On Our Way Home From the Revolution

On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine

Sonya Bilocerkowycz

Published by Mad Creek Books in 2019

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In 2019, five years after Russian troops annexed the Crimean Peninsula, Sonya Bilocerkowycz published her first book, a collection of essays, On Our Way Home from the Revolution. These essays focus on two historical periods—the recent past, between 1933 and 1945, when the Central and Eastern European “bloodlands” (in  Timothy Snyder’s book of that name [2010]: the Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Romania) suffered the murder of more than twelve million civilians by Soviet and Nazi forces; and the present, particularly the last fifteen years, when the author decided to learn more about that devastation and its relationship to her Ukrainian family.

There are fifteen wonderfully varied and polyphonic essays in this collection; four of them are titled “Village,” and the four “Village” essays have musical subtitles: Fugue, Interlude, Reprise, and Da Capo. The village to which we keep turning our attention in these chapters is an unnamed village on the Ikva River near Dubno, in western Ukraine, the home village of Sonya’s paternal grandmother.  Sonya’s family knowledge of this village is rich and nostalgic, until the story turns tragic, as it is forced to endure its fate in the prelude to World War II and then the war itself—the brutal suppression of  Ukrainians under Polish rule, the brief Russian control of the country until the invasion and devastation of the German forces in 1941, and the 1944 liberation of Ukraine by Russian forces, followed by nearly a half century of being an unwilling piece of the Soviet Union. The village became part of a free Ukraine in 1991.

Almost everything the younger Sonya knows about the village has been passed along to her by her family members in the United States—her father had been born and raised in Chicago, and his mother is Sonya’s cherished grandmother, Nina, known to her and the other grandchildren as Busia, an affectionate familiar form of the Ukrainian word for “grandmother,” babusya. 

Sonya’s conversations with Busia, in person and by telephone, dominate the early parts of this book, establishing that her grandmother’s family had had a hard but good village life in Ukraine until the trauma of the wars and occupations. Central to her grandmother’s story is the description of the Bolsheviks who arrested her father (Sonya’s great-grandfather) in the 1940s, charging him with betrayal of the motherland, the USSR. This great-grandfather was convicted and sent to the GULAG, where he died in a hard-labor camp.

Sonya’s personal connection to that history of warring ideologies, suffering, and victimization is what she wants to understand better. She was born in Ohio in 1988 and raised in South Dakota. Part of her training for being a Ukrainian in America came by means of being a regular summer camper in an idyllic summer camp (near Baraboo, WI) for Lithuanian youngsters who played soccer and learned Ukrainian language and patriotic songs with other members of the Ukrainian diaspora; it seemed completely normal to have her Ukrainian church teachings reinforced right alongside a strong Ukrainian nationalism. 

The history of her grandmother’s life in the Ukrainian village is a central theme, but the other chapters are also significant. There’s a brief chapter on Ukrainian pagan folklore about a pre-Christian creation myth. There’s a chapter (from 1950) of instructions for parents who want to raise their children to be authentic Ukrainians: “Don’t trust the Bolsheviks, avoid them at all costs. Young adults must not become close to or marry a Bolshevik.” There’s a chapter with the wonderful title of “Encyclopedia of Earthly Things.” There’s a chapter on the Chernobyl meltdown, and chapters in which John Boehner and Paul Manafort appear. There are many passages in which the narrator explores the ordinary lives and perils of young women, and several sections devoted to heroic women. There’s a chapter on a section of the criminal code of the Ukrainian SSR.

There are also chapters describing her experiences in various parts of Eastern Europe—her first visit to the Ukrainian village with her father, a political science professor in the States; her own adult experiences with teaching in Minsk, Belarus, in 2010, working as an educational recruiter in the Republic of Georgia, and teaching at Ukrainian Catholic University, in Lviv, in 2014. During that teaching year, the Maidan revolution in Kiev changed the course of modern Ukrainian history, and Sonya traveled with friends across the country to Kiev in order to witness the revolution close up and perhaps participate in it. What Sonya began to learn about herself may be evident in the book’s title—a tourist at the revolution does not have to stay any longer than it is comfortable for her to stay.

Sonya’s family, church, and summer camp taught her about guilt, responsibility, and accountability, but nothing prepared her for what turned up in her research into the archival details of her great-grandfather’s collision with Soviet law. The chapters that lead to that moment of recognition for the narrator prepare the reader to pay attention and to follow with interest Sonya’s continuing education. 

This book is timely in many ways—it brings us closer to some of the central issues related to the current war between Russia and Ukraine; it shows us an American subculture we can probably learn from; and it introduces us to a gifted young writer who is eager to be more than a tourist. These essays teach the attentive reader a great deal about how difficult it is to live through revolutions, and how inadequately prepared most of us are to respond to the challenges that make up so much of our political and religious lives. The essays engage the reader in such preparation; it’s not an easy set of lessons, but the fact that much of the writing is brilliant is a great and satisfying gift.