukraine in
1932-1933,” said Dr. Graziosi.
• The Danylo H. Struk Memorial Lecture, the second
in this series of annual lectures, was delivered by George
Grabowicz, the Dmytro Cyzevskyi Professor of
Ukrainian Literature at Harvard University, at the
University of Toronto on May 11. His theme was “Taras
Shevchenko as a National Poet. A Comparison with
Pushkin and Mickiewicz.”
Prof. Grabowicz expounded a theory that national
poets are made, not born; they are made by themselves
with the help of the national ethos, history and their
social environment. The paths were similar for Ukraine’s
Shevchenko, Aleksandr Pushkin of Russia and Adam
Mickiewicz of Poland, although history and social circumstances
were different for each of these poets. Prof.
Grabowicz maintained that Shevchenko, Pushkin and
Mickiewicz painted themselves into national icons by the
sheer force of their eloquence, commanding the reader to
identify them with the national cause.
The causes were similar for all three poets. Pushkin
had criticized the tightening grip of Russian autocracy
upon society and its ruthless territorial expansion.
Mickiewicz bemoaned the foreign occupation that befell
Poland as the Third Partition of Poland was decreed by
the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Shevchenko, in the true
spirit of a freedom fighter, called for open rebellion
against the political and social oppression by Russia in
Ukraine.
• On November 8, 2001, the Harvard Ukrainian
Research Institute hosted Dr. Sherman Garnet, who presented
the second annual Zenovia Sochor Parry Memorial
Lecture titled “The Geopolitics of Muddling Through.”
The dean of James Madison College at Michigan State
University, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense and author of “Keystone in the Arch: Ukraine in
the New Political Geography of Central and Eastern
Europe” (1997), Dr. Garnett argued that Ukraine is a state
that has survived but not flourished. It is a country mired in
transition. Dr. Garnett said he does not see a serious challenge
to Ukrainian sovereignty today, yet there is a threat
to its capacity to determine its own place in Europe. There
is a structural resistance to the change Ukraine needs to
better fit with Europe, and this is the worst time for
Ukraine to present such an image to the West, to appear
lost and muddling through, to retreat from grand ambitions
of finally finding its place in Europe.
At the time when Ukraine looks lost and muddled, Dr.
Garnett noted, Russia looks decisive and, in a way that it
has not in a long time, pro-Western. A certain period of
muddling through is something to be expected from a new
country, like Ukraine, burdened with its Soviet past.
However the internal trends and especially the politics of
the last couple of years have not produced a solid status
quo, they are more characteristic of a state in decline. The
Annual Zenovia Sochor Parry Memorial Lecture Series
was established at Harvard University by friends and family
of the late scholar. Dr. Parry was a professor at Clark
University, the significant and respected scholar in the field
of Soviet and East European history and politics. From the
early 1980s until her death in February 1998, she was a
member of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
• On November 16, Dr. Oleh Wolowyna of Chapel
Hill, N.C. delivered the 2001 Mohyla Lecture at St.
Thomas More College. A demographer and statistician by
training, Dr. Wolowyna provided a historical overview as
well as current information on the participation of ethnic
Ukrainian Canadians in the traditional and non-traditional
churches.
Dr. Wolowyna noted the important role that assimilation
and mortality has had on declining rates of participation
of ethnic Ukrainians in both the Ukrainian Catholic
and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches. Utilizing recently
released Canada Census data, he described regional variations
but underscored that the overall rate of decline has