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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, СІЧЕНЬ 2009 19 Vasyl Barka: A Story About Storytelling by Jean -Pierre Cap The text for this article was the basis for an oral narrative I was invited to record in the context of the 61st Conference on Human Rights, held at UNESCO in Paris, September 3 – 5, 2008. The narrative was video-recorded in New York and was to be presented at the Paris conference as part of a new and imaginative program called “Le Coin du Raconteur” (The Storyteller’s Corner). It was intended for convention participants who, perhaps understandably, tire of listening to the usual genre of papers read at such conferences. The new-format stories, decidedly less academic and more human in texture, were to be placed on the UN’s Web site and the video-recorded CDs deposited in the UN’s archives. During virtually all of his adult life, Vasyl Barka was destined to struggle for survival in conditions of mass extermination, political oppres- sion, ethnic prejudice, and threats of violence against his person. Having survived the 1932 – 1933 Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, which led to the death of millions of peaceful, productive peasants by the most cruel and drawn-out process imaginable — starvation — he vowed to bring this horrendous crime against humanity to the attention of the world. Like the millions of victims * the world never hears of, Barka, despite his talent and productivity, was ignored by the media. Indeed, he had been broadcasting and writing for decades before I heard of him when, quite by chance, I came across his masterpiece novel at a used-books stall on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Its title in French, Le Prince jaune ( The Yellow Prince ), caught my attention; looking more closely, I discovered that the book was about the Famine-Genocide inflicted by Stalin upon the Ukrainian people in 1932 – 1933. In 2001, I had the opportunity to meet Barka in person in the United States — at his modest * Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine, who has taken a keen interest in all aspects of the Holodomor, maintains that the genocide claimed 10 million victims — an estimate which corresponds to that of the Soviet leadership of that period, including Stalin himself, as well as to that of later historians relying on demographic analysis. Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor who coined the word “genocide,” used it to characterize the total communist campaign against the Ukrainian people, which included (beginning in the 1920s), the destruction of 1) Ukraine’s “brain”—the intelligentsia, Ukraine’s “soul”— the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, Ukraine’s “spirit— the peasantry, the repository of the Ukrainian language and popular culture. home in the Pocono Mountains. Finding it awkward to follow the ancient Greek custom of bringing a poet goat’ s milk and honey, I settled for something a little less arcane and brought him several jars of berry jam of my own making, which delighted him as much as it surprised him. We talked for almost five hours. There was much I wanted to learn directly from him about his life during the most tragic century of Ukraine and the world. Barka pointed out that he had been born in a Ukraine in which all texts in the native language of the inhabitants could not be published, in a Ukraine in which children could not be taught in their native tongue. For over 300 years, Moscow’s goal had been to assimilate Ukraine and Ukrainians. While other peoples were developing their own literature and identity, Ukrainians were deprived of the opportunity to do so, to the point where many in the world beyond Ukraine’s borders thought of them as Russians. It was under the czars that Russia first engaged in cultural genocide against Ukraine. But thanks to the power and beauty of the poetry of Ukraine’s bard Taras Shevchenko— poetry rooted in Ukraine’s rich history and folklore, the cultural and national spirit survived. During the country’s brief period of independence from 1918 to 1921, and during the 1920s when the country managed to preserve Ukrainian as its official language, Ukrain- ian culture made great strides. But it was these strides that, in the early 1930s, alarmed the Soviet government because what was occurring in Ukraine was jeopardizing Mos- cow’s long -held ambition to assimilate Ukraine culturally as well as politically. Stalin, though a Georgian by birth, had become a Russian chauvinist and reintroduced cultural oppression. Barka re-
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