"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT - AUR"
An International Newsletter
In-Depth Ukrainian News, Analysis, and Commentary

"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

WEEKEND EDITION
Nine very moving, dramatic stories

A COUNTRY CALLED UKRAINE

"For decades, indeed for centuries, Ukraine was unknown. A part of the
Russian empire, then the Soviet Union, its rich history, culture and
tradition were hidden from the world. The world would be a better place
if it knew more about:

- the glory of Kyiv Rus in the 10-11th centuries, when Ukraine was
one of the most highly civilized countries in Europe;
- the great battles of Hetman Ivan Mazepa against the Russia Tsar
in the 18th century;
- the poetry of Ukraine's greatest poet laureate Taras Shevchenko,
who stood up against slavery;
- the fight for democracy and social justice in the early 20th
century, which culminated in Ukraine's declaration of independence and
formation of Ukrainian Republic;
- the tragic famine genocide of 1932-33, when all grain was forcibly
confiscated and people were perishing at a rate of 25,000 per day,
when Ukraine lost at least 9 million of its most productive population;
- the repressions of the late 30s, which wiped out Ukraine's
intelligentsia;
- the courageous Human Rights Activists of the 60s, 70s and 80s."
[From an Address by Kateryna Yushchenko, article one]

"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT - AUR" - Number 468
E. Morgan Williams, Publisher and Editor
morganw@patriot.net, ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net
Washington, D.C. and Kyiv, Ukraine, SAT-SUN, April 23-24, 2005

------INDEX OF ARTICLES------
"Major International News Headlines and Articles"

1. THE ORANGE REVOLUTION WAS AN EXPLOSION OF HOPE
Kateryna Yushchenko's Address at the University of Chicago
Address by Kateryna Yushchenko
First Lady Of Ukraine
At the University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, Tuesday, April 5, 2005

2. FROM AN IVORY TOWER INTELLECTUAL TO A PARTICIPANT
OF THE ORANGE REVOLUTION
Article by Oleksandr Panasyev
Welcome to Ukraine magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number One, 2005

3. THE REBELLIOUS GENERATION OF THE SHISTDESYATNYKY
Courageous Ukrainian Intellectuals of the Nineteen-Sixties
Article By Myroslava Barchuk
Welcome To Ukraine magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number Four, 2004

4. ALLA HORSKA, A ONCE AND FUTURE ARTIST
Revealed that the Soviet KGB was instrumental in her murder
Article By Yevhen Sverstyuk
Welcome to Ukraine Magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number Four, 2004

5. MAY 9TH - NOT VICTORY DAY FOR UKRAINE
Ukrainian World Congress (UWC)
Toronto and New York, Friday, April 22, 2005

6. UKRAINE 2005: TO THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF LIBERATION
LIBERATION FROM WHAT?
Article by Serhiy Hrabovsky
Welcome to Ukraine magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number Four, 2004

7. ANNIVERSARY OF WAR'S END BRINGS NO JOY TO POLAND
Liberation of western Europe came as eastern countries
fell into the grip of communism
By Vanessa Gera, AP, Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 22, 2005

8. RUSSIAN COMMUNIST LEADER URGES PRAISE FOR STALIN
AP Worldstream, Moscow, Russia, Sat, Apr 16, 2005

9. A CANDLE IN THE WINDOW
Erecting monuments is an official act, lighting a candle is a personal one
By Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 18, 2003
===============================================================
1. THE ORANGE REVOLUTION WAS AN EXPLOSION OF HOPE
Kateryna Yushchenko's Address at the University of Chicago

When I asked the people, "is there anything you need?",
they would answer, "Yes! Freedom."

Address by Kateryna Yushchenko
First Lady Of Ukraine
At the University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Good morning! It is wonderful to be back in Chicago. In the twenty years
since I was here, the University of Chicago has always remained for me a
symbol of the greatest of economic thought, a citadel of true science and
research. My learning at Chicago changed the way I thought about
economics, government and society, and guided me in all my subsequent
endeavors, both in work and in life.

I came to you from Ukraine, a country of 48 million that is now known and
respected throughout the world, a country whose people have demonstrated
their deep desire for freedom and democracy, for a European economic and
political system. The peaceful Orange Revolution changed the Ukrainian
people, and it changed the landscape of post-communist Eastern Europe.

It was not always this way, however. It was during my studies at Chicago, in
April 1986, that Chornobyl exploded. I remember sitting and studying a
Finance text book, and seeing the news flash across television. I remember
watching the news program "Nightline" in horror over what happened to my
family's homeland.

But many of my fellow students could not understand my distress over the
explosion of a nuclear reactor in a country far away. In fact, some of them
did not even know that there was a country called Ukraine.

For decades, indeed for centuries, Ukraine was unknown. A part of the
Russian empire, then the Soviet Union, its rich history, culture and
tradition were hidden from the world. The world would be a better place if
it knew more about:

- the glory of Kyiv Rus in the 10-11th centuries, when Ukraine was
one of the most highly civilized countries in Europe;

- the great battles of Hetman Ivan Mazepa against the Russia Tsar in
the 18th century;

- the poetry of Ukraine's greatest poet laureate Taras Shevchenko,
who stood up against slavery;

- the fight for democracy and social justice in the early 20th
century, which culminated in Ukraine's declaration of independence and
formation of Ukrainian Republic;

- the tragic famine genocide of 1932-33, when all grain was forcibly
confiscated and people were perishing at a rate of 25,000 per day, when
Ukraine lost at least 9 million of its most productive population;

- the repressions of the late 30s, which wiped out Ukraine's
intelligentsia;

- the courageous Human Rights Activists of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

In fact, when I was here at Chicago, few understood that the Soviet Union
was already a shaky empire, with more than a dozen nations yearning to
break free, with an economy on the verge of collapse, a society living in
fear, and thousands of prisoners of conscience.

Then Ukraine along with all the other republics, declared its independence
and abolished the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian people achieved what many
generations of their forebears had vainly sought.

But 13 years of independence did not bring Ukrainians the economy and
society of which they had dreamed. Instead Ukraine gained an international
reputation as a corrupt state where several oligarchic clans governed a
passive population.

When the people of Ukraine came to the streets in November, they were not
only rejecting the brazen election fraud and the campaign of lies that had
stolen their choice for president. They were not only decrying the blocked
roads, closed airports and locked halls that kept the people from seeing
candidates. They were not only protesting the assassination attempt against
my husband. They were demanding a new form of society, a new future for
themselves and their children.

Ukrainians had had enough of a corrupt political system that benefited a few
families at the expense of millions. They were ashamed to be earning the
lowest salaries and pensions in the post Soviet Union. They did not want to
travel to foreign countries to work in degrading jobs to earn enough to
support their families. They wanted a fair chance to receive an education,
and an opportunity to work in their fields.

They did not want to pay bribes to corrupt bureaucrats at every level. They
did now want to have the shortest life span in Europe. They did now want
to be subject to biased and tendentious media reports dictated within the
walls of presidential administration.

In the thirteen years of Ukrainian independence, a new civil society had
been born. A burgeoning if distorted free market had bred a new middle
class. Increasing access to information had shown them the great
differences between their society and economy and those of their
neighbors.

And, not least, a strong, honest, organized opposition showed them, that
there was a way out of their current morass. Throughout 2004, my husband
and his colleagues crisscrossed the country, speaking before tens of
thousands, urging them to get up off their knees, if only just a few
centimeters, and demand change. They had confidence in the people, they
respected the people, and the people reciprocated.

The Orange Revolution was an explosion of hope. It brought together young
and old, students and pensioners, workers, farmers and intelligentsia into a
united whole. They fought the old system not with anger, hate and bullets,
but rather with positive feelings. With music, art and laughter. The
Ukrainian people did not ask the world whether they could join Europe - they
proved to the world that they were Europeans.

My children and I were at the Orange Revolution every day. It was a once in
a life time experience - it was something the Ukrainian people witnessed
once in a millennium. Hundreds of thousands of Kyivites offered their homes
to demonstrators from other cities.

Six hundred doctors donated their time, and pharmaceutical companies
contributed medicine. Dozens of restaurants brought free food to the people
daily. Business people contributed tents, blankets and clothes. When I asked
the people, "is there anything you need?", they would answer, "Yes!
Freedom."

When protestors from the opposing side came, they were met with warm
food, warm blankets and warm words.

From the stage, I saw a sea of hope-filled faces and intelligent eyes. And I
realized that no matter what happened, the people in front of me would never
again be slaves to a system. They had changed, and the country had changed
with them. These were special moments in the life of my family. These were
special moments in the history of our country.

The leaders of the Revolution and the people of Ukraine took great risks to
bring Ukraine to where it is today. Now it is time to try to fulfill their
hopes. This means:

- Creating a competitive free market economy that encourages the
growth of small and medium sized business and that sees the role of the
state as a facilitator not a hindrance to business;

- Wiping out corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy and in all
regions of the country and bringing the economy out of the shadow;

- Establishing a civil society based on tolerance to all religious
beliefs, nationalities and languages;

- Encouraging a humanitarian society based on charity and caring for
one's neighbor;

- Radically reforming the health sector, so Ukrainians have access to
skilled doctors in hospitals equipped with the latest in medical technology
and medicines in order to deal with such problems as HIV/AIDS,
tuberculosis, and cancer;

- Addressing a legacy of social of social ills, from homeless and
exploited children, to family violence, to drugs and alcohol, to the
trafficking of women abroad;

- Integrating the disabled into society;

- Investing in science and culture, to allow the talent of Ukraine to
flourish within its borders and to contribute to the world body of knowledge
and art.

I want to thank the United States and its people for supporting Ukraine in
this important journey it has begun. I was born in America, and grew up
believing in her values of democracy, freedom.

I am proud that the Ukrainian people have embraced these same values
of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I am proud that they have set
an example of peacefully change, which can be emulated throughout the
world. Our freedom is our strength. -30- [The Action Ukraine Report
Monitoring Service, Washington, D.C.]
=============================================================
2. FROM AN IVORY TOWER INTELLECTUAL TO A PARTICIPANT
OF THE ORANGE REVOLUTION
Oleksandr Panasyev, a translator, tells his story of an
ivory tower intellectual finding himself right
in the heart of the Orange Revolution.

Article by Oleksandr Panasyev
Welcome to Ukraine magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number One, 2005

"A difference between a democracy and
a tyranny is not in that bad things do not happen
in a democracy - they do, but in a democracy
the wrongdoings are exposed by the media
and the wrongdoers are brought to justice, and in
a tyranny the wrongdoers are the ones who rule."
A British politician

On January 19, I intended to wait for the decision of the Supreme Court
which, as was widely believed, was to be announced any time that night, I
succumbed to fatigue and fell asleep shortly before midnight. When I woke
five hours later, I fumbled for the turn-on button on my radio which sits on
a table beside my bed but in my nervous eagerness I could not find it.

When at last I did, the first station I tuned to was the BBC World service.
"Ukraine's Supreme Court on Thursday upheld Western-leaning Viktor
Yushchenko's victory in a presidential poll re-run, clearing the way for his
inauguration and ending weeks of turmoil. Court Chairman Anatoly Yarema,
issuing the ruling just before 3 a.m. after days of deliberation, said the
judges had rejected an appeal by Viktor Yanukovych, Yushchenko's rival in
the December 26 election, that the ballot was unfair."

An enormous relief flooded through me, leaving me, strange as it may seem,
physically exhausted. I could not go back to sleep, running over through my
mind the events of the past several months, months of great tension, of
upsurge of hope, of hope shrinking, of depressing moments of violent
indignation and of disabling frustration, of uplifting moments of great
emotional and spiritual catharsis.

I am not a religious person, I admit; after years of soul searching and
being at one point in my life very close to becoming an Orthodox priest, now
I'm what is usually described as a deist. And yet I find it strangely
significant - though, of course, it could have been no more than a curious
coincidence - that the first round of the presidential election in Ukraine
was held on October 31, Halloween or the Day of All Saints when the forces
of evil are chased away by the forces of goodness; the runoff election was
held on November 21, the day when the Orthodox Church celebrates the feast
of the Archangel Michael, the Great Warrior who leads the struggle against
the Fiend; the re-run of the runoff election was held on December 26, right
after Christmas (new hope is born?), and the Supreme Court entered the final
day of deliberations on January 19, another great Orthodox Church feast,
that of Epiphany and Baptism of Christ.

Why should a Supreme Court decision affect a rank-and-file citizen like me?
Why should I care at all? Two politicians vying for power - one wins, the
other loses - where do I fit in? I'm not a member of any parties; until
early fall 2004 I did not read local newspapers, I did not watch local news
shows, I did not take part in "political" conversations except for rare
occasions (and mostly to express my indignation about such corrupt
individuals as President Kuchma and his henchmen).

I was a typical representative of the intelligentsia who live in their ivory
towers of scholarly books, of art and of music. I cannot even say I belonged
to Ukrainian intelligentsia because I'm of a very mixed ethnic background -
from my father's side I have Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and German blood in
me; my mother introduced Uzbek, Tartar, Mongol and Persian blood into my
veins. For most of my life, I was of western leanings in my political
orientations.

Culturally, I was an admirer of Ancient Greece and Rome, of Medieval France
and England, of the Italian Renaissance, of the British aesthetic movement
of mid-nineteenth century, and of a short period in Russian culture that
spanned about fifteen years from the end of the nineteenth century to 1917,
the year of the Bolshevik revolution. The language in which I did (and do)
most of my writing, diaries included, was English, and I talked English with
my children; the language I talked to friends was Russian, though until I
was six it was mostly Ukrainian that I spoke. I was a cosmopolitan in a very
direct sense of the word.

In the soviet times, I was, as long as I remember myself, flagrantly
anti-soviet (though my parents were upright soviet citizens, mom in
particular). The older I was getting, the more anti-soviet I was becoming. I
tried to keep my mouth shut and avoided to express my opinions openly,
even in front of my friends, but it did not save me from being put on the
KGB black list. The list of "whys" I hated the soviet regime so much is a
very long one indeed.

In my rejection of the soviet system I went much further than that. The more
I learnt about its past, the more I hated it but I was too cowardly to come
out into the open and make my views public. But I was perpetually seething
inside - I was a citizen of a country whose government and the ruling party
caused millions upon millions of its citizens to die a terrible death of
starvation and man-made, "artificial" famines, who died, shot by firing
squads, who died of exhaustion in concentration camps, who died needlessly
in wars (the "peaceful" Soviet Union in seventy-something years of its
existence launched wars of aggression against Poland, Japan, Finland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan; it was about to launch war against
Germany only to be hit pre-emptively by it; the soviets supplied arms to
terrorists all around the globe; they supported militarily repressive
regimes in dozens of countries).

The country I was supposed to be a proud citizen of did not allow me to read
books that I wanted to read; it denied me the right to listen to music that
I wanted to listen to; it denied me the right to travel freely abroad; it
denied me the right to express my views freely; it made me live in fear and
misery; it made me stand in long lines to buy the basic necessities of life;
the soviet regime did its best to deny me the right to think.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it came as a great liberation. It
was difficult to believe though that the monster had expired of senility,
with very little blood spilled. Though I was among the supporters of
Ukrainian independence at a rally near the building of parliament when the
decision was being taken to officially proclaim Ukrainian independence, I
remained largely indifferent. I was just happy with the fact that "the evil
empire" disintegrated. The nationalist cause did not attract me, I chose to
stay where I was - far from being involved in any way in political or
national issues.

I was greatly overjoyed at the demise of the Soviet Union but when I saw who
came to power my joy quickly turned into dismay. "The same old shit," to use
not a very polite expression I picked from an American who was describing
his second marriage. Former soviet communist party bosses and apparatchiks
were back in comfortable chairs in government, parliament and ministries.

In presidential elections the choice was between "bad" and "very bad," and I
ignored the calls "to come to the polling station and give your voice for
the candidate who will care for the Ukrainian people." Once I voted for a
nationalist candidate but not because I really trusted him but to spite "the
commies."

In the early 2000s, I felt some vague political stirrings in me. I realized
that the old, nasty anti-soviet hatred began to creep into my nervous system
again. It began to be getting so bad that whenever I saw President Kuchma's
face or heard his voice, his bad Ukrainian, I began to experience bouts of
revulsion. All this lying, corruption of unprecedented proportions, was
definitely getting under my skin.

And yet I did not join the Down-With-Kuchma movement that flared up in 2001.
I went to a rally or two, was disappointed with the people who spoke at
them - either disguised communists or dishonest business tycoons, I decided,
and passed the tents of protesters in the main street thinking that nothing
could be changed by such protests.

Compared to the soviet times, the stores offered an abundance of products
and things; at supermarkets you could buy food that you had only read about
or seen in the movies in the soviet times; book stores had books that I
eagerly bought; I had an access to the Internet and could read New York
Times and any other papers or magazine on the web with my morning tea;
working as a translator for English-language magazines I earned enough for
rent, food, books and occasional trips to the sea. So, there were enough
reasons for me to be more or less content.

In the 1990s, I read a lot of memoirs of Russian intellectuals in
particular, describing the disastrous events of 1917, revolution and civil
war. And I was horrified to discover that most of intellectuals at that time
preferred to stay above the fray, letting the Bolshevik scumbags grab the
power. When they began to protest or join the anti-Bolshevik forces it was
too late.

In the summer of 2004, a process began in me that gradually led to my
miraculous civic awakening. I realized with horror that at the presidential
election to be held later in the year, one of the candidates, was to be
Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian prime minister, who, in my eyes looked and
acted like a person of little education, little brain power, no civility and
no competence in the ways of running a government (it turned that he had a
criminal record and two terms in prison). A figurehead, a puppet his bosses
believed would be easy to manipulate?

His bosses included Kuchma, business tycoons ("oligarchs") from Donetsk
region in the east of Ukraine, and the top boss of them all, The Big Brother
in Moscow, President Putin. To have a prime minister with a criminal past
was humiliating in itself but to have such a person as president was a bit
too much for me.

The only real political figure who could stand up to him was Viktor
Yushchenko, an MP, and a former prime minister, originally a banker, a
person with presidential ambitions. I have to admit I did not trust
Yushchenko too much either - for me he was one of those who made it real
big and now wanted to make it even bigger. But I shuddered to think what
this country would turn into if Yanukovych replaced the disgusting Kuchma.

Probably, a turning point came when I was approached with a request to do a
translation of a book about Yushchenko, or rather it was not so much about
him but a compilation of his speeches, public addresses, reports and
interviews. I suddenly realized I could no longer remain a mere observer of
the events, albeit an indignant one. Yushchenko seemed to be more and
more like an embodiment of a totally new spirit.

And what was most surprising for me - I realized that while talking to
people I preferred to speak Ukrainian. I began to relate to Ukrainian songs,
I began to read Ukrainian books! Me, reading books in Ukrainian, by
Ukrainian authors? Impossible - with my snobbism, with my Nabokov? And
yet it was me, a sort of a different me though.

Then came the news of Yushchenko being followed by secret agents, of
Yushchenko's car being almost pushed off the road, of Yushchenko being
prevented from speaking at the rallies, and finally of Yushchenko having
been poisoned. The massive anti-Yushchenko propaganda in its meanness
and nastiness and idiotic brutality equalled if not surpassed soviet
anti-western and "anti-imperialist" propaganda. I was horrified - with
Yushchenko gone, there was no one who would be able to successfully
oppose Yanukovych at the election.

With the media effectively bridled, I was "back in the USSR." With the
connivance of Kuchma and in fact with his direct involvement, Yanukovych
threw in all the "administrative resources" he had at his disposal,
beginning with his cabinet of ministers down to local authorities.
Yanukovych's propaganda machine did not mince words and called
Yushchenko "a Nazi," "a bloody nationalist," "a traitor who will sell
Ukraine to the Americans."

There was only ONE TV station that dared to provide more or less unbiased
information, Channel 5. I relied mostly on the BBC Ukrainian service and
Svoboda (Liberty) Radio broadcasts, both being foreign-based broadcasters.
Those in power wanted to close down Channel 5; they did make a Kyiv FM
station that re-broadcast some of the Svoboda programmes break their
contract with Svoboda and stop broadcasting. It was an almost total
information blackout. Yes, some information could also be gleaned from the
Internet, but the number of people with an access to the Internet like me
was very limited, in the countryside in particular.

In spite of the enormous pressure and election-rigging mechanism working
full time, Yushchenko won by a narrow margin in the first round. The mood at
the rally held shortly before the runoff was buoyant. I hate crowds. In
fact, being in a crowd makes me feel physically sick; I experience nausea
and dizziness, but then at that rally in the central square of Kyiv, Maydan
Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) for the first time in my life when I did
not feel oppressed by the multitudes. And I was very much surprised by the
friendliness of the people around me - smiles, no pushing, no swearing, no
drinking typical of a very large gathering of people. There were people from
all walks of life, and of all ages.

But Yanukovych and Kuchma did not intend to lose the runoff. I will not
retell here the fraudulent and criminal methods they used to rig the
election. It has been described in the press and was analyzed in court (one
of the greatest gains of the Orange Revolution was the change of attitude of
the media - most of the TV stations and the papers began to provide more or
less unbiased information). The Supreme Court judged the runoff had been
falsified and decreed the rerun to be held in December. It's all history,
but that short period of time between late November and late December
revealed a new country to the world and made me a different person.

When I learned of the preliminary results of the November 21 runoff, I was
shocked though I thought I was prepared to accept any results. I spent the
whole day, with the exception of several hours that it took me to go to the
polling station and return, glued to the television, watching Channel 5.
Exit poles showed Yushchenko in the lead! Great! Your rigging efforts, Mr
Yanukovych, did not help! Little did I know what was in store for me, and
for millions of Ukrainians.

Shock and dismay were followed by mounting anger - Yanukovych was ahead
by about three percent! How could that be? And then information about
massive fraud began to pour in. Anger changed into an emotion which closely
resembled the one I experienced when in August 1991 I heard the news that
President Gorbachev was "incapacitated" and the GKChP (State Emergency
Situation Committee) was taking over. Another Bolshevik coup. Frustration
and despair overwhelmed me. But then I heard on Channel 5 that a rally was
to be held later in the day, Monday, November 22. I began calling friends
and passing this information on.

I went to Maydan not because I was one of the supporters of Yushchenko - I
was there because I felt I absolutely had to do something about it, I did
not want the sovietism winning all over again, I did not want Kuchma and
Yanukovych to rule the country of which I was a citizen. And my being there,
on Maydan, protesting, seemed to be the only thing I was good for.

I'm a pacifist and abhor violence but I felt I was ripe for committing
violent acts - smashing something, burning down buildings. But when I joined
the crowd that was swelling by the minute I experienced a change of mood -
the people who were there on Maydan were indignant but not violent. It was
so amazing to see dozens of thousands of people gathered at one place with
an intent of PEACEFULLY demonstrating their indignation at being cheated
out of what they thought was their victory.

It was even more amazing to see tents being pitched in the main street that
cuts through Maydan, with people coming from all over Ukraine to stay in
these tents. People came from distant villages and towns to stay in those
tents and defend their dignity - I never thought they had any dignity at
all!

"Those were the days, my friend, I thought would never end." On the one
hand, I was emotionally and physically exhausted and dearly wanted to see
the conflict resolved, the sooner the better. On the other hand, I realized
I was living through an experience that would never be repeated.

Even if massive protests erupt again over whatever political issue may be
the cause in the future, I don't think there will be such a spirit uniting
them. I've always thought that I could express in words pretty much
everything that I wanted to express but I don't think I'll be able to
explain coherently what it was that made my being there, with people on
Maydan, or blocking the buildings of parliament, cabinet of ministers or
presidential administration, so special, so spiritually uplifting.

I felt I was witnessing events of a great significance but it took some time
to figure out what the significance was. At last I realized that I was a
witness and a humble participant of a battle of the future against the past,
of Good against Evil. The soviet past, soviet mentality and soviet
corruption rallied behind Yanukovych.

Yes, there were - and are - millions of people in Ukraine who have never
gotten rid of the soviet mentality, people with the desire to escape from
freedom, full of fear of the future, people satisfied with what little they
have (their slogan being, "be happy with what you have, even if it's pretty
miserable existence"), people who, for generations have been brainwashed
by soviet and then by Kuchma-Yanukovych propaganda, people who believed
that America spells trouble, that Russia is our best friend (never mind that
Russia's fraternal love entails loss of sovereignty and of liberty), people
who thought that you can't buy bread with freedom and democracy.

In fact, for most of these Yanukovych's supporters freedom and liberties
and civil rights were empty words. They are the people the soviet power
was based on.

Yushchenko embodied the hopes for a different future, for a truly sovereign
Ukraine, in which generally accepted human values would be upheld, where
basic democratic principles would be introduced, where speaking Ukrainian
would not be regarded as an aberration or evidence of lack of culture and
low prestige, where human dignity and decency would be regarded as assets
rather then liabilities.

I wore an orange arm band and an orange scarf. On cold days, in driving snow
there was so much spiritual warmth generated by the crowd that I did not
feel cold. Several times I openly wept, overwhelmed by emotion, when
Ukrainian songs were performed on the stage erected on Maydan. The first
time it happened I could not understand what was it that moved me so much -

I, a Led Zeppelin fan, moved to emotional tears by a Ukrainian song?
Unbelievable! And yet I was there, among the hundreds of thousands of
people, caught in a great emotion.

When Yanukovych, speaking at the rallies of his supporters, called
Yushchenko's supporters kozly (literally, kozel means "a goat," but the word
is used offensively to refer to someone who is no good; this offensive use
may come from the underworld reference to a pederast) and orange rats, I
took it as a personal offence. And I am sure so did millions of others. Can
you imagine, say, President Bush publicly calling Kerry's supporters "those
scumbags" or "silly asses"? My God, this person wants to be president of
my country, I thought.

For me, Yanukovych represented blatant lies, falsehood, insincerity, low
culture and the soviet past. His wife, speaking at a public meeting in a
city in Eastern Ukraine, said that it was Americans who organized this
"orange abomination," it was Americans who supplied warm boots to the
protesters and delivered oranges infused with narcotics "to make the orange
protesters lose their minds." It was more than just an extremely silly thing
to say - it was another piece of evidence that confirmed my correct
assessment of the forces Yanukovych represented. The very fact that
several key figures, his press secretary included, in his campaign left him
immediately after his "victory" was also very telling.

Maydan gave me so much of positive energy, gave me, a pessimist down to
the very core of my being, an optimistic hope, I began to believe that
change was possible indeed, that Yushchenko, with all his inconstancies and
weak points, was nevertheless the only person who could lead Ukraine into a
better future, who could put Ukraine on the map of democratic nations. There
is something very sincere and nice and decent about him, on a purely human
level and though I've never met and will never meet him he does send the
good vibes.

The phenomenon of Maydan will, of course, be studied by sociologists,
political scientists and psychologists. I'm not in a position to pass
judgments or make assessments but when hundreds of thousands of people
come together at one place and not a single case of violence is reported
over the period of more than three weeks, when people bring food and clothes
and medicines to share it free with those who need these things, when all
you hear are words of support, of good will and of good cheer, when you
realize that though you are only one of many thousands you also matter, then
it means that something much more profound than an opposition rally is
taking place. -30- [The Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Article has photographs by Oleksiy Onishchuk.
LINK: http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20051/36
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: For information about how to subscribe to the "Welcome To
Ukraine" magazine, a world class publication in English, contact:
ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net.
=============================================================
3. THE REBELLIOUS GENERATION OF THE SHISTDESYATNYKY
Courageous Ukrainian Intellectuals of the Nineteen-Sixties

Myroslava BARCHUK pays tribute to the Shistdesyatnyky, the generation
of courageous Ukrainian intellectuals who sought freedom of expression
and promoted the Ukrainian national idea.

Article By Myroslava Barchuk
Welcome To Ukraine magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number Four, 2004

The nineteen-sixties are often referred to as the time of the rebellious
generation in Ukraine. In fact, those years were turbulent in the west as
well, but the Ukrainian phenomenon of the sixties was different from that
of the western sexual revolution, the hippy movement and rock'n'roll. The
then generation of Ukrainian intelligentsia sparked a revival of Ukrainian
culture which had been in decline since the early nineteen-thirties.

FREEDOM SPARKS

To a large extent this spark - or even a shower of sparks - was produced
thanks to what is called "Khrushchev's thaw" (the expression was coined
after the publication of Illya Erenburg's novel called Thaw) when the
process of "de-Stalinization" of the Soviet society began. It led to a
lesser state control of the arts and literature and to somewhat greater
freedom of expression (the thaw did not last too long though).

The starting point of de-Stalinization is believed to have been Nikita
Khrushchev's report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party which he
delivered at night between February 24 and February 25 1956. In this report
made to the party elite, Khrushchev (the then First Secretary of the
Communist Party) denounced "the cult of personality" of Stalin.

The report had wide political repercussions and in the years that followed
it also had a positive effect on the development of science, social life and
culture. The changes in society in their turn led to the growth of national
awareness among the peoples of the Soviet empire. The soviet intelligentsia
took advantage of the thaw to revive national culture.

The changes that were taking place in the very core of the soviet system
were felt in Ukraine too. A number of young, talented Ukrainian literati and
artists began to create works in which they ignored the dogmas and canons
of "socialist realism." Among them were the poets: Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan
Dratch, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Lina Kostenko, Vasyl Holoborodko, Iryna
Zhylenko; the prose writers - Volodymyr Drozd and Valery Shevchuk; literary
critics - Ivan Dzyuba, Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstyuk and Mykhailyna
Kotsyubynska; artists - Viktor Zaretsky, Panas Zalyvakha, Alla Horska,
Lyudmyla Semykina and Halyna Struk; the cinematographers - Yury Illyenko,
Leonid Osyka, Serhiy Paradzhanov; the philologist Svitlana Kyrychenko, and
many others.

The Kloob Tvorchoyi Molodi (KTM - Club of Artistic Youth), founded in 1960,
became a place where the young Ukrainian intelligentsia - those who would
be later called Shistdesyatnyky (literally: those of the sixties - tr.) met
to discuss the cultural issues. With time the KTM Club grew into a cultural
phenomenon around which the cultural life of the early nineteen-sixties
revolved. In 1962, the Shistdesyatnyky group of young actors, theatre and
film directors and poets was joined by several artists - Alla Horska, Halyna
Zubchenko, Lyudmyla Semykina and Viktor Zaretsky - who assumed an
active public stance.

Regular gatherings at the KTM Club brought together poets, writers, actors,
literary critics, artists and sympathizers who shared their ideas and mixed
with like-minded people. An important milestone in the life of the KTM Club
was the creation of a public commission which was to conduct an
investigation into the background of the executions of a great number of
people who were buried in mass graves in the village of Bikovnya which is
situated not far from Kyiv. The KTM Public Commission was set up in 1962
and was made up of Les Tanyuk, a student of the Directors Department of
the Theatre Institute, Alla Horska, an artist, Vasyl Symonenko, a poet.

It turned out that the victims in the discovered mass graves had been
massacred during the Great Terror of the Stalin times. The Commission urged
the authorities to investigate the matter further and to erect a monument to
the victims of the Stalinist Terror. Reaction of the soviet authorities was
immediate, but instead of doing what they were urged to do, they retaliated
in a typical soviet manner - the poet Vasyl Symonenko was attacked by
"unknown persons" and so badly beaten that he died in hospital of the
injuries that he had sustained. His poetry was banned.

Les Tanyuk was removed from the presidency of the KTM Club and the Club
itself was put under an increasing pressure from the state. In 1964 the KTM
was disbanded and closed down. The process of de-Stalinization that had
been launched from the top of the soviet hierarchy in 1956, was halted. It
was Khrushchev himself who actually reversed the process that he had
started.

On December 17 1962 and on March 8 1963 Khrushchev made speeches
in which he subjected the intelligentsia (mostly artists, poets and writers)
to a rude and scathing criticism.

He branded those among the intelligentsia who "deviated from the party line"
as "cosmopolitans, formalists and renegades" (this soviet newspeak needs
interpretation; "formalists" were those artists who "paid much more
attention to the form rather than to the content," or practiced
non-figurative art; "renegades" were those did not fully accept all the
soviet dogmas and canons in the performing and visual arts and literature,
and those who did not show too much enthusiasm in exhibiting their soviet
patriotism - tr.). Khrushchev's words, "We are against peaceful co-existence
in the sphere of ideologies," were taken up as a battle cry in the struggle
against the nonconformist intelligentsia not only in Moscow but all over the
Soviet Union.

During the whole of 1963, a campaign against "the formalists" was waged
in the media as a preparation for a major attack on the dissident youth
intellectuals. The communist party bosses kept making aggressive state-
ments directed against the dissident artist, literati, actors and directors
in the media and at the communist party conferences. Many people were
accused of "ideologically erroneous views" and as a result lost their jobs.

AUTO-DA-FE

May 24 1964 saw one of the most tragic events in the history of the
Ukrainian post-war culture. A fire that started in the Central Scientific
Library of Ukraine, could not - or would not - be controlled and about
600,000 books and manuscripts were destroyed in the conflagration. A
great deal of these books and manuscripts, published or written in the
course of several centuries, were absolutely unique and as such had a
great significance for the Ukrainian culture.

The arsonist was promptly captured and he was identified as V. Pohruzhalsky,
an employee of the library who had allegedly committed arson in a fit of
insanity. The secrecy and speed with which the trial was conducted gave
rise to a suspicion that it was not an act of a fire-thirsty maniac, but a
purposeful destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage.

When Khrushchev was ousted by Brezhnev in October 1964, the control
over the intelligentsia that did not want to toe the party line was
tightened.

Only a month later, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist
Party sent out directives "to step up the ideological and educational work"
(which, translated from the Soviet newspeak meant: brainwash them more
thoroughly - tr.) among "the creative intelligentsia" (that is artists,
writers, etc. - tr.) who were accused of being "nationalistically
narrow-minded."

By the summer of 1965, this "creative intelligentsia" had lost their
illusions concerning "the thaw." After "peaceful means" to get the
intelligentsia under proper control had been exhausted (reprimands;
expulsions from Artists' and Writers' Unions, firing from work, disciplinary
actions, psychological pressure, and so on), the Soviet authorities
resorted to tougher actions.

Yury Daniel and Andriy Sinyavsky, Moscow authors, were arrested and
committed for trial. They were charged with "anti-Soviet activities" and
publishing - without authorization by the Soviet authorities - their books
abroad. In Ukraine dozens of people were arrested in Kyiv, Lviv and
Ivano-Frankivsk.

But contrary to the authorities' expectations, the arrests did not frighten
the rebellious Ukraine intelligentsia into submission - if anything the
Shistdesyatnyky became even more united in their opposition to the
regime.

A month after these arrests were made, Serhiy Paradzhanov's film,
Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors was shown at the Zhovten cinema
house on September 1965. Before the show, Ivan Dzyuba, a literary critic,
addressed the audience and said that many Ukrainian intellectuals had
been arrested by the Soviet authorities.

Vyacheslav Chornovil, a journalist, called upon those who were against
"the tyranny" to stand up in a show of solidarity and defiance; Vasyl Stus,
a poet, joined the speakers (both Chornovil and Stus later were arrested
as "anti-Soviet dissidents" and spent years in concentration camps; Stus
whose health was completely ruined, died in a concentration camp). The
management of the theatre turned the microphones off and turned the
sirens on to drown the voices of the speakers, but the audience had
heard the main part of their message.

END OF "THE THAW"

In 1966 another wave of arrests swept through Ukraine. The trials that
caused an indignant reaction in the west and some of the leading world
papers - Neue Zuricher Zeitung, The Times and The New York Times
among them - published articles and reports about these trials and about
the general situation with the human rights in Ukraine.

A fund for aid to the political prisoners and their families was set by the
Ukrainian intelligentsia in Ukraine. The authorities retaliated by expelling
practically all the dissenters from work; the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine adopted a secret resolution, On Serious
Drawbacks in the Work of the Kyiv Film Studio Named after O. Dovzhenko."

The Studio management was obliged to publicly confess their sins and repent,
and the release of three nonconformist films was suspended. These films
were: Krynytsya dlya sprahlykh (The Well for the Thirsty), directed by Yury
Illyenko, screenplay by Ivan Dratch; Perevirte svoyi hodynnyky (Check Your
Watches), directed by V. Illyashenko, screenplay by Lina Kostenko, and
Kyivski Fresky (Kyiv Frescoes), directed and written by Serhiy Paradzhanov.

Also, the authorities organized mass meetings of "workers and peasants" who
expressed their "unanimous and righteous indignation" about something they
had not seen, had not read and had not heard but were told to be indignant
about.

Vyacheslav Chornovil published in the samvydav press (samvydav - literally:
self-published; clandestine publications of books and other materials
suppressed by the Soviets; in most cases the samvydav books circulated in
type-written copies - tr.) his book, Lykho z rozumu (Woe from Wit) which
told the stories of those who had been arrested and tried in 1966. According
to the contemporary accounts, this publication had a great consolidating
impact upon the nonconformist movement not only in Ukraine but in the
whole of the Soviet Union.

At the end of 1966, an amendment was introduced into the Criminal Code
of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and now Article 187 spelled out
punishment for "spreading deliberately false slander which besmirches the
Soviet state and its social makeup." This article of the Code was
conveniently used by the authorities at the trials of the dissidents and
nonconformists which were not slow to follow.

The dissidents and nonconformists, who were not intimidated, organized
the biggest demonstration of its kind in Kyiv on May 22 1967. On that day,
challenging the authorities' ban, several hundred people gathered at the
monument to Taras Shevchenko to pay homage to the great poet; the police
interfered and clashed with the demonstrators. Five people were arrested.
The demonstrators marched from the monument to the communist party
headquarters and demanded the immediate release of those arrested. The
police failed to disperse the crowd and the arrested people were released.

An open letter signed by 139 people, was sent to the Secretary General of
the Soviet Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier Aleksey
Kosygin and head of the Soviet parliament Nikolay Podgorny in early 1968.
The letter expressed concern of those who signed it over "the violations of
the norms of socialist democracy in Ukraine." The Soviet leaders were
particularly disturbed by the fact that among those who had signed the
letter were not only Ukrainian artists, authors, actors, film directors but
also scientists, journalists, students and blue-colour workers.

All of them were dealt with separately - the students were expelled from
colleges; the scientists were fired from research centres; members of the
Unions of Artists, of Writers and of Actors were expelled from their
respective unions (and the expulsion automatically meant that they lost
their studios, official commissions, and any government support). Those
among the people who had signed the letter happened to be members of
the communist party, were expelled from the party and that meant they
would face great difficulties in finding new jobs - nobody would want to
hire them.

Not only those who had signed the letter but many other nonconformists lost
their jobs and had to work as labourers, street sweepers or security guards
in order to survive (in those times the least paid jobs; "security guards"
were unarmed and their job consisted in being locked in, say, a kindergarten
for the night; in case of trouble, they were supposed to try to scare the
burglars off by their mere presence, hoping the bandits would not harm the
unarmed former students or researchers - tr). The Russian popular musician
Boris Grebenshchikov, in one of his songs, called the nonconformists of the
late nineteen-sixties "the generation of janitors and security guards."

At about the same time, the samvydav press released Dzyuba's book
Internatsionalism chy rusyfikatsiya? (Internationalism or Russianization?)
which dealt with the policies of Russianization conducted in Ukraine by the
communist party. Later, this book was published in the west.

In 1970, the samvydav press in Ukraine which before that time had mostly
published letters and large articles without any regularity, started
releasing a periodical, Ukrayinsky visnyk (Ukrainian Herald). It was edited
by Vyacheslav Chornovil, with Mykhailo Kosiv, Yaroslav Ksendzyor, Olena
Antoniv, Lyudmyla Sheremetyeva and Stefania Hulyk as members of the
editorial board.

A section of the Visnyk was devoted to the trials and persecution of
nonconformists in Ukraine. In 1971-1972 five issues were released, four of
which found their way to the west. The periodical played a significant role
in the nonconformist and dissident movement in Ukraine.

The invasion of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (the then
Ukrainian communist party boss Petro Shelest "warmly welcomed" this act of
aggression to suppress the democratic changes in the neighbouring country)
marked an end to the "thaw" in the Soviet Union which anyway had had long
begun to "congeal" into a cold spell. Starting from early 1969 the process
of de-Stalinization was completely reversed and turned into
"re-Stalinization."

Both Shelest and his KGB chief Nikitchenko were dismissed (they were
suspected by the authorities in Moscow of being "soft" on those who were
called by the Soviets "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists" - tr.). The new KGB
chief installed by Moscow was much tougher and he immediately began to
be putting Ukraine "in order", KGB style. It was at the early stages of his
rule in Ukraine that Alla Horska (see an article about her in this issue)
was murdered.

In 1972 the Soviets were all set to deliver the crushing blow to the
rebellious Ukrainian intelligentsia and the samvydav press. Within twelve
months over a hundred people were arrested, tried and sentenced to long
terms of imprisonment (mostly in the gulag concentration camps) and exile.
Ivan Svitlychny, whom the Soviet authorities regarded as being "particularly
dangerous" was sentenced to seven years in the gulag and five years of
exile.

What the Polish historian Henryk Wereszicki wrote about the victory of
Poland over the Soviets in 1920 could be applied in a certain sense to the
situation with the Shistdesyatnyky: "Our very existence as a nation was
made possible thanks to that war; if we had lost it we would have been in a
situation similar to the one the Ukrainians find themselves in - for several
successive generations their [cultural] elite was being destroyed so that
the Ukrainians would not be able to establish their own statehood."

The Shistdesyatnyky had a tragic destiny - the soviet power used all of its
crushing repressive weight to do away with the best representatives of the
Ukrainian intelligentsia - talented artists, authors and others - who were
called upon to save, preserve and develop Ukrainian culture but who,
instead, were put into concentration camps.

The price they paid for their courage, loyalty and faithfulness to the
Ukrainian idea was very high indeed. They were denied work, they could not
express themselves, they were put into prisons and concentration camps,
they were exiled; they were murdered, they died in the inhuman conditions
they were forced to live.

But they carried this national idea on through the darkness and stagnation
of the Brezhnev times, they were paragons whose example encouraged
others to follow. Their sacrifices were not in vain since they passed their
principles and ideals to the new generations of Ukrainians. There is a
saying in Ukraine, The blood spilled for the native land doesn't go dry
which can be rightfully applied to the heroism of the Shistdesyatnyky. -30-
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In writing this article the author, in addition to other sources, has used
information to be found in the book Bunt pokolinnya (Rebellion of a
Generation) by B. Berdykhovska and O. Hnatyuk published in Kyiv in
2004 by the Dukh i litera Publishers.
http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20044/48
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: For information about how to subscribe to the "Welcome To
Ukraine" magazine, a world class publication in English, contact:
ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net.
=============================================================
4. ALLA HORSKA, A ONCE AND FUTURE ARTIST
Revealed that the Soviet KGB was instrumental in her murder

Yevhen Sverstyuk, a Shistdesyatnyk himself, takes a very
personal look at the Shistdesyatnyky phenomenon in general,
and at Alla Horska, one of the Shistdesyatnyky, in particular.

By Yevhen Sverstyuk
Welcome to Ukraine Magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number Four, 2004

"Shistdesyatnyky (literally - those who lived in the sixties) - a generic
term applied to a group of literati, artists and scholars of Ukraine who,
having realized the criminal nature of the soviet communist system and
rejecting dogmas of "socialist realism", in the early 1960s, at the time of
destalinization and "Khrushchev's thaw" tried to stir national awareness
through their works and public activities, struggled for the preservation of
the Ukrainian language and culture, thus contributing to the democratization
of social and political life in Ukraine.

A lot of pressure was put on them by the soviet authorities and they were
denied opportunities to make their works public. From the middle of the
1960s, Shistdesyatnyky began forming opposition to the communist regime
and soon became active participants of the dissident movement in Ukraine."
Dovidnyk z istoriyi Ukrayiny (History of Ukraine: Reference Book), Kyiv
2002.

"There are few women like her in the whole world," said Rayisa Moroz, a
Shistdesyatnyk herself, of Alla Horska, another prominent Shistdesyatnyk.
What courage and strength of character were required to go against the
repressive communist regime, knowing there were only a handful of
like-minded people, knowing they faced a struggle against great odds with
imprisonment, torture and death being the rewards. Only those who knew it
could appreciate Horska's heroism in full.

Why do we turn to Alla Horska when there were many others among the
Shistdesyatnyky who are better known and who made weightier contributions
to the common cause of national revival?

Is it because of her tragic death? No, there is something else in our
wanting to keep her name well remembered. There were many murders of
talented people, and repercussions of those deaths, little as they were in
those times, soon were overshadowed by other, even more gruesome events.

In fact, it was what those who had plotted and committed murders, hoped
for - Horska's death would also soon be forgotten. But her untimely death
turned her into a very distinctive figure of the Shistdesyatnyky movement
and those responsible for her death discovered to their amazement that
Stalin's pronouncement, "Eliminate a person, and you eliminate a problem,"
did not work. Probably it was true as far as the party apparatchiks and
functionaries were concerned but it fell short of being applicable to a
person who devoted her life to quite a different cause and was prepared to
sacrifice her life for it.

Similarly to other people of her circle and of her fate, she did not belong
socially to the lower classes. She had more or less secure future
established for her by being born into the family of a successful soviet
functionary, she was talented, she was well-bred. She was at the top of
her class in the art school she went to and at the Art Institute. Her
artistic career had a very auspicious start. She married a gifted painter,
Viktor Zaretsky; she had an apartment downtown Kyiv.

Everything seemed to have been set for a successful career but in the
nineteen-sixties a tormenting question arises before many strong,
cultured and gifted Ukrainians - what to do next?

Strong in spirit, that is, because those who were weak accepted their fate
and the destiny of their country meekly. Neither those who were
well-established in the soviet time were asking such questions.

The really talented people avoid everything which is false and choose the
hard way to achieve their goals, eschewing the easy ways of "toeing the
party line."

A highly conscientious person seeks only the truth and will never do with
half-truths. A wise person seeks his national and spiritual identity and
does everything to reveal it. A courageous person seeks friends among the
oppressed and those who are persecuted for the truth. A spiritually strong
person moves against the current and even if at the outset conditions in the
life of such a person were conducive to a career in a chosen field, moving
against the current creates adverse conditions for this person. The fact
that you were born into a loyal and successful (from the soviet point of
view) family could actually make it worse for you - additional pressure
would be put on you "to mend your ways, or else."

Horska was a person of a strong physique who was reduced at times to work
as a labourer. She was a sensitive person of a clear conscience and attempts
were made to involve her in implicating people whom she hardly knew in
crimes they had not committed. At the time when the wave of the national
revival and liberation movement began to subside, she remained adamant in
her adherence to the national cause. The soviet totalitarian regime could
not stand such people. And after a number of "serious warnings" the regime
struck.

It was very difficult in those times to withstand the tremendous pressure
the regime put on such people as Alla Horska who, starting from 1963 when
she befriended Vasyl Symonenko, did all she could to defend the prosecuted
and prosecuted for the Ukrainian national cause. But the thing is that this
defence was put up by those who were themselves persecuted and
discriminated against. The popularity that such defenders gained could not
hold against the vituperative and vicious attacks on "the Ukrainian
bourgeois nationalist" coming from the soviet officials and the obedient and
subservient media. Not a single word of praise about Shistdesyatnyky was
allowed to be said in the press or in any other media.

It was not possible to withstand the coordinated attacks of the regime but
it was possible to help others to survive and support them, morally and
otherwise. Horska was one of those few who stood up for others knowing
only too well that she would face persecution herself. She, similarly to
Vasyl Stus and some others like him, was prepared for self-sacrifice.

We keep coming back to Alla Horska because we feel we lack people like her
in our present-day society. We want her, posthumously, to continue struggle
for the honour of the Ukrainian nation, for the lofty ideals.

Well-fed and well-paid beer guzzlers may laugh at these words. But they are
not just words. In real life, quite real people of flesh and blood, who, in
some respects, are "like everybody else" but who are stronger and higher in
spirit, risk their lives in the minefields of the nation's self-defense,
protest in the face of the regime's retaliation, and many others looking at
them with wonder and respect think to themselves, "If there are people like
these, risking everything for the big cause, then not everything is lost
yet!" The risk-takers are an evidence of the fact that the spirit of
struggle for the common cause and faith in it continues to live.

Cynics and detractors will say, "They're just showing off. I've seen myself
how one of them." People like Alla Horska were no saints. Neither did they
want to show off or play heroes. She just did what she thought she had to do
and sometimes she did something that could be censured but she did it for
achieving a higher goal. And she contributed more than many others.

When she started to learn the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture, she,
in spite of her growing knowledge, always remained an eager student. She
seemed not to have been influenced in any way by the atheistic propaganda.
She lived a highly spiritual life; she was highly conscientious, always
ready to support a good cause; she had an ability to preserve her dignity in
humiliating circumstances, she was committed to a noble cause - all of these
qualities in her revealed the depth of her truly Christian nature. She knew
how to respect things worthy of respect in others, and make others respect
her.

Over three decades that passed since her death have not diminished this
respect for her. Images engraved on our minds by the spirit are more lasting
than the constructions of steel and cement erected by false regimes which,
as time passes, begin to evoke mistrust and consternation - Why have these
been built at all?

Alla Horska has a lot to say to the present-day generation of Ukrainians by
her art and by her life. Her presence among us is both virtual and real. At
the time of disillusionment and loss of faith she is a beacon.

Alla Horska and Ivan Svitlychny (poet, translator, literary critic and one
of the Shistdesyatnyky - tr.) were age peers and back in 1964 both of them
turned 35. Their friends set up in jest the Central Jubilee Committee,
headed by Vyacheslav Chornovil, to celebrate their birthdays. There was
more to it than an ironic parodying of the Communist Party Central
Committee. Nobody at that time celebrated such dates ending with 5, but
they did not think they would live long to celebrate their combined 70th
birthday.

Every person of their circle was aware that life might end soon, and yet
they had in them the Cossack-like devil-may-care attitude to their future.
Both Horska and Svitlychny felt it was their calling and duty to struggle
for the Ukrainian national revival; they had many other things in common -
modesty, for example.

IN MEMORY OF ALLA HORSKA

Rage, my soul. Rage against injustice,
but do not cry.
The sun of Ukraine is in the white frost.
Search for the red shadow the guilder rose
Casts upon the black waters -
Look for that shadow that falls
On a handful of us. Oh there's so few of us,
Barely enough to say prayers, and hope.
All of us are doomed to die prematurely,
Because the blood of the guilder rose is as bitter
As the blood that is running in our veins.

Poem by Vasyl Stus

Alla Horska was born in Yalta, the Crimea, in 1929. Her father, Oleksandr
Horsky was a Ukrainian film producer, one of the pioneers of Ukrainian
cinema. When the war broke out in June 1941, her mother and she found
themselves in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and being unable to leave the
city, they stayed there until the end of the Nazi blockade which killed
hundreds of thousands. Horska and her mother survived. Later they moved
to Kyiv where she went to an art school and then the Kyiv Art Institute to
study painting.

In the early nineteen-sixties she joined the national revival movement which
involved many intellectuals and artists of her generation. Though she had
been raised in a Russian-speaking family (her parents were thoroughly
Russianized), she started speaking exclusively Ukrainian. In 1962 she was
one of the founders of the Kloob tvorchoyi molodi (Creative Youth Club)
which played a significant role in Ukraine's cultural life of that time (see
article The Rebellious Generation).

Alla Horska took it upon herself to organize meetings of Ukrainian,
nationally minded intelligentsia and spread samvydav (literally:
self-published, or published clandestinely) literature. Gradually, she
became one of the leaders of the opposition movement (in the soviet times,
"opposition" meant opposing the soviet regime in language, culture and the
political sphere; it did not have a legal status, of course, and was
brutally suppressed by the regime - tr.).

Vasyl Symonenko and Les Tanyuk and Alla Horska discovered, after a long
search, common graves of thousands of people who had been slaughtered
by the soviet secret police in the terror of the nineteen-thirties. Horska
was instrumental in providing help to the political prisoners and their
families.

In 1964, jointly with other artists (Lyudmyla Semykina, Panas Zalyvakha and
Halyna Sevruk), she created a stained-glass composition called Shevchenko.
Mother in the Red Building of the Kyiv Shevchenko University. This
stained-glass work depicted Taras Shevchenko who with one hand made a
protective gesture over an abused woman that symbolized Ukraine, and in the
other hand held an opened book with his words inscribed on its page: "These
people, turned into slaves, will be glorified, and on their guard I shall
put my word." No sooner was the stained-glass work unveiled, it was brutally
destroyed at night with crowbars on the order of the communist party and
university officials. Alla Horska and Lyudmyla Semykina were expelled from
the Union of Artists of Ukraine.

Expulsion meant she could not find any work in "the capital of the Soviet
Ukraine" and she had to look for commissions elsewhere. Jointly with other
artists, she created several monumental murals and other works in the Land
of Donbas. These works were inspired by Ukrainian Baroque and of Mexican
murals. Alla Horska's art was based on the traditions of the Kyiv academic
art school, folk art and Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s.

In the late nineteen-sixties she created a number of portraits of her
contemporaries (B. Antonenko-Davydovych, V. Symonenko, I. Svitlychny and
Yevhen Sverstyuk among them). Though her membership of the Union of Artists
was renewed, she never stopped taking part in the dissident movement - she
was often present at court hearings of the trials of the dissidents to
provide moral support; she wrote protests to the persecuting bodies and the
KGB, and was involved in other activities that the regime labelled
"anti-soviet." She was one of those who signed the Letter of Protest of 139
(see article The Rebellious Generation) and she was again expelled from the
Artists' Union.

In December 1970 Alla Horska was murdered in the town of Vasylkiv, in the
Land of Kyivshchyna. An investigation that was carried into her murder in
the 1990s by a public organization revealed that the soviet KGB was
instrumental in her death.

The fact that Alla Horska was one of the leading exponents of the
national-liberation, nation-revival and dissident movement overshadowed
her achievements as an artist whose legacy includes dozens of murals and
a great number of paintings and graphic works. We hope this oversight will
be duly rectified. -30- [The Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: To see the photographs with this article please click on
this link: http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20044/52
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: For an additional seven articles about Alla Horska click on
this link: http://www.artukraine.com/commcrimes/allap2.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: For information about how to subscribe to the "Welcome To
Ukraine" magazine, a world class publication in English, contact:
ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net.
=============================================================
5. MAY 9TH - NOT VICTORY DAY FOR UKRAINE

Ukrainian World Congress (UWC)
Toronto and New York, Friday, April 22, 2005

On May 9th, 2005 many will observe the 60th anniversary of the end of
World War II. Preparations are being made in Moscow and Kyiv. The
President of Ukraine has suggested that he would be traveling during
this time, perhaps a day before, to Moscow to share in the celebrations
there. The President of the United States has scheduled a visit to
Moscow specifically for May 9, 2005.

While the demise of the Nazi War machine should be accepted with
much satisfaction, nevertheless within the context of the aftermath, any
celebration is inappropriate. The end of World War II and the infamous
Yalta Treaty several months earlier brought about very little peace, rather
additional pain and suffering to millions who found themselves betrayed by
the Allies, languishing within the confines of a different empire but equal
to if not more vicious than the Nazis.

Operation Keelhaul brought about the extermination of some two million
Soviet nationals. Allied acquiescence in Soviet hegemony over most of
Eastern Europe and Asia resulted in an additional 40-45 years of Soviet
tyranny.

For Ukrainians in Ukraine or in other countries of the world, May 9th should
be an occasion to honor its martyrs, those who perished prior to the War,
during it and after. We should be reminded that some 75 % of Soviet
political prisoners in the period following World War II were of Ukrainian
origin. We should be reminded that the Ukrainian Catholic Church was
liquidated by the Soviets in 1946 and that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
was merged with Stalin's creation the Russian Orthodox Church.

We should be reminded that while the Nazis were responsible for some 20
million lives lost, the Communists were to blame for 100 million deaths. We
should be reminded, as many historians claim, that no nation on earth had
more victims than the Ukrainian nation.

We urge our membership to commemorate the tragic aftermath of World
War II on May 9th, 2005 through requiem observances, liturgies and, wakes
to remember those, who fought in different uniforms but with independent
Ukraine in their hearts. Similarly, we call upon our member organizations to
educate their governments about Soviet repressions and communist evils.

Finally, we urge the President of Ukraine to cancel his trip to Moscow as
Moscow symbolizes the tragedy of the Ukrainian people, their pain and
suffering for 45 years following the specious victory of May 9th.

For the Ukrainian World Congress

Askold Lozynskyj, President
Victor Pedenko, Secretary-General
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UWC, 145 Evans Avenue, #207, Toronto, ON M8Z 5X8 Canada
Tel. (416) 323-3020, Fax (416) 323-3250, E-mail: congress@look.ca
Internet: www.ukrainianworldcongress.org
UWC, 225 E. 11th Street, New York, NY, 10003 USA
Tel. (212) 254-2260, Fax (212) 979-1011, E-Mail: Askold@verizon.net
=============================================================
6. UKRAINE 2005: TO THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF LIBERATION
LIBERATION FROM WHAT?

Serhiy Hrabovsky, deputy editor in chief of the Suchasnist Magazine,
describes the year when Ukraine was liberated from the German
occupation but remained in the clutches of the soviet totalitarian regime.

Article by Serhiy Hrabovsky
Welcome to Ukraine magazine
Kyiv, Ukraine, Issue Number Four, 2004

Ukraine became one of the major battlefields of the Second World War as
early as September 1939 when the German armoured units, thrusting from the
west, and the Red Army armoured units and cavalry pushing from the east,
crushed Poland. Western Ukraine got caught in between the two thrusts and
was "liberated" by the Red Army. In 1940, the Red Army occupied Bessarabia
(Moldavia) and Bukovyna, then Rumania's dominions. Bukovyna, which was
mostly populated by Ukrainians, had been under Rumanian domination for
several centuries.

Though the occupation of Western Ukraine was in compliance with the secret
protocol of the Soviet-German Pact signed in August 1939, both Hitler and
Stalin, these two "arch friends" distrustful of each other, began preparing
for war. Hitler managed to finish his war preparations ahead of Stalin and
struck first. Ukraine was particularly badly hit.

HEAVY FIGHTING

In 1941, the Red Army in Ukraine suffered catastrophic defeats fighting
against the invaders. On June 22 1941, the German offensive was launched
by three army groups; in the south, the army group, under Rundstedt, with an
armoured group under Kleist, advanced from southern Poland into Ukraine
against Kyiv, whence it was to wheel southeastward to the coasts of the
Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The invasion along a 1,800-mile front took
the Soviet leadership completely by surprise and caught the Red Army in an
unprepared and partially demobilized state.

Rundstedt and Kleist had made short work of the foremost Soviet defenses
stronger though they were than anywhere else. A new Soviet front (army
group) south of Kyiv was broken by the end of July; and in the next
fortnight the Germans swept down to the Black Sea mouths of the Buh and
Dnipro rivers to converge with Rumania's simultaneous offensive. Kleist was
then ordered to wheel northward from Ukraine, Guderian southward from
Smolensk, for a pincer movement around the soviet forces behind Kyiv; and
by the end of September the claws of the encircling movement had caught
about 600,000 men.

These gigantic encirclements were partly the fault of inept Soviet high
commanders and partly the fault of Stalin, who as commander in chief
stubbornly overrode the advice of his generals and ordered his armies to
stand and fight instead of allowing them to retreat eastward and regroup in
preparation for a counteroffensive.

By the end of the year almost all of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. In
the winter of 1941/1942, the Soviets launched a big counteroffensive and
regained control of some of the Ukrainian territory. The Red Army's winter
counteroffensive continued for more than three months after its December
launching, though with diminishing progress. By March 1942 it had advanced
more than 150 miles in some sectors.

The German plan to launch another great summer offensive crystallized in the
early months of 1942. Hitler's generals had been awed by the prodigality
with which the Soviets squandered their troops in the fighting of 1941 and
the spring of 1942. By this time at least 4,000,000 Soviet troops had been
killed, wounded, or captured, while German casualties totalled only
1,150,000. Before the Germans were ready for their principal offensive, the
Red Army in May started a drive against Kharkiv, but this premature effort
actually served the Germans' purposes.

This move not only preempted the Soviet reserves but also provoked an
immediate counterstroke against its southern flank, where the Germans broke
into the salient and reached the Donets River. The Germans captured 240,000
Soviet prisoners in the encirclement that followed. In May the Germans drove
the Soviet defenders of the Kerch Peninsula out of the Crimea; and on June 3
the Germans began an assault against Sevastopol, which, however, held out
for a month.

The Germans were delivered a devastating blow at Stalingrad at the end of
1942-early 1943 and began to roll back. But their counteroffensive of
February 1943 threw back the Soviet forces that had been advancing toward
the Dnipro River and by mid-March the Germans had retaken Kharkiv and
Belhorod and reestablished a front on the Donets River.

After the Battle of the Kursk Salient, or Bulge, the Red Army advanced on
all fronts. In September the Soviet advance was accelerated, and by the end
of the month the Germans in Ukraine had been driven back to the Dnipro. By
the end of the first week of October 1943, the Red Army had established
several bridgeheads on the right bank of the Dnipro River. By early November
the Red Army had reached the mouth of the Dnipro, and the Germans in the
Crimea were isolated. Kyiv, fell to Vatutin on November 6.

Vatutin's forces from the Zhytomyr - Korosten sector advanced westward
across the prewar Polish frontier on January 4 1944. Vatutin's left wing,
wheeled southward to converge with Konev's right, so that 10 German
divisions were encircled near Korsun, on the Dnipro line south of Kyiv.

The fighting in Ukraine was particularly fierce - the Germans had about 40
percent of all their infantry divisions and about 70 percent of their
armored units fighting at the Ukrainian fronts, and the Soviets concentrated
over 40 percent of their infantry and up to 80 percent of their armored and
mechanized units in Ukraine. Stalin, after the earlier failures to achieve
large-scale success in recapturing Ukraine, urged his generals to mount a
major offensive and in March 1944 saw a triple thrust by the Red Army. Odesa
fell to the Red Army on April 10 and on May 9 the Germans in the Crimea
abandoned Sevastopol, caught as they were between Soviet pincers from the
mainland north of the isthmus and from the east across the Strait of Kerch.

Thus in the spring of 1944 Ukraine saw arguably the heaviest fighting of the
Second World War: about 4 million soldiers, 45,500 cannons and grenade
launchers, 4200 tanks and self-propelled guns, over 4000 aircraft were
involved in fighting at the Ukrainian fronts on both sides. On April 1944,
the Soviet troops reached the Ukrainian border in the west in Bukovyna, but
it took several more months of intensive fighting before in the fall of 1944
the entire territory of Ukraine was freed from the Germans. In Western
Ukraine the Red Army faced not only the Germans - the Ukrainian
Insurrection Army fought both the Germans and the Soviets.

LIBERATORS OR INVADERS?

The official Soviet history books claimed that the Red Army liberated
Ukraine. But there is another point of view, that of the Ukrainian
nationalists who claim that the Red Army came to Ukraine to conquer
it rather than liberate. Whose claim is closer to the truth?

First, let's turn to some documents, reminiscences and opinions of
historians and those who are in a position to pass judgment.

An excerpt from a German soldier's letter written in 1944: "The Red Army
mobilizes all the population in the areas it recaptured. Battalions are
formed from these mobilized civilians and are used to increase the bulk of
their attacking forces. The Soviets did not care whether these recruits had
had any military training at all, that most of them had no weapons and that
many of them even had no boots. The POWs we captured said that they were
expected to take the weapons of those who had them and who were killed.
The Soviets accused these unarmed people of collaboration with us and
were to pay with their lives for this accusation."

Professor Boris Sokolov from Moscow, 2003: "Those who were called up in
the areas which had been temporarily occupied [by the Germans], particularly
in the western lands [of Ukraine] were looked upon as potential traitors.
They were driven into battle as cattle is driven to the slaughter.

The idea was to use these recruits, nicknamed "black infantry," for wearing
the Germans out and make them use a lot of their ammunition so that the
fresh regular troops would have much less trouble in knocking the Germans
out of their oppositions. These ["black infantry"] people were not even
issued uniforms or rifles. Why should these things be wasted if these
miserable people were doomed to die anyway in the very first engagement?
Besides, their deaths meant that the Soviet NKVD secret police would have
less work to do after the war was over."

Marshal Konev, 1973: "Men from the areas newly liberated [from the
Germans] voluntarily joined the regular forces engaged in fighting the
enemy. For example, in the village of Kvitka alone about 500 men joined
the 180th Infantry Division and immediately engaged the attacking enemy
at the outskirts of their village." Konev, whom we also mentioned earlier,
wrote his memoirs at the time when no one, marshals included, could
express themselves freely and uncensored.

The Soviets used the word "voluntarily" in their very peculiar manner:
"collectivization" of the countryside in the late 1920s was described as
"voluntary" whereas in fact it was forced and cost millions of lives; in the
Terror of 1935-1937, victims of the regime confessed "voluntarily" to crimes
they had not committed after terrible torture was inflicted upon them; the
rank-and-file Soviet citizens "voluntarily" bought bonds issued by the state
knowing they would never get their money back. There were many other
instances when people were coerced by the Soviet regime into "voluntary"
sacrifices.

George Orwell, in writing his 1984, must have had in mind this Soviet
specific use of words inventing his "newspeak." There is another thing worth
commenting in the quoted passage from Konev's memoirs - these "volunteers"
were evidently given rifles but surely there was no time to teach them how
to use them, let alone instruct them in the gruesome art of warfare.

All the evidence we possess suggests that we are talking not of occasional,
separate instances but of a generally practiced behaviour of the Red Army
in the "liberated" areas of the Ukrainian territory. Millions of Ukrainians
who were looked upon as second-rate cannon fodder must have died as a
result of such practices. Is it the way that liberators should treat the
liberated? Does it not look very much like genocide of the Ukrainian people?

Now let's turn to some of the hard facts which unequivocally reveal the way
Ukraine was "cleansed" by the "liberators." On January 7 1944, the NKVD
(People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) issued a decree which in part
said that "all those who have been found to have abetted the enemy in the
territory of Ukraine must be arrested with confiscation of their property
and deported to the Chornogorsky special camp [in the Land of Krasnoyarsky
Kray, Russia]." Anyone who had remained "in the territories temporarily
occupied by the enemy" and worked in the industrial or management sectors
run by the Germans could be regarded as "enemy abettors."

In March 1944, the NKVD issues another ukase: "The families that harbour
the outlawed OUN [Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists] members and the
families, members of which have been sentenced as OUN members, are to
be registered and then deported to the remote areas of the USSR."

On June 22 1944 secret Order # 0078/42, signed on the behalf of the Soviet
leadership by Marshal Zhukov, deputy head of the Stavka (Soviet High
Command with Stalin at its head - tr.) and Beria, People's Commissar of
Internal Affairs, was issued. In that infamous document the sins of the
Ukrainian nation before the USSR were listed and all the Ukrainians who had
stayed "in the territories temporarily occupied by the enemy" were "to be
deported to the remote areas of the USSR", (since all of the territory of
Ukraine was "temporarily" occupied - did it mean then that all of the
Ukrainians were to be deported?); those who collaborated with the Germans
in any way were to be deported ahead of others.

The next in line for deportation were those who worked for the Germans or
provided some services. The deportations were to be carried out in secret;
those who were called up for service in the Red Army from among the
population "in the territories temporarily occupied by the enemy" were to
be kept under constant secret police surveillance.

The Soviet historians and politicians insist (and those who have inherited
their ideology continue to do so) that no such order was issued and that it
is "a concoction" of Nazi propaganda. The Germans did distribute leaflets,
dropping them from their planes, with the text of this order. The Germans
could have obtained this order through their channels and made it public.
Not always Nazi propaganda told lies - didn't Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry,
for example, tell the truth about the massacre by the Soviets of Polish
officers in Katyn?

Stalin's intention to deport the Ukrainian people is verified by several
independent sources such as memoirs of Khrushchev and of Milovan Djilas,
a Yugoslavian politician. Some of the formerly high-ranking Soviet officials
confirm Stalin's intention to do away with the Ukrainian resistance once and
for all. For instance, talking to Felix Chuyev, a Moscow writer, the former
People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR General Ryasny
said: "The text of this order was delivered to me by one of the deputies of
the Minister for Internal Affairs of the USSR.

It said in part that for active OUN resistance to the Red Army, for armed
struggle, for hostile attitude toward the Soviet people in general, Comrade
Stalin ordered to deport all the Ukrainians to hell, or more concretely to
Siberia. My subordinates have packed several trains with them [to be
deported] but later the order was revoked."

According to some sources, Khrushchev begged Stalin, literally groveling at
his feet on the floor and hugging Stalin's boots, to rescind the order. But
there is no clear indication that in fact it was rescinded. In the post-war
years up to 1952, 200,000 families (it translates into about 800,000 people)
were deported from Western Ukraine alone to remote areas of the Soviet
Union for forced labour (in the Soviet newspeak - "to take part in communist
construction"). There are no even approximate figures how many people
were deported from other parts of Ukraine.

According to the NKVD archives, about 5,000 OUN members were arrested
in the Land of Dnipropetrovshchyna alone. And as we remember, being
arrested as an OUN member meant that the whole family which the arrested
OUN member came from were deported too.

In the second half of the 1940s, about the third of the inmates of the gulag
concentration camps were Ukrainians which, in percentage, was much higher
than the percentage of Ukrainians in the population of the whole Soviet
Union.

This is how liberation from "the Nazi German invaders" looked from the
Ukrainian perspective.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES

We return to the events of 1944. The territory of Ukraine was completely
"liberated" in the fall of 1944 during the so-called Eastern-Carpathian
Operation which was launched in September 1944. Its aim was to break
through the German defenses in the Carpathians in several days and
penetrate into the plain beyond the Carpathians in order to provide armed
assistance to the Slovak insurrection against the occupying Germans.

Only five days were allotted for crossing the Carpathians but the Red Army
failed to accomplish this objective and the insurrection was crushed. The
Red Army units involved in the operation had not been trained for a military
action in the mountains and in the ill-prepared frontal attack their losses
were in excess of 120,000 men, or 30 percent of their strength at the
beginning of the attack. The attacking units lost almost 500 tanks and
self-propelled guns, almost a thousand artillery pieces and mortars and
almost two hundred planes.

The operation lasted for two months and the Red Army occupied the
territories part of which before the war had been under Czechoslovakia.
These Transcarpathian lands were heavily populated by people of Ukrainian
descent and on November 26 they were declared to be "a constituent part of
the Ukrainian SSR." The final integration of some of the Transcarpathian
territories into the Soviet Union took place in 1945. On October 28 1944 the
railroad station Tchop on the Western border of Ukraine fell to the Red Army
and this date became the date of "the final liberation of Ukraine from the
Nazi German occupants."

Now we shall turn to two historians for the assessment of the situation the
Ukrainian people found themselves in when they were squeezed between
two totalitarian monsters.

The British historian Professor Hugh Trevor Roper writes that some people
continue to think that Stalin and Hitler were two completely different
phenomena - one of them being an ultra-right dictator, and the other one an
extreme-left dictator. Both of them, according to Professor Trevor Roper,
had much more in common than is usually thought; both were thirsty for
power based on the same principles and supported by similar methods;
when they started fighting each other it was a struggle of two strong
adversaries rather than a confrontation of irreconcilable political
antagonists.

Both were fascinated with each other, both studied each other's methods
and means of staying in power; both hated the western civilization of the
twentieth century and both were bent on destroying it.

The Russian historian Professor Sokolov has this to say: "People of the
occupied territories suffered heavier losses and went through much greater
suffering than the rest of the Soviet population. Dozens of millions of
people who had lived under the terrible, inhuman conditions of German
occupation, after they were liberated found that they had jumped from the
frying pan into the fire.

Untold numbers of them were deported or put into concentration camps;
millions who were called up for service in the Red Army were sent untrained
to be butchered by the German machine and artillery fire. Those who had
been lucky to survive, were branded for many years as "those who had
stayed in the territories temporarily occupied by Nazi Germany" [by the
Soviet standards it immediately put on the KGB "list of suspicious
characters" - tr.).

For decades after the war the Soviet citizens had to inform the authorities
when they were being hired for jobs or were planning to go abroad as
tourists or on business whether they or their relatives had stayed "in the
territories temporarily occupied." The victory in the Second World War was
a victory achieved by one totalitarian regime over another one, a personal
victory of Stalin over Hitler. On the final count, the [Soviet] people have
lost the war though they still think that they have won it."

In view of all this we can say that "liberation of Ukraine" 60 years ago was
in fact only "a semi-liberation" of this country - it got rid of one
totalitarian oppressor to find itself under domination of another one. The
full liberation came on August 1991 when Ukraine proclaimed itself at long
last a sovereign state. -30- [Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service]
=============================================================
PHOTOS: All of these pictures were taken during World War II

The people you see in these photographs had one native land
they shared - Ukraine, but during the Second World War
they often found themselves fighting each other.

Veterans of the Ukrainian Insurrection Army (two top photographs)
fought against two totalitarian regimes, Hitler's and Stalin's.
They realized that both regimes were similar in many respects;
both regimes were inhumanly brutal and bloodthirsty.

Red Army veterans (the bottom photograph) were prepared
to give their lives "For the Socialist Fatherland" and "For Stalin."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: To see the photographs with the article click on:
LINK: http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20044/58
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: For information about how to subscribe to the "Welcome
To Ukraine" magazine, a world class publication in English, contact:
ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net.
=============================================================
7. ANNIVERSARY OF WAR'S END BRINGS NO JOY TO POLAND
Liberation of western Europe came as eastern countries
fell into the grip of communism

By Vanessa Gera, Associated Press (AP)
Warsaw, Poland, Friday, April 22, 2005

WARSAW, Poland - The 81-year-old Pole still bears the scars from eight
years in Josef Stalin's labour camps - a fingertip crushed in a Siberian
coal mine, headaches from a mine explosion, and the anger that boils up
each time he remembers. "I am an old man ... I feel it very strongly,"
Tadeusz Olizarowicz says. "It all has a negative effect on my emotions
and my health."

As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the
Second World War in Europe on May 8-9, the mood in Poland and other
former communist republics is less than celebratory. Here, the feeling is
that the end of the war simply replaced one horror - Hitler's - with
another - Stalin's.

Poland was forced into the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, while the
Baltic countries - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - were incorporated into
the Soviet Union. They didn't regain their freedom until the collapse of
communism in eastern Europe 15 years ago.

The lingering bitterness has led presidents Arnold Ruutel of Estonia and
Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania to refuse invitations to Moscow for the May
9 celebrations, though presidents Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia and
Aleksandar Kwasniewski of Poland will attend.

That Olizarowicz had already been thrown into a Nazi camp didn't help him
with the Soviets. Today, he remembers the Nazis and Soviets as "equally
bad."

"If you did something bad in the German camp, a guard would take out a
gun and kill you immediately," he recalled. "But in a Soviet camp, they
would starve you to death so the death was longer and more painful and
then they would shoot you and finish you off with a sickle."

Olizarowicz's "crime" was serving in Poland's Home Army, the clandestine
force that fought the Nazis, and which the Soviets feared would remain a
rallying point for resistance. Convicted in 1947 of "anti-Soviet activity,"
he was among nearly 800,000 Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians
shipped to labour camps.

During the train ride in cramped cattle cars, Soviet guards would count
their prisoners by hitting them. They fed them only salty dried fish while
denying them water on hot summer days. In a camp in Minsk, in Belarus,
where he spent a year laying bricks before being taken to Siberia,
Olizarowicz saw guards slashing the corpses of inmates to make sure
they were dead.

Today, resentment is stoked by the perceived unwillingness of today's
Russian authorities to acknowledge the suffering.

Kwasniewski, while saying he'll go to Moscow to commemorate the downfall
of Nazi Germany, has repeatedly called on Russia to give an "honest
assessment" of Soviet actions in Poland.

Russian celebrations treat the war as an untarnished triumph that began with
the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and which cost 27 million
Soviet lives. Little mention is made of what came before - a Soviet-German
pact that carved up Poland between the two powers.

President Vladimir Putin's government recently angered Poles by telling
them to be grateful for the Yalta treaty, the 1945 Allied deal that set the
stage for the continent's Cold War division and the consignment of Poland
to the Soviet sphere.

Polish and Lithuanian leaders helped mediate an end to Ukraine's
presidential election crisis in December - talks which resulted in the
defeat of the Moscow's preferred candidate. To Poles, the struggle
mirrored their own efforts in the 1980s to throw off Soviet domination.

Sixty years after what the Russians call "The Great Patriotic War," it's
still a highly sensitive issue, said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in
Global Affairs, a foreign affairs magazine. It is "considered a sacred page
in our history," he said, and, "every attempt to raise questions about the
role of the Soviet Union in this war provokes emotional feelings." -30-
=============================================================
8. RUSSIAN COMMUNIST LEADER URGES PRAISE FOR STALIN

AP Worldstream, Moscow, Russia, Sat, Apr 16, 2005

MOSCOW - Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov on
Saturday urged official praise for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and said
the city formerly called Stalingrad should get back its Stalin-era name.

Amid a clamor in some quarters in Russia for the rehabilitation of Stalin,
known in world history as one of the 20th century's most brutal tyrants,
the communist chief said Stalin's leadership in the Soviet Union's victory
against Nazi Germany deserved recognition.

"We should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building
socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague," Zyuganov
told a congress of communist parties from Russia and other ex-Soviet
republics in Moscow.

"We should energetically support calls by veterans of the front to restore
Volgograd to its heroic name Stalingrad," he said in televised remarks.
Zyuganov also proposed that the communists repudiate the decision made
at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 to condemn Stalin's
cult of personality, a turning-point in Soviet history when reformist leader
Nikita Khrushchev officially distanced the country from the Stalinist
terror, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Stalin came to power after the death of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin in
1924 and began a reign of terror that lasted nearly three decades, ending
only with his death in 1953. An estimated 20 million people were executed,
imprisoned or deported to other parts of the former Soviet Union.
Altogether, 10 million are believed to have died.

Ahead of next month's celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the Nazi
defeat in World War II, there has been a growing trend in glorifying
Stalin's leadership during the war despite his brutal rule. -30-
=============================================================
9. A CANDLE IN THE WINDOW
Erecting monuments is an official act, lighting a candle is a personal one

By Prof. James Mace, Consultant to The Day
The Day, Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 18, 2003

The February 12 Verkhovna Rada hearing on the Holodomor , the Great
Ukrainian Manmade Famine of 1932-33, was a triumph not of any one
person, but of historical justice for millions who perished - not only in
the
countryside but for the Ukrainian people as a whole, for a nation literally
dismembered by terror against those who had taken part in the earlier policy
of Ukrainization and suppression of what they had done, dismembered by
being cut off from much of its own history and culture, which were fed them
in such a distorted form that the very word, Ukrainian, seemed to become
second rate, an object of derision for a people that seemingly could not
become a nation and could not quite make it to a supposedly superior
Russian culture.

The five minutes I was given to describe the work of America's Ukraine
Famine Commission did not suffice for even a fraction of what I should have
said, other than that we did the best we could with what we had. Ukraine,
with a few exceptions like Communist leader Petro Symonenko, has now
come to basically the same conclusion we did in 1990: that Ukrainians had
been the victims of genocide in the 1930s and were crippled to an extent
that many of the shortcomings of their contemporary state directly result
from the lack of what could otherwise have been.

As a foreign citizen I am far from comfortable making policy recommendations
even in the face of catcalls from some Communists that I would do better to
go back to my American Indians. Yet, the years I have spent researching this
tragedy compelled me to try to give one piece of advice that I am not
certain was understood.

As one who unsuccessfully attempted to establish an institute for the study
of genocide a decade ago I can only welcome the current initiative by
various political figures to establish an institute to study the famine.

The call by Communist Borys Oliynyk to name the names of all the guilty
and all their victims, while far easier said than done, is also commendable
as is the belated movement to erect a monument to the victims.

I attempted only to counsel an act of national memory accessible to
everyone - that on the national day to commemorate the victims of 1933
(fourth saturday of November) a time be appointed when each member
of this nation where almost every family lost loved ones will be invited to
light a candle in their window in memory of those who suffered.

It would be only a fitting response to the words of Father Oleksander
Bykovets, son of a Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox priest who himself
became a priest in America: Everybody worried about one thing - everybody
was ready to be a martyr and knew that if not today they would be destroyed
tomorrow but they worried whether the world would know about this and
whether the world would say something.

And there was another problem of a still more intimate character: Would
there be somebody to pray for those who were perishing?

Even after seven decades, lighting a candle in the window seems to
me a fitting answer. -30-
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/260202
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTE: Professor Jim Mace died on Monday, May 3, 2004, in
Kyiv, Ukraine. Jim was only 52 years old. He did not get to see and
experience the Orange Revolution. He would have been so thrilled
for his beloved people, the people of Ukraine and for his adopted
land. He so much wanted them to be free. Jim was a good friend
to so many, we all miss him. [EDITOR]
=============================================================
"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT - AUR"
A Free, Non-Profit, Public Service Newsletter
ARTICLES ARE FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
Articles are Distributed For Information, Research, Education
Discussion and Personal Purposes Only
=============================================================
UKRAINE INFORMATION WEBSITE: http://www.ArtUkraine.com
=============================================================
"WELCOME TO UKRAINE" & "NARODNE MYSTETSTVO" MAGAZINES

UKRAINIAN MAGAZINES: For information on how to subscribe to the
"Welcome to Ukraine" magazine in English, published four times a year
and/or to the Ukrainian Folk Art magazine "Narodne Mystetstvo" in
Ukrainian, published two times a year, please send an e-mail to:
ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net.
=============================================================
"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT- AUR" - SPONSORS
"Working to Secure & Enhance Ukraine's Democratic Future"

1. BAHRIANY FOUNDATION, INC., Dr. Anatol Lysyj, Chairman,
Minneapolis, Minnesota,
2. KIEV-ATLANTIC GROUP, David and Tamara Sweere, Daniel
Sweere, Kyiv and Myronivka, Ukraine, 380 44 295 7275 in Kyiv.
3. ODUM- Association of American Youth of Ukrainian Descent,
Minnesota Chapter, Natalia Yarr, Chairperson.
4. ESTRON CORPORATION, Grain Export Terminal Facility &
Oilseed Crushing Plant, Ilvichevsk, Ukraine
5. UKRAINIAN FEDERATION OF AMERICA (UFA),
Zenia Chernyk, Chairperson; Vera M. Andryczyk, President;
Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
6. UKRAINIAN AMERICAN COORDINATING COUNCIL,
(UACC), Ihor Gawdiak, President, Washington, D.C., New York, NY
7. U.S.-UKRAINE FOUNDATION (USUF), Nadia Komarnyckyj
McConnell, President; John Kun, Vice President/COO, Washington,
D.C.; Markian Bilynskyj, VP/Director of Field Operations; Kyiv,
Ukraine. Web: http://www.USUkraine.org
8. THE BLEYZER FOUNDATION, Dr. Edilberto Segura, Chairman;
Victor Gekker, Executive Director, Kyiv, Ukraine; Washington, D.C.,
http://www.bleyzerfoundation.com.
9. UKRAINE-U.S. BUSINESS COUNCIL, Washington, D.C., Van
Yeutter, Cargill Inc., Interim President; Jack Reed, ADM, Interim
Vice President; Morgan Williams, SigmaBleyzer, Interim Secretary-
Treasurer
10. VOLIA SOFTWARE, Software to Fit Your Business, Source your
IT work in Ukraine. Contact: Yuriy Sivitsky, Vice President, Marketing,
Kyiv, Ukraine, yuriy.sivitsky@softline.kiev.ua; Volia Software website:
http://www.volia-software.com/ or Bill Hunter, CEO Volia Software,
Houston, TX 77024; bill.hunter@volia-software.com.
============================================================
"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT" is an in-depth, private, non-profit
news and analysis international newsletter, produced as a free public
service by the non-profit www.ArtUkraine.com Information Service
(ARTUIS) and The Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service The
report is distributed in the public's interesting around the world FREE
of charge using the e-mail address: ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net.
Additional readers are always welcome.

If you would like to read "THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT" please
send your name, country of residence, and e-mail contact information
to morganw@patriot.net. Additional names are welcome. If you do not
wish to read "THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT" around five times
per week, let us know by e-mail to morganw@patriot.net. If you are
receiving more than one copy please contact us and again please
contact us immediately if you do not wish to receive this Report.
============================================================
PUBLISHER AND EDITOR
Mr. E. Morgan Williams, Director, Government Affairs
Washington Office, SigmaBleyzer Investment Banking Group
P.O. Box 2607, Washington, D.C. 20013, Tel: 202 437 4707
mwilliams@SigmaBleyzer.com; www.SigmaBleyzer.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senior Advisor; Ukrainian Federation of America (UFA)
Coordinator, Action Ukraine Coalition (AUC)
Senior Advisor, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation (USUF)
Interim Secretary-Treasurer, Ukraine-U.S. Business Council
Publisher, Ukraine Information Website, www.ArtUkraine.com
& www.ArtUkraine Information Service (ARTUIS)
=============================================================