What kind of country do we want to live in?

BROVARY — The Day’s dialog “What Kind of Ukraine Do We Love?” between its Russian and Ukrainian readers prompted me to look back and ask myself why I love Russia and Ukraine. Were my life to be divided into Soviet and post-Soviet periods (especially after 1991), there would emerge certain historical distinctions, owing to school course in history and what I realized when studying my family tree, but mostly from The Day’s Ukraina Incognita column.

I would rather start with why I was outraged by Gleb Pavlovsky’s statement (The Day #7, 9 February, 2010) on how Ukraine has been “trying to ruin its Russian foundations, humiliating Russian-speaking citizens, and forcing them to use the Galician patois.” I would like to ask Mr. Pavlovsky, who claims to come from Ukraine: What does the Galician patois have to do with all this? It’s absurd! His attitude to everything Ukrainian is unmistakably hostile, nihilistic even. Unlike Mr. Pavlovsky, I am not a professional to judge whether or not surzhyk is vulgar Ukrainian. Take any Ukrainian language newspaper and see if you can find a single word in the Galician vernacular. Pavlovsky apparently knows Ukrainian MP Hanna Herman well enough. She is from Galicia [Halychyna] and she speaks beautiful Ukrainian with a noticeable Lviv accent. With regard to the Galician vernacular, one ought to know that it is part of the Ukrainian language with its many dialects — as in the case of Russian, whose dialects you can appreciate whilst travelling all the way from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok.

In case Mr. Pavlovsky is interested, I am not even remotely an individual whose “Russian foundation” has been “ruined.” I have a different view on the matter. I am 83 years old and I was born in Shepetivka (Khmelnytsky oblast). I am a WWII invalid, Disability Group 1. I grew up in a Russian-speaking family and it so happened that I never learned proper Ukrainian. I went to school in Rostov-on-Don (my father succeeded in getting the family out of famine-stricken Ukraine in 1933). We returned to Proskuriv in Ukraine in 1940, and then the war broke out. We were evacuated to the Urals. Then I served in the army and later enrolled in the Special Arctic College in Leningrad. After graduating I worked in the Far North for ten years. I finally returned to Ukraine a married man with two children. The first thing my wife (born in the Kuban region) and I did was to enroll our children in a Ukrainian language school. It was hard for them, but now both speak Ukrainian, something their father couldn’t do as a young man. I still can’t write or speak literary Ukrainian (because no one could ruin my Russian foundation).

Following the tradition, the next generation of my family, my granddaughters, finished Ukrainian school and later one of them defended her Ph.D. thesis in Ukrainian. To sum up the debate on whether or not children in Ukraine should study Ukrainian, consider the example of my granddaughter Kateryna. Her father is Greek and she received an elementary education in Greece. In Ukraine she enrolled in Grade 4 of a Ukrainian language school. She is currently in Grade 7 and speaks three languages: Greek with her dad, Ukrainian with her granny, and Russian with me. One might assume that I’m talking parents from Donetsk or Sevastopol into having their children study Ukrainian. By no means! This is a family’s choice to be made on a purely voluntary basis. At the same time it is clearly apparent that, if you live in Ukraine and you are a Ukrainian national, you have to know and respect the official Ukrainian language. Nor should one turn a blind eye to the dark pages in Ukrainian history, when the Ukrainian language was being destroyed. Suffice it to recall that under Alexis of Russia Ukrainian books were burned; under Peter I books in Ukrainian were forbidden from print; under Catherine II Ukrainian, as the language of instruction at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, was prohibited. The Valuev Circular read that “no separate Little Russian [i.e., Ukrainian] language has ever existed, doesn’t exist, and couldn’t have existed,” whoever failed to realize this was an enemy of Russia.

Let me add that my ancestors carried the Ukrainian family name “Pylypenko,” which was subsequently Russified as “Filipchenko.” This is now my “Russian foundation.”

Why do I love Russia? I’ll get to that in a moment. Let me start by what I dislike about Russia. First, there is the fact that Russian society regards Ukraine as an enemy of Russia. Is it because Ukrainians won their independence? Or because they preserve the historical memory of millions of Ukrainians killed by a famine forged by the Stalinist regime? Some people in Russia can’t see the big picture, but we realize that the Kremlin rulers are fueling the fire of animosity towards Ukraine, inciting such sentiments in Russian society with the aid of the media. This has nothing to do with the Russian people. After all, Putin stated once that there is no Ukrainian state as such. This sounds offensive. Also, how is one to respond to Russian President Medvedev’s indecorous remarks addressing ex-President Viktor Yushchenko, about the latter’s allegedly anti-Russian policy and revision of joint history? Why can’t they realize the simple truth that our views on our joint history have been different from those of the Kremlin for more than two centuries? Finally, I resolutely disagree with anyone in Russia mistaking Ukrainian patriotic sentiments, concerning culture and language, for nationalism, describing them as fascist. This is outrageous hypocrisy.

I love Russia because my family name has Ukrainian and Russian roots. I spent part of my childhood, youth, and early professional career in Russia. A lot of my relatives, both close and distant, were born and live in Russia. Our family tree shows that my great great grandfather Ivan Filipchenko [Pylypenko] was born in Nizhyn and that my great grandfather Yukhym Filipchenko was also born there. He graduated from the Higher Gymnasium of Nizhyn and was fortunate enough to have studied together with Nikolai Gogol and Yevhen Hrebinka. The two set the tone in the high school and had a positive influence on Yukhym Filipchenko and his family. My great grandfather’s descendants were born in the land of Novgorod, and studied and lived in St. Petersburg. I am proud of my Russian relatives, they are nothing like what Pavlovsky describes. I also give full credit to my great uncle Yurii Filipchenko, a noted Russian geneticist, founder of Leningrad University’s first chair of genetics (1919), and one of the pioneers and propagators of eugenics, a science dealing with human hereditary peculiarities. I’m not eulogizing all of those who bore my family name. By no means! What I’m trying to do is defend the Ukrainian language as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, by using examples from family history. Let me add that my Ukrainian relatives are also known for their good deeds. My granddad Mykhailo Filipchenko was a noted agronomist, according to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. He paid special attention to the schooling of rural youth and founded an agricultural school in Horodyshche, in what is now Cherkasy oblast, and was its trustee. Currently it is an agronomic college. His son, also Mykhailo Filipchenko (my grandfather) studied in Horodyshche, then in No.1 Kyiv Gymnasium, and eventually graduated from St. Petersburg University. In 1918 he worked for Russian Ministry of Finance. My grandfather’s worldviews were firmly rooted in his Ukrainian patriotism. He was strongly opposed to the destruction of the Little Russian cultural heritage, the humiliation of the Ukrainian language, and censorship of Little Russian publications. After the Central Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian National Republic, my granddad requested Ukrainian citizenship from the General Commissioner for Ukrainian Affairs. He was issued a certificate that read: “… the bearer, Filipchenko /Pylypenko/, Mykhailo Mykhailovych, is a Ukrainian national…” (my grandfather always insisted that his surname was Pylypenko). And so my granddad with his wife and four children left St. Petersburg for Kyiv, but not before forwarding this petition in Ukrainian: “As a citizen of Ukraine, wishing now to live in and serve my homeland, I have the honor of requesting that the General Secretariat assign me a post in the City of Kyiv…” (I have a copy of the document). My grandfather apparently arrived in Kiev with good intentions. Studying his documents, I couldn’t stop marveling at his sincere dedication to Ukraine. While living in Russia, he never forgot his mother tongue. He realized that a Russification policy was being waged in Ukraine, and that its main manifestation was the elbowing out of Ukrainian, replacing it with Russian. This policy is still underway, for some Ukrainians believe that they live in a revived Ukraine while others continue to live in Russia. My grandfather failed to reach his sincere and noble goal of serving his homeland with wholehearted dedication. He died as an emigre and was buried in Beirut (Lebanon).

In conclusion, I wish to say that my fondness of Russia comes from my ancestors, the descendants of my forefather from Nizhyn, who settled in Russia but respected their Ukrainian historical family memory. They remembered that, by the laws of life, whether we like it or not, there is a link between generations through the sacred ancestral graves. Here is an example. There are graves at the Nikolskoe Cemetery in St. Petersburg I hold sacred. These are the places of last repose of my great great grandmother, two great grandfathers; there is a grave of my great great grandfather in Novgorod, and my father’s and brother’s graves are in Sochi. There are also holy places in Ukraine, the graves of my grandfather, grandmother, and my mother.

The large Filipchenko family lives in two fraternal countries, Ukraine and Russia. The Ukrainian and the Russian branch keep in touch, writing letters, visiting, debating, and understanding each other. There is, however, the external irritant of television and newspapers. It seems to be done on purpose. I wouldn’t want to hurt some Russian readers’ feelings, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union they have formed a superficial idea about the way the Ukrainian people actually live.