By: C William Hanson Jr.

Welcome to our issue which marks a date exactly six months after that of our first publication  Much credit goes to our able staff members, including, Anna Calvagna, Lauren Peacock, Tristan Palazzo, and Jack Hughes for whatever advancement one might observe in our journalistic prowess.

On June 28, 2022, I first attended at the Ukraine Media Center a press conference addressing “The current situation on the frontline of the russo-Ukrainian war,” presented by Oleksandr Motuzianyk, Spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. He reported recent successes in defeating Russian troops and  driving the invaders from territory they had initially seized.

After the press conference, my guide (who serves also as my bodyguard and valet) took me  to the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, located only a few blocks from the Media Center.   As mentioned in our first issue, we are in search of better understanding, answers in our bafflement . In that issue I wrote,  “How has it been possible for the Ukrainians to overcome and defeat Russian forces to such an extent? Who are these fierce, determined Ukrainian people, and what have they experienced since the invasion began on February 24th (2022)?”    I was hoping  to find Ukrainian students or even faculty members to interview.  It seemed to me that such individuals might be best able to articulate thoughts and feelings about the war and might even speak English, avoiding the impediment of online  translation. The English language skills of my guide Alex have substantial limitations, and online translators often produce bizarre and sometimes even laughable errors.  

The Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv  is a major center of learning and research and an important cultural institution .Student numbers total about 30,000 students.

I think that the school’s  own website is accurate in claiming that the university is  “a classic university with a distinct research profile, and the leading contemporary academic and educational hub of Ukraine” (“Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv – About Us.” About the University, knu.ua/en/geninf/about/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2024).

You might well  ask: “who is this Taras Shevchenko?   Why is Ukraine’s largest  university named after him?”   I confess that the name meant nothing to me prior to that day.  I wonder if the name rings a bell with any of our readers except of course readers in Ukraine and perhaps in Russia and maybe also some learned scholars among our readership in Germany.  Please do tell me if I am underestimating the general knowledge of any of you. Embarrassed by my own ignorance, I learned that Taras Shevchenko is to Ukrainian language and  literature what Shakespeare is to English and perhaps Goethe is to German.  Though I studied history at Harvard College, I do not recall ever hearing or seeing the name “Shevchenko.”  

Norman Davies provides some insight into this gap in my education.  In 1996 reviewing the textbook literature purporting to present the panorama of European History, he provides the following assessment:

“Any number of titles could be cited which masquerade as histories of ‘Europe,’ or of ‘Christendom,’ which are nothing of the sort.  Any number of surveys of Western civilization, confine themselves to topics which relate only to their chosen fragments of the peninsula. In many such works there is no Portugal, no Ireland, Scotland, or  Wales, and no Scandinavia and there is no port just as there is no Poland, no Bohemia, no Byzantium, no Balkans, no Baltic states,  no Belarus or Ukraine, no Crimea or Caucasus.  There is sometimes a Russia, and sometimes not.  Whatever Western civilization is, therefore, it does not involve an honest attempt to summarize European history. Whatever the ‘West’ is, it is not just a synonym for western Europe. This is a very strange phenomenon. It seems to assume that historians of Europe can conduct themselves like the cheese-makers  of Gruyère,  whose product contains as many holes as cheese ” (Norman Davies, Europe, A History. New York, 1996,  19-20).

In case you share my curiosity, let me relate an impression of more recent imbalance: I checked the other major paper text I own, a generally excellent one which covers a broad span of European history, A History of Modern  Europe from the Renaissance to the Present (John Merriman. New York, 2010).  The book’s index lists Baudelaire, Boswell, Cervantes, Dante, Goethe, Flaubert, Mann (Thomas), Orwell, Shakespeare, Shelley,  Verne, and Zola as well as numerous other writers but no mention of Taras Shevchenko nor of any other Ukrainian writer.  Merriman provides an index listing 9 subheadings for Ukraine, a country of almost 42 million people according to a 2020 census, and a country which has suffered from multiple invasions and other tragedies,. Belgium, a country of about 12 million, rates 27 subheadings, and Switzerland, a country of only 9 million, rates 23. Also, in the Wikipedia entry on Taras Shevchenko, of the fifteen references given only three use the Roman alphabet, and the others all use Cyrillic.  This contrasts with the Wikipedia listing for Goethe which lists three references all in English but also one hundred and twenty five citations all in the Roman alphabet and a very large number of which are in English. Scholars have clearly been neglecting Europe’s largest country, the “breadbasket” for the continent.  

In last month’s issue we furnished a brief historical review of the sometimes competing fundamental principles underlying American foreign policy.  One of these, isolationism, may thrive on ignorance arising from such holes in the existing texts and in the education which our high schools and colleges provide. Must we continue to ignore tyrants who launch aggression against smaller neighbors until eventually a Pearl Harbor is bombed or a Lusitania sunk?   I am thinking of surveying high school and college students to assess their knowledge of Europe.  How many of them will correctly identify Ukraine as the largest country in Europe (Russia lying for the most part in Asia)? Or Kyiv as the sixth most populous European city, larger than Rome, Paris, Warsaw. Budapest, and Vienna, for example?  Or that the number of people who speak Ukrainian is more than double the number of people in the world who speak Turkish, or, otherwise put, exceeds the combined number speaking the languages of several neighboring countries: Hungary, Slovakia, and  Belarus, plus the languages of the former Soviet Republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.  

Regarding Taras Shevchenko, I learned that Ukrainians revere him as a culture hero and have statues of him throughout the land. The Soviets, rather than to engage in a futile attempt to eradicate him from the culture, chose to embrace his resistance to Czarist rule and to cast him as an early revolutionary comrade, foreshadowing the overthrow of the Czar in 1917; consequently his statue crops up in Russia as well.  

Sadly, Putin’s specious though unoriginal claim that Ukraine is not a separate nation but by rights a province of Russia has included an attempt to crush Ukrainian culture in Russian occupied areas.  The excellent reporting by Stephen M. Norris deserves quotation at length:

“When Ukrainian troops liberated the town of Borodyanka from Russian occupation in early April, 2022 they discovered the damage done to its Taras Shevchenko monument. Bullets had hit the great poet’s forehead. The pillar holding him up had been damaged by shells. 

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The damaged base and bust of the Taras Shevchenko monument in Borodyanka, Ukraine, April 2022.

The symbolism of the Russian attack on the monument was obvious. Taras Shevchenko is not just the founder of the modern Ukrainian literary language, he is also the most important symbol of modern Ukrainian nationhood” (Norris, Stephen M. “Taras Shevchenko, Poet of Ukraine” (Origins, origins.osu.edu/read/taras-shevchenko-poet-ukraine?language_content_entity=en. Accessed 30 Jan. 2024). 

In my closing comments this month, I return to the questions and bafflement with which my journey began. To answer the questions, resolve the bafflement, and really understand what is happening, we probably need to delve into some history, a saga of troubled, tragic experiences of Ukraine through decades and centuries . Failure to do so would be like trying to understand the perspective of Afro-American people but overlooking the legacy of slavery and segregation. It would be like someone totally lacking knowledge of the Enlightenment but trying to understand how the Declaration of Independence came to pass. The journey we need to take will need to include some travel back through time in coming issues.

Meanwhile the news media are offering  reams of reporting on Gaza and the Middle East and much, much less on the unjustifiable war by Mr. Putin in Ukraine.  Of course the unnecessary deaths of twenty five thousand Palestinians in Gaza should shock the conscience. For perspective let us consider a Newsweek report that Putin’s criminal  invasion of Ukraine has already cost the deaths of 80,000 Russian army  boys not to mention deaths of Ukrainians both civilian and military (Norton, Tom. “How Many People Have Died in Russia-Ukraine War?” Newsweek, 31 Jan. 2024, http://www.newsweek.com/how-many-dead-russia-ukraine-war-update-troops-civilians-1864034). We believe that Ukraine merits our continued attention.