I was struck reading the interview with Halyna Triakina, the dedicated schoolteacher from Luhansk (Ukraine’s easternmost and most Russified) oblast, who with the help of such Ukrainian national democratic organizations as Rukh and Prosvita has opened up Ukraine and other countries to her pupils, many from far less than affluent families. And in the midst of the hustle and bustle of finals week, I simply could not help thinking about the daunting task that all of us educators face in this country sealed off from the outside world for so long. Hers was a tale of inspiration; mine is more one of warning.
The Soviet Union in its pre-1939 borders lived for over seven decades under Communism, roughly six of them in a state of orchestrated hysteria or at least suspicion that anything from that outside world was hostile, or at a minimum alien to “us,” for “we,” under the wise guidance of our successive Fearless Leaders, knew far better, and we were fated by the ineluctable Laws of History and the Holy Dialectic to prevail. And those so-called Bandera nationalists in Western Ukraine were the most dreaded “them” to the Soviet people, reared in spotless red kerchiefs, or at least reared to forget anything less pleasant. And teaching here, whether in the first grade or a graduate school above all means banging one’s head against the mental Berlin Wall that the very System founded by the self-consecrated leader of the world proletariat and whom tourists visiting the Mausoleum in Moscow call simply Dead Fred. That so many unknowing victims of that unholy system so solemnly celebrated the birthday of its cadaverous creator the day before yesterday makes it all the more apparent that here, more than at any other place or time, the truth (or, more precisely, knowledge) shall make you free. For nothing else can.
