Luchkan 30Th

DeKosta, ChM REMEMBRANCE of a WHIRLWIND (Spohad Vykhoria) September 22, 2003 – 30th Anniversary To-morrow would have given him all, Repaid his pangs, repaired his fall; To-morrow would have given him power To rule, to shine, to smite, to save- And must it dawn upon his grave? (Mazeppa, Lord Byron, 1818) What does it mean to be a man? A hero? A patriot? It‟s been thirty years since we heard that the small plane he was piloting never made it to Detroit, and still Vykhor comes to me - and I think to all who knew him – when we need strength or courage or the righteousness to do the right thing. In these past three decades, can we say that we carried on the traditions and the work that was passed on to us by Vykhor? Those who knew Slavko Luchkan (Vykhor), interacted with him but for a brief decade. But the work of our Chornomorskiy “collegium” was as intense during that period from 1961-73, as the decade was tumultuous. While we can‟t compare it with the extraordinarily harrowing decade of 1938-48 that our parents, and many of our older Chornomortsi survived, it was an important and defining period of our lives in America and that of Plast itself, with an astonishing density and rapidity of world events that formed the context for our experiences. That decade was the foundation for our transition from exile émigrés to immigrants to citizens – from boys to teenagers to men – from the immutable pre-war European world of our parents, to the fast-paced modern world of continuous changes. We lived in a parallel universe, then – in countless ghettos – in the insular world of the “Ukrainian diaspora”, where most of our parents lived as exiles, expecting to return to our fatherland, and devising a virtual reality set of institutions which replicated the lives they left behind. Some looked forward – they were the immigrants who came to stay and build new lives – they were happy to leave the constant misery of their daily lives behind them. Most preferred to remain émigrés and exiles, living in the past and unable to cope with the culture of their new land. We crossed haltingly, at first, between our two overlapping worlds of a dynamic, fast-paced American society with its “rock and roll” culture and the arcane, “old world” social structures of our diaspora, which included Saturday Ukrainian schools, Plast camps, debutante soirees, and an annual checklist of anti-Soviet demonstrations, seminars and commemorations of glorious Ukrainian heroes and countless monumental battles that were mostly lost. We had to keep the faith in some way, and while there was a self-delusional and self-indulgent quality to all these activities, there was also a self-sacrificing nobility in our endeavors – it was for the “right cause”. PLAST was our transition zone between these two worlds – our decompression chamber, allowing us to adjust to the accelerating and confusing pace of life and clash of values. As we fought for human rights in the USSR, we were encompassed in the burgeoning battle for civil rights in the US. We couldn‟t understand why our American college friends, the confused intellectual progeny of Jean Paul Sartre, who famously proclaimed that “…an anticommunist is a rat”, could not identify with our causes, our values and our pre-war European culture. College campuses were beginning to spawn the radical New Left, which viewed “Amerika” as the root of all evil. While the Cold War was our motivation, and John F. Kennedy was the inspiration for our generation, the Vietnam War changed everything. We lost our political innocence on Nov 22, 1963, when JFK was assassinated, but not our idealism. There were many in Plast, like Vykhor, who stoked the idealism that our parents inculcated in each of us, and stiffened our resolve through the turbulent decade that began with JFK‟s death. Our parents lived through a rapidly escalating sequence of history‟s horrors - what the recent Nobel Laureate, Imre Kertysz termed “the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. Prof Hryhoriy Kostiuk captured many of the same insights and observations, for subsequent generations, of countless Ukrainians who lived through this period under the Stalinist regime, in his memoir “Okayani Roky” (Accursed Years). We, on the other hand, lived in our urban ghettos, in our parallel universe and microcosms of virtual reality, vicariously trying to imagine what life was like in Soviet Ukraine. Our parents‟ thoughts were with the families and relatives they left behind, wondering if they would ever find their unmarked graves in the vast and anonymous Soviet Gulag. We could not imagine how 60 years of oppression had changed the minds of the new “Soviet man”, though we had infrequent encounters with Soviet apparatchiks on the streets of New York. They were the select, privileged few, who were embedded in the Soviet hierarchy and sent here to study our ways and to subvert us. And they were good at their jobs, penetrating our organizations and creating discord. While Bob Dylan mesmerized the “baby boomers”, his counterpart, Vladimir Vysotsky was coming to prominence in the USSR. The “shistydesiatnyky”, the Ukrainian dissident movement of the 1960‟s, who were the intellectual heirs of Kostomarov and Drahomanov, were just beginning to emerge. The “samizdatnyky” were not America‟s “yippies”. Lev Lukiananeko, Nina Strokata, Vasyl‟ Stus and Vyacheslav Chornovil (“Lykho z Rozumu” 1967) and Valentyn Moroz did not fight for the same ideals as the “Chicago 7” or the radical “Weathermen”. Alexander Solzhenytsin (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch”) could not relate to the work of J.D. Salinger (“Catcher in the Rye”). Yes, we lived in a parallel universe with vastly different realities. The waves of arrests in Ukraine of the “shistydesiatnyky” in the „60s, „70s and „80s had a profound effect on us, as did the crushing of the Czechoslovak revolution in 1968, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. We sang American folk songs and protest songs (“Blowin‟ in the Wind”) at our “hootenannies”, just as we were discovering the music of Volodymyr Ivasiuk (“Chervona Ruta”) during “Soyuzivka” weekends and Plast campfires. We agonized through the Cuban missile crisis, the failed “Bay of Pigs” invasion, and the assassination of numerous “third world” dictators and tyrants (Lumumba, Trujillo, etc.), each the potential cause of a nuclear conflagration. It was a hectic and somewhat surreal decade for our diaspora and for us “Chornomortsi”, the presumptive heirs of a noble line of partisan heroes. For as we were still mourning the assassination of JFK, the Beatles arrived in the US, and it was only 4 months later that Chornomortsi were singing Beatles tunes with newly composed Ukrainian words at all the Plast camps on the east coast (“Zaplyiusch Ochi Mylenka”). And like the Beatles, we “took sad (Ukrainian) songs and made them better”, while frequently taking bad songs and making them worse. As we were adapting to our new society, our fathers, who had fashioned their own version of reality, their own cocoon - a time warp which froze their view of Ukrainian society to reflect the time period between WWI and WWII - were desperately trying to protect their world and our role in their world. Plast was the compromise zone for the coexistence of our two cultures. We daily stepped into this time zone to escape the persistent contradictions of our lives and the growing disenchantment with the radicalism of the New Left and the seeming hopelessness of our anticommunist protestations. Plast (and Chornomortsi) was our “Camelot”, governed by the “Druids of Euxeinos Pontos”. But even Camelot needed knights to defend and promote its idyllic and idealistic view of the world, and Vykhor was one of those Kozak-knights, a “lytsar” who believed in the virtues of Ukraine and Plast. Every generation and every group has its “band of brothers”, which Shakespeare memorialized in the classic speech by Henry V, after winning the Battle of Agincourt against great odds: From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today, who sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; So many of the original Chornomortsi, laid down their lives for Ukraine – and for us. We were the lucky ones who survived and who could reflect on the achievements of those we left behind and carry on the traditions and values that they cherished, recreated and passed on, fought for and died for. Though we could not fight with them, we were part of their dreams and aspirations – we were the descendents of a band of brothers whose lineage stretched as far back as Jason and the Argonauts, and we had an obligation to carry on the long-standing struggles for a free Ukraine. Of our generation, no one understood this more than Vykhor and no one fulfilled his duties more seriously and fervently. As I wistfully reflect on 30 years of unfulfilled opportunities with our fallen friends, how hard it must be then, for Bohdan Chaikivskiy, now 90 years old, to sit alone in his room in with his memories of the distant past. As far as I know, he‟s the last of the original first generation Chornomortsi who walked the streets of Lviv with his friend Roman Shukhevych, having opened a business with him between the wars and spent his early years in the Plast underground with Shukhevych, Yaro Hladkiy and countless other plastuny agitating against Polish rule. In between the flashes of past events, Chaikivskiy no doubt worries about his son-in-law, and our friend Daniel “Frenchy” Boudana, who suffered a recent stroke.

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