ACTION UKRAINE HISTORY REPORT (AUHR)
Washington, D.C., May 17, 2009

TO: HOLODOMOR WORKING GROUP
Ukraine: Holodomor, Gulag, Crimes of Communism, Holocaust, Genocide
DATE: Sunday, May 17, 2009

FOUR ARTICLES ------

1. JURY STILL OUT ON CAUSES OF UKRAINIAN FAMINE
By Andrew Taylor, Political Affairs, Marxist Thought Online
Communist Party USA, New York, New York, Monday, April 27, 2009

2. HOW TO REMEMBER THE HOLODOMOR
Letter-to-the Editor, by Danylo Terleckyj
Third-year law student at Wayne State Univ, Detroit, MI
To the Action Ukraine Report (AUR), Washington, D.C., April, 2009

3. UKRAINE IDENTIFIES THOUSANDS OF STALIN VICTIMS BURIED NEAR KYIV
A memorial to victims of Stalin's regime stands in the Bykivnya forest near Kyiv
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Kyiv, Ukraine Friday, May 15, 2009

4. IN UKRAINE, THE STENCH OF THE SOVIET ERA LINGERS ON
Life in Ukraine offers a dismal but fascinating panorama of
how difficult it is to shake off the blight of Communism.
Analysis & Commentary: By Matthew A. Rarey
Communications Director, Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation (UCEF)
Mercatornet.com, New Media Foundation Ltd.
Carlton, Victoria, Australia, Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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1. JURY STILL OUT ON CAUSES OF UKRAINIAN FAMINE

By Andrew Taylor, Political Affairs, Marxist Thought Online
Communist Party USA, New York, New York, Monday, April 27, 2009

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization

By Lynne Viola, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.

In November 1929 at its Central Committee plenum, the Communist Party of the USSR volunteered to take on and organize collectivization of agriculture. Of 70,000 volunteers, 27,000 plus were selected, and became known as “the 25,000ers.” In the main they were factory worker-activists, factory committee activists and union committee members.

About 80 percent of them were Communist party members, or in the party's youth organization. Over 50 percent were under 30 years of age; eight percent were women. A strict vetting process was run to eliminate workers from wealthier farmer backgrounds, as well as drunkards, "bad characters," and those with connections to party opposition factions.

After a brief training course the 25,000'ers were sent out amid Communist Party rallies to the rural areas in order to establish the organized collectivization of agriculture. They were of the most class-conscious layers of the industrial working class prepared to assume tasks as chairs of collective farms and administrators.

Soviet archival records reveal that the old rural officialdom, established in their roles, very often resented the urban volunteers' entry onto their turf, denigrated them, and frequently handed them shovels and pointed to the manure mound. The peasantry was to say the very least ambivalent from the start in their approach to exacting grain requisitions, and was often hostile to the urban Party volunteers and their outsider, urban, working class culture.

The letters of peasants to relatives show that there was resentment against the valorization of the urban industrial working-class at the expense of the peasantry. We might at this point refer to the long history of Marxian disdain for peasant "backwardness."

(For example, “The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life," Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Sec. 1: Bourgeois and Proletarians).

In organizing resistance to the post 1928 collectivization policy, the peasants circulated Stalin’s earlier pro-NEP speeches and essays as proof of the unfairness and novelty of the new line on Agriculture.

Lynne Viola notes that documents show the 25,000’ers general attitude towards the peasants was a distinct improvement on that of the average rural officials. But no influx of new organizers is accepted into a bureaucracy without incident, and a few volunteers were murdered with the utmost cruelty. At the close of the collectivization 25,000'er campaign at the end of 1931, fully 18,000 of the volunteers remained in the countryside and had retained leading positions in rural party and administrative structures.

The author states that collectivization was intended "to be a revolution which would undermine the old order, modernize agriculture, institute a reliable method of grain collection, stimulate a cultural revolution, and build a new social and administrative base in the countryside."

STUNNING HUMAN AND POLITICAL COST
Today we know modernization was achieved at a stunning human and political cost to the Soviet people, but in light of new research from the Soviet archives (including letters from 25,000’ers in the countryside back home) the enthusiasm and valor of the 25,000'ers themselves can not be gainsaid.

According to Viola, agricultural collectivization, though at the start a proletarian policy of political education launched by Stalin through the 25,000’ers, became limited in its potential by ad hoc policy responses made in response to immediate crises and widespread peasant resistance.

And it is her contention that collectivization came over time to be shaped less by Stalin and the party center than by the often less-than-disciplined or irresponsible activity of rural officials, the experimental methods of collective farm leaders left to manage as best they knew how, and the stark realities of a backward countryside and the wealthier and middle peasantry who did massive wrecking by destroying cattle, hoarding, and destruction of reserves.[1]

According to Viola, the central government's response changed following the first wave of the 25,000'ers service in the vanguard of the revolution. In response to continued wrecking, strict repressive measures rather than class political action gave the lie to Soviet “control” of agricultural policy.

And the policy of repression that intensified with the resistance to collectivization, continued after the collectivization struggle had completed in distortions of Leninist norms and violations of socialist legality.

The author calls the 25,000'ers the cadres of the "Stalin revolution," the advanced workers, served in the front lines of the Stalin revolution. The central government had continuing outbreaks of food shortages in the cities and viewed the “kulaks” or wealthier peasants as the hindrance to socialist construction and the open enemy of the working-class.
SHORTAGES AND DISLOCATIONS BECAME FAMINE
Shortages and dislocations became famine. And as we know, severe famine led to terrible famine in areas of the Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and the northern Caucasus. Millions are believed to have perished, though estimates vary considerably. Thousands endured exile to the north or east.

Viola's closely documented study using original documents from the Soviet archives illustrates the jury is still out on the precise conjunction of factors responsible for the famine. Some other prominent historian-agronomists do not concur in the claim made by many Ukrainian nationalists that the famine was an "act of genocide" and question the whole thesis of a collective persecution of the Ukrainian nation.

Professor of History at the University of West Virginia, Mike Tauger and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, Steven Wheatcroft, argue that the famine was not a result of a deliberate policy against the Ukrainians, and they bring out agricultural and political documentation to illustrate their contention that the widespread 1932 starvation in Ukraine and western Russian areas was due to misguided or misapplied economic policies during collectivization, to severe drought conditions, and to a harvest that turned out to be much smaller than originally anticipated.

ONGOING VIGOROUS GLOBAL CAMPAIGN BY UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS
This is on one level an academic debate among experts on soviet agricultural and national history. But it is at the same time an impassioned often extremely politicized contended space with an ongoing vigorous global campaign by Ukrainian nationalists, anti-communists, revisionist communists and the crisis-ridden “orange revolution” government of Ukraine (which is pressing a charge of genocide at the UN as one front of its ongoing struggle with Moscow).

The head of the Russian State Archive, Vladimir Kozlov, rejects claims of genocide in 1930’s Ukraine. Kozlov claims not a single document exists in the archival materials that would even indirectly suggest that a strategy was adopted against Ukrainians that was different from other regions, never mind a strategy aimed at genocide.

Viola affirms the 25,000ers as enthusiastic idealist workers fighters for Socialism, the best of their generation. She shows that early in the collectivization campaign the Soviet state mobilized working-class activist support for collectivization and also shows from Soviet Archive documentation that, contrary to previous anti-communist claims, the 25,000ers went into the countryside as enthusiastic recruits. [2]

Her unique social history uses an "on the scene" approach from letters and documents of cadre to offer a new understanding of the process of the USSR agricultural revolution under Stalin.

On a personal note my ex-mother in law was a child of 10 living on her parents farm on the outskirts of Ternopil, Ukraine in 1932 and has no memory of any famine in her area. So we need to be careful about which regions were most impacted by famine.

Second, I suggest to academic readers that they read RW Davies & SG Wheatcroft's book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-33 (NY: Macmillan, 2004)esp p 214; Also see Mark B Tauger's article: "The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933", Slavic Review, 50:1 (1991), esp p 89; and see Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 (Cornell U Press: 2001), esp 273-308.

None of these scholars are "Stalinists." They are social scientists and historians of Soviet agriculture who do not however support the notion of a conscious conspiracy by Stalin and the CPSU of 1929-31 to create a "Ukrainian Holocaust." Their careful research shows there are intermediate positions.

NOTES:
1. From 1929 to 1933 the number of cattle fell from 70.5 to 38.4 million, pigs from 26 to 12.1 million, horses from 34 to 16.6 million, and sheep and goats from 146.7 to 50.2 million.

2. In a speech to the Third Plenum of the North Caucasus Regional Party Committee in 1930, A.A. Andreev said, "Such an upsurge – which we now observe is characteristic only of large revolutionary overturns. This is not an ordinary upsurge, but a revolutionary upsurge, especially the upsurge among workers. All questions of workers' daily life, all questions with which the trade unions are concerned in relation to wages, etc. are now subsumed by the question of collectivization. All problems in workers' provisioning, all questions about inefficiencies, food shortages, high prices, etc., are subsumed by collectivization. All the attention of the working class is centered on collectivization. It [the working class] instinctively feels that the key to all these problems is collectivization and that the sooner this issue is resolved, the sooner all the remaining problems will be resolved. ... We presently have a real revolutionary movement in the working class for collectivization: a real revolutionary socialist campaign to the countryside for collectivization when workers gladly decline a high salary and go to the countryside. There are masses of cases of the best skilled workers refusing high salaries and going to the countryside."

LINK: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8441/
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2. HOW TO REMEMBER THE HOLODOMOR

Letter-to-the Editor, by Danylo Terleckyj
Third-year law student at Wayne State Univ, Detroit, MI
To the Action Ukraine Report (AUR), Washington, D.C., April, 2009

Dear AUR Editor,

A European Union Parliament resolution in October of 2008 declared that the Holodomor, an artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine orchestrated by Stalin in 1932 – 33 through a policy of forced collectivization. was a “cynically and cruelly planned” crime against humanity but the resolution did not go so far as to say it was genocide.

Those who champion the Ukrainian cause find little satisfaction in the Parliament’s distinction but it falls directly in line with the rhetoric coming from Moscow, where on February 25th Vladimir Kozlov, head of Russia’s Federal Archival Agency, presented the Kremlin’s case for not considering the Holodomor genocide.

Russia’s best argument, if true, is that the effects of Stalin’s forced collectivization policies were felt throughout the Soviet Union and therefore not by Ukrainians alone. Kyiv, on the other hand asserts that, notwithstanding the atrocities occurring in other parts of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians were specifically targeted for starvation by collectivization, in addition, Ukrainian language, art, literature and culture were suppressed under this regime.

The issue remains unresolved. Meanwhile, both sides have taken to their respective trenches to continue to launch rhetorical assaults. Although a number of states, including Ukraine, have recognized the Holodomor as genocide, this position continues to lack greater international support. In October of 2008 the United Nations General Committee accepted Russia’s recommendation not to include the Holodomor in its session agenda.

What is most unsettling about this stalemate is that it overshadows the purpose of remembering the Holodomor and the reason for honoring its victims. Just as those who memorialize the Holocaust declare, “NEVER AGAIN,” so do the descendants of those who died hungry, behind the cruel seal of Stalin’s iron curtain. However, the Ukrainian position lacks the leverage necessary for proper recognition.

Political posturing will not feed Ukraine’s growing population of homeless children. Nor will it change the fact that rampant inflation and grain shortages continue to hike up the price of food for Ukraine’s, already financially depressed citizenry. Remembering the Holodomor is important.

The path to recognition may be a long one. More research and scholarly analysis can only help to spread awareness of this tragic chapter in history. However, bickering politicians only casts a shadow on the importance of this issue.

Whatever legal distinctions are applied to the Holodomor the people of Ukraine will remain powerless to overcome their economic conditions so long as their government continues to disregard the potential of its fertile soil to fundamentally change Ukraine’s strategic position. Ukraine’s natural growing conditions and climate could yield enough food to feed the entire country, as well support adequate supplies for export provided its agricultural sector can be properly managed and modernized.

A stable, self-sustaining economy in Ukraine, based on agricultural production, upgraded infrastructure, a highly educated and talented work force and perhaps green energy could be the building blocks of a strong democracy in Ukraine. This would be an excellent way to remember the Holodomor and honor its victims.

AUR FOOTNOTE: Danylo Terleckyj is a third-year law student at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. This is his last semester. He may be contacted at danylo_t@hotmail.com.
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3. UKRAINE IDENTIFIES THOUSANDS OF STALIN
VICTIMS BURIED NEAR KYIV
A memorial to victims of Stalin's regime stands in the Bykivnya forest near Kyiv

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Kyiv, Ukraine Friday, May 15, 2009

KYIV -- Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) officials have announced that they have determined the identities of 14,191 people killed by order of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and buried in the Bykivnya forest outside of Kyiv.

Professor Vasyl Danylenko, of the SBU archives, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that there are 18 places in Ukraine that were used to execute thousands of people during the Stalin era.

He said Bykivnya was heavily guarded in Soviet times and, though many executions were carried out in Kyiv, the dead were buried in mass graves at Bykivnya during the night. Before World War II, most executions were carried out directly in the forest with the victims lined up before ready-dug graves.

Danylenko said of the other 18 mass burial sites in Ukraine that have been identified, some are being used as parks, some have department stores built on them, or are serving as city cemeteries.

Ukraine will officially commemorate victims of political repression on May 17 when thousands of people will visit Bykivnya to pay their respects. Many people have erected signs on trees with the names of relatives they believe are buried there.

LINK: http://www.rferl.org:80/content/Ukraine_Identifies_Thousands_Of_Stalin_Victims_Buried_Outside_Kyiv/1732495.html
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4. IN UKRAINE, THE STENCH OF THE SOVIET ERA LINGERS ON
Life in Ukraine offers a dismal but fascinating panorama of
how difficult it is to shake off the blight of Communism.

Analysis & Commentary: By Matthew A. Rarey
Communications Director, Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation (UCEF)
Mercatornet.com, New Media Foundation Ltd.
Carlton, Victoria, Australia, Wednesday, April 29, 2009

"Bolshevism evolved into religion, some kind of materialistic pagan religion, which worships Lenin
and his like as demigods, while considering lies, deceit, violence, the oppression of the poor, the
demoralizing of children, humiliation of women, destruction of the family... and the reduction of all
the nation to extreme poverty as the principles of its rule - although all these principles are false." -
Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics (1936)

A great and holy man made this grim and blunt pronouncement three years before Stalin drenched all Ukraine in red, his veracity confirmed in violence. To understand Ukraine today, we must briefly revisit its pre-Communist history.

Writing these cautionary words in his eighth decade, Metropolitan Sheptytsky (d. 1944) was the long-serving spiritual leader of the largest Eastern Rite within the Catholic Church, the dominant Rite in Ukraine, and rightly so: Ukraine is the crossroads of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholics are Eastern in spirituality but Western in faith, the Kievan Church having re-entered into communion with Rome in the sixteenth century, a first big step toward closing the chasm created by the Orthodox schism in the 11th century.

Sheptytsky was a prophet in his own right as well, clearly perceiving the threat from the armed ideology that would soon persecute his entire country, the eastern two-thirds already having suffered Communist rule since being incorporated into the Soviet Union shortly after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The western third, where Sheptytsky lived, then lay within the political boundaries of Poland—the part that would be ceded to Stalin in 1939 as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty.

History would prove Sheptytsky right. Grim and blunt was the apt way to describe Communism, a grim and blunt ideology that would bludgeon an historically Christian people for the better part of the last century, leaving millions of Ukrainians dead in body (Stalin's forced-famine in the 1930s, deportations to the Gulag, swifter forms of execution) and untold more dead or wounded in spirit. Today the "walking dead" have a less than salutary effect on civil life.

On the plus side, post-Soviet Ukraine is a free and independent country for the first time in centuries. (Being a largely flat-landed country, strategically located and historically flanked by great powers, has not been propitious for Ukrainian statehood.) This freedom is a source of hope. The so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, when a presidential election widely perceived as rigged for the pro-Russian candidate was overturned by a peaceful popular uprising, seemed to tap into that hope.

Today, however, that hope no longer inspires such infectious popular enthusiasm. But why? Because Ukraine bears the bruises of Bolshevism, some of which signify grave internal damage—damage so severe that, save for a rebaptism of the human spirit in the Christian faith that united the Ukrainians as a people in the tenth century, it may lead to the Ukrainians doing to themselves what Stalin was not able to accomplish: the debilitation, if not the death of Ukraine.

SOBERING SOCIAL TRENDS
I spent two months in Ukraine in early 2008, volunteering at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) at the invitation of the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation (UCEF), a non-profit organization dedicated to rebuilding the Catholic Church in Ukraine. (Upon my return, I was hired by the UCEF to help spread the good word about the Good News being promoted in Ukraine: a mission, in fact, inspiring people and reaping tangible benefits far beyond the borders of that pivotally important country bridging East and West.)

I came impelled by the desire to learn and report about a unique and powerful apostolate on the Church's Eastern Front that I had heard about while working in Washington, DC. I was intrigued by UCU, the only Catholic university in the former Soviet Union, fighting for the faith in a culture corrupted by Communism and tempted by Western secularism. This small but dynamic university is helping train a new generation of lay and religious leaders re-evangelizing Ukraine in all aspects of daily life.

After returning from an enlightening tour-of-duty in a land that has known much darkness, and where the long, sinister night of the 20th century continues to cast shadows deep and wide, I wrote several pieces for religious and secular publications about the how UCU and the Church in Ukraine are rebuilding religious and civil society, particularly by addressing the causes of the demographic crisis and the assault of Western-style secularism: like all of Ukraine's major problems and challenges, causes neither economic nor political in nature, but moral and religious. Most of those articles may be found on the UCEF's website: http://www.ucef.org.

Using demographic data about Ukraine released not only by the national government but sources such as the UN, these articles were informed by a personal perspective of Ukrainian life in the western third of the country, principally its main city, Lviv, where UCU is located.

What do the data reveal about Ukraine? The more sobering trends include:

[1] One of the lowest birthrates in the world, 1.2 per woman, that threatens to country's population of 47 million by the year 2050—a demographic crisis President Victor Yushchenko last year declared a "critical threat to national security";

[2] the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in Europe: as of mid-2008, almost 130,000 registered cases of HIV infection and 13,000 deaths due to AIDS, actual numbers likely being far higher due to public ignorance of the causes of the disease;

[3] 40,000 alcohol-related deaths per year, and, according to the World Health Organization, some 700,000 Ukrainians annually treated in hospitals for alcohol dependency. The situation may grow worse as Ukraine struggles through the global financial crisis that is hitting its post-Soviet economy especially hard: the national currency having lost half its value against the US dollar last year as the lifeblood of the economy, heavy industrial output, drains as world demand plummets;

[4] a divorce-to-marriage ratio as high as 3:4 in eastern parts of the country, although that drops as low as 3:10 in western parts;
as many as 33 million abortions performed since legalization in 1955, averaging six per woman: according to the Ukrainian legal code, "only a physical personal [having] the right to life," a "physical person" being one who "exists only after birth"; and abortion being a common means of birth control in a country where condoms have not caught on as in Western Europe;

[5] corruption pervading all levels of society, from politics to law enforcement to business—so common, expected, and generally accepted that statistics about corruption do not exist.

If only the personal perspective I gained on the ground had informed the articles I wrote shortly after returning, however, they would have painted a rosier picture of Ukraine. Certainly there was evidence of nationwide problems: eg, a drunken woman savagely beaten (by her husband?) in a busy public market in Lviv while shoppers, including a policeman, went along their business; the scantily clad young women for whom looking like anorexic prostitutes must have some pay-off, but certainly not in terms of self-respect; everyday stories of police and politicians who would rather take bribes than enforce the law; the young married women taking in an English class I helped teach who said they would rather have more and better material goods than more children, or any children at all.

WHY IS WESTERN UKRAINE DIFFERENT?
Western Ukraine, however, is better off than the rest of the country, largely due to fortunate historical circumstances that prevented its mores from enduring attacks as long and vicious as in the east.

Churches packed on Sundays and holy days are the joyous outward expression of private belief persecuted and forced underground during Soviet rule. Public displays of Christian belief abound, such as statues of the Virgin Mary, Christmas manger scenes, and huge crucifixes venerated by young and old alike.

And the good work being done by religious associations—particularly the resurgent Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which was banned during most of Soviet rule—is evident in myriad social ministries, from orphanages to alcohol-addiction programs to classes introducing engaged couples to the concept of marriage as a sacrament rather than a legal arrangement, commercial in nature and dissolved at whim.

And although one may charge this writer with bias, the Ukrainian Catholic University is helping lead a re-evangelization of Ukraine—mainly in the familiar west, but with forays into the east as well—through its various institutes addressing social problems in very practical ways, but mainly through the work of its graduates: courageous young people who are helping Ukraine overcome a century of totalitarianism by serving virtuously in church, government, and business.

What explains the different milieu of the western half of the country? In short, western Ukraine enjoyed a 25-year respite from Communism, and Communism at its most wicked. It was incorporated into Poland after the First World War, and it did not fall decisively to the Soviets until 1944. Eastern Ukraine was not so fortunate.

Absorbed into the Soviet Union in the years just after Red October, it endured the birth pangs of Bolshevism, from the Soviets’ brutal enforcement of militant atheism to the great famine orchestrated by Stalin in the 1930s, which killed upward of seven million Ukrainians and demoralized millions more, thus serving Stalin's intention of making a proud people supine to Soviet rule.

For in the first decades of Bolshevism, the Soviet scythe slashed with amateurish enthusiasm. As Communism matured, it became more of a business than a labor of perverted passion. By the time it came to western Ukraine, it had entered the business stage, evidencing more the banality than the bloodiness of evil.

Today, eastern Ukraine is stricken to a greater degree with the nationwide diseases cited above: breakdown of the family, demographic collapse, fatalistic nihilism, and, in lieu of religious faith, a materialism all the more vile for its tawdriness.

PERVASIVE IMMORALITY AND CORRUPTION
But what do Ukrainians have to say? Through supporters of the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation who maintain close ties with Ukraine—many of them being either members of the generation of Ukrainians who fled abroad to escape the Red Army in 1944 or their children—I recently was put in contact with several Ukrainians from different parts of this country roughly the size of Texas.

Their accounts of the troubles confronting their country—and the roots of those causes, all somehow branching from the tap root of Communism—were depressingly similar. For the space of this article, two will have to suffice; and suffice well, since all were minor variations on the same theme.

"The worst evil in Ukraine is immorality. Moral decay is not something you can deal with just by investing some money into some kind of program," said Natalka Lominska, an instructor at the National University of Ostroh Academy, a secular university in the western city of Volynia. "Let's take trust. In your culture, when two people meet, they tend to trust each other... But not in Ukraine. People trust almost nobody: state institutions, government officials, even neighbors and doctors! Not only are you expected to bribe the doctor [for supposedly free services] but you can't be sure tests will be done properly or you'll be diagnosed properly. And if all goes well, chances are high that the drugs from the pharmacist will be fakes."

(To give at least some doctors their due, I met a decent one in Lviv who said his salary was so paltry that he would gladly accept even a peasant's chicken in return for services. As it was, he had to moonlight as a computer programmer to make ends meet.)

Lominska, who obtained a graduate degree in the US, is a widow raising a 13-year-old son. She is particularly concerned with the pervasiveness of corruption, a hangover from Communist days when everyone was equal, only some more so than others through their connections.

"Corruption is so widespread that young people think they can buy everything, even love, trust, friendship, and health. When I ask my students about it, the answers are shocking. When I answer that one can buy medicine, but not health; that one can buy sex, but not love, and so forth, they seem to be very skeptical. Consequently, money becomes the most important thing for a lot of people. Stealing is a widespread method of obtaining it... There have been grandchildren who have killed their grandparents for a few hundred hryvnia [there are roughly seven hryvnia to one US dollar]. It's terrifying, but it's true."

The prospects for Ukraine? Said Lominska, after noting other problems such as alcoholism, AIDS, and the increasing rate of hard drug use that, in turn, fuels the rate of HIV infection leading to AIDS: "I'm not a pessimist, but I'm scared."

This predicament was expounded upon by Oksana Sorokowski, a native of the capital city of Kyiv who emigrated to the US in 1993 and now works for the National Institutes for Health, a federal government agency. But she keeps in close contact with friends and relatives in Ukraine and visits every couple of years.

Ukraine evidences the same problems resulting from Communism as other post-Soviet countries, she noted, especially corruption: an outward manifestation of spiritual ruin wreaked by displacing Christianity with a "new system of ethics built on hypocrisy." Almost two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stench of Orwell's Animal Farm clings close to the ground.

What differentiates Ukraine is that the Soviets deliberately sought to destroy the Ukrainian national identity, resulting in a wounded nation confused about its own identity—the eastern part having been heavily crucified, and Russian rather than Ukrainian being the language commonly spoken in Kyiv even today.

"Except for the western part of Ukraine... most of the people, especially in the south and east, were so poor and brain washed that they didn't even embrace their [post-Soviet] freedom," she emailed from her home in the Washington, DC suburbs. "They were wishing to be back in a cage" as during the old regime when life resembled a "zoo: "people had no freedom, but their basic needs were taken care of... they were fed, watered, given a place to live."

"Brainwashing" is a term grown rusty since the Cold War contest between Free World and Communist. But Mrs. Sorokowski's use of the term is apt today, even among younger Ukrainians who evidently imbibed the brainwashedness of their parents.

GREAT GENOCIDAL FAMINE
A North American newspaper, The Ukrainian Weekly, recently featured a series in which first-year university students from western, central, and eastern Ukraine—the first cohort of university students born in post-Soviet Ukraine—were interviewed about Ukrainian history. Those from western Ukraine evidenced the least brainwashing, having had parents and grandparents who remembered pre-Soviet Ukraine. Some from the east, however, could have been mistaken for Young Pioneers, members of the Soviet scouting organization.

They were asked about the great genocidal famine, often called Ukraine's Holocaust, which even today is shrouded in Stalinist-era secrecy and propaganda. (In the West, this propaganda was abetted by Soviet-smitten fellow travelers such as Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who duly reported the Communist Party line on Ukraine.)

One freshman, a self-identified supporter of the Communist Party of Ukraine, even claimed the Holodomor was "technically necessary, from an economic point of view." Uncle Joe would be proud of his latter-day children who call themselves Ukrainian.

FADED HOPES
Mrs Sorokowski's thoughts about Ukraine's present prospects?

During the Orange Revolution in 2004, she said, "people rediscovered trust, love, true friendship, kindness, and hope. Crime went down to an all-time low. I visited Ukraine shortly after... and the change was unbelievable. Alas, it didn't last long. The hopes for dramatic [political and social] change faded... and now I hear again about corruption, moral decrepitude, and total lawlessness. Yes, money seems to be everything—the substitute for law, for education, for just about everything. Crimes go unpunished when you are rich. Law, medicine, banking, and real estate seem to be especially warped by corruption. And it seems to be getting worse as the crisis tightens its grip on the economy."

On a relatively lighter note that complemented Mrs. Sorokowski's song of woe, Matthew Matuszak, a Ukrainian-American who is English-language editor of the Religious Information Service of Ukraine (http://www.risu.org.ua), told me: "It is totally inconceivable to imagine a politician in Ukraine getting thrown out of office like [Rod] Blagojevich [the former governor of Illinois, accused of trying to sell President Obama's vacant Senate seat]. Politicians here are outside the law."

On a somber but still complementary note, Matuszak related an ordinary example of police corruption that makes Chicago's legendary bad cops Officer Friendlies in comparison. Ukraine, like Russia, is facing a sad phenomenon: the ever-growing population of homeless adolescents, abandoned by parents due to such causes as alcoholism and economic hardship. The Catholic Church in Ukraine is supporting many projects to help these kids.

One such project in the city of Zaporizhzhia has encountered resistance from a source unimaginable in most Western countries: the local police department. The project director has said that the police make money off the street kids vis-à-vis prostitution and drugs, so they really don't want the problem solved.
Ukraine's prognosis is dire.

The antidote, however, is simple but difficult to imbibe in many quarters after almost a century of totalitarianism: a rebaptism of the human spirit in Ukraine's historic Christian faith, and a total rejection of the false gods of Marx and Mammon. Wherever the antidote is being imbibed, however, the human spirit in Ukraine is proving itself as rich and life-sustaining as the soil that makes this huge and fertile country the bread basket of Europe.
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FOOTNOTE: Matthew A. Rarey is communications director at the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to rebuilding the Church in Ukraine by supporting various projects, especially the only Catholic university in the former Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Catholic University. For more information, visit http://www.ucef.org or contact Matthew Rarey at rarey@ucef.org.

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LINK: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/in_ukraine_the_stench_of_the_soviet_era_lingers_on/