In Praise of Galicia

I always love reading anything that Volodymyr Zdoroveha has to say. He is not only my wife’s mentor in the skills of journalism, which she taught me largely from what he taught her, but he is one of the lions of Galicia, a land that the late Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, also a friend albeit departed, once called the backbone of Ukraine. Petliura also recognized that through the act of unifying the East and West of this nation, European Galicia could pull Eurasian Dnipro Ukraine into Europe. The Act of Unification on January 22, 1919, was timed to coincide a year later with the Fourth Universal of the Ukrainian Central Rada, declaring the independence of Ukraine from Russia. It essentially tried to put right the preceding Third Universal, which I for one consider one of the truly stupid acts of Ukraine’s political history. Essentially what it did was to create the Ukrainian People’s Republic that, without separating with Russia, intended to call upon the Buriat-Mongols and other national minorities to save Russia from the Russian Bolsheviks and set up a government of all socialist parties to rule Russia as a federation. Of course, all this produced was a congress of nationalities that dutifully elected Mykhailo Hrushevsky as its president and called down the wrath of Lenin’s Red Guards on Kyiv, who shot on sight anybody in the street they found speaking Ukrainian. Galicia has always given the needed word that Ukraine will not save Russia, but it can save itself. Rudnytsky was right: Galicia is Europe, and the rest of us can only get to Europe through the splendors of Lviv. Russia is something else, and let it live its own life without Ukraine’s participation.

The Act of Unity did not lead to a truly united Ukraine because urban society in the West was more heterogeneous and did not elect a socialist government, while in Eastern Ukraine it was practically impossible to imagine a Ukrainian who was not a socialist. Socialism is by no means a simple ideology, but when everybody is a socialist, I suspect that this indicates a simplified view of the world in which nobody feels that they have anything to lose. Yet, Prof. Zdroveha said that Western Ukraine cannot imagine a Ukraine without Kyiv. I, for one, cannot imagine Ukraine without the old city of Lviv. Incidentally, they have a couple of good places for pizza, should the honored professor be interested. My wife loves him, as do I. Ukraine is made of people, not of land . And Prof. Zdoroveha is among their best.