Editor’s Note: For centuries, Ukrainians have left their homeland and gone abroad. Part 4 of The Great Exodus series explores how Ukrainians in North America define their cultural heritage.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Disillusionment with Ukraine is running at an all-time high in the diaspora communities abroad.
The 2010 election of President Viktor Yanukovych, followed by rollbacks in democracy, and the Oct. 11 conviction of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, seen as political persecution, are being taken as signs that Ukraine is moving in the wrong direction.
If there is unanimity about recent developments in Ukraine, there’s no consensus about how to respond to what is seen as creeping authoritarianism under the Yanukovych administration.
Some Ukrainians in North America are calling for a boycott of ties with Ukraine’s current leaders.
Others note that Yanukovych was elected by the people and that the diaspora should find constructive ways of engaging him.
Still others want to disengage, noting that – while Ukraine is the ancestral homeland – those living abroad should worry less about Ukraine and more about the new lives they have forged.
Those who favor engagement believe that members of the diaspora “have an important role to play in the consciousness of the Ukrainian state,” says Paul Grod, who is the national president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which unites all of Canada’s national, provincial and local Ukrainian organizations. “We can’t go and impose our way of living on the Ukrainian people. That is an Old World view of Ukraine. … But if people in Ukraine want to effect change, we can help them.”
Lisa Shymko, who is the executive director of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Center, which was established by Canadian Friends of Ukraine, says it is important to keep up pressure on both Kyiv’s leadership and the Canadian government to ensure Ukraine does not continue its backslide in democracy.“We want to make sure that the opposition is allowed to participate in the elections with Tymoshenko,” Shymko says.
While disappointment is shared by many Western political leaders, some within the diaspora say the community’s disillusionment may stem from a view of the country governed by personal experiences, rather than the situation in Ukraine.
Other than the latest wave of migrants who left Ukraine after 1991, most members of the diaspora got to know the country only through stories told to them by their parents.
“They created a mythical Ukraine that didn’t actively exist,” says Nadia Diuk, vice president at the National Endowment for Democracy.
A child of Ukrainian immigrants who was raised in Britain, Diuk says many of the migrants who belonged to the third, post-World War II wave were quite young when they left their homeland. Most hailed from western Ukraine, territory that was once part of Poland and divorced politically and psychologically from the rest of Ukraine, which had been under Soviet rule since the 1920s.
Ridding Ukraine of Soviet domination became a driving force and uniting factor for this community of migrants.
“What did they actively know about the country?” Diuk says. “Freeing Ukraine became … a purpose. It’s understandable. A nation that doesn’t have a state becomes idealized in the collective mind.”
To some degree, however, that collective mind helped create a unique feature of the diaspora: No matter where they are, Ukrainians immediately find a community of individuals they can relate to and which readily offers help.
Increasingly, a younger generation of diaspora leaders understands there are genuine differences between themselves and people living in Ukraine.
“Very few of us are going to go back to Ukraine to live,” says Eugene Roman, chairman of the Ukrainian Credit Union in Canada. “We’re at year 20 [of Ukrainian independence]. There are problems, but we’re optimistic.”
Frank E. Sysyn, a Ukrainian-Canadian scholar at the University of Alberta, agrees. “There are great problems and great dangers for Ukraine,” Sysyn said.
Yet the story of Sysyn’s uncle, John, offers a lesson on the value of patience and remembrance, of uniting old and new countries.
In 2004, John, then 96, decided he wanted to visit his native village of Mshanets after an 80-year absence.
Ivan was born in the U.S., and then returned to Mshanets, some 150 kilometers from Lviv, after his mother died. He stayed there until in 1924, when he then returned to America despite a crackdown on Ukrainian migrants, because he was U.S. born.
“He had a list of his five best friends. He had great hopes he would see his girlfriend,” Sysyn says of the trip. Of course, many of the people Ivan knew as a youngster were gone by then, but strangely, all of their descendents knew of him.
That is because people never forgot John or the other migrants who left Mshanets for North America. Even in the church books, priests carefully noted the number of their parishioners who lived abroad, and counted them as members of their flock.
“John Sysyn had a wonderful trip,” Sysyn said. “He talked about it for four years, and then died at the age of 100.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected].
Part 1:Ukrainian exodus to North America
Part 2: How America became home to Ukrainians seeking better opportunities
Part 3: How to be Ukrainian in a new, foreign land
Part 4: Ukrainians abroad strive to keep alive cultural traditions of the homeland
