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From the editor / What's On
Funny how things go. There was Viktor Yushchenko in New York City recently, being feted as s hero by a Ukrainian - American community that still hasn't grasped the extent to which his presidency has been either a disappointment or an outrage against decency. Yushchenko's popularity back West is an indication of the gulf that exists between Ukraine's foreign supporters and local reality, and it's a shame, because it gets in the way of doing the right things. You can be on it: Yushchenko puts on an embroidered shirt and mentions Shevchenko, and the North American Ukrainophiles will swoon. Meanwhile, other Ukrainians of the sort who wouldn't be invited to a certain type of North American function in a hundred million years are actually doing good work on behalf of the country.
Take, at random, the often-demonised Viktor Pinchuk and his wife Elena Franchuk. Franchuk (who even has the never to be the daughter of Leonid Kuchma himself) has generated massive positive exposure for this country through her anti-AIDS work and by bringing Elton John and Paul McCartney to play Kyiv. Her husband's PinchukArtCentre, meanwhile, has had a galvanising effect on this city's cultural life. Even Pinchuk's adventures amidst the garishly rich of Western Europe are good for the country in a way - they get it noticed. And recently a friend of mine visited a top Western university where a benefactor had just endowed a programme in Ukrainian studies. Was it Pinchuk?
My friend's interlocutor refused to say, but there are reasons to think it was. Even if it wasn't, this ‘oligarch' who speaks Russian, who is not ethnically Ukrainian and who supported the ‘bad guys' during the Orange Revolution has arguably done more for Ukraine than everyone in Yushchenko's circle combined. Just don't tell anyone back West. Such news upsets the reassuring old categories of thought that still persist today, four long years after the Revolution.
