The Ukrainian Diaspora

Vic Satzewich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9781138880030
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134434947
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this fascinating book, Vic Satzewich traces one hundred and twenty-five years of Ukranian migration, from the economic migration at the end of the nineteenth century to the political migration during the inter-war period and throughout the 1960s and 1980s resulting from the troubled relationship between Russia and the Ukraine. The author looks at the ways the Ukranian Diaspora has retained its identity, at the different factions within it and its response to the war crimes trials of the 1980s.

1
UKRAINIANS AND THE CONCEPT OF DIASPORA

In the years immediately following World War II, the term ‘diaspora’ was not used by Ukrainians living outside of Ukraine. Instead, it was much more common for them to think of themselves either as being ‘in the emigration’ or as ‘an immigration’. The diaspora label tended to be used only when Soviet authorities wanted to discredit Ukrainian émigré nationalists living abroad who were calling for the overthrow of the Soviet regime and the liberation of Ukraine. For the Soviets, diaspora was a pejorative term that referred to groups of people living abroad who had ulterior political motives for their interest in their ancestral homelands in the Soviet Union. As Harvard historian Roman Szporluk (1998) explains: ‘The Soviets needed to characterize immigrants negatively since the immigration fought against the “silent liquidation” that was proceeding against Ukrainians in a complicated historical and political process’. Szporluk suggests, however, that the politicized Ukrainians ‘in the emigration’ were not, in fact, offended by the diaspora label and gradually embraced it as part of their self-definition.

Since the late 1980s, the term diaspora has increasingly formed part of the everyday vocabulary of Ukrainians living outside of Ukraine, who routinely use the term to describe their organizational life and identity. For instance, in October, 1998, the Ukrainian American Professionals and Businesspersons Association of New York and New Jersey organized a ‘Year 2020’ conference. Its goal was to begin to formulate answers to four fundamental questions. ‘Will there be a North American Ukrainian diaspora in the year 2020?’, ‘Does an independent Ukraine enrich and invigorate the diaspora, or undermine its reason for being?’, ‘Will a new wave of immigrants play a key role in the diaspora’s future?’ and ‘Are the futures of the Canadian and American diasporas tied to each other, or will their paths be shaped by markedly different circumstances?’ In 1994, the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York helped fund the publication of Ukraine and Ukrainians Throughout the World: A Demographic and Sociological Guide to the Homeland and its Diaspora. The Society is currently preparing an encyclopedia of the diaspora, which is intended to be a source of information about all Ukrainian communities outside of Ukraine. And, to complicate things even further, the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council and the Ukrainian World Congress (each of which claims to represent the interests of Ukrainians in the diaspora), see Ukrainians living abroad as made up of two diasporas–an ‘eastern’ diaspora, which lives in various countries in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and a ‘western’ diaspora, which lives in North and South America, western Europe and Australia.

The postwar shifts in the way that the concept of diaspora has been used in reference to Ukrainians outside of Ukraine inevitably raises the question of definitions. In other words, what does the concept of diaspora refer to, and why is it a useful tool for carving up social reality? Before discussing the concept of diaspora, this chapter briefly considers some of the parallels between the Ukrainian diaspora and other diasporas. This will set the stage for a critical theoretical analysis of the concept of diaspora, and for a discussion of the scope and limitations of this study.

Comparing the Ukrainian diaspora

In addition to being a label used by Ukrainians to refer to themselves, the idea of a diaspora, through implicit and explicit comparisons with the Jewish diaspora, has helped Ukrainians living abroad to understand their own community life and politics (Bardyn, 1993). Indeed, according to Manoly Lupul (1990: 466), ‘the Jewish people—… members of a persevering and successful diaspora that has regained its promised land—have always been the model for Ukrainians in Canada’. According to Lupul (1990: 466), discussions of Ukrainian-Canadian issues are replete with references to the Jewish community, and ‘Dyvitsia na zhydiv [look at the Jews] has been the coup de grace or call-to-arms of many a Ukrainian Canadian leader’. Some diaspora Ukrainians have, for example, pointed out that after the founding of the state of Israel, Jews in the diaspora did the same soul-searching that Ukrainians are now doing about the new independent Ukraine. It was once thought that the existence of Israel makes the Jewish diaspora unnecessary, and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state in 1991 is sometimes thought of in the same way. Others have pointed out that even though many diaspora Ukrainians are disillusioned with certain facets of life and government in independent Ukraine, many Jews living abroad have consistently stood behind the state of Israel even though they have their own reservations about some of the government’s policies. Furthermore, Ukrainians have pointed out that Jews are concerned about the long-term survival of their communities in many of the same ways as Ukrainians. For example, The Vanishing American Jew, by Alan Dershowitz (1997), has both comforted and alarmed some Ukrainians in the diaspora. Some find solace in the fact that ‘even the Jews’ are being assimilated and are seeing the fortunes of their organizations decline; others suggest that if the Jews cannot withstand the forces of assimilation and survive as a diaspora, then there is little hope for groups that appear to be less powerful and less organized.

The persecution of the Jews also has parallels in the narratives of Ukrainian diaspora life, for many diaspora Ukrainians argue that their ethnic group has been the victim of genocide, and that there was a Ukrainian Holocaust that was at least equal in horror to the Jewish Holocaust. The famine of 1932–3 is considered as a deliberate attempt by Stalin and the Soviet regime to physically annihilate the Ukrainians as an ethnocultural group. And the Soviet government’s subsequent policy of Russification is seen as a further attempt to destroy Ukrainians, culturally if not physically.

In fact, much of the vocabulary that forms the discourse about the Jewish Holocaust is increasingly being used by Ukrainians when they describe their own experiences and those of their ancestors. At the 1997 World Forum of Ukrainians, for instance, the Ukrainian World Congress proposed that the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council be authorized to lobby the Ukrainian government to strike a ‘Second Nuremberg’ where leaders of the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and of Ukraine would be tried for crimes against ‘the Ukrainian people and the human race’. These crimes ‘include forced starvation, terror, deportation, genocide and penal servitude’. The Congress also wanted the Forum to ask the Ukrainian government to proclaim a Ukrainian Day of Sorrow and Memory for all Ukrainians who died in their fight for the survival of the Ukrainian nation (Ukrainian World Congress, 1997). In that same vein, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA), which was formed, in part, to lobby the Canadian government to acknowledge, and pay restitution for, the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during World War I, uses emotion-laden terms from both the Cold War and the Holocaust to describe what happened to the Ukrainians. Terms like ‘concentration camps’ and ‘gulag archipelago’ are used regularly to describe the Canadian internment operations. The UCCLA web site, for example, describes the camps as the Canadian ‘gulag archipelago’, an obvious reference to the Soviet Union and its treatment of dissidents. Similarly, the term ‘concentration camps’ evokes images of barbed wire fences, emaciated prisoners, brutal prison guards and, above all, the Jewish Holocaust.

Though Ukrainians less often compare themselves with groups other than Jews, the experiences of other diaspora groups may actually be just as relevant, in particular those of other east central Europeans in North America such as Latvians, Lithuanians, Hungarians and Poles. For the Ukrainians and other east central Europeans, their ancestral homelands were all dominated by the Soviet Union and this gave them a number of things in common as diasporas. First, they were physically cut off from their homelands. Certainly the Soviet Union and countries of the eastern bloc liked to see the occasional diaspora socialist or communist return temporarily to the homeland to tell Soviet workers how well off they were and how exploited the workers were in the west, but large numbers of diaspora returnees were not welcome, particularly if they had nationalist political aspirations.

Second, until the 1980s, not many people in these communities were keen on actually returning while their countries were under Soviet control. The fear of arrest or repression for having left the homeland, particularly among those who escaped during the chaos of World War II, acted as a strong brake on any return movement. Even going back temporarily as a tourist or to visit relatives was out of the question.

Third, the anti-Soviet attitudes of many people in the diasporas who came from east central Europe, or whose ancestors had come from there, led to an active political mobilization against human rights abuses and the wider Soviet domination of their homelands. Many longed for, and worked toward, the day that their ancestral homelands might one day be free.

Fourth, because of Soviet restrictions on emigration, for many years east central European groups in North America saw very few new arrivals from the homeland. Some individuals did occasionally escape from the Soviet Union or the larger eastern bloc in circumstances that were sometimes not dissimilar to the adventures of James Bond, but their numbers were far less than the masses of emigrants who left before and during World War II. In fact, the decades-long drought in new immigrants for many east central European diaspora groups in North America may mean that they all have similar difficulties integrating new members into existing structures and organizations. This issue certainly requires further research.

Fifth, the diaspora has been a site of creativity for many east central European groups. During the period between the end of World War II and the rise of independent states in the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc, eastern European diaspora groups felt that in many ways their authentic language, culture and traditions were making their last stand in the diaspora. The suppression by the Soviet Union of languages other than Russian, and its efforts to create Homo sovieticus in a Russian mold, seriously threatened the ethnic cultures and languages, or so it appeared in the diaspora. For Ukrainians and other east central European groups, some of the impetus to maintain the language and culture of the ethnic group came from that larger political subtext.

Finally, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain have provided new opportunities for members of these diasporas to reacquaint themselves with their ancestral homelands. However, after decades of separation, the freer movement of goods, people, ideas and information to and from the homeland may be having unintended consequences. Though it is not entirely accurate to compare the ‘reunification’ of the Ukrainian diaspora and Ukraine with the reunification of East and West Germany, commentators have noted how both forms of ‘reunification’ have resulted in a greater sense of the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In some ways, getting reacquainted has only led to a greater recognition of the differences.

Despite these similarities, there are also differences between the Ukrainian case and that of other east central European groups. Though this idea is still speculative and needs further research, the Ukrainian diaspora seems to have been less successful in becoming involved in the politics of the homeland than other diasporas. The Ukrainian diaspora’s involvement in the politics of the homeland also seems to be less welcome in the homeland. While there are political parties in Ukraine that draw at least some of their resources and leadership from the diaspora, the extent of Ukrainian diaspora involvement in politics in the homeland seems to differ markedly from that of places like Latvia. The President of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, left the country as a child, grew up in refugee camps in Germany and spent much of her adult life as a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal. However, in 1999 she was elected President. Though the case of a person who had spent most of her life in the diaspora and has then become a head of state in the ancestral homeland may be more the exception than the rule, it does suggest a dramatically greater social acceptance of diaspora involvement in the politics of the homeland. And, finally, comparatively fewer diaspora Ukrainians seem willing to ‘return’ to, or to move to their ancestral homeland, than members of other east central European diasporas. The size, nature and extent of ‘return’ movements are difficult to measure, and further comparative research on this topic is also necessary. However, if there is a difference between the Ukrainian diaspora and other diasporas in the willingness to return, one reason may be the make-up of those different communities. The contemporary Ukrainian diaspora, particularly in North America, has comparatively few first-generation immigrants. In 1986, for example, 92 percent of the Ukrainian population in Canada had been born in Canada (Isajiw and Makuch, 1994: 328), and in 1980 83.1 percent of the American-Ukrainian population had been born in the United States (Markus and Wolowyna, 1994: 363). If the pull of the ‘old country’ grows weaker with the number of generations that people are removed from the ancestral homeland, such differences may be due to general sociological processes rather than the particularities of different ethnic groups.

The concept of diaspora

Even though the term ‘diaspora’ is widely used in Ukrainian communities in North America, and even though parallels can be drawn between the diaspora experience of the Ukrainians and that of Jews and other east central European groups, not everyone considers it a useful term. The dissenting view has not been expressed systematically, but some reservations about the applicability of the diaspora concept appeared in an article in the Canadian Ukrainian News in October 1998. Thomas Prymak, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, took issue with the recent tendency of many ethnic communities, including Ukrainians, to refer to themselves as a diaspora. In his view, there are three reasons why it is inaccurate to call Ukrainians a diaspora. First, he argued that, historically speaking, the vast majority of Ukrainians have always lived in their European homeland. Despite various waves of emigration from the late nineteenth century, the reality is that most Ukrainians have stayed home and therefore have no history as a diaspora. Second, he suggests that only a small proportion of Ukrainians left Ukraine for political reasons. The comparatively few political émigrés from Ukraine are not, in his view, very representative of the total emigration, which was made up largely of labor migrants who left Ukraine for essentially economic reasons. Third, he argues that, in the case of Canada, people of Ukrainian ancestry are so thoroughly assimilated that the vast majority think of themselves as Canadian first and Ukrainian second. In view of the high rates of language loss and intermarriage, he suggests that the term diaspora is of limited use in describing the Ukrainian-Canadian community (Prymak, 1998).

Both Prymak’s reservations about the concept of diaspora, and the ease with which the term is used within the organized Ukrainian community raise the question of definitions. Specifically, how should diaspora be defined, and does the term help us understand the social reality of emigrants and their ancestors who left an ancestral homeland?

The penchant of ethnic groups to use the term diaspora as part of their self-definition has its parallel in the academic world, where the word has experienced a certain amount of conceptual inflation. A keyword search of sociological abstracts for ‘diaspora’ turns up eighteen scholarly social science papers published in 1980–1, but no fewer than eighty-seven papers published in 1999–2000. Cohen (1997: ix) points out that the word is derived from the Greek terms speiro (to sow) and dia (over), and was originally used to refer to processes of migration and colonization. In the 1970s, it referred more narrowly to a forcible collective banishment, and was applied mainly to the Jews or, occasionally, to Palestinians and Armenians. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, scholars in the area of Black Studies began to refer increasingly to the African diaspora or the Black Atlantic. And, by the 1990s, any group that had a history of migration and community formation was termed a diaspora (Safran, 1991; Akenson, 1995). Indeed, the term has become so popular that sociologist Floya Anthias calls it a ‘mantra’ (Anthias, 1998: 557), and historian Donald Akenson (1995: 382) a ‘massive linguistic weed’ that threatens to take over academic discourse about immigration and ethnicity.

Anthias (1998) finds two general ways that the concept of diaspora has been employed in scholarly analysis. One approach likens diaspora to a social condition and process; the other uses ‘diaspora’ as a descriptive, typological tool. According to Anthias (1998), the conceptualization of diaspora as a social condition and process tends to be linked to post-modern understandings of globalization and recent literature on transnationalism (Basch et al., 1994). The diaspora condition is seen to be structured by the complicated interplay between migration and settlement. It is characterized by complex and contradictory sentiments, attitudes and practices that are ‘put into play through the experience of being from one place and of another’ (Anthias, 1998: 565). Migration results in the formation of new and fluid identities and social boundaries, which in turn are rooted in a desire to be different within a global context that seems increasingly to emphasize homogeneity. These new identities are also seen to result in wider social and political changes, particularly in the hybrid spaces of global cities, where numerous diasporas come into contact and interact. In some formulations, new diaspora identities and hybrid social spaces are believed to undermine traditional understandings of ethnic identity and the nation state. Traditional ethnic identities become destabilized in the diaspora because of multiple forms of interaction with other diaspora groups; national boundaries become less significant because diaspora groups often have loyalties to two or more different states. Thus, the emphasis within the ‘diaspora-as-condition approach’ is on the ways that new identities, cultural forms and social spaces are created and negotiated in the course of complex interactions between different kinds of ‘home’.

The typological approach, on the other hand, is linked to the work of Robin Cohen (1997). Cohen, like the proponents of the first approach, is dissatisfied with the traditional analyses of international migration and ethnic relations. In particular, he is critical of the static terms in which ethnic-relations theory has conceptualized movement from, and return to, a ‘homeland’. Leaving and returning ‘home’ are much more complicated, multilayered and interactive than implied by concepts like migration, settlement and assimilation. In Cohen’s view, many groups that have migrated display complex loyalties and emotional attachments to an ‘old country’. These vary in both intensity and direction, but they nevertheless signal an attachment to an ancestral homeland and a larger imagined community.

Cohen uses the cases of the Afro-Caribbean, British, Armenian, Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese and Sikh communities to construct both an ideal-type and a typology of different kinds of diaspora. He suggests that diasporas normally exhibit several of the following features:

• dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically
• alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions
• a collective memory and myth about the homeland
• an idealization of the supposed ancestral home
• a return movement
• a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over time
• a troubled relationship with host societies
• a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other societies
• the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries.

(Cohen, 1997: 180)

Though an important element in Cohen’s (1997) definition is a forcible and traumatic dispersal from an ancestral home, he includes mass movements of people for economic reasons, such as the search for work and trading partners. Political persecution is not, therefore, the only basis for the diaspora condition (Akenson, 1995: 382).

According to Cohen, the type of diaspora a group becomes, however, depends in large part on the reasons they left their country in the first place. Victim diasporas, such as the Jews and Armenians, were formed as a result of the traumatic events that occurred in their homeland and that resulted in large-scale and widespread dispersal. Imperial diasporas are formed out of the colonial or military ambitions of world powers. Despite cultural differences between Scots, English and Irish, Cohen argues that the people from the United Kingdom who moved overseas to the new dominions and the colonies formed a larger British imperial diaspora. Labor diasporas consist of groups who move mainly in search of wage labor; they include the Turks who, after World War II, emigrated to a variety of countries in Europe, North America and the Middle East. Trade diasporas, like those formed by the Chinese merchants who emigrated to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, consist of people who left their homelands to pursue opportunities as movers of goods and services in the emerging system of international trade. And, finally, Cohen develops the notion of a cultural diaspora to characterize the migration and settlement experiences of migrants of African descent from the Caribbean after World War II. These migrants are take...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: UKRAINIANS AND THE CONCEPT OF DIASPORA
• 2: EMIGRATION AND THE FORMATION OF A LABOR DIASPORA (1890–1914)
• 3: WHAT KIND OF UKRAINIAN ARE YOU?: CLEAVAGES WITHIN THE PRE-WORLD WAR II DIASPORA
• 4: THE THIRD WAVE: WORLD WAR II AND THE DISPLACED PERSONS
• 5: THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE POSTWAR DIASPORA
• 6: UKRAINE IN THE POSTWAR DIASPORA: EXPOSING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
• 7: UKRAINIANS AND THEIR SENSE OF VICTIMIZATION
• 8: THE DIASPORA AND THE CHALLENGES OF UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY