As a child, I would wait with anticipation for my parents to return from trips to the Soviet Union. Often they brought gifts like a few loaves of hearty brown bread, or a wheel of briny, homemade cheese. Sometimes they also brought back notebooks, or bits of paper with verses scribbled in Ukrainian.

These were the writings of dissidents and political prisoners whose work was banned in a systematic attempt to erase Ukrainian history and political expression.

Throughout the 20th century, czarist and then Soviet policies banned publication and education in the Ukrainian language.

Under Joseph Stalin’s rule, the Soviet Union killed at least 750,000 artists, writers, scientists and intellectuals, as well as regular citizens, between 1936 and 1938. The Great Purge, as it is known, has since been well documented. But Soviet persecution of Ukrainians and other Eastern European nationals continued through the rest of the 20th century.

Ukrainians who fled felt responsible for preserving their native country’s intellectual and cultural heritage. My parents were among those in the Ukrainian diaspora who did so.

I am a Ukrainian American and a professor who studies the role of art in society; my work is an act of political defiance against centuries of cultural genocide.

Russia invaded Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula, in 2014. Since then, I’ve worked closely with a Ukrainian nonprofit organization, the Development Foundation, to build community health and trauma programs in response to the Crimean conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s escalating threat to invade Ukraine again does not come as a surprise to most Ukrainian Americans.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Feb. 18, 2022, that East-West tensions are at their highest point since the Soviet Union’s collapse, as Russia has amassed between 160,000 and 190,000 troops along Ukraine’s border.

Read full story at The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/why-ukrainian-americans-are-committed-to-preserving-ukrainian-culture-and-national-sovereignty-176943

Image courtesy: Katja Kolcio