Dear Editor,
In reference to "Furor Over Tabachnyk Appointment Rising" (Kyiv Post, March 18), one can be amused by Dmytro Tabachnyk’s peroration that was quoted from a Russian newspaper: "Halychany (western Ukrainians) practically don’t have anything in common with the people of Great Ukraine, not in mentality, not in religion, not in linguistics, not in the political arena".
Such a perception could be coherent if the words "Great Ukraine" are replaced by "South-Eastern Ukraine".
This is so because large parts of the south-eastern regions have lost their Ukrainian language and identity, or have never affirmed it, as these areas experienced a major influx of population from Russia since the end of the 18th century.
It is quite clear that the South-East is the kind of Ukraine consistent with Tabachnyk’s "mentality, linguistics, and the political arena".
To get to that stage took 200 years of Russia’s colonial expansion and russification of the subject population. It was accomplished by, among other measures, the official prohibition to publish or print anything in the Ukrainian language, including school books and the Bible. It was enforced by Russia’s ministry of internal affairs (the Valuev directive of 1863), and reaffirmed by the Elms decree of Tzar Aleksander II in 1876.
This prohibition lasted until the 1905 revolution in Russia, which removed the emperor’s clothes. During those years, Halychyna under the Austrian rule became the oasis of the Ukrainian language and political activity, and was veritably called Ukraine’s Piedmont.
Similarly, the Catholic Church of Eastern Rite in western Ukraine became a bulwark of the Ukrainian church — when the Ukrainian Orthodox church became extinct in the Russian empire by being absorbed into Moscow’s government-dominated orthodoxy, until its revival in recent decades.
As for Halychyna’s linguistics and other alleged digressions, a glance at the south-east Ukraine — which resembles the moonscape in terms of the Ukrainian content — shows that Tabachnyk’s swipe is ludicrous. It is indistinguishable from the flapdoodle coming from Russia’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
In the same Russian newspaper, Tabachnyk then escalated his tone, swinging at Roman Shukhevych and Stepan Bandera as "killers, traitors, and abettors of Hitler’s executioners".
But these classifications actually characterize, in that order, the Soviet KGB (that rubbed out millions Soviet citizens and organized the Holodomor in Ukraine with Stalin’s blessings), "the contemptible Malorosy" who despise themselves, and the Soviet complicity in Adolf Hitler’s ventures by way of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
Stalin personally toasted Joachim von Ribbentrop at a Kremlin reception and wished him a "speedy victory over Germany’ enemies", while the garmoshkas and violins were playing the tangos and lovey-dovey music. Stalin then introduced Ribbentrop to Lavrentiy Beria, the KGB chief as "Russia’s own Heinrich Himmler" (the German Gestapo boss), who — again in Stalin’s own words — "is likewise doing a good job".
All this is in the Kremlin’s archives, and it was aired in the media before President Vladimir Putin, a KGB graduate himself, tightened the screws.
Stalin’s "good job" alongside Hitler’s included mass murders of Polish prisoners-of-war at the Katyn forest.
Paradoxically, the graphically Ukrainophobic Tabachnyk is having a hysterically hilarious good time denouncing the bedrock Ukraine from a government chair of the shape that looks somewhat like a Trojan horse.
Is that the price Ukraine is paying for democracy ? While the carriage has been saved, the wolves are devouring the mare.
Sincerely,
Boris Danik,
North Caldwell, NJ.
