published in Eastern Economist #402, October 15, 2001
If you ask people who have travelled extensively in Ukraine, there is a fairly widespread sense among them that the population of Ukraine is split in two.
“It’s like there’s two Ukraines,” said one American acquaintance recently. “There’s the east, which is really Russian and thinks in Russian terms, and there’s the west, which is the only really Ukrainian part.”
Personally, I have seen a variety of attitudes. People in Luhansk were quite willing to switch to Ukrainian; those in Donetsk were very reluctant. Odesa is a surprising mixed bag, but then it’s a happy-go-lucky cosmopolitan city historically, and they don’t let too many flies stick.
Crimea is clouded with its own problems and a lousy economy, but you can find people who speak decent Ukrainian and there’s even a museum dedicated to poet and playwright Lesia Ukrainka in Yalta – she went there for a tuberculosis cure at the turn of the 20th century. You can hear plenty of Russian in L’viv and Rivne.
But there is a dividing line.
It’s a man called Stepan Bandera.
Bandera was what most Americans would call a freedom fighter. He fought everyone who was in the way of a free and independent Ukraine. When the Poles gave Ukrainians a hard time, his guerillas would assassinate their generals and blow up their cars. When the Germans turned out to be anti-Slavic, they were targeted and their depots were fair game. But the longest battle went on with the Red Army, the Russians.
Bandera was no pussy cat. He meant business. So much so that his organization eventually split in two: those who believed in fighting fire with fire, and those who wanted a more political approach.
Most Ukrainians who were born in the West grew up on the songs of the UPA, the Ukrainian Partisan Army, from WWII. And many Baby Boomers remember hearing when Bandera was assassinated in Munich in 1962.
But that’s about it.
After more than a half-century, little has been written about the people who tried to keep the flame of Ukrainian spirit alive. The average Ukrainian on either side of the Atlantic knows next to nothing about the real Banderivtsi or Banderites.
Portrayed from the outset as thugs and terrorists by both the Poles and the Soviets – the Germans weren’t around long enough to care –, the epithet “Banderovets” came to be used as a put-down against anyone who simply hailed from Western Ukraine. Whether they were nationalists, patriots or even Ukrainian speakers didn’t seem to much matter.
Nor did those attitudes disappear with independence.
I remember one young woman from Uzhhorod telling me back in 1992 how, when she and her father moved to Kyiv in the late eighties, they were completely shunned for a very long time by their neighbors.
“I hate this city and these people,” she said vehemently. “They are so prejudiced!”
Yet this woman didn’t give a hoot for nationalism. She spoke mostly surzhyk, a blend of Ukrainian and Russian fairly common in Ukraine to this day. And she certainly felt no particular urge to switch to Ukrainian.
The thing is, people are still being labeled Banderovets. Yet the Banderites did far less damage than, say Israel’s Stern Gang, many of whom became upright citizens of the State of Israel after its founding in 1948. One even became president.
Which is why I was intrigued when someone handed me a book not long ago called “Thousands of Roads.”
It’s the memoir of a woman called Maria Savchyn Pyskir. Mrs. Pyskir is a quiet, ordinary, retired Ukrainian American of a certain generation. Her son Bo grew up to run Motorola Ukraine for a couple years in the early nineties.
Yet this simply written book of hers is a very disturbing, even frightening memoir.
It’s not just the obvious horror of being barely 20 and losing two infant sons forever. Nor the constant fear of living in hidden bunkers with little or no fresh air or light, and at times even no food. Nor the unbelievable terror of running from village to village from the mountains in the south to the Belarus border in the north. Of being hunted by the Polish police, Red partisans, the Red Army, and later the soviet police.
Most people don’t realize that these Ukrainian freedom fighters carried on until some time after Stalin’s death. For them, WWII ended in 1954.
But what scared me down to the soles of my feet, reading this book nearly 50 years later, was the hopelessness of the cause.
If you ask Ukrainians who have moved from western to eastern parts of Ukraine, particularly the border oblasts, attitudes haven’t changed much in ten years of independence. They’re being passed on.
Not long ago, I was at a wedding near Kolomyia where I met a young lady who was enrolled in university in Kharkiv. Ksenia’s home is in the foothills of the Karpaty or Carpathian Mountains.
“It’s not what I expected at all, going to school in Kharkiv,” she told me. “It’s not even the language thing.”
“What is it, then?” I asked.
She hesitated before answering. “People are afraid.”
“Afraid? Of what?”
“Of… of Banderites.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not,” she said, looking crestfallen. “I tried to invite some of the girls I’ve met to visit me at home in Kolomyia. They won’t come. They’re… afraid.”
She paused and blushed.
“It’s worse than that, even… I can’t get a date. The boys are afraid to go out with me.”
I looked at this lovely, bright young Ukrainian woman, with long chestnut hair and dark eyes. She had the courage to go away to university at the other end of her country. And this is what she had come up against: Boys were afraid because she was really Ukrainian.
But Ksenia just tossed her hair back, smiled at me: “It’s ok. I understand.” And went off to dance. •
–from the notebooks of Pan O.
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