On the same day that the Russian army forced Ukrainian soldiers to retreat from the eastern city of Avdiivka, students at Middlebury College mounted what they called a “showcase of Ukrainian resilience through art.” Through music, dance, poetry, film and personal testimony, the Ukrainian students at Middlebury and the college community offered their answer to Russia’s invasion, occupation and brutalization of the Ukrainian nation.
It was evident from their performances that a devotion to Ukrainian culture has been crucial to the persistence of the Ukrainian people through centuries of oppression and exile. Nothing at Middlebury’s showcase was more inspiring than the folk dances staged by first-year student Sofiia Tretiak. These included an ensemble dance called “Kalyna,” which she described as “an ode to the enduring beauty of our homeland and the resilience of our people.” The red kalyna berries held by the dancers embody resilience through the seasons and are a “symbolic part of Ukrainian culture since ancient times,” she said.
Tretiak is from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, and in an email she described the experience of her family there. “Although Lviv is located far from the frontline, I want to emphasize that in Ukraine, there are no entirely ‘safe’ cities … I remember sitting one night in the corridor with my parents and distinctly hearing the chilling sound of a missile flying over our apartment and a couple minutes later, the explosion a few streets away. My family got lucky, but someone’s not. And that’s the reality my family and other Ukrainian families live through daily: We do not talk about the future. We simply live in the present.”
Tretiak said she started dancing when she was 5 years old. “Ukrainian dance is an art that requires a lot of physical and mental endurance, patience and practice,” she wrote. She also performed a solo dance called “The Call of the Carpathians” that put on display the rigorous physical demands of her folk tradition.
Another highlight of the showcase was the music performed by members of the New York Crimean Tatar Ensemble. Violinist Nariman Asanov described the centuries of oppression suffered by Crimean Tatars, a Muslim Turkic people who have lived in Crimea since the 12th century. Stalin banished the Tatars of Crimea to Uzbekistan in 1944, and that is where Asanov was born. In the 1980s exiled Tatars were allowed to return to Crimea, where Asanov began his musical education.
The power of the Crimean Tatar folk tradition is an answer to the long and troubled history of the Tatar people. Asanov explained that the rhythmic complexity of the music is owing to its frequent use of time signatures — such as 7/8 or 12/8 — that are unusual to the Western ear. Referring to his music, Asanov said, “This is our weapon.”
Meanwhile, it is becoming ever clearer that other weapons are also necessary. That Republicans in the U.S. House are blocking military assistance to Ukraine at this crucial point in the war is a shock to the conscience and a grave moral failure imposed on the House by a small band of extremists. It is no secret that Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee, favors Russia over Ukraine. That is to say he favors the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin over a democratic nation struggling to defend itself and to survive. The way that elements of the Republican Party have begun to fetishize dictatorship is a disturbing reality of our present day. To understand the danger of this trend, we need only look at our own history.
That history includes the period before U.S. entry into World War II when pro-Nazi militias, activists and spies, including members of Congress, sought to keep the United States out of the war. Hitler had achieved what Putin so far has been unable to do, conquering neighboring nations and subjecting them to his fanatical, genocidal rule, but isolationists and fascists in this country saw no reason for the United States to concern itself.
It is dawning on the nations of Europe that Putin is now the most serious threat to their freedom since the era of Hitler and Stalin. Frontline nations such as Estonia and Poland are worried the most, but Ukraine occupies the true front line, and U.S. support for Ukraine, so far, has been one of the most significant achievements of the Biden administration.
The Ukrainian students at Middlebury are from Lviv, Kyiv and Donetsk, which is in occupied eastern Ukraine. In addition to the dances staged by Sofiia Tretiak, they performed Ukrainian songs and offered personal testimony of family history. Looming large in Ukrainian history is the famine intentionally caused by Stalin in the 1930s to force agricultural collectivization and to destroy Ukrainian resistance. It claimed millions of lives, among them five siblings of the grandfather of one of the Middlebury students.
For Americans to encounter the traditions and culture of unfamiliar regions is an important eye-opener. The Tatar folk melodies performed by Asanov and clarinetist Aziz Veliev, with keyboard player Eldar Ibrahim, consisted of lengthy complex arrangements played in unison, not off written scores, but from the folk tradition preserved in their memories.
Republicans reluctant to aid Ukraine would have learned something were they to have witnessed the showcase at Middlebury. At least, they would have been face to face with the people they seek to sell out.
But Sofiia Tretiak’s words are an inspiring answer to them.
“There is no single person in Ukraine whose relatives or acquaintances did not die in the war. We are experiencing terrible stress, aggravated by the large amount of information piling up on us daily. However, every Ukrainian continues fighting on their frontlines: soldiers by defending us, volunteers by providing the military and citizens on the war-ravaged territories with necessary supplies, students by investing in their education and the future of our country.”
American liberals who complain they are “tired” or “exhausted” by the ordeal of responding to the crimes and lies of Trump and his enablers ought to recognize that it is the Ukrainians who have reason to be tired. But they fight on. There is no excuse for Americans to be “tired.”
Asked what message she might offer the American people at this time of crisis, Tretiak wrote: “My main message is to remind that if Russia stops fighting, there will be no war, but if Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine. We fight for the right to exist.”
