Ukrainian Canadian

Last week a Pennsylvania resident Olga Yurechko, 90, wrote to her family and friends before she died a couple of weeks ago a very touching memorial about her life in Ukraine, as a slave laborer under the Nazis in WW2 and emigrating to America:

"I was born on Aug. 6, 1920 in a paradise where the wheat fields swayed like a golden ocean, and each stalk of wheat struggled to stand upright under the weight of its ripened grains. That is where I first saw the sun’s radiance. That is where I took my first little footsteps. That is my beloved land — my Ukraine. Within that paradise, I was born in a little village named Vilshanitsha.”

…

"As I was finishing my last year in school, my father suddenly died. My world was turned upside down, and the people I thought were good and decent people who might help us instead took advantage of my mother and me. With my father gone, they came and took many of our belongings and left us near starvation. This, my dear family and friends, was the forced collectivization of private lands and property by the communist regime.”

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"And then the war began. During this horrendous, war-torn time, I was taken to Germany as a slave laborer. I was forced to work in a large restaurant run by a German mistress and her teenage children. The work was long, hard and dirty. But worse than any of that, this is where I experienced their vile hatred for me, because my mistress’ husband had recently been killed on the Russian front. She and the children constantly tormented me, as if I were the cause of their loss. It was so terrible that I didn’t want to live. I tried to escape, but was caught by the authorities. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but fortunately they did not return me to the family that brought me such misery. Instead, I had the good fortune to be assigned to a different family. Although I was still a forced laborer, the work was much easier, and they treated me well. After the war ended, the allies opened refugee camps to accommodate the many displaced people still in Germany. I moved into one of these camps, where I met and married my husband. Three years later, our son was born.”

There were reportedly 6 million forced labourers under the Nazi regime abducted from Ukraine during WW2, known as the Ostarbeiter (Eastern workers):

Former Soviet civil workers primarily from Ukraine. They were marked with a sign OST ("East"), had to live in camps that were fenced with barbed wire and under guard, and were particularly exposed to the arbitrariness of the Gestapo and the industrial plant guards.

Degraded as Untermensch (sub-human), many workers died as a result of their living conditions, mistreatment or were civilian casualties of the war, under Hitler‘s policy of Lebensraum: the conquest of new lands in the East. They received little or no compensation during or after the war.

Olga like many other thousands of Ukrainians received refuge in the USA:

The Displaced Persons Commission Act signed by President Harry S. Truman on June 25, 1948. More than 100,000 Ukrainians benefited from this act of the 80th Congress of the United States when they immigrated to the United States. During four years of its existence, the Commission created by this act was able to process, transport, and provide visas for 370,000 persons, allowing them to enter the United States.

The Ukrainian Museum of Archives in Cleveland has a virtual exhibit on these Displaced Persons.

Ukraine celebrated it’s 19th anniversary of independence today, below are some news stories coming out of the wire:

Ukrainian president says wants more powers

Yanukovich said the former Soviet republic needed a new, stable political system led by a "strong president" to guide it through potentially painful structural reforms.

"In order to achieve this we need to reform the constitution thoroughly," he said in a televised speech on Ukraine’s Independence Day.

Ukraine curbed presidential powers in favour of parliament through constitutional amendments introduced in 2004 when pro-Western politician Viktor Yushchenko came to power after the "Orange Revolution" street demonstrations.

The curbs, promoted by Yanukovich’s supporters at the time, limited Yushchenko’s effectiveness as president and set up confrontation with parliament and prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The dispute ultimately contributed to his downfall in an election earlier this year.

Yanukovich supporters now say his hand should be strengthened so he can push through unpopular reforms such as raising household gas prices and slimming down the bloated pension system.

Many of the reforms have been undertaken at the behest of the International Monetary Fund which has extended a new $15 billion stand-by arrangement to Ukraine to help stabilise its economy.

Read the rest of the article

How can Presidential powers be relinquished for pro-Western President Yushchenko, and then be asked to be returned for pro-Russian President Yanukovych. In addition to that he wants the Constitution reformed (gutted) for a Chinese style one-party government that eliminates the opposition and leaves the door wide open for a return to Communism – on the 19th anniversary of the country’s independence!

Meanwhile a Kharkiv reporter critical about authorities has been missing and feared dead for two weeks now, as freedom of the press, speech and to organize have been under attack under this regime.

Interview: Scholar Says Ukraine’s Greatest Achievement ‘Survival’

As Ukraine marks its Independence Day on August 24, one analyst says Kyiv’s greatest accomplishment since independence has been "survival." But he adds that survival is not good enough.
Andrew Wilson, the author of books like "The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation" and "Ukraine’s Orange Revolution" and a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, talks to RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service correspondent Maryana Drach about the high and low points of the country’s 19 years of statehood.

RFE/RL: According to the latest opinion surveys, 45 percent of Ukrainians have doubts about whether Ukraine is truly an independent state. What is your view?
Andrew Wilson: In some ways, I might be one of them… Its economy has actually been in trouble recently, and with so many sectors falling under Russian influence, there is a question mark about how economically independent Ukraine really is.

RFE/RL: What is the biggest achievement by Ukraine during the last 19 years?
Wilson: Survival…

Read more…

Last month I posted that Ukrainians who want independent and fair TV news coverage only had Channel 5 (Kanal 5) and TVi left. Channel 5 played a crucial role during the Orange revolution and TVi was set up by a Russian media tycoon who was the first victim of Vladimir Putin’s squeeze on media in Russia. Recently a court has stripped them of their new broadcast frequencies:

The board claimed that the court hearing was being influenced by Ukrainian Security Service head Valery Khoroshkovsky. Khoroshkovky owns the rival media holding Inter Media Group, which has asked for a new tender for frequencies. Khoroshkovsky strongly denied exerting pressure on Channel 5 and demanded proof of the allegations made by its editorial board.

"What kind of direct proof one can have, other than the fact that Khoroshkovsky is one of the owners of Inter Media Group? He is the chief of the security service, a member of the Higher Council of Justice. His wife is the manager of Inter Media Group. Here you have double standards," Roman Skypin, a journalist who heads TVi’s information service, said in an interview with RFE/RL.

As a result TVi will remain a satellite channel with little coverage in Ukraine, and Channel 5, whose licence allows it to be mainly about entertainment, may not be able to retain its news programmes.

It’s not surprising that independent media would start to disappear when the Yanukovych government decided to sack the current head of the SBU (secret service) and replace him with a rival television network and media empire owner. It is clearly a conflict of interest and journalists are vying for an independent parliamentary commission to investigate as well as Khoroshkovsky’s dismissal.

The development follows weeks of growing complaints by journalists about the resurgence of censorship and heightens fears that a Kremlin-styled crackdown on media freedoms could be in the works five months into the presidency of the Moscow-friendly Viktor Yanukovich.

Oleh Rybachuk, a former presidential administration chief turned civic activist, said “censorship is re-emerging, and the opposition is not getting so much coverage. There are similarities to what [Vladimir] Putin did when he came to power. We are seeing Putin-style attempts to monopolise power.”

In 2012 Ukraine makes the transition to digital broadcast television, in which all the old analog channels will discontinue and TV stations must re-apply for these new digital frequencies. Telekritika, a media watchdog news website and magazine commented in her Kyiv Post interview ‘ Power wants monopoly’:

TVi had prepared the frequency for itself. It is common practice here that after that there has to be a tender held. By agreement with the National Council and all market players, the initiator has historically received the most frequencies. But they had to share with others, too.
But Inter Group claimed most of these frequencies – and that’s unfair. [Having understood that the claim would not be satisfied], they withdrew their application, and then filed a lawsuit. It’s not very clear why.

…

The desire of the new power to control and monopolize television is visible through many of its actions and through the quality of the news we have.

Khoroshkovsky is a member of the High Council of Justice. In any democratic country, undoubtedly, this kind of a court hearing, with major procedural violations, simply could not happen.

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Another point is that something needs to be changed at the National TV and Radio Council. These sorts of commercial disputes lead to the loss of news channels. This shows inadequate work of the National Council, which has to make sure that we have information channels, public TV and that the needs for Ukrainian-language media are satisfied. But it has never done it in a civilized way.

And finally some background on television and politics in Ukraine:

During the Presidency of President Kuchma Ukrainian television was more or less controlled by Kuchma while the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) controlled Inter TV ^[1]. After the Orange Revolution Ukrainian television became more free. In February 2009 the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting claimed that "political pressure on mass media increased in recent times through amending laws and other normative acts to strengthen influence on mass media and regulatory bodies in this sphere".

As of January 2009 Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko refused to appear in Inter TV-programmes "until journalists, management and owners of the TV channel stop destroying the freedom of speech and until they remember the essence of their profession – honesty, objectiveness, and unbiased stand".

Members of Ukraine’s media have banded together to form the ‘Stop Censorship!’ movement to protest these actions of flagrant censorship.

From Window On Eurasia:

Aleksandr Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB, and Valery Khoroshkovsky, head of Ukraine’s SBU, have signed a five-year agreement that will allow Moscow again to put intelligence agents in Crimea, from which 19 such Russian officers were expelled at the end of last year for attempting to recruit Ukrainians as spies.

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The behavior of Russian agents last year, Rostislav Pavlenko, the director of the School of Political Analysis of the Kyiv-Mohylev Academy, said, raises doubts as to whether any document Moscow officials sign or any statements they make can be trusted. After all, what the Russians did last year was prohibited by bilateral agreements.

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Given that Ukraine has agreed to extend the presence of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol for another 25 years, there is certainly time for the appearance of a situation “when the Black Sea Fleet and the special services based within it can be used in actions that are counter to the interests of Ukraine.”
But the impact of this FSB-SBU accord is likely to be even larger, Ukrainian political scientist Yevgeny Zherebetsky argued. That is because the commanders of the Black Sea Fleet, immediately after the extension of the basing accord, began a “massive” downsizing, retiring some 7500 staffers, “of whom 6500 are civilians and citizens of Ukraine.”

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In addition, the fleet plans to retire 550 officers, many of whom will like the civilians have relatively low pensions and thus be open as are the civilians for recruitment by the Russian special services for work against Ukraine as a way to supplement their relatively small benefit checks.
According to Zherebetsky, it is “very important for Russians to obtain control over Crimea” because it lacks warm water ports. But “if everything will develop so ‘well’ [for Moscow] as it is now, then the Russians will try to extend their influence to Odessa, Kherson, and Nikolayev,” in an arc extending from Transdniestria to Abkhazia.
For that purpose, he continued, “Russia needs a broad network of agents of the special services,” but its prospects for success if these agents are active are very good because “over the course of the period of independence, the Ukrainian leadership has done nothing so that Ukraine could obtain complete power over the territory of Crimea.”

Read the rest of the article

Meanwhile the SBU recently tried to recruit a Ukrainian Catholic priest to become a secret informant to infiltrate student protests, many whom dislike the Yanukovych government:

Read more…

Among the many ‘bend over’ deals Yanukovych signed with Medved on his visit to Ukraine last week, this slipped through many people’s radars:

The release of the first unified Russian-Ukrainian textbook for history teachers is planned for the end of 2010, the Ukrainian education minister said at a RIA Novosti video link-up

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“The textbook is being created for to the teachers who work with…secondary school pupils – to understand each other better,” Dmitri Tabachnyk said.

Many Ukrainians despise Tabachnyk for his professed hatred of Ukrainian nationalism. Not surprising then is his approval of school materials in Russia that have been quietly transforming into Soviet-era propaganda pieces for the government to idolize Stalin for a new generation:

Stalin acted ‘entirely rationally’ in executing and imprisoning millions of people in the Gulags, a controversial new Russian teaching manual claims.

Fifty-five years after the Soviet dictator died, the latest guide for teachers to promote patriotism among the Russian young said he did what he did to ensure the country’s modernisation.

The manual, titled A History of Russia, 1900-1945, will form the basis of a new state-approved text book for use in schools next year.

It seems to follow an attempt backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to re-evaluate Stalin’s record in a more positive light.

Critics have taken exception, however, to numerous excerpts, which they say are essentially attempts to whitewash Stalin’s crimes.

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Historians believe up to 20 million people perished as a result of his actions – more than the six million killed during Hitler’s genocide of the Jews.

Now the new teaching manual is attempting to tell a generation of Russian schoolchildren that Stalin acted rationally.

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The manual informs teachers that the Great Terror of the 1930s came about because Stalin ‘did not know who would deal the next blow, and for that reason he attacked every known group and movement, as well as those who were not his allies or of his mindset.’

It stresses to teachers that ‘it is important to show that Stalin acted in a concrete historical situation’ and that he acted ‘entirely rationally – as the guardian of a system, as a consistent supporter of reshaping the country into an industrialised state.’

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The controversial manual is produced by the country’s leading school book publishers Prosveshenije, a state-supported company that was a monopoly supplier of classroom texts in the Soviet era, and appears to be returning to that role.

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Alexander Kamensky, head of the history department at the Russia State University for the Humanities, said the manual was, ‘sadly,’ a sign that teaching history in schools has become ‘an ideological instrument.’

But it seems to echo Putin’s remarks to a group of history teachers in June 2007 when he said while Stalin’s purges were one of the darkest periods of the country’s history, ‘others cannot be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us.’

An earlier manual called Stalin an ‘effective manager’.

Read the rest of the article

With this being taught in Ukrainian schools, as well as erections of Stalin busts in the country it seems that a new Soviet Union is in the works.