For your weekend listening pleasure, the BBC has published a two-part documentary podcast on
‘useful idiots’ – a phrase coined by Lenin about Westerners who endorsed the Soviet Union and its Communist ideologies, usually in the press.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and American journalist Walter Duranty were some of those people who also visited the Soviet Union. They mingled with political leaders, were escorted into the countryside by Joseph Stalin’s secret police, and returned home to speak and write of ‘a land of hope’ with ‘evils retreating before the spread of communism’.
However as stories mounted of mass murder and starvation in parts of Russia and the Ukraine, reporters such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge investigated and reported on ‘the creation of one enormous Belsen’. Duranty responded with an article in the New York Times headed ‘Story of the famine is bunk’, and got an exclusive interview with Stalin.
Soon after, Jones died and Muggeridge’s career nose-dived. Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer.
How can intellectual curiosity transform into active promotion of a dangerous lie? Why so many ‘useful idiots’?
That popular
‘Carol of the Bells’ song you hear at Christmas? Yup, it’s Ukrainian!
The melody was created in 1916 by Ukrainian composer
Mykola Leontovych (1877-1921) and titled “Shchedryk” (
lyrics). Based on an old Ukrainian folk song, the original lyrics describes the swallow flying into a household to proclaim the plentiful year that the family will have. The song’s title is derived from the Ukrainian word “shchedryi” which means “bountiful.”
The original song in Ukrainian: Choir Irkutsk University – Shchedryk
The song was originally written for the New Years, not
Christmas:
the original folk melody that Leontovich used to compose his work was one of many well-wishing tunes sung in many Ukrainian villages on Jan. 13 — New Year’s Eve on the Julian calendar — usually by adolescent girls going house to house in celebration of the new year. As the girls sang the tune predicting good fortune, they were rewarded with baked goods or other treats.
“Very few people realize that the composition ‘Shchedryk’ was composed and performed during a time when there was intense political struggle and social upheaval in Ukraine,” Potoczniak said. The same choir director who commissioned the song formed the Ukrainian National Chorus, mandated by a fledgling Ukrainian government, in 1919 to promote Ukranian music in major cultural centers in the West. Touring across Europe and North and South America, the chorus performed more than 1,000 concerts.
The Ukrainian National Chorus did not limit its performances of “Shchedryk” to the Julian New Year, and the song became popular in other parts of the world as the choir introduced it to other nationalities, including the United States, where they first performed the song to a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall Oct. 5, 1921.
When American choir director and arranger Peter Wilhousky heard Leontovich’s choral work, it reminded him of bells; so he wrote new lyrics to convey that imagery for his choir. He copyrighted the new lyrics in 1936 and published the song, despite the fact that the work had been published almost two decades earlier in Soviet Ukraine. In the late 1930s, several choirs that Wilhousky directed began performing his anglicized arrangement during the Christmas holiday season.
Now called “Carol of the Bells,” the song has become associated with Christmas because of its new lyrics, which include references to silver bells, caroling and the line “merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas.”
Lettere da Kharkov (Torino, 1991 and Kharkiv, 2007)
The Great Soviet Peasant War (Cambridge, MA, 1996 and Moscow, 2001),
Bol’sheviki i krest’iane na Ukraine, 1918-1919 (Moscow, 1997)
A New, Peculiar State. Explorations in Soviet History (Westport, CT, 2000)
Guerra e rivoluzione in Europa, 1905-1956 (Bologna, 2002, Kyiv and Moscow, 2005)
L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 1914-1945 (Bologna, 2007)
L’Urss dal trionfo al degrado, 1945-1991 (Bologna, 2008)
He serves on editorial boards of a number of French, English, Italian, Ukrainian and U.S. specialized journals, co-edits in Moscow, since 1992, the series "Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii" (15 volumes in print) and is a member of the editorial board of the series Istoriia Stalinizma (Rosspen, Moscow).
Telephone interview with historian Dr. Andrea Graziosi, conducted by Roman Brytan, producer & host of Radiozhurnal, Edmonton’s daily Ukrainian radio program on
101.7 World FM.
This is an interview with several CUPP students in October 2009:
The Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program (CUPP) gives students from Ukraine an opportunity to work and study in the Canadian Parliament. Each student is placed with an M.P. The CUPP program is in its 18th year. It is hoped that CUPP will contribute to the education of future leaders of Ukraine.
Conducted by Uliana Haras-Kojolianko for the Ukrainian radio program in Ottawa:
CHIN 97.9 FM Listen Online:
http://www.chinradio.com (click on Listen live – Ottawa 97.9) Enjoy traditional & contemporary Ukrainian music, interesting interviews, information & features. Keep up to date with what’s happening in the community, upcoming events and news !
Edit: The audio player has been fixed for Internet Explorer
Judy shares memories of picking pidpenke and a recipe for fresh mushroom soup. Fr. Ihor Kutash on two wonder-workers of 1245. Mirko Petriw on Ukraine House and volunteering during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. Proverb of the Week, upcoming community events, and great Ukrainian music!
Ukrainian Time is a Ukrainian-language radio programme serving the Montreal community since 1963 and is hosted by Valentyna Golash. Material is often presented in English and French. Ukrainian Time is the media, which bonds the Ukrainian community in Montreal. The one-hour show is broadcast from Radio CFMB 1280 AM in Montreal on Saturdays at 6:00 p.m. and archived on this page for a few weeks at a time.
The melody was created in 1916 by Ukrainian composer
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