Culture Gap a Wide Chasm to Westerners in Ukraine

Thrust to the front lines of a revolution that is unlocking a part of his soul, John Hewko says he feels as if he is reliving American journalist John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World.”

“Since the coup, I have definitely felt like I was in 1917,” says the Detroit-born lawyer of Ukrainian descent. “There’s no shooting here, like there was in Petrograd, but it has felt like a country was being born.”

Like a few dozen other Westerners who have come to live in the Ukraine and to discover their ethnic roots, Hewko is reveling in the fringe benefit of witnessing history in the making. The failed Aug. 19 putsch by hard-line Communists in Moscow has acted as a catalyst for the Ukraine’s independence drive and challenged those from the diaspora to assist in the creation of a new, democratic state.

American, Canadian, British and other Western professionals such as Hewko have settled in Kiev to work with the reform movement and to liberate the land of their ancestors after seven decades of repression and terror.

For some, the attraction has been a career move, a chance to share skills and advice with those building the new Ukraine. For others, the return is a voyage of discovery, a chance to get acquainted with a national heritage that was for so long shielded by the Iron Curtain.

“All my life it was really frustrating being of American-Ukrainian background,” says Hewko, 33, who is coordinating a panel of foreign advisers to the Ukrainian government. “Unlike my Italian-American and Polish-American friends, who could go back to the old country every summer and get some sense of where they came from, I could never do that. I never knew these relatives, and this place that was part of who I am.”

Getting in touch with their ethnic identity is one of the strongest attractions for the grown children of emigres who fled communism but never broke the emotional tie to the Ukraine.

“If your self is lost between here and there, you come here to find it,” says Ivan Lozowy, 29, a political policy analyst devoting a year to the Ukrainian independence movement, Rukh. “There’s something about the place you were always told about as a child. I studied in France for a year and that was wonderful, but I never felt the kind of echo that comes to me here.”

Lozowy and other Westerners joke that they worry when they begin to fit in and when the cultural differences that at first traumatized them slip out of conscious thought.

“I was standing in line in this gastronom (food store) two weeks ago and I remembered the first time I’d been there,” the sandy-haired New Yorker recalls. “The stench was so bad I couldn’t imagine buying anything there, never mind eating it. Suddenly I was terrified. I thought, ‘I can’t smell that smell any more! I’m too used to it.’ ”

The transplanted Westerners say the struggle with shortages and living conditions are peripheral compared to the daunting task of trying to make a difference.

“In some ways, the rewards are immediate. There are some places where people don’t even know how to operate a photocopier,” says Lozowy, whose work with Rukh is being underwritten by the conservative, Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

But the imported experts also must adjust to working among colleagues deeply indoctrinated in slothful Soviet ways.

“In this respect, they feel absolutely no impact from my being here,” Lozowy says. “They may respect the hell out of me, but they won’t listen to anything I have to say.”

The payoff for Lozowy is the front-row seat he has on history as the tragic experiment with communism unravels before his eyes.

“The politics here are very fascinating,” he says. “The changes just in the six months I’ve been here are beyond people’s greatest expectations. What has happened here in one month would take 10 years anywhere else.”

Devoting time to the cause of Ukrainian freedom is a trend that began with the opposition movement in the fall of 1989 and has kept pace with the accelerating tempo of reform. U.S. Consul John Stepanchuk says there are about 75 American citizens now living in the Ukraine, including business people, missionaries and political consultants. Many, like himself, are of Ukrainian heritage.

Irene Jarosewich left her public affairs consulting firm in Washington this summer to spend a year helping Rukh get its independence message across to the West. She grew up speaking Ukrainian in what she calls a very “nationally conscious household” and was inspired to get involved in the transformation of her ethnic homeland after encountering a busload of poor Polish-Ukrainian peasants in Rome for a Ukrainian Catholic Church celebration in 1988.

“It was really one of those times when you realize, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ ” Jarosewich recalls of the confused and frightened pilgrims. “It’s not so much that you want to come and show how it is done in the West but because you feel no one should have to live like this. They need a lot of help from us.”

For Jarosewich, coping with life in a country so dramatically different from the one she has known all her 34 years is the price of being part of history.

“You have to make your peace with the conditions here within two to three weeks,” she says. “Usually, most people flip out by then. I used to get outraged over things, like when a cabbie would ask for 150 rubles just to take you a few blocks. Now I don’t waste emotional energy on such things.”

“What I miss is windsurfing,” says Lozowy, when the conversation at a Kiev restaurant takes its inevitable turn toward the shortcomings of their temporary home.

Jarosewich says she would just like to be able to buy nice things to prepare a dinner for friends--and a kitchen big enough to cook in.

For those who stay, the sacrifices pale in comparison to the rewards.

“I never imagined this coup, and the acceleration of all this history. It’s just incredible,” says Hewko.