One of Ukrainian TV channels recently showed an interesting report about, so to speak, to the ideological education of youth. It dealt with the following dilemma: should a portrait of the current Ukrainian president be hung in Ukrainian school classrooms?
Teachers and students interviewed by a journalist offered various solutions, and the most interesting one was an opinion of one schoolgirl. She said that since presidents in Ukraine are replaced every five years, hanging their portraits on school walls doesn’t make sense. Something more timeless, so to say, must hang there.
In this case, whose portraits should be on the walls of Ukrainian schools? Whom should Ukrainian children (and not only they) see on television screens? Whom should they read about in fiction literature? Different wording, but the question, in fact, is the same. One can state hundreds of such names which, after all, must replace the images of our presidents, prime ministers, or MPs on the walls of schools and television screens. A part of them is unfairly forgotten, while another part even worse – profaned and leveled by numerous incorrect references and mentions.
The otaman Yakiv Halchevsky (insurgent nickname – Orel, Orlyk, Voynarovsky), colonel of the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the last commander of the right-bank Ukraine insurgent forces in 1922, belongs to the first, unjustly and untimely forgotten pantheon of Ukrainian heroes who start coming back to us today. For 15 successive years now, on the eve of Ukraine’s Unity Day, his memory is commemorated by the prize bearing his name and entitled “For selfless devotion to state building.” It is awarded to literary critics, researchers, politicians, public activists, journalists, and artists.
“The name and personality of Yakiv Halchevsky are little known to the general public. But the final phase of the military part of the Ukrainian national revolution in 1917–20 is linked with him,” says Bohdan TELENKO, chief editor of the Khmelnytsky-based newspaper Proskuriv and head of the Yakiv Halchevsky Cultural Society. “It is interesting and important that Halchevsky, who mounted armed resistance to the Bolshevik expansion until 1925, left the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic undefeated. Neither at the time nor now was he duly appreciated for his merits before Ukraine, although there is no doubt that he is worth honoring.
“In 1951, Mykola Chobotariv – one of activists of the national liberation movement, colonel, and head of Symon Petliura’s guard – wrote that Halchevsky belonged to the cohort of the national liberation movement leaders though he never laid claim to this status. This is a model for many contemporary activists who, for the sake of their political vanity, are ready to sell our statehood. We always see it during elections. And Halchevsky is a personality of an absolutely different type: an example of service to the Ukrainian state without expecting any preferences, even in a historical sense.”
The organizing committee announced the first laureates of the Halchevsky Prize, – and these were Levko Lukianenko and Ivan Koliaska – before the Unity Day in 1995. Today the number of laureates is over 60. The decision on awarding the prize is made based on ratings given by the laureates from previous years. Since 2003 the Halchevsky Prize has a nationwide status. One more nomination was recently added – “For reviving the traditions of national sponsorship.”
Fifteen years ago representatives of the Khmelnytsky oblast organization of the Ukrainian Republican Party and the editorial board of the party newspaper Chas became the founders of the prize. Later the Yakiv Halchevsky Cultural Society, set up by Bohdan Telenko, who initiated the prize in the first place, took over. Telenko recently sent a letter to Den/The Day, informing that in 2010 the organizing committee chose its chief editor Larysa Ivshyna as the winner in the combined nomination “politician” and “for journalistic activity.”
“This, in my opinion, is just a part of those social preferences your work and your newspaper The Day generally deserve,” Telenko pointed out in his letter and invited Ivshyna to the awarding ceremony. It will take place in Khmelnytsky on January 22 during a research conference dedicated to the Unity Day and Yakiv Halchevsky’s 115th birth anniversary.
It happened so that in the neighboring corner of Ukraine a company of potential laureates of this prize – the Ostroh Club for Youth’s Free Intellectual Exchange, led by Ivshyna – is gathered. The mission in Ostroh remains a priority for four years now, “but my soul and thoughts were with you,” Ivshyna assured Bohdan Telenko in a letter. She added: “I highly appreciate the efforts and the position of those Ukrainians who even before the official return of independence draw this time nearer. Exactly these people are the main statesmen. Unfortunately, modern politicians do not always reach the high standard established by the fighters for the Ukrainian independence. This should be changed.”
In his commentary to The Day Telenko emphasized that the prize, which immortalizes and popularizes the name of Yakiv Halchevsky, “is especially necessary for our society.” “Through their return to the historical context such figures and their worldview become a part of present-time Ukraine,” he pointed out.
Therefore, there will be fewer questions about whose portraits our children should see in schools.
