Selections from FM GALICIA
09.12
I believe that most offenses should be forgiven. I believe that society should not be divided into the guilty and the not-guilty. However . . . Today, I came across a manifestation of something that frightened me ten years ago. Here’s what happened. It was the Ukrainian revolution. We, students from Lviv, were organizing a very risky demonstration in Kyiv. Marching toward us was a riot police brigade. This was scary, but most of us were used to it. That day, doubt had emerged within the police. So they didn’t start beating us right away. Several leaders of the student corps, including me, were packed into a car and taken to the commanders of the Kyiv special forces. There were people there whose last names were the very symbols of brutality, but it’s not worth listing them now because they are the ones who are in power in today’s Ukraine. And it was then, at that interrogation ten years ago, that I suddenly understood: a time will come—the one for which, in fact, we are fighting now—when I will be forced to attest to these very people my allegiance to a sovereign Ukrainian state. I understood that neither my absolute belief in Ukraine, nor my indisputable patriotic upbringing, nor that which I do now so that Ukraine may continue to exist, nor all that my family has done— nothing will protect me from that situation when I will be forced to prove to all those generals and their cronies that I am for Ukraine and for its statehood. It’s absurd, but absurd things such as these are precisely those that usually come to fruition. And today, I finally experienced this as reality. I am all for forgiving, I am against revising biographies, but I desire that which, it seems, is completely normal— that the forgiven understand that they have been forgiven and that the guilty know that they are guilty, and thus do not continue their offences. I don’t want to have to prove to people responsible for all sorts of malevolence back then that I am for this country and for this state. I don’t want former enemies to judge what I have done for my people. And I don’t want to have to answer to boys from the special services who were members of the Komsomol [1] to its dying days and who are now responsible for the safety of my country. Even though I have lost the biggest game of my life and things have not turned out the way we had wanted them to, my former brothers-in-arms and I should not have to fear the harassment of those who change colors when it’s convenient.
Notes
[1] The Komsomol, or All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, was a Soviet youth organization that served to prepare future members of the Communist Party.
Translated by Mark Andryczyk