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1 2 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, СІЧЕНЬ 2018 With Your Shield Or On It Tamara Stadnychenko Cornelison No volume of world history is complete unless it chronicles the story of t he 300 Spartans who perished at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., while guarding a mountain pass against a much greater Persian force intent on conquering the Greek city - states. Led by King Leonidas, the Spartans were well - trained soldiers, experi- enced in the art o f war and raised in a social environment that placed a premium on honor on the field of battle. Their stand at Thermopylae was a suicide mission, a military tactic designed to give the Greek city - states time to prepare a unified defense against the militar y might of King Xerxes. What occurred at Thermopylae has been called by at least one contemporary writer “the most he- roic resistance in history,” an observation that sadly underscores how little the world knows the history of Ukraine. For in most of those same weighty volumes that purport to describe the history of the world, there is no mention of a battle that took place at a railroad station 130 kilometers northeast of Kyiv on January 29, 1918. The Battle of Kruty, much like the battle at Thermopylae, p itted 300 soldiers against a far greater military host, a 4,000 - man Bolshevik army advancing on Kyiv. But unlike King Leonidas’s Spartans, the 300 Ukrainian soldiers at Kruty were students from the Khmelnytsky Cadet School in Kyiv, schoolboys whose militar y training had consisted almost entirely of classroom lectures or drills performed in the schoolyard. Led by Captain A. Honcharenko, most of these 300 young men were mercilessly slaughtered. Like their historic predecessors, however, they held the enemy f orces at bay as long as they could, dying with honor in defense of a divided homeland that was attempting to assert its sovereignty in a chaotic world too self - absorbed or politically naïve to understand what was at stake. According to some Ukrainian hist orians, their sacrifice delayed the Bolshevik advance into Kyiv long enough to allow the fledgling Ukrainian government to negotiate a peace treaty with the Central Pow- ers (Germany, Austria - Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria), which officially recognized the Ukr ainian National Republic as a soverei gn state on February 9, 1918. This brief commentary on the Battle of Kruty was originally published ten years ago, in the January 2008 issue of Our Life. It has been resurrected ten years later as a tribute to the you ng warriors of Kruty and a salute to the new generation of Ukrainian warriors who are defending their homeland from the same implac- able foe. Slava Ukraiini! From the Editors In December 2017, during a teleconference of members of Our Life’s Editorial Board, a proposal was made to resurrect a tradition started many decades ago by erstwhile editors of the magazine, namely to incorporate materials featuring pivotal moments in Ukrainian history and honoring the people that shaped that history. It is with t his in mind that we include in this month’s issue the story of Kruty and poet Vasyl Stus’s translation of a Rudyard Kipling’s famous poetic instruction to his son . В місяці грудні 2017 - ого року, підчас телефонічної конференції, члени Редакційної Колєґії журналу ' Наше життя ' , запропонували відновити традицію розпочату колишніми редакторами багато десятиліть тому зв ' язану з зображенням в журналі ключових подій українсь кої історії та вшануванн я тих , хто мав значний вплив на історію України. У зв ’ язку з цим ц ього місяця подаємо історію про Крути і переклад поета Василя Стуса знаного навчання Рудярда Кіплінґ , яке написав своєму синові.
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