Destiny of man in independent Ukraine

The current political and psychological crisis in Ukraine prompts one to reconsider who we are and where and how we are advancing. Why do we often recall such derogatory dictums about Ukrainians as “Why are we poor? Because we are stupid!” and “Why are we stupid? Because we are poor”? These dictums should be analyzed from the viewpoint of their paralyzing effect on Ukrainian people’s awareness.

But I will start with some positive things. My fellow psychologists, the American professors Barry and Janae Weinhold, regard Ukraine as a huge living laboratory. They can see systems developing very quickly here. Ukraine drew the Weinholds’ attention because they think it has lived through a long period of forced codependence as part of an empire. In their opinion, Ukraine shows more evidence of the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy than other countries.

During a lecture at Kyiv’s Institute of Sociology, Janae Weinhold emphasized that as a psychologist, she is well aware of the ongoing struggle in Ukraine between aspirations for real independence and codependence. In her view, this struggle between striving for independence and seeking codependence can be an example for the whole world and even have an impact on it. Precisely the way we are establishing a democratic society is going to contribute to stemming the worldwide tide of totalitarianism. The direction of Ukraine’s movement reflects the direction of the movement of the entire world. So I will begin analyzing Ukraine’s political and psychological crisis on this optimistic note right now, when so many people are disillusioned and feel lost.

As an expert, citizen, and ordinary individual, I keep wondering why our people “are poor because they are stupid and stupid because they are poor.” I have been thinking about this for more than a year, and now I would like to make a few generalizations and analyze everything. The crisis of our so-called elite prompted me to this.

I would like to stress that we do not have a state: we only have a government and the people. There is no political elite, there is only the so- called “new class.”

This term was introduced by the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas. In the Soviet era, this new class was the Soviet party nomenklatura. Djilas gave a philosophical and political characterization of the society that was being constructed in the USSR and the Eastern European countries. He analyzed the social structure and ideological superstructure that dominate in the philosophical, economic, and political planes of this concept, and the official theory and practice of public administration. He thus revealed the essence of the “new class” of socialism — the party-based bureaucratic apparat. In Djilas’s view, one of the most interesting phenomena of socialist and communist construction is that in formally proclaiming a classless society as the goal to be achieved, immediately after seizing power communists always and everywhere establish a class society in which there is only one privileged class — the “new class.” Since Djilas did not consider this a scholarly term, he used such synonyms as nomenklatura, ruling class, caste, etc. A new class can be classified as one that historically emerges as a monopolistically ruling group of people, which uses special privileges by exercising its governmental functions, formally exercises public (“state-run,” “people’s”) ownership of the means of production, determines the nature of social labor organization, and takes unauthorized possession of a sizable share of public wealth.

According to Djilas, the “practical utopia” of Lenin’s plan to quickly build a classless society naturally brought about Stalinism. In his opinion, the power of the “new class” is linked to the idea of achieving a radiant future and establishing a classless communist society.

In the past 16 years this new class, a party and Komsomol nomenklatura, has followed the path of mimicry and now exists in Ukraine’s political life under new — national and patriotic — slogans. These people now hold top government posts or are members of parliament. Unfortunately, most of them demonstrate a low cultural and ethical level, as well as a lack of strategic and trans-systemic thinking, ideas about the development of our country, love for their homeland, or respect for ordinary people.

I have singled out four lines of thought to analyze the existing situation.

The first line is an analysis of the situation with the Ukrainian people’s leadership capital in the context of Ukraine’s psychohistory.

The second line is an analysis of the role of culture in the formation of a human personality and the cultural paths of the Ukrainian people under imperial oppression; an imperial model of governing the culture of oppressed peoples.

The third line is an analysis of the way a colonial society’s top echelons establish goals, map strategies, and administer in conditions where they have no right to make decisions.

The fourth line is an analysis of Ukrainians’ psychological traits in the wake of almost 300 years of slavery and persecution of leaders.

I will first consider the Ukrainian people’s leadership capital in the context of psychohistory, the current situation, and prospects.

Leadership capital includes: 1) the vision of a goal, 2) values, 3) wisdom, 4) the ability to communicate effectively, 5) courage, and 6) the ability to arouse trust (according to Larry Stout).

There are also four principal features of a successful leader and political figure, which demonstrate his/her grandeur, as singled out by Thucydides, who analyzed the personality of Pericles, the famous ruler of ancient Athens:

He is eloquent and can lead the crowd. The art of a politician lies in being able not only to make correct decisions, but also to convince the people that they are the right ones.

He is well-educated, wise, and farsighted; he can predict events and soberly assess their consequences.

He is an undeniable patriot — not because he always swears in the name of the people: the interests of his compatriots are inseparable from his own. He thinks only of his country’s interests, not his personal glory.

Finally, he is disinterested, incorruptibility being the best manifestation of sincerity.

When and how was Ukraine losing its leadership capital both on the national level and that of a district, city, town, village, and individual human being? I will not shy away from saying that Ukrainian society suffers from a lack of leaders — statesmen and stateswomen who meet the above-mentioned criteria: they do not have leadership capital or traits that are indispensable to a successful politician; at best, they have only a small part of these qualities.

Let us look at Ukraine’s psychohistory in the context of leadership capital and the traits of a successful political figure.

First of all, for a long period of time Ukraine was partitioned by different empires. Let us examine the period of our psychohistory when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire.

Look at the history of the Battle of Poltava and the record of the prominent Ukrainian figure Ivan Mazepa. Unfortunately, Ukrainians are still locked into the image of Mazepa as a traitor, an old man who was in love with a young girl, and a person who was anathemized in Orthodox churches. When you look at the recently published book Mazepiana, you are surprised to see Hugo and Byron’s poems dedicated to Mazepa, which still have not appeared in a Ukrainian translation.

The year 2009 will mark the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava. If we look back almost 300 years, we will see that Peter I and his descendants learned the lessons of the Battle of Poltava very well. I will emphasize that the government of tsarist Russia deliberately stamped out the leaders of enslaved Ukraine. Peter I began with the complete evacuation of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: professors, even sick ones, and students. This was followed by the ban on publishing books in Ukrainian (1720).

Here is a quote from Zoia Khyzhniak’s book Kyiv Mohyla Academy (1988), which discusses the impact of the academy’s professors (I. Boretsky, K. Sakovych, P. Mohyla, L. Baranovych, I. Galiatovsky, F. Prokopovych) on the formation of the standard Ukrainian language: “They wrote many of their books in the Ukrainian literary language, thereby developing feelings of respect in students. Many spoke the Ukrainian folk language and were bridging the gap between bookish and everyday spoken Ukrainian.” So Peter I launched an attack first on Ukraine’s intellectual leaders and then on national values and the national language. All this dealt a painful blow to a component of Ukraine’s leadership capital: values.

There followed another 75 ukases against the Ukrainian language, including one by Joseph Stalin in 1947, which introduced a Russian- based Ukrainian orthography.

Today we hear a lot of lamentations over the Ukrainian language. But unfortunately, the general public still has no access to the results of a thorough analysis not just of the tragedy of the Ukrainian language but the true role of language in the formation of a personality, a nation, national self- identification, and national leaders. In terms of psychology, the onslaught on the Ukrainian language was for more than 300 years a deliberate action targeting the awareness of the Ukrainian people and their leaders, an attack on such components of leadership capital as wisdom, ability to communicate effectively, and courage.

In 1997, at the request of the Kyiv municipal authorities, experts from the ROZRADA International Humanitarian Center conducted a study of the Kyiv population’s attitude to the Ukrainian language and culture. Here are some results of this survey.

According to V. F. Petrenko, a well-known expert on psychosemantics, “The general cultural space as an aggregate of meanings, figures, and symbols of public awareness is appropriated to a certain extent by the subject and, being reflected through its set of values and world outlook, assumes one personality-related sense or another, which sets the attitude of the subject to this reality and determines the usage of this mental space as an historical metaphor to categorize the next epochs.” Thus, we see that there is a direct link between learning the native language and the formation of an individual’s values.

Andrii Potebnia wrote that it is common knowledge in the 20th century that language is a way of creating ethical and esthetic ideals, and the multiplicity of languages in this context is no less important than in the context of cognition. Therefore, it is impossible to shape values and ethical ideas without developing the language.

Also interesting are the results of a study by the well-known psycholinguist Dan Slobin on the relationship between language and the cognitive development of an individual. Slobin points out that the 20th-century’s most eminent psychologists Jean Piaget and Jerome S. Bruner studied the sources of the influence of language on children’s intellectual development. Slobin concludes that language is an important component of an individual’s psychological nature.

Oddly enough, long before the 20th century the tsarist governments were well aware of the importance of depriving the Ukrainian people not only of their language but also of respect for this language and for themselves. So I think it is dangerous to cultivate an image of clueless khokhly, who butcher their language.

Painstaking efforts are still being made to instill in Ukrainians an inferiority complex and disrespect for their native country, language, and culture. The terms “Little Russia” and “New Russia” are an instrument of this psychological attack.

Thus, the first component of the anti-leadership imperial policy is an onslaught on the national language and the nation’s self-respect.

The second component is that the empire understood that there should be no leaders in Ukraine. The intention was to lure such people away to Moscow or St. Petersburg or to kill them. This process lasted for over 300 years, deportation of the Ukrainians and the Holodomor being the empire’s final “exploit.”

The empire always considered Ukraine to be very important. For example, I will again recall Vladimir Pozner’s TV program “Times,” which was about Russia’s destiny, although it was in fact focused on Ukraine. As Lenin said, “there can be no great Russia without Ukraine,” while Hitler said that he needed Ukraine so that Germany would never be hungry.

So, as far as the first line of the analysis is concerned, the past 300 years of Ukraine’s history were not conducive to the formation of leaders at all levels of Ukrainian society.

The last and most terrible thing was World War Two. No other country lost as many people as Ukraine. Ukraine was totally occupied during the war and lost a staggering number of males. In 1945, after the Holodomor, the purges, dekulakization, and the war losses, Ukraine in fact became a territory where practically all the social strata that could have engendered leaders had been destroyed. This means there simply could be no leaders with an independent way of thinking.

Wisdom is an important component of leadership capital, but it cannot emerge during a famine or in conditions of all-pervading fear. In addition, the Soviet education system did its best to deprive students of strategic thinking, decision-making, and planning skills.

Another reason why the Ukrainian people lost their leadership capital was the loss of the greater part of the male population during World War Two. It is commonly known that a person is formed within the family. It is the family above all that shapes human values and teaches one to trust people and win the trust of others. In this psychohistorical context let us consider the formation of leaders in the postwar Ukrainian family.

After the war, families were headed by women. From the late 1930s the USSR was forming a totalitarian family pattern with tough rules, a rigid distribution of roles, and the absence of private life and personal opinion among certain family members, especially children. The woman had to assume the role of family head, a man and woman rolled into one. On the one hand, she was a totalitarian leader (not a leader in the literal sense of the word), while on the other, she was enslaved by having to clean the house, do the laundry, check her children’s homework, etc. In the next 50 years the country was ruled by men who had been raised by this kind of totalitarian mother.

The well-known psychologist Alfred Adler showed that when a boy is brought up only by a woman, who makes all his decisions for him, e.g., where to study or whom to date, he will subconsciously develop a hatred for women. Then this man will transfer all his feelings of dissatisfaction with his mother to his wife.

At the same time, being raised in a totalitarian family does not promote leadership qualities in a person. How can you be courageous and wise if all decisions are imposed on you immediately and in a totalitarian manner? Therefore, the family not only could not contribute to the formation of leaders but formed a sexist Soviet and post- Soviet society. Women copied their mothers’ totalitarian models of behavior in the family and were unable to form themselves as leaders in their enslaved conditions: work/shopping/housework/raising children/sexual partnership. At the same time, men are still showing “the transference of their totalitarian mother complex” to other women and the rejection of women as society’s leaders.

As I said above, this is the first line of analyzing why we have no leaders.

The following unfavorable factors hindered the formation of leadership capital and hence of leaders in Ukrainian society: 1) Ukraine’s colonial status, 2) the attack on the national language, 3) the psychological attack on Ukrainians’ self-identity and self-respect, 4) elimination of leaders, 5) extermination of the active part of society, 6) creation of favorable conditions for luring leaders away to the empire’s center by helping them raise their self-respect and improving their housing conditions, 7) a totalitarian pattern of the family (psychologically not typical of but imposed on Ukraine), and 8) a system of education that was not conducive to the formation of cognitive, ethical, and personal qualities of a true leader.

In this context, let us go back to the leadership capital situation in present-day Ukraine. Let’s examine such components of leadership capital as vision of the goal, values, and wisdom.

My analysis of the psychological consequences of the Soviet totalitarian regime in the cognitive context shows that the Soviet system of education was not aimed at developing tactical thinking, problem solving, and theorem proving. It was not intended to develop strategic thinking, planning, projecting, goal setting, decision making, etc.

In fact, neither wisdom nor the vision of a goal was not and still is not being developed. Unfortunately, communication abilities were not developed either because this requires the formation of certain skills by active teaching.

As for courage, the Soviet man’s all-embracing fear was not at all conducive to the development of courage as a leader’s trait. Recall what Pope John Paul II said: “Do not be afraid!”

We should also look at another factor. Ukraine is now introducing active methods of teaching; for example, training sessions where emphasis is put on emotional problems, communication skills, and conflict resolution. Regrettably, the problems of values, envisioning goals, and wisdom based on strategic and trans-systemic thinking are practically absent, whereas this is perhaps the most pressing problem in the formation of leadership capital in Ukraine.

Let us examine the traits that were promoted in ancient Greece and see whether there were conditions for the formation of such leaders in Ukraine. What are the psychohistorical causes of the lack of leaders in Ukraine?

1. He is eloquent and knows how to lead the crowd. The art of a politician lies in being able not only to make a correct decision but also, or even to a higher degree, to convince the people that the decision is right.

It is about the art of oratory. Ancient Greece attached paramount importance to this art, and its achievements remain unsurpassed. Unfortunately, this art has not been taught across the board in the past 70 or 80 years. Take even the highest echelons of power: do you remember the Soviet Union’s top-ranking officials, who always read their speeches from a sheet of paper? They would read their texts in a drawn-out, boring fashion. And how pleased the Soviet people were when a big boss chose to speak “without a paper” even for a short while!

Thus, we have always lacked experts in the art of oratory and still do. This can also include the ability of a leader to clearly express knowledge and information in a speech.

2. He is educated, wise, and farsighted, and capable of foreseeing things and soberly assessing their consequences.

A person’s traits and intellectual skills enable him/her to think strategically, project, plan, make decisions, and forecast.

As I stated above, since the empire did not need leaders, its education system was not conducive to the development of these intellectual skills. So the task of Ukraine’s educational system is to develop this set of skills.

3. He is an unquestionable patriot, not because he always swears in the name of the people but because the interests of his compatriots are inalienable from his own. He only thinks of his country’s interests, not his personal glory.

Patriotism was totally devalued in the Soviet Union because the all-pervading deception nullified the love of an individual for the new Soviet country as the fatherland. As for love of Ukraine, that was simply a crime in the empire. I will never forget what was done to the famous Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Sosiura for his poem “Love Ukraine!” in the late 1940s.

On the other hand, the new class and the ordinary people were worlds apart in the Soviet era, as they are today, unfortunately. The new class still has its own houses, hospitals, health centers, etc. How could the members of this class know the truth about the lives of ordinary people?

Moreover, the members of the new class still claim that they are feeding the people without knowing how they really live. Suffice it to recall their hackneyed phrase “We must first keep the people well-fed and only then culture and all that stuff!”

4. Finally, he is disinterested, incorruptibility being the best manifestation of sincerity.

These are problems of morality, which have experienced the disastrously negative effects of imperial times.

Values were so debased and double standards were so customary that those deceptive values were replaced by others that were even more deceptive — power and money. Today we cannot speak about disinterestedness or incorruptibility of Ukraine’s current leaders, although the best among them have some of these traits.

The second line of analyzing the leadership capital situation in Ukraine requires considering the role of culture in the formation of a human personality and the paths of Ukrainian culture under imperial oppression. It is an imperial model of managing the culture of enslaved peoples.

The following are the features of an imperial state’s cultural policy: 1) eliminating areas of active thinking in conquered or annexed countries, 2) forcing the cultural figures of an enslaved people to serve the empire or destroying them, 3) applying psychological methods of influencing the awareness of the enslaved people in order to stifle their creative and civic energy, 4) developing an inferiority complex in the enslaved people, 5) creating a closed information space for the people on an artificial basis, 6) distorting the history of the enslaved nation, 7) concocting myths about the inferiority of the people’s language, culture, and mentality, and 8) cultivating pseudo-folk myths that fuel the slavish mentality of the conquered nation.

So, within the second line of the analysis is the fate of culture. Today we are worried about culture. I am interested in pictorial art. What truly depresses me is the fact that many treasures of Ukrainian culture are in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So what’s the problem? The point is that the empire deliberately carted away cultural monuments not only from Ukraine but also, say, Central Asia.

There are areas of active thinking and zones of relaxation in peoples’ lives.

Areas of active thinking are grouped around universities, museums, etc. An area like this existed in Kyiv when the Kyiv Mohyla Academy was in its heyday. Suffice it to recall the famous intellectual contests between representatives of the Kyiv Cave Monastery and Kyiv Mohyla Academy. The evacuation of Kyiv Mohyla Academy by Peter I touched off the gradual decline of active thinking in Kyiv.

It was the empire’s policy to cart away cultural treasures of enslaved and annexed peoples. Vitkovych’s article on the renaissance in Central Asia, published in the journal Novyi mir when it was edited by Aleksandr Tvardovsky, showed that incalculably priceless treasures were shipped out of Central Asia.

It was also the empire’s strategy to force cultural figures to serve. If you don’t want to serve or cannot, you’ll go to a prison camp or disappear into oblivion, but if you serve, you’ll get a decent house, money, and honors.

On the one hand, culture was to serve the empire and, on the other, it was not supposed to exist in the provinces because museums and cultural centers form an area of active thinking.

Let me give you an example. A little girl from a family living in St. Petersburg family, who would grow up to be an eminent Russian psychologist, was taken to see the paintings in the Hermitage. For example, after she read about the labors of Hercules, she was brought there to see paintings of Hercules.

For me this was a lesson in how to shape awareness, the ability to think and to compare different arts in the mentality of prominent figures who are now becoming leaders and promoting knowledge.

Ukraine was losing all this. In fact, we have creations of culture without number. Fifty thousand exhibits vanished from the Khanenko Museum. The German army smuggled out the decorations from St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral. The prominent Ukrainian historian Serhii Kot studied various documents and found out that Germany had indeed returned them — but to Russia, not Ukraine.

We have lost the area of active thinking, on the one hand, through the loss of art works and the possibility of cultural development and, on the other, through the neutralization of cultural figures (the GULAG archipelago, execution, or failure to present one’s works to the public at large). In this way we lost our spiritual heritage, which is an indispensable source for improving the quality of the population’s top stratum. This is about values, ideals, and moral standards.

The third line is an analysis of the mores of the upper strata of a colonial society where it tries to set a goal, develop a strategy, and manage in conditions of being unable to make decisions.

An important point in the life of Ukraine and other conquered or annexed peoples was the complete absence of an opportunity to plan the life of their country and make their own decisions.

To be able to think strategically, one should know how to establish a goal, draw up goal-achievement plans, and make decisions on the tactics of implementing a strategy.

I have studied the psychology of creative work for many years, and I know that the main thing is to set a task and see the goal clearly. One must first see the problem and only then seek ways to solve it.

In the Soviet era, Ukraine was placed in a situation where there was the semblance of a government, not a government itself. We seemed to have ministries, but there were in fact no ministries because all decisions were made in Moscow and then simply handed down to Kyiv. For example, we had a foreign ministry but no embassies of our own. We did not address many problems: we just carried out what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR demanded. We had a ministry of the economy called the State Planning Committee, but we did not have our own economy. Everything was located in Moscow. So we should also make allowances for having had no practice in establishing and fulfilling creative tasks and making decisions. In fact, the entire so-called governmental system of Ukraine was only good for fulfilling the central government’s decisions.

Ukraine found itself in a “zero-option” situation in 1991, with no practice of genuine administration, no structures of government, and no banking system!

Today we can see that the people in power do not even suspect that they must learn from and work with bona fide expert advisers. It is important to understand that there are no personalities today that can generate an idea that could rally the nation. It is obvious that our people are making better progress than the government. It is easy to see that there are already approaches that could beget leaders because it is far more difficult to kill a nation genetically than morally or psychologically.

Seventy five decrees against the Ukrainian language are also an element of the cultural defamation of a nation, so today we are not healing as fast as we would like to.

The fourth line is an analysis of the psychological traits of Ukrainians as a result of almost 300 years of slavery and persecution of their leaders.

Remember the article in The Day whose author discussed the victim mentality and listed the typical traits of a victim, as described by Randy Gage in his book Why Are We Stupid, Sick and Poor, and How to Become Wise, Healthy and Rich. As a practicing psychological consultant, I often come across victims of domestic violence, and I think the Gage list is very important for us post-Soviet people.

The psychological traits of a victim (according to Gage):

1. They can always persuade themselves that all the failures in their life occur through no fault of theirs.

Let us recall the way we always look for a guilty party: the one who broke a faucet in a shared apartment, the one who failed to establish order in the courtyard, a school, the city, etc.

2. They think that all their troubles stem only from external factors because this exempts them from personal responsibility.

Let us recall how we always look for foreign or domestic enemies, nature-related causes of our failures, or for such “enemies” as our boss or neighbor.

3. They receive a considerable part of attention, sympathy, and pity from those who surround them.

I feel bad. You should help me. I am so miserable that I can’t do anything, I am a loser. Leave me alone.

4. They interpret this attention, sympathy, and pity as love, which they desperately need but do not know how to obtain.

With their complex of being unloved, they readily interpret sympathy as love without taking an independent and self-affirming stand.

5. They use their past failures in their private lives as confirmation that they are incapable of emotional closeness with anyone.

This develops the complex of a loser who wastes life energy.

6. They refer to their past failures to justify the lack of attempts to achieve lofty goals and implement promising projects.

They lose courage. They do not act. They think that a passive stand is simply normal.

7. They view as the gospel truth the fact that they are “disgraceful sinners,” that they have no proper education or connections for achieving success.

The stigmatization of the victim takes place. Any lofty idea and courage as part of the vision of a goal are out of the question.

8. They feel as though they are heroic “little men” who, in spite of everything, are battling evil forces.

The lonely figure of a stigmatized individual is not conducive either to one’s own rise or rallying people around a lofty goal.

9. They are aware of their spiritual grandeur, placing their life on the altar of humankind and thinking that they will be duly rewarded later in their lifetime.

The sacrificial quest of a lonely figure that is not blessed with wisdom and trust in people will not beget those who can lead people and will not create conditions for creative satisfaction.

10. They can eke out a literally unconscious existence, succumbing to their instincts, and simply allow life to take its course without thinking about anything.

This kind of life stance enables the existence of the individual that occupies the position of leader but is not a leader.

No matter what can be said in this connection, one thing is undeniable: all this impairs an individual’s inner growth and prevents him from living a true, joyful, and full-blooded life.

On the other hand, there are some rather positive phenomena in the Ukrainian people’s mentality. Here are a few notes on the national idea of Ukraine.

After reading Klara Gudzyk’s article in The Day about Nikolai Leskov’s book The Jews in Russia, I took a look at this book. It turned out that Leskov wrote the book in 1883 in order to understand the complaints against Jews. But interestingly enough, a large portion of the book is devoted to the analysis of differences between Ukrainians and Russians.

Independently of Leskov I had come to embrace the same ideas. It is very interesting to recall how we wander from Kyiv to Moscow. As we reach the village of Khutir-Mykhailivsky, our image of a village house — white with decorated windows, interestingly designed, with marigolds blooming next to the house, and a small orchard — gives way to black houses without a single flower, and you understand that this is an entirely different mentality.

I came to the following conclusion. We often say that Ukraine has the world’s best black soil. God sent people not just the soil to live on. He also gave them a special ecological link with the Earth with which one must always be bound.

First: you have done something, and the earth responded to you. Look at the way our people grow all sorts of crops on our land. Wherever there are Ukrainians, be it in Siberia or Canada, they grow cucumbers, sorrel, and wonderful flowers even on a small plot of land. This is a manifestation of a special ecological link with the Earth. This link is typical of all those who have roots in this Earth — Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Bulgarians, Moldovans, etc.

The second thing that is germane to the people who live here in Ukraine is a radiant perception of the world. This white house, these flowers, white clothes, embroidered towels are truly impressive. There is no way this is a fantasy: we were beaten on the head, but we embroider to our heart’s content.

Leskov writes that when you come to a Ukrainian marketplace, you are surprised at the way young women are dressed and the way the stalls are adorned. A radiant perception of the world means that Ukraine can show the whole world how one should live — in union with nature, poetically, beautifully, in the midst of the full cycle of events: work, singing songs, eating supper, rites, and beauty.

I have often visited the United States, where people are in a rush to get rich and make money. This is not what we should copy.

There is one trouble that Peter I visited upon us: the copycat policy. It is important to remember that we have things of our own. When he went to Holland and saw the way of life there — cleanliness, neatness, and high labor efficiency — he became excited and with great energy (this energy helped him oppress the Ukrainian people after the Battle of Poltava) he began to copy the European lifestyle. And from that moment the idea was genetically foisted on us that somewhere else — in Japan, the US, or the UK — people know how to live better.

But it is we ourselves who should decide how to live, because we are slow people, and all this hurry and speedy enrichment causes premature strokes, heart attacks, divorces, and nervous breakdowns. Why? Because we have a different philosophy of life. If we do not lose our spiritual principles and learn to value time and work more efficiently, understand our values, become wiser, and esteem those whom we already have — Lina Kostenko, Ivan Dziuba, Professor Serhii Krymsky, Yevhen Sverstiuk, and others — we will discover ourselves, and the world will see one more way of living a harmonious life.

Is it really worth launching a nationwide debate on whether the sense of life lies in crazy money so that we can sit on gold-plated toilet seats and vacation in the Canary Islands, or in having a nice family, playing with our children, and being able to realize our creative potential?

Lev Gumilev once said that our steppes are the most unknown page of European history, that there is no information left about what used to be here. Incidentally, we are now seeing a real upsurge of information about Trypillia and other cultures that once existed on our land. This is a moment that we should seize.

History is giving us a chance. Our chance is to show the entire world a way of living, the sense of life, and a true culture of peace.

As a psychologist, I have always noted the extremely peaceful nature of our people. Ukraine has never conquered anyone, but it was conquered many times. It was surrounded by such bellicose peoples as the Turks, Russians, Lithuanians, and Poles. We never took anything from anyone. This is also what we can teach.

So I see a grave danger in the violence that is being foisted on us — not by America but by the people who want to cash in. I am talking about mass culture, violent magazines for teenagers, violent films on TV, and violent whodunits that are so easy to read. All this is bringing things to Ukraine that are not germane to it, and this can lead to a serious social explosion because we are different.

When you walk down the street and see 14- and 15-year-old girls clutching bottles of beer, you should be aware that this is a great threat to the very existence of our nation. So I would like to launch a debate on this menace. We can still be heeded; there are those who may support us. I have been sounding the alarm for a long time and must say this: dear compatriots! Wake up! Let’s get back to ourselves and start marching down our own splendid road.