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Our Life | Наше життя February | Лютий 2021 21 Why psychology? Probably because in Plast I was a counselor for both novatstvo (cub scouts age 6 to 11) and yunatstvo (scouts age 12 to 17). To be a counselor, you were required to take special courses ( vyshkil ), and those included psychology. I was fascinated with psychology and really liked it. In college, the more psychology courses I took, the more I liked it. So I decided I might as well com - plete the major. How and when did you start with The Ukrainian Weekly ? Actually, I started by working for Svoboda while in high school [at the time, the offices of the UNA, Svoboda , and The Ukrainian Weekly were located in Jersey City; today they are in Parsippany, NJ]. I worked after school, doing various tasks like filing for some very illustrious editors of Svoboda , whom I got to know personally. I must say they were very good to me and treated me so nicely and very respectfully – even as a 16-year-old. While studying journalism in college, it made sense to do some part-time work, so I started as an editorial assistant for The Weekly . In 1977, I started full-time while pursuing my master’s. I became the Editor of The Weekly in 1980. To tell the truth, I became the Editor because one was reassigned, another left for other opportunities, and only I was left. This was definitely a challenge, but by then I had a good idea of what the newspaper was all about and what needed to be done. So, it wasn’t a question of can I do this, but rather, can I get help, because I couldn’t do this alone. A person did come in to help at a really critical time, and shortly thereafter we added staff. In 1991, I became the first editor of The Weekly to be given the title Editor-in-Chief. What are your most memorable moments during your time with the newspapers? Well, what stands out, of course, is Ukraine declaring its independ - ence, and before that Ukraine adopting the Declaration of State Sovereignty, and before that the Chornobyl nuclear accident. Those are probably the most important events, and they were huge; they can be considered as single events as well as part of a series of events that led to the re-establishment of Ukraine’s independence. There was also the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005. But for me, what was key was our reporting on the Ukrainian dis - sident movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We were reporting things in English that very few publications were reporting, and The Weekly was there to fill that need. We translated documents from Ukrainian into English to make materials available to the general public. It was important to get this out in English so that it could be read by anyone. This is why staff bilingualism was so important. Everyone on our staff knew both languages well enough to be able to translate, and we translated ourselves. We translated informa - tion coming from the Ukrainian press and from unofficial sources that we knew to be trustworthy – from the dissident, democratic, and environmental movements. This was in Soviet times, so these sources were taking grave risks, but things started opening up in the late 1980s under Gorbachev – during Perestroika. Rukh and other ROMA HADZEWYCZ WITH COLLEAGUES AND STAFFERS THROUGH HER YEARS AT THE UKRAINIAN WEEKLY AND SVOBODA 1983 1989 1995 1998 with Svoboda ’s acting Editor-in-Chief Serhiy Myroniuk
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