Something happens, someone says something, and an opinion eventually takes shape. A year ago, during The Day’s roundtable devoted to the events in Pidliashia in 1917-21, chief editor Larysa Ivshyna asked, “Why didn’t we Ukrainians have our Pilsudski?”
In 2007, the 80th anniversary of the series of events triggered by the creation of the Ukrainian Central Rada in March 1917, this question remains absolutely topical. Why was Pilsudski, once he became the head of the Polish state, able to protect its independent political existence and at the same time annex a chunk of ethnic territories belonging to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania? Why were Hrushevsky and Petliura unable to do the same? Why were they incapable even of repeating Khmelnytsky’s partial success and forming an autonomous hetman state under foreign protectorate?
Some may say that the Soviet Ukrainian republic founded by the Bolsheviks was just such a creation, but it was mostly the result of the incomplete success of Lenin’s idea of building a worker-peasant state that was destined to fall apart despite subsequent restructuring (the Stalinist terror and Gorbachev’s perestroika).
Unless one wants to consider the details of the historical calendar, then the general answer is a very simple one. After the partition of Poland in 1795 (the treaty between Prussia and Austria was signed on the Russian side by Empress Catherine’s Little Russian Chancellor, Prince Oleksandr Bezborodko) the Poles became a nation without a state. Yet they preserved their aristocratic-nobiliary political elite, which helped turn the 19th century into an age of struggle for the restoration of Polish national sovereignty. In 1918-20 they succeeded in drawing the masses into this struggle.
At the turn of the 19th century Ukrainians had become an ethnos almost completely stripped of national instinct (“a Little Russian tribe”) and the age of romanticism and nationalism was an era of struggle by a small group of intellectuals for the conception of a nation. This struggle did not end when the First World War was transformed into a struggle for a new political map of Central and Eastern Europe. This incompleteness of the Ukrainian nation-building process, with its abyss between the hopes, needs, and possibilities of mobilizing the people, in the name of which the autonomy of the Ukrainian National Republic was first proclaimed, and eventually its state sovereignty, turned all of our subsequent history into all-out horror.
But history, no matter what it is, is only a story related in books, like the tale of the fire-breathing dragon or the iron wolf. My native northern Pidliashia remained on the sidelines of these great and tragic events: the liberation struggles, the Holodomor, and the struggle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The roiling passions of those days were not transmitted through the stories of grandfathers to their grandchildren and were not examined honestly through the landmark sites of the native landscape, which were recorded in history.
As paradoxical as it may seen, I first became aware of the dark pages of 19th-century Ukrainian history not on Ukrainian soil but near the capital of Great Poland, Poznan, which I visited last year. There, not far from the village of Slupca, is a graveyard where several thousand Ukrainian soldiers (“Petliurites”) are buried, who in 1921-23 were interned in a camp in Strzalkowo. The graveyard is more than a kilometer long, reached by a muddy, potholed road crossing plowed fields and many hectares of beet fields. The graveyard, where nearly 8,000 soldiers are buried, stretches over many hectares. The Strzalkowo camp was built by the Germans in 1914 and was intended for Russian POWs.
Above the stubble and the beets I saw a square patch of luxuriant greenery with bushes and trees, surrounded by a concrete wall. A white monument with an eight-pointed cross stood among the greenery. It shone in the August sun as though it were a feast day, which it was: the Transfiguration of Our Lord. It was the sole sentinel standing guard over the thousands of dead buried in the black soil.
A path paved with concrete slabs, leading from the metal gates hung with the sign Cmentarz wojenny [Military Cemetery] to the concrete memorial cross, cut through the greenery. All around were weeds, grass, bushes, lindens, and poplars. These trees had grown on Cossack blood. Everywhere you could hear the loud singing of birds. But the noisy birdsong only emphasized the silence of this deserted place. It seemed as though I could hear a requiem mass and sense the grateful memories of descendants: suffering, solitude, anguish, even fear, which is not alien to heroes. It seemed as though all this was rising from the earth like an invisible mist, crawling over the sleepy fields, reaching with its paws through the stems of St. John’s Wort. It was horror permeating the air and making my head swell. I wanted to flee, but there is no running away from the past.
Nevertheless, the graves of those who went into the “bloody battle from the Sian to the Don” and met their death are no reason to shed tears, because no nation has ever sailed down that river to its future. They did not rise shoulder to shoulder in the face of death for us to cry, but to live in peace and happiness.
Just as a baby cannot be born without blood and pain, so a full-fledged nation cannot be created without suffering and blood shed in battle. The blood of our heroes is the yeast from which rise our mother tongue, our songs, and our national spirit.
Let us come to the sacred places of memory, because it is precisely our memory that quenches the thirst and appeases the hunger of our ancestors’ souls.
