[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: FT; WP; NYT (2); EDM; WoE

[Deychak, Orest]

Financial Times

www.ft.com

Ukraine: Decision in disillusion

By Stefan Wagstyl and Roman Olearchyk 

Published: January 5 2010 20:40 

Vasyl Humeniuk, a veteran small-town Ukrainian politician, has changed his name in an attempt to capitalise on the crisis-hit country's widespread political disillusionment.

With Ukraine holding presidential elections this month, some voters are so disgusted with political turmoil, economic recession and rampant corruption that they want nothing to do with any of the main candidates. They can register their anger by putting a cross on the ballot form beside the words "against all". But many see this rejection of all candidates as a wasted vote. So the enterprising Mr Humeniuk is offering a new option. He is running under the name Vasyl Protyvsikh - or Vasyl Against All.

Rebounding but risky

With its 46m people and abundant coal and iron ore and farmland, Ukraine has great economic potential - but also suffers from instability, poor infrastructure and corruption. Foreign investors swallowed their doubts, contributing to growth of 8 per cent in 2007. But the economic crisis - which hit steel, the main export, hard - led to a fall in gross domestic product of about 15 per cent last year. With support from an International Monetary Fund package, the country could enjoy a 35 per cent recovery in 2010, largely due to rebound effects and improvement in steel markets. But with the currency down about 50 per cent against the dollar since mid-2008, debtors may still struggle to pay foreign creditors. The credit default swap rate, a measure of perceived default risk, remains among the world's highest.

"I have now been watching for 19 years how the elite is ripping Ukraine off. It is time for a man of the people to take charge," says the 63-year-old head of a chamber of commerce in the western town of Ivano-Frankivsk. Mr Humeniuk is no democratic idealist, having worked closely with Leonid Kuchma, the former authoritarian president of Ukraine. He is an opportunist, seizing his 15 minutes of fame, but his candidacy shows the depths to which Ukrainian politics has sunk on the eve of the first presidential election since the disputed 2004 poll that sparked the Orange Revolution.

In spite of the public disillusion, however, the poll matters to Ukraine, a strategically important state lying between Russia and the European Union which was, pre-crisis, among the continent's top emerging markets.

The new president will need to secure political stability, revive the recession-hit economy, maintain an International Monetary Fund rescue programme and balance the competing foreign policy demands of Moscow and the west. With Ukraine sitting astride the main route for Russia's EU-bound gas exports, Kiev can influence life far beyond its borders, as in last winter's gas dispute with Moscow when supplies to a big slice of eastern Europe were cut off for two weeks.

The victor's policy plans will matter less than his or her ability to stabilise the political order enough to permit economic recovery. Rory MacFarquhar of Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, says that even more important than the identity of the winner is the way politicians handle the campaign, the election and any post-election manoeuvring. "There is a sense that anything is possible because the stakes are so high." 

CORRUPTION

'There are all sorts of regulations, some useless, most unevenly enforced'

"I would not advise anyone to open a small business here," says Euan McDonald, the Scottish owner of Baraban, a bar in central Kiev that is popular with foreigners. "There are all sorts of regulations, some useless, most unevenly enforced. It's just one thing after another. As soon as you handle one problem, another comes along. The regulators can come after you any time to generate some extra pocket cash."

The daily struggle of Mr McDonald, unsure whether to shut or keep "bumping along" in Ukraine's muddy sea of graft and red tape, is not an exception. The country ranks among the worst in terms of corruption perceptions, according to Transparency International, the watchdog. It is 146th - alongside Russia and Zimbabwe - out of 180 states.

Ukrainians routinely bribe underpaid public officials to cut through red tape and secure access to services. Around $10-$100 can get traffic police, sanitation or fire safety officials to overlook alleged violations. Kiev's constitution guarantees free healthcare but doctors demand payments on top of their $100-$200 monthly official salaries for "quality care".

Securing favourable court rulings is big business. One regional judge, Ihor Zvarych, is awaiting trial for taking bribes, with more than $1m in cash found in his home. He has denied the claim. 

Corruption is learnt from an early age. Students bribe teachers to pass exams. Politicians have been accused of purchasing diplomas without ever attending classes. Andriy Kislinsky was relieved of his duties as deputy head of the secret service late in 2009 after officials found his degree was illegitimate. 

In one survey, 63 per cent of Ukrainians indicated they had been involved in corrupt transactions with officials over the past 12 months. An illegal payment to inspectors can, for example, quickly secure a building permit. If not, "it takes 476 days to get a construction permit for a two-storey warehouse in Ukraine. In the US it takes just 40 days," says Georges Massoud, managing partner in Ukraine for McKinsey, the consultancy.

This environment keeps investment at bay and stifles competition, leaving Ukraine's economy dependent on inefficient steel and chemical factories controlled by a handful of oligarchs. 

In a break from normal diplomatic language, José Manuel Pinto Teixeira, the European Union representative in Kiev, recently said: "Corruption, red tape, administrative obstacles of every kind - these are only things that serve the interests of those who today control the economy because they do not want competition. They are allergic to competition."

Viktor Pynzenyk, a former finance minister, says: "The business and political elite can adjust to competition from abroad and it would boost the value of their assets in the long run. But they avoid it."

Eighteen candidates, including Mr Humeniuk/Protyvsikh, are standing in the first round on January 17, with the two who get the most votes going into a second on February 7. Whoever wins, the biggest loser is likely to be President Viktor Yushchenko, who is clocking under 5 per cent in opinion polls. The hero of the Orange Revolution wins praise for replacing Mr Kuchma's feared regime with multi-party democracy. But, in the view of many Ukrainians, he has lost the public's trust by failing to control corruption or impose his authority on his rivals, including Yulia Tymoshenko, his prime minister, or Viktor Yanukovich, his opponent in 2004.

The president's heroic reputation has also suffered from some decidedly unheroic financial allegations. Ms Tymoshenko has accused his "inner circle" of profiting corruptly from the shady gas trade. Mr Yushchenko has denied the claim.

For the tens of thousands who took to the streets after the previous presidential election, it is a bitter disappointment. As Boris Kryvytsky, a 56-year-old businessman who helped organise the protests, says: "The ideas that we stood for in the Orange Revolution were right, but we made the mistake of trusting the wrong leaders. Nothing will change until we rid this country of the bandits."

To Mr Yushchenko's fury, the election frontrunners are Mr Yanukovich and Ms Tymoshenko. They differ greatly in style but not so much in policy - nor in the drive of followers hungry for the spoils of office.

In many European countries, Mr Yanukovich would have lost all political credibility for fighting in 2004 a campaign widely condemned as fraudulent. But in Ukraine he has retained control of the eastern industrial heartland and leads the largest party in parliament. He is also supported by key oligarchs, headed by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man.

The tough 59-year-old former lorry driver, who worked his way up the administrative ladder in Soviet times, has refashioned himself as a democrat. With the help of US public relations advisers, he has learnt to work the crowds, listen and smile. In interviews, he has adopted the soundbite. Serhiy Lyovochkin, an aide, says spending time out of power has changed Mr Yanukovich.

Ms Tymoshenko, 49, came to prominence in the 1990s by making a fortune in the murky Russia-Ukraine gas trade, in which little known companies act as intermediaries between Gazprom <http://markets.ft.com/tearsheets/performance.asp?s=ru:GAZP> , the Russian gas group, and its customers. Since backing Mr Yushchenko in the Orange Revolution, she has comprehensively upstaged him and captured the support of the revolution's followers.

To her critics, she is an unpredictable populist with authoritarian instincts. After the Orange Revolution, she frightened business by threatening to renationalise scores of privatised companies - an attack on the oligarchs who, under Mr Kuchma, had won highly prized state assets in privatisations beset by charges of cronyism. She gave up in the face of overwhelming odds but the assault has not been forgotten.

In the past year, she has won some praise for her handling of the economic crisis and relations with the IMF. But business people have complained about her penchant for direct intervention in markets, with threats of caps on prices, margins and profits in key sectors, including agriculture.

Many in business are also sceptical about Ms Tymoshenko's goal of changing the constitution to end the division of power between parliament and the presidency in order to return to the strong presidential rule that prevailed before the Orange Revolution. While the chances of forcing such reforms through the fractured political system are low, the very idea worries her critics.

Even some liberals who backed the Orange Revolution now find themselves favouring Mr Yanukovich as the least bad choice. The pollster Ilko Kucheriv says: "If we have Yanukovich as president it will be shameful for Ukraine. But he is not as cynical as Yulia. Our parliamentary democracy has weaknesses but it is fundamentally better than the alternatives."

However, the price of a Yanukovich victory in the presidential election could be further political uncertainty because Ms Tymoshenko holds a majority, albeit slim, in parliament. Mr Lyovochkin says if there is even "a small chance" of forming a coalition, Mr Yanukovich will try. Otherwise there will be parliamentary elections, bringing extra turmoil. JPMorgan, the US bank, sees this risk as so significant that it backs Ms Tymoshenko, saying she would stabilise Kiev faster than Mr Yanukovich. 

 

Post-election instability would bode ill for the fragile economy. The IMF came to Kiev's rescue in autumn 2008 with a $16.4bn loan to stabilise the crippled banking sector and the bud­get. But, with election drums beating, and president and prime minister in conflict, Kiev failed to deliver promised reforms; in October the Fund suspended a $3.8bn tranche. Ukraine responded last month with a plea for emergency finance to help pay bills - including crucial monthly gas payments to Moscow. Citing a lack of political consensus, and desperate to stay out of Kiev's politics amid claims by Ms Tymoshenko's critics that it has been soft on her government, the IMF declined. But late last month it allowed Kiev to stay afloat by approving a $2bn transfer to government accounts from IMF-backed central bank reserves to cover external liabilities including Russian gas bills. 

The public finances are in "an extremely difficult situation", Hryhoriy Nemyria, deputy prime minister, told the FT last month, warning of risks of a spill-over to other states. "The cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action," he said.

Both Mr Yanukovich and Ms Tymoshenko have pledged to stick with the IMF programme, which includes spending cuts to reduce the budget deficit from about 10 per cent this year to 4 per cent. But they will not spell out the details before the polls.

After dropping about 15 per cent in 2009 in the biggest decline in Europe outside the Baltic states, Ukrainian gross domestic product is expected to stage a moderate recovery of 3-5 per cent in 2010 . But the country remains vulnerable to new shocks.

One such surprise could come from the Russia-Ukraine gas trade. Ms Tymoshenko and Vladimir Putin, her Russian counterpart, have promised that this winter there will be no repeat of 2009's contract dispute and supply break. But that depends on Kiev's ability to pay its bills. 

Ms Tymoshenko and Mr Yanukovich both approach Moscow pragmatically. Mr Yanukovich has a longer record of co-operating with Russia than Ms Tymoshenko. But, to Mr Putin's satisfaction, she has accepted chunky rises in gas prices. Mr Yanukovich's recent pledges to fight for a better deal for Ukraine will not have en­deared him to Mr Putin.

Both have distanced themselves from the pro-west policies of Mr Yushchenko, who irritated Russia by pursuing Nato membership. The Kremlin in 2008 made clear its intention to stop further Nato expansion through the war in Georgia, which had also hoped for membership before its defeat. Sergei Karaganov, head of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, says a renewed Nato push into Ukraine would cause "a threat of a large-scale war in Europe". In Kiev, the matter is no longer on the agenda.

But integration with the EU remains popular. Among Mr Yushch­enko's few successes was securing World Trade Organisation membership, which opened the way for deep economic co-operation with Brussels, including a free trade agreement now under negotiation. However there are many difficulties, with institutions, notably the courts, falling far short of EU standards. Mr Kucheriv says: "We have a simulation of European behaviour. Not the reality. When Ukraine's political leaders talk of integration with the EU they don't know what they are talking about."

Neither a Yanukovich nor a Tymoshenko presidency would change that very much. Ukraine's best hope is that the new president can provide the stability that has been missing in the past five years. That may sound meagre but, for a country mired in prolonged instability, it would be something.

The Washington Post

www.washingtonpost.com

 

A Section

In Ukraine, debate over history; Bid to honor members of WWII underground encounters resistance 

by John Pancake 

6 January 2010

WP

FINAL

A07

In World War II, members of the Ukrainian underground fought to make their vision of an independent nation real. They battled Hitler and Stalin. Ultimately they lost, and the Soviets took control of most of Eastern Europe after the war.

The Ukrainians finally achieved independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Now many in this fledgling nation would like to formally recognize those earlier nationalists -- the "brave defenders of the Motherland," as President Viktor Yushchenko has called them. Newly introduced legislation would honor members of the underground and provide them with benefits accorded to war veterans.

But the movement to pay tribute to the insurgent fighters has set off a national debate about exactly what happened more than six decades ago. Many say the underground collaborated with the Nazis, killed thousands of Jews and perpetrated a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Poles.

The legacy of the underground flows through Ukrainian culture today. Its best-known banner -- a red-and-black flag -- is seen at the rallies of nationalist politicians. In this western Ukrainian city, where the insurgency was active, members of the underground are buried in elaborate marble tombs in a historic cemetery. Street vendors sell memorabilia commemorating the resistance. There is even an underground-themed restaurant outfitted as a bunker. In one corner, diners can do target practice using a picture of Stalin.

While those involved in the debate over the underground are somewhat polarized, they agree on one thing: It's complicated.

To begin with, the underground was made up of many factions, subfactions and rivals. In hindsight, some look better than others. Meanwhile, for the majority of Ukrainian families, the experience of "the Great Patriotic War" was fighting with the Red Army to defend the homeland. Some descendants of Red Army soldiers view members of the underground as traitors.

The effort to recognize the insurgents also is taking place against the backdrop of centuries of persecution of Jews in Ukraine, where pogroms were common.

The Cossack chieftain Bogdan Khmelnytsky, whose statue stands in the Ukrainian capital, fought for independence during the 17th century. But he also presided over the killings of tens of thousands of Jews, said Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny, head of the Religious Union for Progressive Jewish Congregations of Ukraine. "Was he a hero or an anti-hero? Even after 350 years, it is difficult to know," Dukhovny said.

Considerable research on the underground is underway in Ukraine and Canada, a center of the Ukrainian diaspora.

One of the key figures involved in the research is Peter J. Potichnyj. Born in a Ukrainian family in a village in what was then eastern Poland, Potichnyj experienced the horrors of the war firsthand. Soviet secret police executed his father. Poles massacred most of the people in his village.

In 1945, at age 14, he joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, and fought against the Soviets until 1947. He eventually became a historian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and helped edit 77 volumes about the Ukrainian underground.

Potichnyj, 79, said that although the underground may have had brief strategic alliances with the Germans, it was mostly fighting the Soviets. He said much of the anti-underground talk these days is orchestrated from Russia.

"You know the Russians don't want to admit there were people fighting them -- not because they were cooperating with the Germans but because they were fighting for their own culture and the liberation of their own countries," he said.

As for the killings of Jews and Poles, Potichnyj argues that no matter where guerrillas fight for liberation, it's a messy affair. The Poles provoked the Ukrainians, he said.

"With respect to Jews," he said, "obviously, in the situation there must have taken place some killing of the Jews, although in 1943, when the UPA was quite strong, there were hardly any Jews left because the Germans had, unfortunately, killed them all off. But there were some remnants, and the remnants were either working with the Ukrainian underground or they were working with the Soviets." Those allied with the Red partisans were obviously enemies of the underground, he said.

Potichnyj said the underground made a terrible mistake in not condemning the Germans' efforts to exterminate the Jews. But he strongly denies that there is any document showing that the underground ordered the "systematic" killing of Jews.

John-Paul Himka, a historian at the University of Alberta, believes there was a systematic killing of Jews in some Ukrainian areas. Himka has written extensively on the Holocaust and Ukrainian history. He said he has read hundreds of accounts, composed in different places and at different times, of Jews who survived; many mention killings by the Ukrainian militia.

Of the plan to honor UPA fighters, he says: "This is really a problem area because they killed so many people, civilians." In addition to Jews, he said, they killed 60,000 to 100,000 Poles, as well as political opponents, Orthodox clergymen, teachers of Russian and many prisoners of war from eastern Ukraine. He estimates that UPA fighters killed several thousand Jews, "but perhaps the number was much higher."

"Although what UPA did to the Jews may not have been, in the larger scheme of things, a major contribution to the Holocaust, it remains a large and inexpugnable stain on the record of the Ukrainian national insurgency," he said.

Olexiy Haran, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, said Russian "propaganda" distorted the extent of the atrocities. The Ukrainian insurgents were fighting for independence, he insists.

"I believe that these people deserve to be veterans, maybe with the exception of those who committed crimes," he said. "This was guerrilla warfare, and it's difficult to imagine guerrillas without atrocities."

Many academics say the debate over the underground is part of a larger tug of war over Ukraine's national identity. Russia ruled most of what is now Ukraine for more than three centuries. But relations between the countries have been testy, and since Yushchenko's election in late 2004, Ukraine has distanced itself from Russia while moving toward the West.

Yaakov Bleich, whose title is chief rabbi of Ukraine, said of Yushchenko's effort to legitimize the insurgents: "His goals are noble; the means stink."

"What I mean is that we all understand that Yushchenko is trying to build up national pride, and we all understand that that is needed," Bleich said. "After 350 years that the Ukrainian people were subjugated, they have to rebuild national pride.

"But should we take things that are controversial -- heroes that are still of questionable repute -- and use them to do that?" he said. "At this point you have people out there living today [who suffered], and the image is one that would hurt people. The Ukrainian insurgents fought alongside the fascists. And maybe their intentions were good, but I will say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

-- Special to The Washington Post

The New York Times

www.nytimes.com

 

Dining In, Dining Out / Style Desk

A Ukrainian Beacon In the East Village 

By JULIA MOSKIN 

Late Edition - Final

1

English

ABOUT 40 years ago, Tom Birchard -- a mild young New Jersey man of Pennsylvania Dutch and Midwestern antecedents -- showed up at a fraternity party at Rutgers University, and was sucked unwittingly into the rest of his life.

''You meet a girl, you never know what is going to happen,'' he said last month, gesturing around the bustling dining room of Veselka, an East Village restaurant famous for its garlicky, peppery Ukrainian dumplings and borscht.

Mr. Birchard married the girl, Marta. She was a daughter of Wolodymyr Darmochwal, an agronomist who, along with thousands of other professionals, was expelled from Ukraine after World War II, when it was under Soviet rule. After two years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany, the family settled in New Jersey and opened Veselka on the corner of Second Avenue and Ninth Street as a combined newsstand, canteen and community center in 1954.

The marriage did not endure, but the restaurant did. Mr. Birchard, 63, who went to work for his father-in-law in 1967, is now the sole owner. Over several decades that turned Veselka into a canteen for anarchists and artists as well as Ukrainians, he became many things he never expected: an honorary Ukrainian-American, a community leader and performance art patron.

His steady employment of pirogi-folders, sauerkraut-brewers and kielbasa-makers has made him an unlikely Anglo-Saxon Noah of a food culture that is fading in the East Village, though the neighborhood was a haven for Eastern European immigrants for more than 100 years.

At this time of year, Mr. Birchard is also a dispenser of Ukrainian Christmas spirit. From Dec. 24 to Jan. 6 -- the date of Christmas Eve in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church -- the restaurant serves the Sviata Vecheria, a traditional 12-dish dinner that is meatless and dairy-free. It is eaten before Mass and is followed, on Christmas morning, by a prodigious feast of ham and sausages.

The meal begins with kutya, a thick porridge of wheat berries and sugared poppy seeds that promises a sweet year ahead. Traditionally (and on Jan. 6) the man of the house offers bread, honey and kutya to everyone at the table, pronouncing blessings on each for the new year. Mykola Kamyanka, one of Veselka's managers, said that the woman of the house does the same for any animals in the barn. ''Even the cows and the chickens get a taste of kutya,'' he said. ''They are part of the family, too.''

The dinner ends with uzvar, a sweet, spiced compote of dried fruit. ''Everyone in Ukraine -- Catholics, Orthodox, whatever -- shares the same meal that night,'' said Andrew Lastowecky, a Ukrainian-American who has been a regular at Veselka since the 1950s, and who was eating a dinner of stuffed cabbage with mushroom gravy and potato dumplings on Dec. 24.

Today, Ukrainian food -- with its repetitive repertory of root vegetables, pork, and sweet and sour tastes -- does not seem all that exotic. But to Mr. Birchard, the flavors of the food and the warmth of Ukrainian family life, as well as the excitement of the New York streets, proved irresistible. The East Village in the late 1960s was in transition from a starting point for upwardly mobile immigrant families -- Jewish, Italian, Polish, Puerto Rican -- to a bohemian, raucous, eventually ungovernable incubator of New York's counterculture.

''We were in and out of Veselka all day, every day,'' said Penny Arcade, the writer and performance artist who arrived in the neighborhood as a teenage runaway in 1967 and is still a Veselka regular. ''It had the Village Voice before anywhere else, a row of phone booths, smokes for a dime and cheap good food that never changed.'' Mr. Darmochwal, she said, never hid his disapproval of the hippies and beatniks, artists and punks who lingered there over coffee and cigarettes and free challah. ''But he never threw us out, either,'' she said -- even in 1969, when an anarchist squirted him with breast milk after he objected to her breast-feeding at the table.

On Mr. Birchard's watch, Veselka has sponsored performance artists including Ms. Arcade, David Leslie and Karen Finley, whom the restaurant supplied with gallons of honey to be poured over her naked body for her recent ''Honey Dance'' series.

Once, the celebrated artists of the East Village were instead performing ''King Lear'' and vaudeville sketches in Yiddish. In the late 19th century, as Jewish immigrants arrived from the region, Second Avenue became a global center for Yiddish theater, music and culture. After 1900, Mr. Lastowecky said, when non-Jewish Ukrainians followed, they settled among the sounds, smells and tastes of the villages they had left behind.

''It was a very familiar mix from the Old Country,'' he said. ''Kosher butchers, pork butchers, dairy restaurants, the same music, the same languages.'' Here, they established churches, baths, cafes, and a headquarters for Plast, a nationalist Ukrainian youth organization that was banned by the Soviet government. (Plast owns the building that houses Veselka.)

Ukraine changed hands several times in the 20th century, moving from Austro-Hungarian rule to the Soviet Union to today's independent statehood, and each change took a new wave of Ukrainian immigrants to the East Village. By the 1950s, it had one of the largest Ukrainian communities in the world.

During the later Soviet era, contact between the East Village and Ukraine became difficult, and emigration rare. Veselka was staffed mostly by Polish women, including four pirogi-makers who worked together for 25 years and were ''the backbone of the place,'' Mr. Birchard said. To make pirogi that are light but substantial, savory but not aggressive, and perfectly consistent is not easy, he said.

Veselka is particularly famous for its pirogi, although that is the Polish term for the plump dumplings more properly called varenyky in Ukrainian. ''I challenge Tom on nomenclature all the time,'' Mr. Lastowecky said. ''There are those who would be offended to see the word 'pirogi' on a Ukrainian menu.''

Mr. Birchard said that during the 1980s he worried that he would never be able to sustain the Ukrainian traditions at Veselka, since the flow of emigrants had dried up. ''And now look,'' he added, gesturing to the four young Ukraine-born women who were rapidly folding varenyky and vushka, plump mushroom-and onion-filled dumplings resembling tortellini. Vushka are part of the Sviata Vecheria, and are made only at Christmastime.

''Every girl in the Ukraine knows how to make them,'' said Maria Maksymiuk, who perched a couple of vushka on her fingers to demonstrate their shape. ''Vushka'' means little ears, and with their curvy whorls, that's just what they look like, especially when they turn bright red in a bowl of vegetarian borscht.

Mr. Birchard said that now there is a steady flow of young people from the cities of Kiev and Lviv who turn up on Veselka's doorstep looking for work in the kitchen, where almost everything is still made from scratch. ''Everyone in Ukraine knows about Veselka,'' said Mr. Kamyanka, one of Veselka's managers. ''It is probably the most famous Ukrainian restaurant in the world.''

Of the old Ukrainian restaurants in the neighborhood, which included Leshko's, the Kiev and many others, only Veselka has transformed itself into a fully Ukrainian-American restaurant, and endured. ''It's because of how Tom Birchard welcomed the whole community of the East Village that Veselka is still around and still popular,'' Ms. Arcade said.

''This man keeps us going,'' said Julian Baczynsky, throwing his arms around Mr. Birchard before crowds of Christmas shoppers. Mr. Baczynsky, 86, is a butcher whose smokehouse, across the street, supplies Veselka with 200 pounds of kielbasa (kobasa in Ukrainian) each week.

Veselka, like the East Village itself, has become cleaner and brighter over the years, but the food is still perfect for cold weather, with a savory earthiness and bright, clean flavors. ''The Veselka Cookbook,'' published last year, illustrates how, through small adjustments in seasoning (black pepper or garlic, caraway or carrot), texture and technique, a richly varied cuisine can evolve from a limited group of ingredients.

That said, to be a regular at Veselka is to become truly intimate with beets, cabbages, onions and potatoes. ''You can't eat this food every day,'' said Jason Lee, a Korean-American art student who lives a few blocks away. ''Every so often, I manage to eat a whole order of pirogi, and then I'm pretty much set for a week.''

Recipe: Ukrainian Christmas Borscht Adapted from ''The Veselka Cookbook,'' by Tom Birchard with Natalie Danford (St. Martin's Press, 2009) Time: 1 hour

Adapted from ''The Veselka Cookbook,'' by Tom Birchard with Natalie Danford (St. Martin's Press, 2009)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/dining/06soup.html?scp=1&sq=Ukrainian&st=cse

The New York Times

Ihor Sevcenko, 87, a Byzantine Historian 

By WILLIAM GRIMES 

5 January 2010

Late Edition - Final

10

Ihor Sevcenko, a leading scholar of Byzantine and Slavic history and literature who as a young man persuaded George Orwell to collaborate with him on a Ukrainian translation of ''Animal Farm'' for distribution to refugees, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on Dec. 26. He was 87.

The cause was bone cancer, said his daughter Catherine.

Mr. Sevcenko (pronounced EE-gore Shev-CHEN-ko) was unrivaled among Byzantinists for the breadth of his linguistic expertise and the variety of his interests.

Ukrainian by background and Polish by upbringing, he had command of a dozen Slavic and Western languages in their ancient, medieval and modern forms. His elegantly written essays dealt with, among other topics, late Byzantine intellectual life, early Slavic history and literature, Byzantine saints' lives and epigraphy (inscriptions), and Byzantine-Slavic cultural relations.

Perhaps his most fascinating, if uncharacteristic, literary contribution came shortly after World War II, when he worked with Ukrainians stranded in camps in Germany for displaced persons.

In April 1946 he sent a letter to Orwell, asking his permission to translate ''Animal Farm'' into Ukrainian for distribution in the camps. The idea instantly appealed to Orwell, who not only refused to accept any royalties but later agreed to write a preface for the edition. It remains his most detailed, searching discussion of the book.

Ihor Ivanovic Sevcenko was born on Feb. 10, 1922, in the village of Radosc, not far from Warsaw. His parents were Ukrainian nationalists, and his father had served in the interior ministry of the short-lived independent Ukraine created after the Bolshevik revolution.

After graduating from the Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium and Lyceum in Warsaw, where he began his studies of Greek, Latin and French, Mr. Sevcenko earned a doctorate in classical philology, ancient history and comparative linguistics from the Deutsche Karls-Universitat in Prague in 1945, adding German and Czech to his store of languages.

It was on April 11, 1946, that he approached Orwell for the first time. ''About the middle of February this year I had the opportunity to read 'Animal Farm,' '' he wrote. ''I was immediately seized by the idea that a translation of the tale in Ukrainian would be of great value to my countrymen.''

Orwell agreed, and in the special preface he wrote for Mr. Sevcenko, he explained the intentions and political ideas behind ''Animal Farm.'' He also described the incident -- the sight of a local farm boy whipping a horse -- that gave him the idea of creating a fictional world in which oppressed animals rise up against their tormentors.

Orwell's English version of the preface has been lost. It exists today as a retranslation from Mr. Sevcenko's Ukrainian text.

Mr. Sevcenko, combining his father's first name and his mother's maiden name to form the pen name Ivan Cherniatyns'kyi, turned ''Animal Farm'' into ''Kolhosp Tvaryn,'' one of the first translations of the book into any foreign language. About 2,000 copies were distributed to Ukrainian readers. The remaining 1,500 copies, to Orwell's disgust, were handed over by unwitting Americans to Soviet repatriation officers at the camps, who destroyed them immediately.

At the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Mr. Sevcenko pursued further studies in classical philology and Byzantinology and took part in the renowned seminar in Byzantine history presided over by the great Byzantinist Henri Gregoire. In 1949 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy and letters.

That year he came to the United States and, after teaching ancient and Byzantine history at the University of California, Berkeley, accepted a post in the department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan.

He taught from 1957 to 1965 at Columbia University, when he was named a senior scholar at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, a center of Byzantine studies in the United States.

In 1973 he joined the classics department at Harvard as the Dumbarton Oaks professor of Byzantine history and literature. He retired in 1992.

His three marriages, to Oksana Draj-Xmara, Margaret Bentley and the art historian Nancy Patterson, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Catherine, of Alexandria, Va., he is survived by another daughter, Elisabeth, of Brooklyn, and three grandchildren.

Mr. Sevcenko once wrote that historians fell into two categories: ''the brightly colored butterfly flitting about over a flower bed'' and ''the crawling caterpillar whose worm's-eye view covers the expanse of a single cabbage leaf.''

He was both, a restlessly inquisitive but painstaking scholar whose wide-ranging interests embraced the cultural resurgence of late Byzantium, the literary (as opposed to documentary) qualities of Byzantine saints' lives, the editing of Byzantine texts, and the history and culture of Ukraine, which he addressed in the book ''Ukraine Between East and West'' (1996).

His essay collections include ''Society and Intellectual Life in Late Byzantium'' (1981), ''Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World'' (1982) and ''Byzantium and the Slavs in Letters and Culture'' (1991). At his death he had completed, after 20 years, a critical edition and translation of ''The Life of Emperor Basil I,'' the only secular biography in Byzantine literature.

 

Eurasia Daily Monitor
January 5, 2010-Volume 7, Issue 2

Yushchenko and Yanukovych Forge an Electoral Alliance 
On December 25, 2009 UNIAN published a secret agreement "On Political Reconciliation and the Development of Ukraine" leaked by Yaroslav Kozachok, the deputy head of the presidential secretariat's department on domestic affairs and regional development. Kozachok resigned in protest at the secret agreement between President Viktor Yushchenko and Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych to appoint the former as Prime Minister in the event of Yanukovych's election. 


The Yushchenko and Yanukovych campaigns -not surprisingly- alleged that the document was a forgery (Ukrayinska Pravda, December 28). At the same time, its authenticity is proven by two steps undertaken by the presidential secretariat. Firstly, the presidential secretariat's pressure on television channels not to discuss the document, which led to Kozachok complaining about the return of censorship to Ukrainian media. "It is obvious that ignoring (the document) has taken place on instructions from 'above,' and the system has worked to block the appearance in the mass media of information unpleasant for senior officials" (Ukrayinska Pravda, December 29). 


This would not be the first occasion when direct intervention halted revelations about a secret electoral alliance between Yushchenko-Yanukovych. In December the Security Service (SBU) was instructed by the president to investigate the appearance of large billboards throughout Kyiv and other cities that had reproduced the front cover of the December 4 edition of the weekly magazine Komentarii with the headline "Yushchenko has negotiated the seat of premier." The billboards, which showed Yushchenko and Yanukovych embracing in a pose reminiscent of the Soviet and East German leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker, were ordered to be taken down. The Ukrainian media complained of "censorship." 


Secondly, if the document unveiled by Kozachok was indeed a "forgery" then why did the president order the prosecutor-general to launch an investigation into the publication of a "state secret?" Yushchenko ordered a full report within ten days on how the document was leaked, while presidential secretariat head Vera Ulianchenko initiated an internal investigation of Kozachok's employment record (Ukrayinska Pravda, December 28). 


The secret agreement aims to ensure "political stability and economic development" and to end years of political in-fighting. Both sides agreed compromises based upon avoiding raising issues that are considered divisive within Ukrainian society. Yushchenko agreed not to raise rehabilitating and promoting nationalist leaders or demanding compulsory Ukrainian language tests in schools and universities. In return, Yanukovych would not advocate Russian as a second state language or call for a referendum on Ukrainian NATO membership (UNIAN, December 25). Yanukovych has downplayed his election program commitment to Russian as a state language and Yushchenko has not mentioned NATO in his program. 


The next section of the secret agreement calls for Yushchenko and Yanukovych not to criticize each other. The 2010 election campaign is noticeable for the absence of criticism by Yushchenko of Yanukovych and the former's daily accusations against Tymoshenko. Yushchenko has asked voters to stay at home and not vote in round two, arguing there is no difference between Tymoshenko and Yanukovych who will inevitably enter the February 7 run off. A low turn-out in "Orange Ukraine" would result in Yanukovych's election, while a large voter turn-out would ensure Tymoshenko's election since the combined "Orange" vote is larger. Yushchenko is in effect calling on his supporters to not vote negatively against Yanukovych in the second round. 


Playing on Western Ukrainian, anti-Russian nationalism, Yushchenko has accused Tymoshenko of being "unpatriotic" by referring to the fact that she has only one ethnic Ukrainian parent (her Armenian father separated from her mother when she was a child). In addition, since the summer of 2008 Yushchenko has repeatedly condemned as "treasonous" Tymoshenko's cultivation of a pragmatic economic-energy relationship with Russia that has brought her support from Western Europeans anxious to avoid another gas crisis in January. Yushchenko has appealed to Ukrainians to vote for a "Ukrainian premier" (meaning himself) who will not, allegedly unlike Tymoshenko, sell Ukraine to Russia by permitting the Black Sea Fleet to remain in Sevastopol beyond 2017, which would require a constitutional amendment that no president could undertake (Ukrayinska Pravda, January 3). Tymoshenko would also allegedly transfer Ukraine's gas pipelines to Russia, an accusation which contradicts Tymoshenko's mobilization of parliament in February 2007 to vote for a law banning any transfer of the pipelines from Ukrainian state control and her March 2009 agreement with the EU to modernize the pipeline infrastructure without Russian involvement. 


Tymoshenko is also accused of being the "biggest threat to democracy" in Ukraine, Yushchenko has claimed (Ukrayinska Pravda, December 24). This accusation ignores the perilous state of Ukrainian democracy, as shown by recent Western and Ukrainian surveys, which reveal that Ukrainians associate democracy with "chaos" following years of instability and elite in-fighting. 
The "Coalition of Political Reconciliation and Development of Ukraine" would propose Yushchenko as its candidate for prime minister. The basis of this coalition remains unexplained, since Yushchenko controls only 15 out of 72 Our Ukraine deputies. 


Yushchenko has always wavered between supporting a grand coalition with the Party of Regions or a "democratic" coalition with the Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT). Following the March 2006 elections Yushchenko sent the Prime Minister (and head of Our Ukraine) Yuriy Yekhanurov to negotiate a grand coalition and Roman Besmertnyi to form a "democratic" coalition. Following the dissolution of parliament in April 2007, Yushchenko negotiated a compromise with the Party of Regions to hold pre-term elections in September in exchange for a grand coalition. During the 2007 election campaign Yushchenko campaigned for a "democratic" coalition, which was established with Tymoshenko as its candidate for prime minister in December 2007. Raisa Bohatyriova, the head of the Party of Regions parliamentary faction, was appointed as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NRBO) who, together with the presidential secretariat head Viktor Baloga, spent 2008 seeking to undermine the Tymoshenko government in which Yushchenko had demanded that half the cabinet posts go to Our Ukraine. 


The agreement seeks a grand coalition through a Yanukovych presidency, but will again fail for the same reasons that it has in the past. Yushchenko will be unable to ensure that a parliamentary majority will vote for him: Our Ukraine deputy Oleksandr Tretiakov said that parliament would never vote for Yushchenko's candidacy (Ukrayinska Pravda, December 15). Tymoshenko would therefore remain a constitutionally powerful prime minister under President Yanukovych. -
-Taras Kuzio

 

Window on Eurasia: Suleymenov Says Ukrainians Will Understand 'Az i Ya"

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, January 6 - Olzhas Suleymenov,  the Kazakh author of a book that some have helped lead to the rise of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, says that he welcomes its translation into Ukrainian because Ukrainians will understand that book's argument about the close ties between the Slavic and Turkic peoples at the time of Kievan Rus'.

 

            Speaking in Kyiv on the occasion of the appearance of the Ukrainian translation of "Az i Ya," a 1975 book that sparked controversy in the Soviet Union because of its argument that the author of "The Tale of the Host of Igor" knew both a Turkic and a Slavic language, Suleymenov said Ukrainians are well-placed to understand his point (kstnews.kz/index.php?a=2394).  

 

            Suleymenov, one of Kazakhstan's most distinguished intellectuals, recalled the problems he faced when he published that book in Soviet times.  "It seems to me," he said in Kyiv, that the Tale reflects the complex bilingual culture of the 12th century. But in the 19th century," he continued, Russian scholars, who were "monolingual," did not understand the Tale's 'Turkisms."

 

            His 1975 book, Suleymenov continued, angered many Russian nationalist scholars.  The case, which led to the book's suppression, "even reached the Central Committee of the CPSU," but there, the Kazakh writer said, Leonid Brezhnev supported him, by saying that "there was nothing especially harmful in the book."

 

            But the Kazakh writer added that he was not certain Brezhnev had in fact read the book "all the way through." In any case, he noted, the Soviet leader "was not able to convince [ideologist Mikhail] Suslov, and the latter continued to exclude it from library collections, and it some places, [the 1975 edition] was even burned."

 

            Now, more than 30 years later, most of his critics have come around to his point of view, or at least see it as a possible position. The book has been republished in Kazakhstan, and several editions have appeared in the Russian Federation and Turkey, but despite some efforts, it has not appeared in English, French or Japanese, Suleymenov said.

 

            The publication of a Ukrainian translation is "especially important," he continued because Kyiv was the center of Kievan Rus, and Ukrainians understand intuitively the complex interrelationships between Slavic and Turkic cultures, ties that some Russian writers in the past and even now go out of their way to ignore or even deny.

 

            In an interview taken by Yuliya Kim in Kyiv that appears in today's "Kostanayskiye novosti," Suleymenov rejects the suggestion that his book played a key role in the demise of the Soviet Union.  "I never wanted that" to happen, he insisted, and "I would not want my book to be considered in that way."

 

            In other comments, Suleymenov said that some censorship, of the tsarist rather than the Stalinist kind, is not an entirely bad thing as it eliminates from public discussion some things that should not be discussed and forces writers to search for new ways of expressing themselves, a process that can be useful.

 

            "In our [Soviet] time," he continued, there were five 'no's' - there was to be no propaganda of violence, pornography, religion, war, and anti-Sovietism. Now, anti-Sovietism and certain other prohibitions have already become not relevant, but several of the 'no's' from this list could be accepted."

 

            The Kazakh writer said he is concerned about "the crisis of the book," the result of the Internet and other electronic forms of communication which are redirecting young people away from the printed word. That is especially dangerous in places like Kazakhstan where "written culture appeared relatively not long ago. Losing it [now] would be a catastrophe." 

 

            Asked about the Terror Famine of 1932-33, Suleymenov said that "it is impermissible to privatize [that] tragedy." Ukrainians were not the only people who suffered: "Kazakhs, for example then also lost a very great deal - at a minimum a third of the people [of that nation] died at that time."

 

            And in a comment on the upcoming presidential elections in Ukraine, Suleymenov said that he has come to the conclusion that "the regular change of the powers that be and frequent elections are good for an established society with a well-functioning economy. But in the transition period, which we all are living through, stability is very important."

 

                In a final comment, Suleymenov said that "the Eastern Slavs and the Kazakhs have a very similar mentality.  Our history has made this possible, as we have lived together for centuries. ... We understand in a similar fashion good and evil." And that commonality should allow us, he said, to avoid clashes and "help resolve common problems."

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 63773 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20100106/d60320a8/attachment.bin>