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regional representative council and she takes a very active part in its proceedings. Religious ceremonies were open and public. The Catholics, locked out of the baroque St. George Ca thedral, celebrated in the Transfiguration Church that their parents and granparents had built at the end of the nineteenth century to prove to the Poles that Ukrainian presence in that ancient city is as viable as the historic Ukrainian claim to L’viv is valid. Other churches were turned over to the Catholics, some joined the newly reestablished Ukrainain Orthodox Autocephalous, but many are being fought over and argued over. The pageantry and symbolism was most dramatic at the Transfiguration celebration. Three bishops celebrated the midnight service which culminated with the Easter mass that ended at five in the morning. No one went home, and that and other churches were full at all the other masses later that morning. There was much pageantry — boys dressed as Roman soldiers (courtesy of the L’viv opera) had guarded the grave, and the last time I saw that many embroidered church banners was at the installation of the first Ukrainian Catholic metro politan in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Some people came to watch; most came to pray and rejoice. The women sang, in clusters and choirs, the decades of terror, of want, of work outside the home and work in the home clinging to them like the grime of Eastern Europe. For a week L’viv celebrated — girls in gay em broidered costumes singing and performing the ancient spring songs in the open air museum, where the church was opened and became a church again. Bells pealing, concerts of patriotic mild rock attended by all ages, with grandmothers rocking to the beat, singing along with the other tens of thousands, and at night lighting candles as a festive hush fell over the crowd. There was a even a sturdy cossack who built his own canon and fired it, undamped by the pouring rain that bested even the most assiduous practitioners of the water dousing prac ticed by the young on Easter Monday. Impressive also was the absence of the police and the orderliness of the crowd. At one concert in the open air stadium just renamed Ukraine, part of the thirty- thousand crowd rushed to the particularly popular music group. R u k h boys, who kept order, needed only to announce through the P.A. system to restore order. The green was cleared. Kiev was also changed. True, it did not yet welcome us with the sea of blue and yellow flags that enveloped L’viv, but nevertheless there are groups of people, speaking either Ukrainian or Russian, carrying that flag. It seems that an increasing number of Russian speaking residents of Kiev identify with the blue and yellow flag, the flag of reform, reorganization and hope. Signs in Kiev are now in Ukrainian and you can hear the language spoken in the streets. R u k h — the democratic movement for restructuring in Ukraine — is a popular movement, not one of the intelligentsia and poets only. It is a grass roots organi zation seeking to undo the decades of mismanagement and exploitation. It is returning to the people not only hope in a better foreseeable tomorrow, but also a belief in themselves, in their ability to affect their destiny. R u k h ’s program is moderate, practical, and its member ship reflects its heterogeneous, open platform. The women in Rukh, best personified by the architect Laryssa Skoryk, are practical, efficient, and impressive — juggling as a matter of course careers, politics, households and families. But there are very few women in R u kh . Marichka Drach, whose husband, the poet Ivan happens to head Rukh, with a group of Kiev activist women has organized a women’s Society along the broad principles of R ukh. Its aim is to draw together women of Ukraine to enable them to make their voices heard. These women, who know next to nothing of the existence of women’s organizations in Kiev before the Bolsheviks foisted their own brand of centrally directed women’s oraganization upon the women. At very short notice one of the larger rooms at the Union of Writers, a converted mansion that now serves R u k h as much as it serves as the head quarters of the Union of Writers, quickly filled up with women of various ages — all eager to hear about the story of Ukrainian women and the organizations they had fashioned through the ages. The irony of the system that had for generations robbed these women of their past of their present — an American had to be telling them about the organizations women in Kiev had built seventy years ago! I had reconstructed the story from police archives that remained guarded by a different police, and that are preserved in the repositories of Kiev itself. Ivan Drach introduced me, and the women (with a sprinkling of men in the audience) sat transfigured through the presentation. There were questions, and we could have stayed through half of the night. The women in Kiev have organized, and were planning how best to use the power that organized women can develop. They want to continue the tradition of cooperation, joint action, tolerance, and lack of ideological and relgious bias that was so characteristic of Ukrainian women’s organizations. I felt at home among these women, sisters across the ocean, across the steppe, renewed by the resurgence of liberal Ukrainianism, singing of a Ukraine that lives as long as we ourselves are alive. Americans have much to offer Ukraine, especially women of Ukrainian origin who know how American democratic organizations work best by reflecting the needs of their own members. We know that we cannot transplant organizations, modes of thought and ways of action; we know that Americanism is not for export. But we can demonstrate more: we can show how democratic institutions work within a Ukrainian community; we can illustrate how best to remain true to ourselves and helpful to our community. The example is a real one, a sign of the continued regeneration of society, a symbol of eternal spring, a joyous Easter that transcends individual mortality. ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЖОВТЕНЬ 1990 25
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