One of her mates rejoined: "I hope she has a better fate than Tymoshenko."
That day, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had rejected an independent German doctor’s opinion that the imprisoned, mysteriously sick former Prime Minister needed to be transferred to a hospital. Let her die! the president of Ukraine was really saying; for his Party of Regions is a gang holding the Sovieto-medieval view that political opponents are to be eliminated. That Ms. Tymoshenko might become a bigger problem for them in death than she is in life is beyond them.
A few days later, a furor erupted in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv, more commonly known by its Russian name, Nikolayev. On March 9, 18-year-old Oksana Makar had been gang-raped, set on fire and left for dead. Three men were arrested. Two of them, who are from families of the contemporary nomenklatura under the Party of Regions, were released without bail.
Makar had burns over 50 percent of her body and was expected to die of her injuries. But when I left the country she was holding on and speaking out from her hospital bed. In Ukraine, victims of sexual assault are not protected by a custom of privacy, as in the United States. Our ways have their reasons, but I was struck that her voice, her face, her wounds, her burns bespoke her humanity in a way that our reticence about naming the victims of crimes involving private parts does not. Mykolayiv/Nikolayev, near Odessa, has supported the Party of Regions. This crime, with its ritual protection of the regime’s mazhory (brats) produced a national outcry and an unprecedented local one.
There is a theme here. The 29-member Yanukovych cabinet contains no women. Yet the Russian writer Tatiana Tolstaya, who has lived in America, calls the Slavic lands matriarchies in which the baboosa, the grandmother, is the family’s CEO – as opposed to our own Anglo/German/American traditional patriarchies. We don’t have to answer that to understand that Ukraine survived 1,000 years of foreign oppression through the strength of her women; and that women will play an essential role if the country is to be freed from the morally-enervating, economically-hindering corruption of today’s domestic oppressors.
The government’s message to the girl with the russet-golden braids through Yulia Tymoshenko, Oksana Makar and its cabinet of men is the wrong one. To Ukrainian womanhood it is, I believe, intentional.
Back at Chopin Airport, sorrow at leaving Ukraine was lifted when I was seated next to a young Polish woman for the flight to America. In the 1940’s, her parents had suffered the privations of fascism’s Soviet continuation. She works for a Swiss company, and was on her way to an American holiday, including Disney World. She knows the history of Poland’s extinctions as a nation, and is patriotically proud that Sovieto-fascism met its match in a Polish Pope.
All in all, Poland may be the healthiest country in contemporary Europe. For Ukrainians, who have a shared history of faith and culture, war and oppression, Poland thriving is an alternative to the retrograde methods of the current rulers of both Ukraine and Russia.
Footnote: Oksana Makar died on March 29 as this went to press. The two released suspects had been re-arrested under public pressure. All three suspects have now been charged with murder.
Journalist David A. Mittell, Jr. is senior editor of The Duxbury [Massachusetts] Clipper.
