See related story: Ukrainian-American leaders discuss highlights of last 30 years, future goals
WASHINGTON — The largest Ukrainian diaspora organization in the United States, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, or UCCA, this year marks the 80th anniversary of its creation.
UCCA, which calculates that it represents two million Americans of Ukrainian heritage, was created at a conference in Washington D.C. on May 24, 1940 that brought together representatives from various smaller diaspora bodies that had been operating separately in different parts of the country settled by Ukrainian immigrants.
The first small self-help groups sprang up in coal mining communities in the state of Pennsylvania, which attracted thousands of Ukrainian migrants in the final decades of the 19th century. Those original fraternal societies had modest aims such as providing decent funerals for the many who died in frequent accidents in dangerous mines with little or no safety precautions.
In 1894 the societies formed the first organization uniting the expanding community. Called the Ukrainian National Association (UNA), it printed Ukrainian and English-language newspapers to inform the immigrants about developments in the “old country” and to teach them about the possibilities offered by their new homeland.
Working together with the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches operating in the U.S., the UNA began to explore how to parley the growing number of Ukrainian-American voters into political influence to better their lot and, after the upheavals of World War I, to help the independence struggle in Ukraine itself.
As World War II erupted in 1939 the Ukrainian community realized that violent turmoil was about to reshape the map of Europe again. They knew their best hope of influencing the American government to help Ukraine, now trapped between two competing murderous and tyrannical powers – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, required coordination and to speak with one voice.
UCCA’s headquarters has been in New York City. However, in 1977 its publicity and political lobbying arm, called the Ukrainian National Information Service (UNIS), began operating in Washington to function as the diaspora’s connection to the nation’s highest elected officials.
UCCA had intended to mark the anniversary in various ways that would have included events in Congress to inform and lobby American politicians to support Ukraine at this critical moment of the continuing war against Russian aggression and invasion.
Church services and events such as concerts in local UCCA branches around the U.S. had also been planned but these have been canceled or suspended because of the restrictions imposed by measures to combat the coronavirus.
Instead, the UCCA has placed online a “virtual celebration” on a video that can be viewed at UCCA’s website [www.ucca.org]. Other commemorations may be held later this year as the coronavirus situation allows.
From the start, UCCA functioned on the principle that: “The fates of both America and Ukraine are ultimately indivisible: by protecting the freedom of the one the Ukrainian-American can assure its restoration in the other. Toward this vital and noble end, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America was created.”
To show the U.S. diaspora’s support for victory in World War II, UCCA established the American-Ukrainian war bond drive, raising over $5 million. Around 250,000 men and women of Ukrainian origin served in the American armed forces during the war.
Although UCCA could not persuade the American government to prevent Ukraine from falling under a brutal Soviet occupation, which continued until 1991, it did momentous work to help hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians uprooted by the war and who, for years, faced an uncertain fate in refugee camps, mainly in Germany and Austria.
UCCA formed the United Ukrainian American Relief Committee, which helped the refugees in the camps and, following UCCA’s lobbying to allow Ukrainian displaced persons to come to the U.S. in 1948, enabled some 110,000 Ukrainians to start a new life in America.
In 1945, UCCA sent delegations to the conference that created the United Nations in San Francisco and to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 to speak on behalf of captive Ukraine.
Although the U.S. government and world bodies seldom acquiesced to the Ukrainian diaspora’s pleas or demands, the very fact that they were uttered and recorded on countless occasions and at high-profile events meant that Ukraine could not be hidden from sight and quietly made to disappear from the world stage – much to the Kremlin’s fury.
An UCCA priority has always been to help preserve a living Ukrainian culture in the diaspora while at the same time encouraging its members to become good American citizens.
UCCA’s Educational Council coordinates more than 30 Ukrainian (Saturday) schools nationwide where pupils are taught Ukrainian language, literature, history, culture, and geography.
In the 1960s and 1970s in particular, UCCA and the other most powerful Ukrainian diaspora organization, in Canada, with help from smaller communities around the world, prominently Great Britain, campaigned to publicize the plight of thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners in Soviet Gulags.
In the critical years leading up to Ukrainian independence in 1991, UCCA provided vital support to the Ukrainian RUKH pro-independence movement, supplying equipment for printing, photocopying, faxing, furnishing cash and helping with know-how and political lobbying abroad.
Since then UCCA has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting democracy-building projects in Ukraine and it has helped Ukrainian politicians, officials, and civic activists access their American opposite numbers. America has provided billions of dollars in aid to help build democratic and civil society structures in Ukraine and expand her economy.
UCCA publicized the 2004 Orange Revolution that led to Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency as it was happening and organized scores of demonstrations and other events in support of the mass protests happening in Ukraine.
It funded projects and provided personnel to educate Ukrainian voters about the democratic process and has monitored each of Ukraine’s main elections from 1990 onward.
Following the cancellation of fraudulent presidential election results which had triggered the Orange Revolution, UCCA was instrumental in more than 2,500 volunteers travelingyoUkraine to serve as election observers to protect the integrity of the fresh elections. That was the largest mission ever registered by Ukraine’s Central Election Commission.
There was another tremendous outpouring of support from the Ukrainian-American community during the dramatic mass protests and the bloody and violent response by the then Ukrainian security services that led to the 2014 EuroMaidn Revolution, overthrowing President Viktor Yanukovych, and Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and the Donbas.
UNIS and UCCA helped create a Ukrainian Congressional Caucus composed of Congress members from both major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, enabling stronger bilateral relations between Ukraine and the United States.
The caucus combined with determined lobbying by UCCA and UNIS can take much of the credit for America providing the lion’s share of military aid and training to Ukraine since the 2014 Russian invasion, and why the U.S. is the only country so far to have supplied lethal weapons, Javelin anti-armor missiles, to Ukraine.
Ukrainian Independence Day has been observed since UCCA’s foundation. But until 1991 commemorations were held on Jan. 22 – the day in 1918 that saw Ukraine’s first attempt in the 20th century to gain sovereignty.
UCCA changed the commemoration to Aug. 24 after Ukraine broke free of the Soviet Union on that day in 1991.
A commemoration of the Holodomor, when Josef Stalin starved at least four million Ukrainians to death in 1932-1933, takes place in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 2017. (Askold Krushelnycky)
The Ukrainian community had tried to publicize the horrors of the Stalin-engineered Holodomor famine of 1932-33 as it was happening and has continued to inform the world about the atrocity which claimed, by the most conservative estimates, four million lives. Successive Soviet governments and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin have tried to conceal the mass murder.
UCCA lobbied successfully the U.S. Congress in the 1980s to establish a commission to investigate the Holodomor which concluded in 1988 that “Josef Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-33.”
UCCA organizes various Holodomor commemorations annually. In 2017 UCCA organized a campaign requesting the governors of all 50 American states and mayors of major U.S. cities to recognize the Holodomor as genocide. So far 21 states have done that and in October 2018 both houses of the U.S. Congress passed resolutions recognizing the Holodomor as genocide.
UCCA’s involvement was key to the erection of a Holodomor monument in Washington in 2015.
That became the second major Ukrainian monument in the U.S. capital. In 1964, UCCA’s role had been vital in gaining Congressional and presidential approval to erect a statue to Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, unveiled by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower before a 100,000-strong crowd.
The inscription on the monument’s base quotes one of the poet’s works linking the aspirations of people in Ukraine with America’s founding father, George Washington: “When shall we get ourselves a Washington to promulgate his new and righteous law? But someday we shall surely find the man!”
Without doubt UCCA and the diaspora community in Canada helped immeasurably to transform the dream of Ukrainian independence into reality. The stubborn, impassioned efforts of both North American Ukrainian communities kept alive the very notion of Ukraine when those occupying her territory were trying to obliterate Ukrainian identity.
