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Roman Kupchinsky –

The Creation of a ‘Cold Warrior’

[Dedicated to

Roman’s son Markian ]

Commemoration If deeds be in question, those who are here interred have received part of their honors already, and for the rest, their children will be brought up till manhood at the public expense: the state thus offers a valuable prize, as the garland of victory in this race of valor, for the reward both of those who have fallen and their survivors. And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are found the best citizens. (Pericles’ Funeral Oration for Athenian Citizens., 430BC)

A single bugle sounded out the last solemn notes of taps as nine uniformed soldiers smartly escorted Roman’s cask to his final resting place at Arlington National Cemetery. There’s nothing more memorable than a military funeral. And military funerals at Arlington are special because of traditions accumulated over two centuries of combat that reflect the unique sacrifices that our soldiers have made for their country and the world. The military bearing and precision, alone, demands respect – for these

are tributes to citizen soldiers and warriors alike. The solemnity of the ceremony evokes the core meaning of the ultimate sacrifice that a soldier offers for his country, to preserve those intangible principles of liberty. There were no orations on this day. None were needed – we were standing on hallowed ground, whose genesis could be found in the commemoration by Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address. The funeral oration of Pericles to his fellow Athenians (430 BC) on

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the sacrifices of Athenian soldiers for their state and their countrymen was among the first, and still stands as the most eloquent exposition of what the ultimate sacrifice of a soldier means to all citizens. We exist and prosper because they sacrificed for us. This soldier, and all those buried under the white snows, fought for our freedom and our comfortable lifestyles. We owe them all a debt – for they secured everything we value in life. They defended our core principles. To understand that debt, one needs only to walk among the rows of graves and pause just at one. Slowly read the names, the dates and ponder when and where, and why it all came to an end. It is because his life came to an end that I stand and ponder our respective fates. Roman Kupchinsky was laid to rest among our nation’s most distinguished warriors and heroes, amongst privates and Presidents. He had the distinct honor of serving both his adopted country, America, and his native Ukraine - both in the ‘hot war’- Vietnam, and the long ‘cold war’ against the ‘evil empire’. The deep snows of successive record blizzards in Washington, DC blanketed the gravesites of America’s heroes under a panorama of blinding white purity. Alas, the snows also prevented us from having the traditional ceremony, with a horse-drawn caisson to the gravesite. Roman would have been proud and happy that everything

worked out as well as it did. Near the end, he talked openly of his plans for burial at Arlington, and shared them with his 21-year old adopted son, Markian (shown receiving the ceremonial flag that draped Roman’s coffin). He didn’t plan on the two feet of snow, though, but even that worked in his favor, for it was a truly unique scene. Roman was proud of his service in Vietnam, even though he had second thoughts about the overall strategy, execution and purpose in his later years. A young soldier rarely asks ‘why’ in the heat of battle – the survival instinct

takes over and obliterates any philosophizing. The philosophizing came later, with the maturity of many years – well after he came back. He had time to reflect and digest what happened behind the scenes; why and how all the noble hopes and dreams deteriorated into bitterness and cynicism. As a decorated soldier of the Vietnam War, and a frontline warrior in the subsequent cold war, Roman deserved to be laid to rest here, in the hallowed grounds of Arlington, alongside the Nation’s war heroes. Better to have his name inscribed here, on a gravestone in Arlington cemetery, than on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall. In Roman’s case, the difference between the two inscriptions was 40

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years of additional service in the ‘cold war’, which he devoted to the ‘cause’ of Ukraine’s freedom.

Roman had some remarkable accomplishments that we were not fully aware of, since his return from Vietnam on New Years day, 1969. Over 80 of his close friends and professional colleagues showed up to pay their last respects and to let the rest of us know how much Roman meant to each one of them. Markian was able to see, perhaps for the first time, the great esteem in which his father was held by his numerous old Plast friends from New York and New Jersey, and his larger professional circle of colleagues from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America – some of whom flew in from Europe to be at the service. While he was growing up in Prague, Markian probably saw Roman simply in his role as a single parent, a jovial, disheveled, grizzled and somewhat eccentric dad who was always traveling somewhere and cursing

whomever was in the news that day. For Roman, being a father was outside the norms of his colorful and carefree personality – so, he had to work extra hard to bring up a son as an only parent. By all accounts, Roman did a terrific job, and his adopted son Markian, is a thoughtful, dutiful and polite son. As is generally the norm for young people, though, they typically think that their parents are out of touch with much of contemporary life. Roman’s nature was such that he was always modest about his work and accomplishments, and in fact mostly minimized his activities and role in the long unfolding history of Ukraine’s independence by joking and belittling just about every aspect of his work. In fact, few of us knew of his substantial accomplishments – though a few suspected what he was up to in his secretive ways. When the ‘Economist’, a respected world-class news journal, writes an obituary for Roman Kupchinsky (Jan 28, 2010), and the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yuschenko, notes the passing of Roman as an irreplaceable loss for all of Ukraine, then you finally realize that you’ve been dealing with someone who’s accomplished something lasting and important:

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#%7$&7$6E;#21%$+:%2(F7=7%6.,'9&(32'<1%– 4$-3F(:%6%()#2D633#%J+'20%$-,5'201%(22.I.2010) !"#$%&#'()6/&+"#45%3H)20)B0;,')F867%'4>+%I)',&$3%7,I'0)A,?,(0)$"0A%3)&59)"0$3%(+8)'#$,5#@'0-)8+",-'4>+0-)68A5/J%4(%+%)I)5/(#",(8"%H),+(%3'0)46"%93)3/&"0&@#''<)8+",-'4>+0-)&#"@,3'04(/H)8(3#"&@#''<)3)',=/I)+",-'/)&#;0+",(/-)I)430A0&%)4503,G Yet few of us knew of Roman’s role in the long ‘cold war’ in which we all took part, one way or another. And the few who did know, never understood the true dimensions and depth of his involvement, while others criticized his maneuvers and machinations, without understanding the work behind the scenes. For most of us, he was just our old buddy, from the earliest days of our youth in New York City – when he acquired his nick name “Hairyman” at the age of 13. And because he was our old buddy, we ‘forgave’ him for what we thought were some of his ‘hare-brained’ ideas and actions. By its very nature, Roman’s important work was conducted largely behind the scenes. A lot is now being revealed, but many details will never be known, for as the ‘Economist’ (2010) noted: “Those who read his reports there (a fortnightly digest for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), and later for the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank, found them eye-poppingly well-informed and insightful. Yet they were only dilute versions of what he really knew.” “Much of what he did in the cold war is still a secret.” (Economist, 2010). Much of it will remain so, unless Roman reveals some of this in the memoirs that he was writing. Roman knew how to keep secrets, though he was a walking encyclopedia of information – but he shared very little of it with us mere mortals, who served as foot soldiers and auxiliaries in the long ’cold war’. That was the nature of his job, and after he returned from Vietnam, he drifted away from our insular world of pleasant summers at Plast camps and our mundane concerns with sports, jobs and family. He was on an important mission now - the horrific experiences in Vietnam changed him dramatically, but it also gave him renewed energy and, most importantly, purpose to his mission. It became a self-imposed exile from his early friends in Plast and Chornomortsi, though over the years I kept in touch with him infrequently, just to discuss politics and what was happening ‘behind the scenes’ in his line of business. When he moved to Europe in 1991 (Munich, Prague and Kyiv), I visited him often enough and saw how influential he had become in his line of business, running the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Ukrainian Bureau. Even in our private moments, he simply refused to take me behind the scenes of his work, which nominally was providing a news digest of information as it related to Ukraine. All he shared with me was what I could read in the papers – though he did add texture and color to the news reports I was reading. The rest, I had to guess by reading between the lines. During the many funeral eulogies and testimonials, Markian, along with many of Roman’s old friends ( photo -some of the founding members of the “Zaloha Hamaliyia”: Todio Kostiuk, Zenon Stakhiv, Oles Popovich, Bohdan Germak, Yarko Oryshkevych – kurinney, and Oleh Kolodiy) saw an entirely different set of facets of Roman’s life and his character. For most of his adult life, Roman was literally a ‘jewel in the rough’- his

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numerous felicitous facets were not polished, but that’s what made him unique – his rough edges made him authentic, but beneath he was still a jewel. So, most of us were pleasantly surprised when Ukraine’s Ambassador to the U.S., Dr. Oleh Shamshur, presented a very moving eulogy the evening before at the Parastas (the liturgical memorial service before the burial), citing Roman’s crucial role in Ukraine’s long struggle for independence and his subsequent role,

after independence, in providing an alternative voice of objectivity for the people of Ukraine. There are additional aspects of Roman’s life, especially his early formative years that are worth recalling. For it is during that period – the period of youthful naïveté, of hope and optimism – when you are just who you seem to be – and the pretensions and illusions of adulthood have not yet taken form. When you work for weeks, day and night, side-by-side, at a scout camp for a common purpose, with considerable responsibility and accountability – that is when one can honestly size up the true nature of a person. When you play soccer with, or compete against your friends, you get to judge their character through the sportsmanship and teamwork that he exhibits. These are the traits that stay with you, and by which you judge a person’s character: was he a selfless player?; did he play fair?; and was he a team player? This is the period when Roman’s essential character was molded – the patriotic, honest, loyal, warm, generous, courageous, committed and perpetually mischievous Roman Kupchinsky. After the Vietnam War, he hid beneath the veneer of cynicism, crude humor and destructive habits of heavy smoking and drinking. But every one of his friends and colleagues knew who the real Roman was beneath that rough, unpolished veneer. We knew we could count on him, if needed. Loyalty was one of his principal virtues and he relied on that attribute to good effect in his later work, which often tested his loyalties and ours. Over the decades that I stayed in touch with Roman, his projects, activities and seemingly random appearances were just lots of vaguely connected dots for me, though I knew that no ‘appearance’ of his was ever random – there was a purpose to everything he did. Roman was involved in so many different aspects of our long struggle for Ukraine’s freedom, that it was literally impossible for anyone to keep track of his numerous trips abroad and his countless contacts and projects. Listening to the moving eulogies from his many professional friends, I was finally able to connect those dots for a fuller picture of the many things that Roman accomplished quietly, behind the scenes. He worked in the shadows, by the very nature of his work, so it was difficult for anyone to see the ‘big picture’. All that most of ever us saw was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It was like looking up into the heavens searching for a definable constellation of stars – a zodiac sign that defined his life in the midst of the starry Milky Way. That night, at the Parastas, I

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finally got to see the outline of ‘Roman the Cold Warrior’. I can see him, with his long Churchillian cigar in his hand, pondering how quickly our dreams for a free Ukraine were

squandered away by the ruthless politicians of Ukraine – there was no difference between them and the corrupt political institutions in Iraq or Afghanistan. For me, he belongs next to ‘Orion the Hunter’ – for Roman’s origins as a nationalist and Ukrainian patriot first began as a ‘plastun’ (Boy Scout) and then matured as a ‘Chornomorets’ (sea scouts: “Men of the Black Sea”). Orion was the constellation that guided our ‘Chornomortsi’ on their life’s voyages. Before he became a

‘cold warrior’, though, “Zhulik” was instrumental in guiding many of us to our life-long relationship with ‘Chornomortsi’. Conception So, who was Roman Kupchinsky and why were all these important people saying such nice things about him? How was it that many of his closest early friends from his formative ‘Plast’ (Ukrainian scouts) years knew so little of Roman’s work and his impact on the course of events that we were only peripherally involved with? What were the formative events in Roman Kupchinsky’s life that made him into the person lauded by President Yushchenko? What were the events that cast his character and who were the people who influenced his life, and the lives that Roman influenced? As is the case, so often, for most of his childhood friends, he was just plain old “Hairyman”, “Kup” or ‘Zhulik’- his official pseudonym when he became a ‘Chornomorets’. We knew him since he was about 12 years old, and we grew up with him through the 1960’s till the year he went off to Vietnam. When you know someone since childhood, and you remain friends for decades, your view of that person is colored by the many years of early pranks, escapades, collaboration and camaraderie. You minimize their faults because you know what’s in their heart – your perspective is anchored in the years that you worked closely with that person, and your judgment is fixed by the deeds and actions of that period. A person encountering Roman for the first time in his later years might come away with an entirely different judgment. But, it was apparent from the overwhelming response of all his professional colleagues that they all treasured Roman’s unique personality. After Vietnam, his active Chornomorets days dwindled, and his professional career took over, with many new associations. Once Roman’s professional career took over, his old Chornomorskiy friends saw less of him as the years passed by – except for those like Oleh Kolodiy, Erko Palydowycz, Mirko Pylyshenko, Zenko Onufryk and others who worked with Romko through the decades, supporting various initiatives related to the Ukrainian dissident movement. I kept in close touch with Romko through the decades, since I was also involved in some of those actions, and knew about many aspects of Roman’s work, but

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only superficially, since he never went into any detail on any issue with me. Nor did I press him when he asked me to attend a certain event, or organize a few people to come to a demonstration, or spend some time with a particular individual. He seemed reluctant to discuss issues that were topical but politically sensitive, and probably assumed that we all understood what he knew. I understood that many controversial steps and decisions he made were important for some higher purpose, and I was usually glad to help, if it made sense to me. On occasion, we disagreed on his overall strategy, since I didn’t understand or disagreed entirely either with his objectives or his particular approach – especially when it came to Leonid Plyiusch and Gen. Hryhorenko. I eventually came to understand his overall aims and tactics, but not at the time those events were happening. It was the nature of his profession that set him on a different path from the rest of us. He simply knew more than we did of what was happening behind the scenes. Plus, he was aiming to fulfill a different set of goals from those of our traditional Ukrainian organizations. When the Ukrainian dissident movement began, and all sorts of individuals, whom we knew very little about began popping up, our ‘hromoda’ was looking for heroes, to rally and inspire our ‘movement’once again and raise us from the torpor and ennui that had overcome our institutions. Many of these dissidents disappointed us after we got to know them better. Roman knew they were flawed individuals and that they would disappoint – but he was looking to use them for a different purpose: to split and undermine the European leftist solidarity that supported the USSR throughout the 1960’sand ‘70’s. The dissidents, most of whom were still loyal Marxists and socialists, would be used to undermine that solidarity very effectively by Roman. Back in the old days – the days at the end of the Eisenhower administration, and the beginning of the Kennedy ‘New Frontier’ - the era of Buddy Holly, the ‘Big Bopper’, Elvis, the Drifters and Platters, Sam Cook, the Kingston Trio, the Inkspots, Limelighters and Village Stompers - we acquired friends the old-fashioned way – we earned them. That’s why our friendships lasted a lifetime. This was not a post-modern, ‘facebook’ generation, of casual acquaintances and artificial and ephemeral friendships. Ours was not a generation of irony and detachment and of trivial pursuits, an era so well captured by the Jerry Seinfeld series. We grew up together; went to Ukrainian school on weekends, and Plast scout meetings in the evenings, during the weekday. But mostly we were thrown together at Plast summer camps and we worked hard and struggled together during our formative teenage years, torn between the old European virtues values and the new wave of freedom and self-expression, captured by the teenage rock and roll rebellion that was sweeping the nation. We had lasting bonds that went beyond friendship – they were the invisible bonds of Ukraine’s history; of common origins and struggles against oppression. The boys who were brought together by Roman to form his new group of Chornomortsi were drawn to him not only because of his personality and passion, but because we were all looking to serve a higher cause which was still ill-defined for us, but that would be revealed soon enough. We joined sports clubs and played on high school and college teams together, and competed against each other. We worked on common causes that were always close to our hearts and minds – against communist oppression; for a free Ukraine. The biggest and perpetual cause was the battle against misinformation - that Ukraine’s history was

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not Russia’s history, which was played out every day in editorial columns of local newspapers and in the classrooms every time we were taught Russia’s history. It was in this cauldron of seething discontents against the USSR that our awareness and struggles began against the misinformation of outwardly leftist, Marxist and socialist college professors and sympathizers of the Soviet Union; confrontations with demonstrating college students who joined communist front organizations (e.g. SDS, Youth Against War and Fascism), that lasting friendships were forged and which survived the ruthless winnowing process of life’s random discontinuities and personal tragedies. We all came of age on the cusp of President Kennedy’s “New Frontier”. Culturally, politically and economically everything, including the ‘cold war’, was changing rapidly around the world and especially in America. This is when the events of the ‘modern era’ began to accelerate rapidly – technology, politics, culture, and the collapse of colonial empires. America was leading the cultural changes, yet our parents’ conservative European culture held us back and kept us from fully engaging in our recently adopted homeland. The Depression and WWII were still fresh in their minds. We had one foot in the unfamiliar culture of our adopted country, and one foot in the ‘old world’ of our parents. During our first decade in the US, our parents had a most difficult time gaining a foothold as newly arrived immigrants, but somehow they recreated the institutions of their native lands – institutions such as Plast, SUM, academic and cultural-literary organizations, choirs, church groups and folk dance groups – and of course, a proliferation of splinter political parties and factions., etc. Every large city had its own micro version of central Lviv or Ternopil. These little Ukrainian enclaves and ghettos became our ethnic comfort zones as we tried to adjust and adapt to our new environs. Here, we could revert to the lifestyles that our parents hoped we would emulate. Here is where our parents reenacted their respective roles and positions in the ‘old world’ societies they left behind forever. But that would prove to be too difficult for many of us – bridging our two parallel worlds that were rapidly converging and increasingly coming into conflict. Many were absorbed into American society, lured by the virtual realities of the cultural revolution in the mid-sixties, with its rock and drugs. Some of us successfully straddled our parallel worlds, and effectively balanced our lives in both spheres. Others disappeared entirely into the hippie culture. We lived in parallel universes – one centered on ‘downtown’ New York City, with the nucleus at the Plast ‘domivka’, the ‘Veselka’ restaurant below it, adjacent to the Ukrainian National Home and ‘Lys Mykyta’; across the street from ‘Orchidia’, Bachynsky’s meat market and the ‘Literaturney Mystetskiy Kliub’ (LMK). It was below the LMK that the infamous ‘Le Metro Café’ was located, where we once heard one of Allen Ginsberg’s poetic presentations. I don’t remember whether it was his famous “Howl” or some equivalent nonsensical poem that is somehow revered by the ‘cognoscenti’ and ‘literati’ of the Left, but we were not impressed. Even Adrian Kerod and Borys Levytsky– both of whom were closer to the beat culture than most of us were, could not comprehend the ‘poetry’ that evening, though it was harmless enough, and served as fodder for a humorous evening. A few blocks down was SUM (Spilka Ukrayinskoyi Molodi), St. George’s Catholic Church and primary school, the ‘Samopomich’ Credit Union, ‘Arka’ and ‘Surma’ Ukrainian variety shops next door to

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McSorley’s Ale House, which was established in 1842. The other universe was our adopted home – America - the one that was rapidly transforming from the Eisenhower-Dulles era of a static ‘cold war’ with the USSR to a more dynamic global explosion of the end of colonialism and of third world marxist revolutions starting with Cuba. Most of us were brought up as dedicated Ukrainian nationalists and ferocious anti-communists. Our parent’s survived two world wars bookending a great Depression and Ukraine’s own great famine – the ‘Holodomor’, perpetrated by the Soviet regime and infused with Stalin’s campaign of terror. Many of our parents we directly involved in the struggle first against Polish oppression, then in the short-lived liberation of Carpathian Ukraine in 1939, and finally in one of the underground insurgencies during the war. My father, Evhen Stakhiv spent time in a Hungarian prison with Oleh Kolodiy’s father, along with Yaroslav Boydunyk, Adia Fedash’s father. His subsequent path in the underground during WWII crossed the families of many of our Plast friends. Andriy Vytvtysky’s grandfather was the President of Ukraine’s government in exile, and Yuriy Denysenko’s father was involved in the underground in the Volyn’ region. Imagine living through 40 years of this persistent terror, uncertainty and misery – this is what life was like for our parents. Those are the memories and experiences that shaped our parents’ worldviews, and which they brought with them to the New World and transferred to us, their children. From the moment they were born, our parents were engaged in a constant struggle against one oppressor or another – first it was Poland, then Germany, and after that the long struggle against the Soviet Union. This was what gave meaning to their lives, and every Ukrainian institution that they formed in their respective cities became a tool and platform in a campaign for Ukraine’s freedom and the war against communism. We were to be the next generation carrying on the long struggle for Ukraine’s liberation from Soviet oppression. Plast was our training ground – the seed bed of Ukraine’s great nationalists who populated the leadership ranks of UPA, OUN and UHVR before and during WWII . We were being groomed to carry on the ‘struggle’. Roman was one of many who answered the call, but even before Vietnam, he chose a more direct path to achieve those goals. The world was shrinking in size, and knowledge was expanding exponentially. As teenagers, we were on the cusp of many changes that were occurring simultaneously. The late 1950’s saw the beginning of the space race and the introduction of the first microchips and computers. But more importantly, this period augured broad cultural and political changes in the US and the world – changes that few of us living in our cloistered parallel universe were aware of until the election of John F. Kennedy and the inauguration of the ‘New Frontier’. Just about everything that we saw in the unfamiliar American political scene, we viewed solely through the prism of the cold war. Our boyhoods were marked by a rapidity of events that defined the cold war and all its ramifications: Sputnik (Oct 4, 1957); the first Soviet rocket (Lunik I; Jan 2, 1959) to sail past the moon; Anastas Mikoyan’s (USSR’s Deputy Premier) trip to New York on Jan 4, 1959; Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago; Fidel Castro’s visit to New York, Washington, DC and Boston on April, 1959; Khrushchev’s visit to the US on Sept 15, 1959; the downing of the U-2 spy plane on the eve of the Summit May 1, 1960; Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium at the opening UN session in Sept 1960; and JFK’s

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election, Nov 4, 1960. We were on the brink of nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis and the Berlin Wall. This was the era of ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ and James Bond. These are the events that captivated us and set the context for the rest of our lives and our career paths. The Vietnam War was just beginning, but few of us paid any attention to the troubles brewing a half a globe away, nor did we ever imagine how that would change our lives – especially that of Roman. Before us, our parents lived through a more profound and rapidly escalating sequence of history’s horrors - what the recent Nobel Laureate, Imre Kertysz termed “the barbaric arbitrariness of history”. Prof Hryhoriy Kostiuk captured many of the same insights and observations of countless Ukrainians who lived through this period under the Stalinist regime, in his memoir “Okayani Roky” (Accursed Years) for subsequent generations. Their’s were not happy lives, but we remembered the joyous moments they had because they were so rare. We, on the other hand, lived in our urban ghettos, in our parallel universe and microcosms of virtual reality, vicariously trying to imagine what life was like in Soviet Ukraine. Our parents’ thoughts were always with the families and relatives they left behind, wondering if they would ever find the unmarked graves in the vast and anonymous Soviet Gulag, trying to figure out how to penetrate the iron curtain for news of their loved ones – did they survive? Where they sent off to the Gulag? Who was left to carry on the struggle. When they finally did find out, the news was almost always bad. Worse, we could not imagine then how 60 years of oppression and terror would change the minds of the new “Soviet man”. Though we had infrequent encounters with Soviet dignitaries and Soviet exchange students on the streets of New York, we could not penetrate through their well-indoctrinated psyches to shine the light of freedom and aspirations of the numerous Soviet Republics for freedom. They were the select, privileged few who were embedded in the Soviet hierarchy and sent here to study our ways and subvert them and us. And they were better at their jobs than we were at ours.. While Bob Dylan mesmerized the “baby boomers”, his counterpart, Vladimir Vysotsky was coming to prominence in the USSR. The “shistydesiatnyky”, the Ukrainian dissident movement of the 1960’s, who were the intellectual heirs of Kostomarov and Drahomanov, were just beginning to emerge. The “samizdatnyky” were not America’s “yippies”. Lev Lukiananeko, Nina Strokata, Vasyl’ Stus and Vyacheslav Chornovil (“Lykho z Rozumu” 1967), Lina Kostenko and Valentyn Moroz did not fight for the same ideals as the “Chicago 7” or the radical “Weathermen”. Alexander Solzhenytsin (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch”) could not relate to the work of J.D. Salinger (“Catcher in the Rye”). This became Roman Kupchinsky’s world – a world of asymmetrical contrasts presented as moral equivalents. Yes, we lived in a parallel universe with vastly different realities. The waves of arrests in Ukraine of the “shistydesiatnyky” in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s had a profound effect on us, as did the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Czechoslovak revolution in 1968, followed by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968. We sang American folk songs and protest songs (“Blowin’ in the Wind”) at our “hootenannies”, just as we were discovering the music of Volodymyr Ivasiuk (“Chervona Ruta”) during “Soyuzivka” weekends and Plast campfires. We agonized through the Cuban missile crisis, the failed “Bay of Pigs” invasion, and the assassination of numerous

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“third world” dictators and tyrants (Lumumba, Trujillo, etc.), each the potential cause of a nuclear conflagration. This steady stream of cold war events meant much more to us Ukrainian émigrés than to the average American, whose view of the cold war engendered a perpetual state of dread of the ‘bomb’. We began our ‘cold war’ activism as teenagers, demonstrating in front of either the Soviet embassy or the UN every time there was an outrage perpetrated by the USSR – and there were many. Simultaneously, a profound cultural revolution crept up on us that was to shake the foundations of US democracy a decade later. This was the era of fallout shelters, and at the same time a change in mores and attitudes of the populace. The epicenter of this movement began in downtown New York City with three avant garde literary ‘pioneers’: Allen Ginsberg (Howl), Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Norman Mailer’s (Advertisements for Myself). They started as ‘bohemians’ and created a new permutation - the cool, hip ‘Beat Generation’. Just as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises became the manifesto of the ‘Lost Generation’, 1959-60 became the turning point and dividing line between the old ‘high culture’ of Eisenhower’s America and the beginning outlines of a new ‘mass culture’, as defined by the three influential writers and their acolytes. J.D. Salinger died recently (Jan 29, 2010) at the age of 91. His passing put our college period in perspective. As native born American kids were experiencing the dawn of their new self-absorbed adolescence, and breaking away from the conformities of the Cold War, we were just becoming serious warriors in the Cold War. The ‘Catcher in the Rye’ never resonated with us, for it was an alien world to us, and it marked the beginning of the existential narcissism of American youth. We understood Hemingway, somewhat, for he made unhappiness and angst seem beautiful. Salinger made unhappiness a virtue in its own right. These were the beginnings new age of self-absorption Though the Ukrainian cultural center was located at the edge of Greenwich Village, and we passed by many of the bohemians, on a daily basis, who were in the vanguard of these changes, we were largely oblivious to these cultural trends, as we were not yet in college and simply did not take note. When we finally got to familiarize ourselves with this ‘literature’ and cultural ideas, most of us mocked what appeared to us as random incoherent rantings of a strange cult of disaffected existentialists who shared little of our perspectives and struggles and yearnings of freedom from Soviet oppression. These were the avant garde of a new narcissistic form of expression – the focus on the self, and on one’s noble sufferings of life’s trivial miseries, as imagined by the beat culture. For us, the lovably goofy Maynard G. Krebs of the TV show Dobie Gillis characterized our view of the ‘beatnik’ generation. Our view of this sort of angst-driven poetry could be captured in one humorous limerick that was composed to mock the essence and core of this movement and its philosophy: “Hickory, dickory dock, The mouse ran round the clock The clock struck twelve… And killed the poor bastard”

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This focus on the ‘self’ was the opposite of our European Plast training of God, duty, honor, country and sacrifice. We unconsciously contrasted the real sufferings of our parents with the perpetual angst-ridden, childish whining of the ‘beatniks’, and their pathetic, self-absorbed attempts to discover meaning in their vacuous lives. Consolidation

It’s hard to describe Roman and his character to someone who’s never met him. You can can glean something from the progression of photos from youth to maturity – but it doesn’t tell you what he was made of and how he presented himself . One looks for equivalent familiar characters from the movies or the stage to provide an image. He was a charismatic ‘character’, known to us as “Hairyman” and/or “Zhulik” (rascal). By nature, he was a combination of

Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the actor W.C Fields, Dickens’s good-natured MaCawber (as played by W.C. Fields), with the voice and bearing of ‘Smokey the Bear’. As a professional journalist, he had the wit, sarcasm, cynicism and political insights of H.L. Mencken. His outward , somewhat brusque personality was often at odds with his inner, gentler, nature. His personality was much more layered and complex than first impressions would suggest. Roman was a man of contradictory impulses- of gentle judiciousness and occasional brutal irrationality; of responsibility and careless freedom; ambivalence and decisiveness. He was carefree, jovial, undisciplined and boisterous. But at times, especially later in life, he was contemplative, with a solitary, unreachable core. In his mature years, his whole being reflected a ruined splendor; of ideals and dreams that went awry – of missions and goals unfulfilled. He was a classical cynic – an idealist who was mugged by reality. We knew him before Vietnam had changed him; before the contradictions set in and were accentuated daily as part of his shadowy world and his work. He served two masters: the United States and his ideal vision of a free Ukraine. He was to become disillusioned by both. We knew him at a time when we were all beginning to ‘molt’ and began to differentiate as adults - from a bunch of uniformly molded but still socially awkward teenage Boy Scouts (‘Plastuny’) into individuals with unique personalities. And as we differentiated, and were shaped by a sequence of life’s experiences and unexpected twists and turns, we started meandering on separate paths towards whatever destinations that fate had charted for us. Roman, like the rest of us, lived through the ambiguities and contradictions of our émigré society, straddling both the old world values and customs of our parents, with all the resentments, animosities and political factions of pre-war Ukraine. He was not raised in the kind of ultra-patriotic setting that many of us were. His father , Stefan Kupchinsky, died of shrapnel wounds in an Allied bombing raid on Vienna, shielding his months-old son Roman in his arms. His foster father, Julian Savchak, whom his mother, Maria (Wozna) met in one of the DP (Displaced Persons) refugee camps set up in Landeck,

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Austria and in Germany by the Allies after the war, was a young lawyer by training, who was never especially active in émigré politics, and chose to lead a quiet, happy domestic life. So, Roman’s patriotic awakening took a bit longer, and it happened during his Plast years, in association with us. Unlike us, however, who went into various professions, while demonstrating and campaigning as part-time anti-Soviet activists, Roman made the struggle for Ukraine’s independence his profession. He stepped into the world of US power, politics and national interest, while we agitated and demonstrated at the periphery of events. His conception as a ‘cold warrior’ began with the patriotic training that he received in his formative years in Plast. He soon found that U.S. politics were often not in concordance with his ideas for a strategy for Ukraine’s liberation. His colleagues often misunderstood the path he took as part of his work. It was often indirect and opaque to most. They began to think that his politics were soft, and he was betraying his ideals and his native Ukraine. Nothing could be further from the truth. As ‘novaky’ in Plast, we lived a schizophrenic life. During the week we watched the ‘Davy Crockett’ TV series in the 1950’s, along with a slew of cowboy and Indian films – the ‘Lone Ranger’ and the ‘Cisco Kid’ on our black and white TV’s. ‘Superman’ was also big then. We wore our coonskin caps; tied sheets around our shoulders and jumped off of high steps and garbage cans emulating Superman; and wore holsters with pistols and played cowboys and Indians. No one wanted to be an Indian in the decades before political correctness. We played ‘stoop ball’ and ‘stick ball’ in the streets, and used the sewer covers as bases, while dodging in between the traffic of a steady stream of cars on the streets of Brooklyn, Bronx and Manhattan. We became either Brooklyn Dodgers, Giants or Yankees baseball fans, and watched the football NY Giants play in the NFL Championship game in 1959, without quite understanding the rules of the game – as if we were watching a cricket match on the frozen turf of the stadium. After that famous game, we’d roll up newspapers, tied them with a string, and played football in the streets of NY city. On weekends, we went to Ukrainian school and Plast meetings, and learned about the Knyiazhi, Kozaky, Turks and Tatars. We went camping and hiking, dreaming that we

were the knights (knyiazi) who fought off the nomadic hordes of the forests and steppes, whether it was the ‘Derevliany’, ‘Sivertsi’, Severyiany, ‘Pechenihy’ or the Mongols. We learned to play soccer and volleyball and competed in races and improved our scouting skills. These were our two very different worlds. Soon they would collide over Vietnam. As ‘yunaky’ Roman’s summers were spent at a series of Plast camps at Vovcha Tropa (East Chatham, NY) named either after our Ukrainian heroes, historical places and momentous events, like “Sich” (1956); “Staleva Sotnyia” (1957); “Zahin Zavzhatsiv” (1958); “Baturyn” (1959). This is where, as teenagers, we learned that whenever we thought we had surpassed our physical and emotional limits - they were routinely exceeded every succeeding day and each week of

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each camp. These were designed to be Spartan training camps, run by former members of the Ukrainian underground movement – heroes and survivors of UPA, the ‘Diviziyia’ and OUN. Their job was to prepare us for the liberation of Ukraine. This time period of our youthful training was less than a decade after our parents had emigrated from Ukraine to America, and only a few years after Roman Shukhevych, the leader of UPA was killed in 1953 by the NKVD. The Hungarian revolution exploded in 1956, and our Ukrainian community rekindled its hopes of reclaiming Ukraine. The ‘resistance’ was still fresh on the minds of many of our parents. The same sort of training was underway at other Ukrainian youth camps, such as SUM (Spilka Ukrayinskoyi Molodi) and ODUM (Orhanizatsiya Demokratychnoyi Ukrayinskoyi Molodi) camps. There’s no question that after each camp, we came away with an immensely increased sense of achievement and confidence in our abilities to withstand any hardship or crisis.

Surviving one of these month-long, quasi-Marine training camp ordeals was the fastest way of converting a boy into a man. It also helped us to survive the mean streets of lower Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn, where we lived, as we daily navigated several different neighborhoods controlled by various black and Puerto Rican gang groups on our way to our Plast domivka or Ukrainian school. Our daily lives were not those portrayed in the musical ‘West Side Story’ – it was more a simple matter of surviving the gauntlet of

insults, harassment and provocations as we walked the 10 or so blocks to our schools. We ‘survived’ the perpetual harassments and extreme conditions imposed by our scout leaders at those camps, whose job it was to push us beyond our limits and teach us self-sufficiency. It was that training which was the most important factor in our subsequent successes in life. When you look at Roman’s Plast pictures and compare them with his few Vietnam photos – you can see the same tough demeanor. Plast had

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prepared him for the chaos and difficulties of basic training and later Vietnam. I corresponded with Roman when he was in basic training at Fort Benning in 1967, and asked how it compared with his Plast training. He acknowledged that it was tough at Fort Benning but that his Plast years had prepared him to cope with the harassment and discomfort – especially in Officer Candidate School, and he had an easier time of it than many of the other recruits he trained with, since about 40% dropped out. So even Roman, who was not an exemplary Plastun – he loved fun too much for that, and did not care for the mindless militarism of the scouts – was better prepared for his leadership role in the US Army because of his Plast training. Our training fell under a traditional prescribed formula for a middle class European upbringing. We all dutifully attended Ukrainian school on Saturday; suffered through piano lessons, ballet or folk dancing; Plast ‘skhodyny’; engagement in a variety of sports – either soccer or volleyball with a Ukrainian sports clubs, as well as track; and attended an endless series of commemorative patriotic celebrations of largely obscure Ukrainian historical events. These were usually scheduled after church services, on Sunday afternoons– seemingly just about every other Sunday of the year. We accumulated life-long friends in our world – kids with the same backgrounds, whom we teamed up with to play soccer, volleyball; attend scout camps and hitchhike throughout the East Coast during our summers away from home. At these camps, Yurij Denysenko, Andriy Vytvytsky, Roman and I became close friends and the nucleus of what was to become our Chornomorska Zaloha “Hamaliyia”. Roman would travel from Brooklyn at least twice a week by subway from his Brooklyn home in Flatbush to our ‘Plast domivka’ in Manhattan on the corner of 9th street and Second avenue – adjacent to the Ukrainian National Home and ‘Lys Mykyta’ our Ukrainian ‘korchma’. This was ‘downtown’ – our little world several blocks from the famous ‘Greenwich Village’. I lived in the ‘projects’ on Houston Street and Ave D, so we’d walk together from Plast to his train station on Houston Street and Ave A, since it was on my way home. For two years, before my family moved to Astoria, and I had to take a different train home, we walked the 10 blocks slowly to the subway stop and talked about everything that teenage boys talked about, but also about politics and the state of the world. He was in Brooklyn Tech and I went to Stuyvesant HS. He played soccer and I played soccer and ran on the track team. We were in the same kurin’, but he was ‘kurriney’ by acclamation, and I was elected ‘suddyia’. We formed a close bond during those two teenage years as we were growing up, and he helped me work through my problems almost an older with sound advice. During those walks and talks, Romko was usually serious. He became my role model – almost an older brother, and he worked with me to overcome my shyness and timidity, and took me under his wing at a time when I needed it most. This was the thoughtful and serious side of Roman that few people saw or knew about. He was self-assured and a risk-taker – and I was just beginning to develop my own character, emerging from my cocoon. He loved his mother, but rarely spoke of his stepfather, Mr Savchak, though he never complained about him, either. It was as if he didn’t exist. Years later, when Roman got to know my father, because of his long and close association before and during WWII with the

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founders of Prolog – Lebed, Prokop, Chaikivski, Lopatynskiy – all leaders of the underground, Roman would tell me often that he loved my father –he liked him the best of that whole crowd of patriots for the honest, patriotic fiery and headstrong person that he was. What I didn’t know, till much later, was that my dad took Roman under his wing during Roman’s early Prolog days, and they had a lasting personal and professional relationship till the end. Romko was a natural, but reluctant leader – he didn’t like telling people how to behave or act, especially since he saw himself as a rebel. He had the one essential quality of leadership, though, - he was bold and daring – and that quality came out ever so often, just as it was needed to move forward. He didn’t get angry often, but you could easily tell when he was he pissed or fed up with some inane action. He became gruff then and swung into action and took control. “Cut the crap” was his favorite exclamation when he got fed up. We knew it was time to shut up because when he got serious – it was time to make a decision and move forward. You can see that look in the photo from Vietnam – the ‘stop the bullshit’ look that I well remember. Generally, he preferred staying in the background, behind the scenes – it suited his personality, and that personality was compatible with what ultimately became his professional calling. We were all part of the formation of a new Plast ‘yunatsky kurin’, then – the 21st, named in honor of Col Yevhen Konovalets. Throughout the U.S., all the Plast ‘stanytsi’ were growing in leaps and bounds. New York ‘stanytsia’ was no exception, and the two boy’s kurins (3rd, 9th) already were too large to admit 30 new members. At the same time, they also formed a new girls ‘kurin’, the 30th named in honor of Olena Bdzilka (?). They became our sister ‘kurin’, and we grew up alongside each other through our ‘yunak’ years. I got to know Romko better, after he became more prominent when we elected him as our ‘kurinney’, sometime in the fall of 1958, and he served by popular acclaim for twoyears. As ‘kurinney’, he had new responsibilities, and he took some of us under his wing. I considered myself one of his lucky friends. During his tenure as kurinney of 21st kurin (1958-60), we began to meld as a unit – a collective of many different young scouts, in the midst of a ‘rock and roll’ era that clashed with our unique Ukrainian identity. As kids, we didn’t really recognize what the qualities of leadership were then, but we intuitively understood that he was the right guy for that time – he simply stood out. As teenagers, we all matured at different rates – some fell behind – others zoomed out in front, as scholars or athletes or musicians. Romko was the first one in our kurin who shaved – at the age of 12! That’s how he came to be known as ‘Hairy Man’. And he was bigger than most of us puny kids. Early on, this factor alone propelled him to the forefront as a leader - in a kurin of hairless, callow boys, the boy with a beard becomes a prince. We began working towards a set of common goals that were prescribed for us in Olexander Tysovsky’s ‘Zhyttia v Plasti’. This awareness came about just as America began to move along an entirely different cultural path. There was an inevitable clash of cultures and objectives – the Boy Scout Code of Honor, and the Hippie credo. We were also beginning to understand what was at stake in our fight against the USSR, and

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understood that Plast was the training ground for the next generation of warriors in what was understood to be a lifelong struggle. This was the world in which Roman Kupchinsky grew up, along with the rest of us. Plast was the closest experience which allowed us to find respite from the daily pressure and grind of a poor and difficult immigrant existence – this is where we lived our lives, dreamed our dreams and formed our identities. We were thrown in with kids whose parents were in similar circumstances – we were comfortable in a familiar culture- this was our one constant in an unfamiliar world. But, we were envious of our American friends who did have the time to just ‘hang around’ and play stickball in the streets. They seemed to be just goofing off while we were being groomed for some vague mission of national liberation that was to come some day. We grew up at the height of the ‘cold war’, and the beginning of a cultural revolution that affected all of us during and, most prominently, after our college years. It shaped Roman’s world view, while his intensively active Plast years allowed him to hone his leadership skills and prepared him for a momentous event six years later, when he was drafted in the US Army to fight in Vietnam. But Vietnam was the event that was the turning point to a radically different direction of his world view and his subsequent life and commitment to Ukraine. Chornomorskiy Collegium As far as I know, Roman was the only professional ‘cold warrior’ working in our midst – amongst thousands of amateur ad hoc demonstrators and anti-Soviet human rights ‘activists’. Regrettably, he was first among our small original ‘band of brothers’ to pass away. But, nearly fifty years ago, in 1961, entirely inadvertently, he changed the course of our history – he organized us as the first Chornomorska ‘zaloha’, “Hamaliyia”, on the east coast, in New York City. This turned out to be a most important act because it is that zaloha which forms the nucleus of our ‘kurin’ today, and has led its activities for the past 40 years. It’s hard to imagine what our Chornomorskiy kurin would look like today without the existence of that zaloha. Ultimately Romko's biggest contribution to Plast was that he ventured out on a bold initiative in the summer of 1961 – while still only a 16-year old yunak, and to hitch-hike alone through Detroit, on his way to Alaska. This was to be his trademark and sign of his leadership skills - the willingness to take risks and the search for adventure and new horizons. This trip was his Jack Kerouac “On the Road” adventure. It was on this trip that fate led him through the “Dibrova” Plast camp near Detroit. It was there that he met a group of Chornomortsi and Chornomorski Khvyli – and the rest is history. “Hairyman” came back from his adventures on the way to Alaska raving about how 'cool' the Detroit zaloha was, and started recruiting us to join the CHMs. Some of us were already exposed to other kureni – we had spent our entire summers traveling to various tabory around the US, each summer since 1960 - basically renting out our services as counselors (‘bratchyky’ or ‘vykhovnyky’), or as workers at each of the camps – whether ‘Dibrova’(Detroit), ‘Bobrivka’(Hartford), ‘Vovcha Tropa’(New York), ‘Zeleney Klen’(Cleveland) or ‘Novey Sokil’(Buffalo). This was how we spent our summers, and where we met hundreds of interesting Ukrainians from all the big cities and small towns

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in The US. But they weren’t just Ukrainians – they were part of a dedicated nationalistic youth organization with a noble history in western Ukraine. These were youths who were committed to our unique set of ideals developed as part of the world scouting movement initiated by Lord Baden-Powell in 1903, and began in western Ukraine in 1911. We were at a threshold – soon our yunatstvo would be ending as we graduated from high school and went onto college. We were all looking for a ‘starsho-plastunskiy kurin’. There were many very active and acceptable ‘starshoplastunski’ kureni then – Burlaky, Vovkolaky, Chota Krylati, Lisovi Chorty, Khmel’nychenky, Pobratymy, Shiromantsi, etc. Everyone had their own noble origins, history, traditions, unique characters and attitude – they were all organized by men who were involved in Ukraine’s historic struggles for freedom, each with their own approaches and interests. They all swaggered around our ‘zustrichi’ and tabory, trying to impress one another, and competed fiercely with each other to attract us, the next generation of recruits. But, there were no Chornomortsi that we knew of at that time, except for one – “Yontek” (Orest Havryliuk). Before Vietnam, Romko was our natural leader in New York City, simply because he took the initiative to set a different course. He set the tone for our zaloha – after all, he created it, and we were the products of his personae. He personally recruited each of us – the original group of ‘kandydaty’. He had to sell us, because we were all creatures of habit, reinforced by the discipline of our parents and the predetermined path that we had set on, simply by being the best ‘plastuny’ possible. We were over-achievers - all hard-working novatski and yunatski vykhovnyky;, we worked in different posts in our stanytsia; several of us were ‘Skoby’, and some were members of the ‘Orlyney Kruh’. We were ‘Joe Plastuny’ and loved the organization – its quasi-military discipline; its noble history of resisting against Polish occupation, and the leaders it trained to fight in UPA. Romko wasn’t quite on the same ‘career track’ with respect to Plast that we were. He loved Plast, and its camaraderie; the ‘Plast tabory’ and campfires - but he didn’t like the discipline, and often rebelled in many different ways. He was irreverent and irascible when it came to adhering to conventional wisdom and authority. Why he chose us, conventional ‘by-the-book’ plastuny to join him in a new adventure; an uncharted path, is still a mystery to me. Perhaps he sensed that beneath the straight arrow corporate exterior, each of us had a spark of adventure and unconventional yearnings to be free of the conformity of the 1950’s. In a way, joining ‘Chornomortsi’ was our rebellion against family and conformity to the norms of our age. We chose a different path for rebelling against the ‘system’. It was relatively benign and accommodated our deep devotion to Ukraine and Plast. Yuriy Denysenko, Andriy Vyvytskiy and I worked very closely together, as we were in training to become “bratchyky”. We went through our first ‘vyshkil’ at ‘Vovcha Tropa’ in the last week of June, 1960 – just before the tabory began. You couldn’t become a counselor without a 1-week training camp. It was demanding, and the staff scored us on every aspect of countless requirements throughout the week. The three of us did very well, and ended up in the top 15 percent of the class of nearly 50 aspirants. Orest Havryliuk was the head of what was then known as the “Orlynney Kruh” (Circle of Eagles) which was reserved for the top achievers, who were called ‘Siri Orly’(Grey Eagles). He saw our scores and encouraged us to apply. There were additional stringent

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requirements that were added before we could become members, that would take nearly another year to fulfill. Yontek was a Chornomorets, but he was one of those fellows from the ‘old school’ – he was very stern disciplinarian, officious, and demanding. We all understood that he held to the highest ideals of scouting and chivalry and, more importantly, he lived those ideals in his everyday life – and he was respected for that. He was a medical doctor in the US Army, who spent two tours in Vietnam and retired as a colonel. But at that time we were all looking elsewhere. In those days, we had certain images of sailors – and Yontek did not fit that image. Nevertheless, we became full members of Orlynney Kruh the following year, and lectured at the Vyshkoly in 1961, 1962, and 1963 , while candidates to Chornomortsi. And when Yontek found out that we were going to join his kurin, he became even more demanding of us and our time. He recruited us to take over a number of novatskiy camps in the ensuing years. He was one of Plast’s many ‘characters’ who made it the organization that we all loved, and at For us, every summer starting in 1960 through 1965, was a Jack Kerouac experience, as we hitchhiked all over the East Coast, visiting every Ukrainian resort, every relative and Plast camp – from Detroit to Cleveland, Toronto to Buffalo, New York to Hartford, and our ‘home base – East Chatham, NY. We started the summer in our typical style, late June, soon after the college semester ended. We packed our Army surplus rucksacks and each had a duffle bag containing a sleeping bag, shovel, axe and mess kit – for we had no idea where we’d end up, or where we’d have to sleep. Our journey always began at the Plast domivka, where we’d gather and organize the trip. We’d either head for Grand Central Station (our Voksal) and take the train to Chatham – which cost about 5 dollars in 1960. Or, we’d take the Lexington Ave subway line all the way to the end of the line to Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. There, Wall Street and Madison Avenue executives had parked their cars for their final trip home to Westchester County and beyond. This was the starting point for most of our trips north when we hitchhiked rides to our various destinations. We were all one year away from becoming starshi plastuny, and most of us had vowed to stay in our kurin to compete at the big Yuveleyna Plastova Zustrich (YuPZ) in August, 1962, celebrating 50 years of Plast at ‘Vovcha Tropa. Though most of us were destined to join the ‘Chota Krylati’ kurin, en masse, it seemed that we had no choice once Romko made up his mind. The stage was set, and our destiny was determined by that one visit. Roman was a rebel, but he was a rebel with a cause. He didn’t like the militarism and authoritarian structure of Plast, but he loved Plast – the camaraderie, the dedication and its noble history, so he started looking for a place for a place that better suited his personality after he moved from the boy scouts (yunaky) to the next level of ‘Starshiy Plastuny’. He wanted to find a kurin, preferably one without the rigor that he experienced in his yunak years. He knew all the starsho-plastunski kureni in New York – ‘Chorty’, ‘Krylati’, “Burlaky”, ‘Chervona Kalyna’, ‘Siromantsi’, etc. It was from their ranks that our scout masters and leaders emerged. They were stern men and women, who suffered through the hardships of war and establishing new lives in America. We didn’t realize that they had a human and humorous side to them – they never showed that side to us - we just knew them as tyrants and severe taskmasters. Our parents were also stern, so we

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were looking for something different, something more appealing, something less conventional and with more sparkle. Imperceptibly, we were slowly being influenced by the culture of the outside world, but we were not ready to jump over to the American side – we looking simply for a more exhuberant and modern version of Plast –one that was less anchored in the rigid strictures of the past. Roman was the one to create that alternative reality when he came back from his cross-country, hitchhiking trip to Alaska in the summer of 1961– his personal Jack Kerouac ‘On the Road’ moment. Roman found the ‘kurin’ he was looking for on the way to Alaska and came back raving about this cool group of ‘Chornomortsi’ that he had met in Detroit. Now, Roman was a cynic from childhood, and he never exaggerated or puffed up anyone – on the contrary, few individuals lived up to his standards. So when he came back raving about this new Plast ‘kurin’ – “Chornomortsi”, everyone took notice, for it was not like Roman to laud these guys as if they were the finest fellows on earth. We listened, as he went on with his laudatory exaltations, to the point that we began to believe they were superhumans. One of the many young fellows that he had met on his trip was Yuriy Boychuk, who was kurinney in 1961 (shown together in photo from 1963) .

But there were only a few Chornomortsi on the east coast, and except for Slavko Luchkan (‘Vykhor’) who was very active at ‘Bobrivka’ and Orest Havryliuk (‘Yontek’) who was very active in Plast’s “Orlyney Kruh”, we didn’t get to see the core of ‘Chornomortsi’ who were located in Buffalo, Rochester, Toronto and Detroit. Who were these fabulous fellows? After all, it made sense for them to evolve there - that’s where the

Great Lakes were and big-time sailing. It took a while, but slowly a core group began to form around Roman - Yuri Kuzmych, Bohdan Germak and Zenon Stakhiv (21st kurin), Yuri Denysenko and Andriy Vytvytsky (3rd kurin') and Bohdan Terlecky (9th kurin). Roman kept after us, and we gathered informally in the spring of 1961, and began discussing our plans for that summer. We decided to serve as counselors at Bobrivka, and there we met Slavko Luchkan, who was the commandant of the boy scout camp and also a candidate to the Chornomorskiy kurin. Kupchinsky, Stakhiv, and Vytvytsky were impressed by Luchkan’s attitude, leadership and organization, and that turned the tide for us. This was also the camp where Roman first met Markian’s future godfather – Miroslav Smorodsky- but under rather antagonistic circumstances, to be discussed later. After the summer of 1961, we met Nestor Kolcio (‘Nelko’), who had moved to New York City, and began to meet more frequently. Nelko, had a small studio apartment on the lower east side was joined by Zenko Onufryk (“Rekin”) who lived in Newark. The foundations for a new zaloha were set. We decided not to wait till after YuPZ (Yuveleyna Plastova Zustrich) to form our zaloha, and we decided to make our official entry as 'kandydaty' to CHM during the winter of 1961-62. Most of us attended our first Rada in Detroit, Feb, 1962, where we became 'kalabannyky', and 'Hak' became kurinney. That was followed

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with the summer Zustrich at Hunter in the summer of 1962, where most of us first met Erko Palydovych . We all participated in YuPZ in August, 1962 at Vovcha at as ‘Chornomortsi’, where we participated in all the sports events, and won both competitions: track and field and volleyball. Yurij Boychuk and Ostap Macielinski took two medals in the high jump; Zenon Stakhiv and Yurij Denysenko took two medals in cross country and Zen Stakhiv won the 100m and took third in the long jump. This was perhaps the largest gathering of Plastuny in the US – ever, as nearly 2,000 scouts from Canada and the central US appeared for this huge jamboree. Romko’s crowning moment came on Dec 25, 1962, when our Zaloha 'Hamalia' was officially designated as a full Chornomorska Zaloha, and “Hairyman” was elected our first Sternovey. He wasn’t ‘Zhulik’ yet, for that is a pseudonym that is bestowed on you by the senior ‘Chornomortsi’ when you become a full member – but they recognized something about “Hairyman’s” character that we didn’t yet – that he was a unique character – a rascal – a ‘Zhulik’. Ultimately, it was Romko's initiative, passion and thinking 'outside the box', questioning conventional wisdom and following his own drummer that set the rest of us on a journey that few of us have regretted. Were it not for him, our 'band of brothers' might not have survived the decades since that momentous decision. The events that he set in motion and the friends that have gathered and grown around that nucleus have lasted for fifty years, and the brotherhood has grown and endured. We were young, brash, exhuberant, passionate, patriotic and full of ‘vim and vigah’, as President Kennedy liked to say. We wanted to show that we were the ‘best and brightest’ of the new Kennedy generation – at least in our little world of Plast - and that we were the worthy successors to the legends that began Chornomortsi in 1927. We wanted to link the beginnings of our new Zaloha to Ukraine’s naval history. It didn’t take long to name our zaloha after a fictitious sea-faring kozak made famous by Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko. Shevchenko got inspiration for his poem on a stormy voyage from st. Petersburg to Stockholm in 1841. From 1962 – 1982, our zaloha was seen everywhere where there was a Plast tabir or stanytsia on the east coast of the US. We organized “Sviata Vesny”, track meets and countless volleyball tournaments. We took command of and organized scores of plastovi tabory at Vovcha Tropa, Bobrivka, Zeleney Yar and (Buffalo). We ran our annual Chornomorski Vodni Tabory at Stillwater Reservoir, Triangle Lake, Indian Lake and Cranberry Lake. Our work began in earnest in late 1961 with 6 core members: Romko Kupchinsky, Yuriy Kuzhmych, Bohdan Terlecky, Andriy Vytvytsky, Yuriy Denysenko and Zenko Stakhiv. The following year, in September 1962, right after the 50th anniversary of Plast (Yuveleyna Plastova Zustrich) our group expanded by several more members: Adrian Kerod, Borys Levytskiy, Bohdan Germak and Todio Kostiuk, followed by Borys Stakhiv, Oles Popovich, Bohdan Mycak and Roman Terlecky.

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We were still kandydaty to our Chornomorskiy kurin, for it would take a few years of work to demonstrate that we were worthy of the title “Chornomorets”, but we needed to formally establish a new zaloha for the New York metropolitan area,, with our own komanda. We were aware that each ‘Chornomorets’ had to ultimately select his own ‘psevdo’ or nickname once he became a full member, but we thought it would be a great idea if we had our own ‘psevda’ within our zaloha. Someone had the idea to name us after the series of rapids in the Dnipro R. These were the original nine rapids that the Kozaky had to portage on their way to their famous raids along the Turkish coasts of the Black Sea. The first Kozak fort, ‘Kodak’ was

strategically situated at the head of this series of rapids, at the confluence of the tributary rivers Sura from the west and Samara from the east and the mighty Dnipro R. For a while we were quite serious about this idea – each one of us would assume one of the names of the rapids. But, we realized that they were so clumsy to pronounce, that we soon discarded the idea. We just couldn’t see ourselves referring to each other as either “Kodakskiy Porih” (rapids) or Surskiy, Lokhanskiy, Dzvonetskiy, Nenasytets, Lyshney or Vol’ney Porih. Roman, of course, was already working on his Chornomorske ‘psevdo’, and he wasn’t going to be named after some silly ‘porih’. No, he didn’t want to be referred to as either “Hairyman” or Romko – he wanted to be known as “Zhulik”. Roman and I worked together as Plast counselors, as did many of our Chornomorskiy compatriots. We led a scout group for a year in NYC in 1964-65 that was notable for the fact that there were two young budding scholars and future political activists in that group – Alexander Motyl and Adrian Karatnycky. When Roman came back after Vietnam, he recruited those two college students to work with him at Prolog. Over the years we mentored numerous young Ukrainian students and activists, but through divergent paths. His was through direct political activism; mine was through organizing and running many scout camps, where hundreds of young boys and girls were trained to become self-reliant and active citizens and proud Ukrainians. Whatever path we undertook, they all became active in one way or another in our cause.

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Romko and I were sitting on a train to Detroit, Feb 1964 – we were going to our second ‘zymova zustrich’. The rest of the group rented a large car, piled in and drove all night to Detroit – on the way back, a snowstorm hit them, and it was an adventure getting back. In those years, our kurin’ formally met twice: once in the summer for a formal ‘Rada’, and then again in the winter for a ‘zustrich’ – which was more of a friendly gathering, where we also conducted business. In June of 1962, we attended our first Rada officially as ‘kandydaty’ to Chornomortsi, at Hunter, NY, at Severyn Palydovych’s summer place.

During that weekend, we all pitched to help a bit with the building of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which was under construction – it was unique in that it was being built to replicate the traditional Carpathian Hutsul style – all wood and cedar. Mainly, our job was clean up the rubble and debris that had accumulated around the church, so that we could attend Sunday morning Mass the next day. At that Rada, was where I first met all those interesting characters from Detroit that Romko had enthralled us with. (photo, 1963: Andriy Latyszewski, Zenon Stakhiv, Roman). Indeed, they were much different from the serious plastuny from New York, but we were meeting them in a friendlier setting – we got to see their human side. Soon after, however, when it came to organizing and leading Plast summer camps, we saw that they too were made of stern stuff – you don’t sail across the Great Lakes without being a tough guy.

Anyway, we’re on our way to Detroit, sitting in civilian clothes, and Roman says let’s make believe we’re Russian exchange students. “Why”, I asked.? He said that girls are more intrigued with foreigners, and people are more likely to buy us drinks. Sure enough, people who heard us speak in Ukrainian came up and asked where were from. “Soviyet Oonion” was Roman’s reply, in a heavy Russian accent. “Ve arr stadee at Kaloombia Ooniversity” “Oh, how interesting! – Are you exchange students”? “Yes, ve are staddying Amerikan political seestems, preeparation for deeplomateec karyeer”. “Yevgeni (pointing to me), khi eez staadying heestory and political science – I am steadying zhurnalism”. It went on like this for hours, and I got better at it, since I had to play along, but Roman did most of the talking –it was hard enough keeping a straight face. We had free drinks and dinner on our way to Detroit. Maybe Roman didn’t know at that time, that this was a prelude to his ultimate career, but he seemed to like this small deception, and playing this role – he was a natural. It is from such small, inadvertent beginnings that careers are sometimes built.

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As kandydaty, and later full members of Chornomortsi, we were all required to attend the summer sea-scout training camps – where we learned the basics of canoeing, sailing, astronomy, navigation, and many other typical scouting skills. The early camps that we attended in 1963 and 1964 happened to be near ‘Bobrivka’, located at an American Boy Scout camp on “Triangle Lake”. In those days, while the Detroit zalaoha had a great deal of ewquipment, and large motorboats and sailboats, the east coast group was just emerging. We had very little equipment, and had to rent the canoes. So we spent most of the camp listening to lectures from our esteemed elders (Yaro Hladkiy, Nestor Kolcio, Mirko Pylyshenko, who was ‘kapitan’ and Zenon Onufryk). Slavko Luchkan, on the other hand, was engaged in building a huge mast, with cross-pieces for various nautical flags. Most of the male camp was engaged in digging a huge pit near the shoreline, mostly with the small army-type folding shovels. It took a week to dig the pit, and raise the 50-foot mast. And Roman spent a lot of his time in that pit (see photo).

Our camp was also meagerly supplied with food. It seems that the older Chornomortsi lacked basic organizational skills – consistent with their carefree mariner attitudes that attracted Roman. We had very little to eat, when our ‘kapitan’ Pylyshenko showed up on Sunday evening with what we were promised was real food. For supper that night we had rye bread, kovbasa, chesnyk (garlic) and tsybulia (scallions). And that was it for breakfeast and lunch the next day. So, we had to reorganize and send out a provisioning party to the supermarket in Colebrook, Connecticut to survive two more weeks of camp. To compensate, we’d sneak out of camp after about 2am, and pile into the one car we had – Todio Kostiuk’s new Rambler, and drive to the diner in N. Colebrook. We’d be able to squeeze in about 10 guys each time – till Todio drove into a ditch and we couldn’t get the car out. After that, it was back to ‘mamalyga’ for the rest of the camp. Roman loved to sing – unfortunately he sang in a monotone that resembled the voice – if you can imagine it- of a cross between Smokey the Bear and Bullwinkle the moose. Worse, he had a tin ear, which had been stomped by an elephant. His favorite songs were “Matrosyky” and “Chornomorets Mamochko”. He was hopeless, but he loved the campfire songs, and the ‘hootenannies’ we used to organize at the New York Plast stanytsia in the early 1960’s. Folk songs and hootenannies were the rage at college campuses then - we just brought them to Plast. Yurij Denysenko, Adrian Kerod and I played guitar, but the most talented guitar player and singer was ‘Mukha’ Cisyk, older sister of Kvitka. We’d join forces, playing different songs; sitting in a large circle of

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about 50 yunaky and starshi Plastuny, singing Ukrainian versions of American folk songs. Roman was right there, happily ‘singing’ along with everyone, oblivious to the fact that he couldn’t carry a tune – but it didn’t matter then. Our singing highlight was when our Chornomorskiy group went to Vovcha Tropa for ‘Den’ Plastuna’ in 1964. By

then we had written numerous songs to catchy American tunes. In particular, DeKosta had written several songs ‘Zapliusch Ochi Mylenka’ (to the tune of the Beatles’ ‘Close your Eyes and I’ll Kiss You’), as well as “Khochu Staty Chornomortsem”, which became the song of our Zaloha ‘Hamaliyia’. They had just visited the US, and were the rage of American teenagers. (Photo 1965, Vocha Tropa: Vytvytskiy, Roman and Popovich). It was a memorable vatra – approximately 300 yunaky and yunachky, plus another

200 or so visiting parents. And we came out to sing, with Romko, Yurij Denysenko, Yurij Kuzhmych, Adrian Kerod, Zenko Stakhiv and Romko Kupchynskiy. We were all in our newly acquired Chornomorskiy sweatshirsts and we launched into our converted Beatles songs. The crowd went wild, demanding more. Fortunately, we had a few other original songs then. This was Roman’s big moment – appearing as part of a group singing his favorite songs. We asked only that he lip-sync along with us.

We were all sports-minded; many of us played on high school and college teams and beyond. That was one of the things that bound us together, along with our shared family histories. The photo shows Roman at an USCAK track meet, Grafton, Canada in August, 1965 – he was our shotputter and discus thrower. Playing team sports requires a certain dedication, discipline, focus and persistence. How does

a group of different teenagers get together – what draws them together. A common vision; inspiration and excitement. What keeps them together is a personality that persists beyond the superficial. We were brought together in Plast because our parents believed in their ideals – this was already a unique weeding out process, as only a fraction of the Ukrainian community enlisted their children in Plast. Second, our imaginations were captured by the romanticism of the Chornomortsi, and their long noble history of providing the leadership for UPA and OUN. We believed in and lived those ideals.

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Finally, being an athlete means you’re competitive – that’s what drew us together and kept us together – we were among a group of competitive high-achievers. We were driven to excel and keep up with the leaders. The internal peer pressure was healthy for most of

us. Those who didn’t have the ‘moxie’, or were turned off by the constant macho bravado and competitive spirit simply drifted away. The ones who remained loyal Chornomortsi are stalwarts. To the end, Roman was a Chornomorets and cherished the many years we spent together at camps, track meets and football games. Chornomortsi began a weekend tag football league for the starsho plastunski kureni in NYC. Football was a new an interesting game for those of us who grew up playing the traditional Ukrainian sports of soccer, volleyball, skiing, and track and field. It was an American game that was new to us, but we dove into it with our usual reckless abandon. First, we simply organized games amongst ourselves. Then, we enlisted the other kureni: Lisovi Chorty, Chervona Kalyna, Chota Krylati, Khmel’nychenky and Chrestonostsi and formed a league and played for many years – through the 1980’s. The 1960’s comprised the high point of Plast – the greatest membership and the most activity. These were the ‘glory years of Plast, and we thought the ‘golden age’ would last forever. We had the smallest team, but it was the fastest and most skilled. Roman, was our biggest player at about 180 lbs, while most of us were in the 150-160lb range. The only one of us who

actually played football in high school was Andriy Vytvytsky, and understood the nuances of the game. He was joined in a core group by Oleh Kolodiy, Todio Kostiuk, Zen Stakhiv, Adrian Kerod, Bohdan Germak and Oles Popovich. Yurko Kuzhmych and Ihor Terlecki were our biggest guys, but they weren’t athletes and rarely showed up for the games. Most teams had at least 5 players at 180 or above – we just ran around them (photo, NY Central Park, 1966). Over the years that we played our Saturday games in Central Park, NY – we never lost a game. As the games became more serious and rougher, we got new and bigger players – Boris

Stakhiv and Ihor Zalucky joined as kandydaty, and immediately made an impact. But

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Roman was always the anchor man of a team that mastered the new and complex American game.

We were engaged in many other formal sporting events outside of our high school and later college teams. We played for various Ukrainian clubs – ‘Chornomorska Sitch, Karpatskiy Leschetarskiy Kliub, Tryzub, and Ukrayinskiy Sportovey Kliub. There were annual Ukrainian championships of all the Club teams from all the US and Canadian cities. These were high level sporting events, featuring semi-pro level soccer clubs and college level volleyball and track. (Photo shows our small team of Chornomortsi, which won second place in the men’s division -

1965USCAK, with the help of Roman’s shotput and discus places. ) We were constantly competing in many different tournaments all over the eastern US _ Chicago, Cleveland, Rochester, Detroit, Toronto. We competed at all the scout camps, and organized track and volleyball teams and trained at Chornomorskiy scout camps, taking a team of over 30 boys and girls directly to the championship meets. Roman was a soccer player at Brooklyn Tech high school and shot-putter, and occasionally a discus thrower. He’d join us at those meets. It’s curious, but not surprising how many of our friends and acquaintances that we spent

our summers with during the early years, intersected our lives in later years, either professionally or because we were thrown together working on other causes. One of the more amusing and wholly unexpected coincidences linked Myron Smorodskiy, Markian’s godfather, with Romko Kupchinsky in the year 1962. Neither of them knew each other, and they first met under less than favorable circumstances. Myron was a scout

counselor at Bobrivka in 1960 (kneeling right, with clipboard), while still an older yunak. Once we became Chornomorskiy ‘kandydaty’, Slavko Luchkan, who was commandant of the yunak camp at Bobrivka in 1962, tried to recruit as many of us as possible to serve at the Bobrivka camps. Roman became one of his bulavni, while Andriy Vytvytsky and I took charge of the ‘novatskiy’ camp. In those

years, as part of our ‘commando’ training, it was acceptable to raid other scout camps,

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and try to steal something valuable – some icon or token to show that you were able to sneak in and retrieve this item – a flag, a bugle, the camp’s information board, or even walk away with the latrine! We trained our yunaky to stand guard – a ‘stiyka’- throughout the night, in 3 or 4 hour shifts, stationed strategically around the camp, but hidden in the woods. For the most part this was simple quasi-military training to demonstrate the need for vigilance. Each night, just as in the military, there was a

different password, so that the campers and counselors would be able to move about freely. The yunaky, most of whom were 12-14 years old, were naturally afraid of the night – the unfamiliar sounds of little rodents scurrying about in the dark, of rustling trees and falling branches on dark, moonless nights – everything was a potential threat. And the counselors often scared them with stories of wolves and ghosts. (photo, 1962 Bobrivka: Chornomortsi – Stakhiv, Havryliuk, Roman, Vytvytsky, Luchkan) By the summer of 1962, Myron Smorodskiy had become a kandydat to the kurin ‘Burlaky’. They had gathered at Vovcha Tropa for the weekend, which was about 45 miles from Bobrivka. I suppose they had little to do, after the campfire was over, and decided to launch a raid on Bobrivka, whose terrain Myron knew well because he spent the summer of 1960 there as a ‘bulavni’. Three of the Burlaky tried to sneak into Roman’s camp, but were detected by the ‘stiyka’, which raised an alarm, and started to scuffle with the Burlaky, who tried to flee. One of the Burlaky, who were already in college, struck the young yunak and injured him. Slavko Luchkan, the ‘komendant’, did not take this lightly – this was a serious breach of the ‘rules of engagement’ for such raids on youngsters. He immediately organized a small group of bulavni, including Vytvytsky and me, and decided to chase after the attackers – whose identity we weren’t sure of at that time –other than they were starshi plastuny, probably from Vovcha Tropa. Luchkan threw a few rifles into the trunk of the car, and decided to pursue with a smaller group in one car – himself, Romko and Boris Pavliuk, who was Slavko’s good friend from Hartford and bunchuzhney of the camp. They were roughly 30 minutes behind the Burlaky. And Slavko Luchkan knew all the shortcuts to Vovcha Tropa, so they gained some time in their chase. (Photo, ‘Bulava’ from left to right: Boris Pavliuk, Slavko Luchkan, Lesyk Havryliuk, Liubko Hayda and Roman Kupchinsky) They arrived at Vovcha Tropa at about 3 am, and scouted around, feeling the engines of the autos that were parked – to detect which ones were still warm – it was easy, because there weren’t many autos in those days. They found one car parked near the old red barn, and guessed that the group was sleeping upstairs in the loft. They didn’t know who the culprits were, but randomly grabbed the most conveniently located of the bunch – who

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happened to be Myron Smorodskiy, and kidnapped him at gunpoint! They stuffed Myron into the trunk of the car, and drove back to Bobrivka. Midway through the trip, Myron complained that he needed to go to the bathroom. They let him out at a gas station, and he alerted the attendant, who called the police. So here you have a situation of a few rough-looking guys with rifles and a kidnap victim. It took a few hours to resolve the situation. Twenty years later, Roman and Myron were thrown together as allies in supporting the dissident movement in Ukraine. And a decade after that, Myron became Markian’s godfather!!

There were many such strange and convoluted episodes in our history – our countless activities and encounters catalyzed such unexpected outcomes. Just about everyone of our group in the early years was involved at least in one of the numerous tabory that were being organized throughout the eastern U.S. (Photo: Bobrivka yunaky, date unknown, showing Roman’s cousins: Popovich and Kyzyk).

Consolidation 1973 was a ‘watershed year’, a turning point for our group. Most of us had reached the age of 28-29 years. It was time to leave our Starsho-plastunskiy kurin’ and join the senyiorski branch of Chornomortsi. These included a few of the original band of Chornomortsi, who formed the kurin with Roman Shukhevych, and fought along side him in UPA. It was a major decision – we certainly weren’t ready to become ‘senyiory’. Some took a pause and didn’t join. But Roman and Zen Stakhiv went immediately – we understood that our time for adolescence had passed – Plast was a serious enterprise, and we were too old to ‘connect’ with most yunaky. We needed to move aside for the younger Chornomortsi, and allow them to move into leadership positions, and show what they could accomplish. Roman had different plans, as he was already engaged in the dissident movement. The first edition of the senyiorsky magazine “Chornomorets’ (June, 1973) writes the following about Roman Kupchinsky: “Roman Kupchinsky vystupyv z promovoyiu na demonstratsiynym vichi ponevolenykh narodivproty Moskovskoho rezhymu v CCCP v oboroni areshtovanykh ta pereshliduvaniyia v Ukrayini. Roman ye odnym z initsiyatoriv novoyi politychnoyi hrupy-pershoyi pislia zakinchennyia II-SvitovoyiViyny. Nedavno bulo opublikovani yoho dvi statti: 1) (na anhliyski movi) “Free Holubtsi and Free Ukraine” v studentskim zhurnali v yakim Vin syl’no krytykuye brak orhanizatsiyi, kontseptsiyi I pliany v aktsiyi

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Vyzvolennyia Ukrayiny; 2) “Suchasnist”, (sichen’, 1973 – v Ukrayinski movi) “Mizhnarodna Presa pro stanovyshche v Ukrayini”. Roman nedavno buv zvil’neney z chlenstva v USP I pravdopodibno oformytsia v UPS.”

In Sept of that year, a tragedy hit our kurin . The Detroit zaloha organized a zustrich in at a yachting club. They were pressing us constantly to have one ‘real’ Chornomorskiy event, where we’d all go sailing together, and experience the thrills of the sea. Some of us o the east coast were all ready to attend, but it was a rainy, stormy weekend. Slavko Luchkan, one of our most respected leaders was a bold and daring fellow, and wanted to fly to Detroit, and lined me up and Erko Palydovych to fly with him in his single engine plane. Slavko was a bold and daring fellow, verging on a daredevil. He loved speed and planes. We knew that this would be a stormy weekend – the point was to fly to Detroit, and spend time on Lake St. Clair and do some real sailing. The entire east coast was going to be rainy, including Detroit. Slavko was not deterred, but we passed. It was the last time we’d see Slavko, for he met with a terrible and tragic end, as his plane crashed

into electric transmission wires as he attempted to turn back from his ill-fated trip. Commitment Roman was the first among our ‘ band of brothers’ drafted to serve in the U.S. Army in 1966. Boris Levycky followed him a year later, and served as a military policeman in Vietnam. Roman arrived at Ft. Jackson, SC for 8 weeks of basic training in May 1966.That was followed by advanced infantry training. His leadership instincts kicked in, and he probably realized that if he was to go to war and fight in Vietnam, that he’d go there as an officer – a leader. He applied for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning was assigned there in November, 1966. He graduated as Second Lieutenant in May 17, 1967 and was shipped to Fort Lewis in Tacoma, WA as training officer for basic training of new conscripts before being shipped out to Vietnam. On the way to Vietnam, he spent a month in Panama for jungle warfare school and arrived in Vietnam on 3 February, 1968, just as the war became hot. He joined the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division as Rifle Platoon Leader. Eventually he was ordered into Khe Sanh on the Laotian border for search and destroy missions and along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) for patrols. At the end of May of 1968, he was assigned as an intelligence officer, and served the rest of his tour in that capacity – no doubt learning many of the necessary skills that would serve him in his future role. He returned home to New York City on New Year’s Day, 1969. Most of his close friends in our Chornomorskiy kurin had graduate school deferments or high lottery numbers, and were exempted from service. In compared Roman wasn’t really

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cut out to be a soldier, and he was a reluctant warrior. But he did his duty, and was dramatically transformed by that harsh experience. Vietnam changed him - from a carefree, chain-smoking and wise-cracking young man just starting out on a professional career, to a newly minted officer and a serious person. In a span of 6 months, he went from a blubbery 240 lbs to a fighting trim 175 lbs when I saw him at graduation at Fort Benning in May, 1967 – just before he shipped out. I owed him a visit that day, since he went AWOL from his post, and unexpectedly showed up at our wedding on Aug 20, 1966, in his uniform. He paid dearly for that indiscretion with a long stint at KP duty. Maybe that’s when he decided he’d become an officer and a gentleman. When Romko returned from Vietnam in Jan, 1969, our NY Chornomorska Zaloha threw him big party. We were genuinely thrilled and happy to have him back alive. Woodstock was still months away, but the Yippies and the anti-war protesters, the SDS, Black Panthers, and the Weathermen had a banner year in 1968 – the year Roman was ‘living dangerously’. Our returning Vietnam warriors came back to a skeptical US and a strong, almost vicious anti-war sentiment. They were not viewed as American heroes by the draft-card burning college youth of America. But we Ukrainians and especially Plastuny, were very much still in the anti-communist camp, for this was a war against the ‘evil empire’ that our parents had prepared us for during their ‘exile’ in the U.S. Ironically, of all the patriots, athletes and ‘gung-ho’ activists that we had in our Zaloha, Romko Kupchinsky and Boris Levitsky seemed the least likely to end up in Vietnam, because they were the least passionate about war and the false heroism of our Plast existence. Most of us tried to avoid Vietnam, either through student deferments, marriage or the lottery, and most of us were lucky to have escaped serving in Vietnam, for by 1968 it became evident to most that this war was not being fought to win. It was conducted in response to the vagaries of political pressure rather than as a focused military campaign. We were all much relieved that Romko came back alive, along with Boris Levitsky, especially after all the bad news we had read in the press about how poorly the war was being directed by our feckless politicians. We didn’t hear much from Roman when he was over there – the only news coming from inquiries of his mother, who loved all of us as her own sons. The Democratic convention in Chicago was a farce, and our society was being torn apart by the radical left. The ‘old order’ was disappearing, but somehow we expected the old Romko – the wise-cracking jokester with a droll sense of humor with an endless string of ‘salty’ jokes and Soviet anecdotes - to return to his original form and resume his prominent position in our lives and carry on as before. After all, he was our ‘Zhulik’, a pseudonym he chose for himself, to reflect his own conception of his personae. In fact, before Vietnam, he was truly a rascal, a rogue, a rapscallion – but not a thuggish hoodlum – a ‘batiar’. He was impish in his actions and deeds, and generally favored harmless pranks and irreverent actions. We knew him from childhood – we knew who he was, and what was in his heart. He was good-natured, and neither mean-spirited nor spiteful. He just loved to have fun and enjoy life, but he disliked the mindless authoritarian mindset of Plast. This is what attracted him to Chornomortsi – he found a group of kindred spirits – a happy medium between militarism and mischief. Above all, Roman was loyal to his friends. If you needed him, he was there for you.

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Yet, after Vietnam, he came back a dramatically changed person – and once again, he matured well ahead of his peers – but he was no longer ‘Hairyman’ or ‘Zhulik’. He became a man on the killing fields of Vietnam, but he refused to talk about his experiences. We could not drag out any war stories, other than trivial humorous anecdotes. We desperately wanted the old Romko back – the jovial ‘Zhulik’ that we all loved, but he couldn’t retrieve his old personality – that came much later – he needed a healing period, a time for reflection and reorientation. Before Vietnam, we could always count on him to be the life of the party, to regale us with the latest jokes from the Soviet Union and lead us on his roguish path of playful insurrection against the mildly ridiculous and self-important ‘authorities’ of our Ukrainian institutions. At that moment, when he sat quietly at the corner of his couch, separated somewhat from the rest of us boys, I saw that he was looking at us strangely, as if he we were old forgotten acquaintances. We asked that he tell us how it was on the battlefield, to regale us with his heroic deeds and Purple Heart, but on that evening he couldn’t muster the words. He had been profoundly transformed by the experience, and could no longer relate to the carefree, boyish and trivial concerns of our clique. He came back a man, and though we were all in graduate school or working for a living – we were still the same boys that he left behind. Everything changed that day for Romko, and for us. It’s very hard to come back from the carnage and mayhem that was Vietnam, without it changing your view of life. Romko saw horrible things none of us would ever have to face. He constantly faced life and death situations and killed regular North Vietnamese enemy soldiers and Vietcong guerillas, always wondering who they were; the families they left behind; and the dreams that were shattered on the field of combat. As an intelligence officer, he had access to the life histories of many captured and dead soldiers, and I recall that that’s the only serious topic about his experience in Vietnam that he would talk about. He knew that it could have just easily been his documents and life that the Vietnamese were discussing casually. To the end, he agonized over every soldier that he killed, and wondered why he was spared in a war where life and death was decided purely by chance. When he came back to our world, our comfortable middle class cocoon, he was strangely silent – he couldn’t partake in our joy of his return to the fold. Conscription In a few short years, we went from watching Davy Crockett on TV to James Bond in “Dr No’. We were mesmerized by this entirely new genre of spy movies. It was more exciting than all the TV shows and cowboy movies we had been exposed to. Maybe it was James Bond who captivated Roman, and put the notion of the spy game in the back of his head. After all, what inspired us teenagers then – who were the ‘romantic adventurers’ that captured our imaginations. Astronauts and spies – and both were central to the struggle between the US and USSR. The Berlin Wall, the ‘Spy Who Came in From the Cold”, our own history of covert operations and internal diaspora intrigues. This is the milieu that we grew up in, and which influenced us and Roman.

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I think I can take some credit for getting Roman started on his career path – again, totally unanticipated. It often happens that small, insignificant events determine one’s life and career path. The Greeks and most other ancient civilizations believed that a man’s fate was determined by mischievous deities. In this case, I was the mischievous entity, and was simply doing my father a favor. My father, Evhen Stakhiv, was very much involved in the post-war political struggles in our Ukrainian émigré community. Naturally, he associated with all of his friends and colleagues who worked with him in the underground (OUN) and insurgency (UPA) during the war. His closest allies set up a Ukrainian Information Service – “Prolog’, which was a front for CIA information gathering. There were many other operations such as this, operated by other ethnic groups focusing on Poland, the Baltics and other areas of the USSR. It was not a classical spy organization, though. They simply gathered information from the Soviet press and related publications around the world; read, digested, analyzed, translated and prepared summaries for our US intelligence agencies – primarily the CIA. It was mundane, routine work, and most of the people working there were intellectuals who were involved in Ukraine’s fight for liberation before and after WWII. They didn’t recruit spies, nor did they run secret spy operations or collect military intelligence. It was essentially “Kremlin watching’ – culling economic data; keeping track of who was in charge of which ministry; what events were occurring that were of interest to the US; and assessing whatever minute social, cultural and political changes were occurring in the Soviet Union, but focusing on the Ukrainian SSR. In fact, an operation very similar to that of ‘Prolog’ was depicted in a very good 1975 spy thriller, “Three Days of the Condor” with Robert Redford. Redford played a bookish analyst, who read spy novels to get ideas for innovative ways to conduct real spy operations. One day he comes to his office to find everyone dead, and he unravels a devious plot while on the run. The lives of ‘Prolog’ employees were very dull indeed – that is, until Roman showed up. Anyway, my father wanted to get some young people, and me in particular, to start paying attention to what was happening in Ukraine in a more focused and intellectual manner and begin engaging in ‘the struggle’. One day, in 1962, when Roman and I were already college freshman, my father suggested that we attend a seminar at Prolog, that was to be delivered by Mykola Lebed, the head of Prolog. Lebed was a revolutionary legend among Ukrainians, starting his underground activities in the early 30’s against Polish oppression; assassinating a few high level officials along the way, and spending years in Polish prisons and German concentration camps as a political prisoner. So, I convinced a few of my friends – Yuriy Denysenko, Andriy Vytvytsky and Roman to come along. My father saw the ‘movement’ was beginning to ossify, and he wanted to engage the next generation. I saw why - Lebed was a dull speaker, as were the rest of the staff – it was a classical European delivery – one read from a lengthy typed manuscript, with many pauses and throat-clearing in mid-sentence, and then a polite discussion followed. I can’t remember exactly what it was about – a status of political issues in Ukraine at the time, and how it related to our political struggles in the US. We were bored, but listened politely. Later, during a coffee break, we rummaged around the office – which was essentially an apartment on 103 str, - there were stacks of books against the walls in hallways and in offices. All sorts of topics – economics, culture, politics, edited versions of speeches and writings and poetry of people we never heard of. It was a

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strange world that opened up for us, for un till that moment, all we knew of Ukraine was through standard texts on history, geography and the giants of literature – Franko, Shevchenko, Gogol, etc.) that was drilled into us during our Saturday Ukrainian school sessions. Roman was particularly taken with this cache of unfamiliar literature. After all, he was studying political science at LIU, and here was a strange and interesting new world opened up for him. Soon after that seminar, he was working as a part-time student intern for Prolog, doing some of the reading and analysis – and it turned his life around. After Vietnam, Roman dropped out from most of our active Chornomorskiy work, i.e. organizing Plast summer camps and our own annual sea scout camp for older youths. Though we were all away at graduate schools, but we’d all met on the weekends in NYC, zustrichy and Plast tabory frequently –at least 10 times annually. Roman would show up maybe once or twice. He didn’t go to graduate school – but went straight to work, back to his old employers before Vietnam - Prolog. His graduate training was in military intelligence on the brutal fields of Vietnam. But he unexpectedly showed up at one of our senyiorski rady at the ODUM ‘oselia’ in Lehigton, Pennsylavnia (I believe it was 1977). I remember it well because it was Orest Fedash’s first Rada as a kandydat, and I introduced him to the rest of the kurin’. ‘Erko’ was there also, and between him and ‘Zhulik’ they kept us in stitches at vatra, with a staccato series of jokes and humor. It was one of the most memorable zustrichs, because Roman lived up to his name ‘Zhulik’ that weekend. Afterwards, though, I wondered why Roman appeared suddenly, ‘out of the blue’, since he hadn’t been active for years – the last time he showed up at an official function was at Slvako Luchkan’s funeral a few years earlier, in 1973, though we all saw him many times collegially in between, mainly as part of various anti-USSR demonstartions . It took me a while to connect the dots. Roman was working at the Zustrich!. In those cold war years, very few Americans, and fewer natural-born Ukrainians were able to visit the USSR, and Ukraine, in particular. There had to be a good reason and plausible cover for such a trip. It happened that Volodymyr Pylyshenko (‘Harpun’) was a professor of art at Brockport State U. He was part of an exclusive scholars exchange program between the US and USSR. His proposal was to study the ethnography and culture of remote tribes and cultures, and he specialized in Carpathian art, artifacts and Hutsul, Boyko and Lemko cultures. Harpun would bring back lots of native woodworks, sculptures, plates, embroidery, costumes, etc. But he also brought back information – he had contacts with most of the Ukrainian intellectual underground and emerging opposition – Chornovil and Horyn’. It was that information that Roman wanted to hear and to request additional contacts and data. There were many contacts between Harpun and Zhulik during the time harpoon regularly visited Ukraine between 1972-79, when the Soviet regime finally wised up and kicked Harpun out of Ukraine. Even then, Roman flew out to Vienna to meet with Harpun to find out the circumstances of what happened. Even at our Chornomorski events, Roman was working! Though Romko came back disillusioned with the war, he understood that the struggle against communism played out on many fronts, in many subtle ways. He wanted to continue his role in that struggle- but in a different form – one that suited his personality

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and gave him the ability to serve not as a regular army soldier, but as a guerilla warrior who shaped the rules of combat as he went along. Prolog provided him the opportunity to continue the war against communism in many different ways. Most of us chose to continue our modest efforts in the only ways available to us: in overt displays of defiance against the USSR – marches, demonstrations at the Soviet embassy or near the UN. We chose to stay on our clear path of anticommunist resistance. Ours was a world of black and white choices: you’re either with us or against us. Plast and our parents taught us that there is truth, justice and goodness, and for the longest time, perhaps naively, we stayed the course. After Vietnam, Roman entered an entirely different world – a parallel universe which rarely crossed into our world of Plast and Chornomortsi, and we stayed apart for the next two decades. As we grew through our childhood and teenage years, the separation in our respective abilities and interests became more apparent. Our individual characters begin to take shape and solidify, and we began to define our respective paths in life. Each of us charted a slightly different path, and over time the initial small divergence grew progressively larger, so much so that some of our founding members left the fold, never to return. Life’s important choices were made – to follow one path or another, and a different group of leaders emerged over time, to continue on with our boyish dreams and romantic notions. But Romko was never forgotten, even as he moved to Europe, following his career. He was the ‘Founder’ and a Vietnam hero, and though his mood changed after he returned from Vietnam, somehow we always fondly remembered the old, ‘original’ Romko who had that unique blend of humor, irreverence, mischief, leadership and ultimately heroism The ‘cold war’, i.e fighting communism behind the scenes, at many different levels, followed an entirely different game plan, if one could call it that. This was a shadowy Jean Le Carre world of subterfuge, unwritten rules, moral ambiguities and sleights of hand, of sudden opportunities and tragic disappointments. It was the product of grand devious chess master strategies devised by anonymous policy gurus located in the Kremlin, the White House and the CIA – people with a string of academic diplomas and esoteric publications, but little else in real world experience - well above Roman’s pay grade. In a recent CIA history (“Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence”) the following 1967 “eyes only “ cable from Richard Helms, to CIA’s chief of station in Saigon, William Colby is noted (with parallels to more events in Iraq and Afghanistan): I simply have come to the point where I feel that the American effort in ‘pacification’ and ‘national building’ has become so preoccupied with organization, theory and guidelines, that the best brains , certainly of the Washington level, are not being devoted to the precise task of how the game is to be played…After all, football games are won by teams that understand the mechanics, rather than the theory, of making touchdowns…The time is late … This should be the year for players, not for cheerleaders. I often got the feeling that Roman was frustrated because even he couldn’t figure out what was happening and why, with the many seemingly inexplicable shifts in policy, as each Administration tried out new variants of untested academic theories - but he

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soldiered on in a different kind of war - the cold and shadowy one that was conducted behind the headlines of the New York Times. The job description for a soldier is simple- in the words of General Patton, the duty of a soldier is “not to die for your country, but make the other bastard die for his.” Roman entered the shadowy world of espionage through the rear door, working for an information-gathering organization called ‘Prolog’. In that world, the rules are malleable and change with the political winds and the self-described brilliant but untested ideas of academic policy wonks working in obscure policy think tanks. While most of his colleagues at Prolog were from the previous generation engaged in largely dead-end Ukrainian émigré underground politics, Roman was their first field operative recruit engaged in Soviet counter-espionage of a low =level variety. Roman knew that in his world, where his motto could easily have been “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” - overnight, friends become enemies and vice versa. In his line of business, you worked with people you didn’t trust, disliked or even despised, and often you had to distance yourself from your friends. He also encountered surprises – well-known ‘community leaders’ who were working for the other side. He cultivated an entirely different group of colleagues to help him achieve his aims. And he left most of his childhood friends behind because we were still ensconced in the old world politics of our parents. He entered the big leagues. THE COLD WAR YEARS The Committee Roman’s work for Prolog, and his stature within the organization mushroomed in 1972, when he, with Yarko Koshiv, formed the ‘Committee for the Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners” (CDSPP). The CDSPP was controversial from the start, because he chose to defend “Soviet” political prisoners – all of them, not only Ukrainians. Oleh Kolodiy was one of the founding members, and he worked closely with Roman through the campaign to support Gen. Hryhorenko (Grigorenko). The CDSPP drew a lot of criticism from the Ukrainian community throughout that period, since they associated themselves with many ‘New Left’ groups that were then in opposition to the Vietnam war. I had several discussions with Roman at that time, strongly disagreeing with his associations with such as Daniel Berrigan and Naom Chomsky. As a result, he kept me out of his inner circle, which was Ok with me, and I pursued my own connections. It was not till about 5 years later when I moved to Washington DC, and became active in the “Free Sakharov” campaign organized mostly by scientists, that I began to see the ‘big picture’ that Roman tried to lay out for me in 1972. I took a lead role, through the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose membership was over 100,000 to begin including the names of all the Ukrainian political prisoners who were also engineers and scientists, in the various appeals to Congress and politicians. It was then that I understood Roman’s grand strategy, for which he was deeply criticized by me and many others. Roman was ultimately correct in that he understood that if the Ukrainian community supported only its ‘own’ political prisoners, they wouldn’t get much support in the press, or from other groups who were engaged in supporting the dissident movement from many different angles. There was the movement against psychiatric imprisonment (Leonid Plyusch); the

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‘Jewish ‘refuseniks’ who wanted to emigrate because of religious persecution (Sakharov, Daniel and ; all of the rest who were opposing totalitarian oppression – both Russians, Ukrainians and many other nationalities, including the Tatars. Roman got involved with the anti-war Left who wrote a full-page ad in the New York Times, condemning the war and suppression of political prisoners, among whom were listed all the Ukrainian dissidents, with short biographies. Daniel Berrigan then read the open letter to Leonid Brezhnev, at an anti-Vietnam war Congress organized in Moscow in 1972. The letter condemned the USSR and Brezhnev for violating the human rights of its citizens. It caused a big stir at the Congress and split some of the groups who supported the USSR. The news hit the front pages of the New York Times. Roman did his job well. Leonid Plyiusch was another example of our Ukrainian community’s misunderstanding as to the larger issues at stake. Pliyusch was an avowed Ukrainian Marxist, and he was a mystic who believed in the Jewish Kabbala – plus he liked to drink – heavily, it turned out. It was hard for Plyiusch to associate with our western nationalist views. Yet, he was a serious and heroic dissident. How to deal with him, was the issue. However, because he was a Marxist, the European Left supported him – if he were simply a Ukrainian anti-communist they would have ignored Pliyusch entirely. Roman took advantage of this fact to continue splitting the leftists, who supported the Soviet regime, by using ‘one of their own’ to carry the messages about the abuse of human rights in the USSR. Pliuysch, on the other hand, was more interested in obscure issues in the US – as for example when he came out in defense of the Rosenbergs at a large meeting organized by the CDSPP at Madison Square Garden. That was the end of the love affair with Leonid Pliyusch and the Ukrainian Community. Successful spies inherently have dual nature – to be effective, you have to be able to compartmentalize and show different personalities and keep track of who you want in your confidence, and which personae you’re presenting in what situation. Oddly, Roman presented the same face and personality to everyone – he was a wise-cracking, jovial cynic to everyone with whom he came in contact. But he separated his friends from his working colleagues, and rarely combined the two worlds. In part, he probably thought I wouldn’t understand the numerous devious machinations that he had to undertake in his line of work – and he knew that I disagreed with some of his tactics. He kept his secrets well. Perhaps, he didn’t want to implicate his close friends in any of his business, in case things turned the wrong way. On the other hand, I sometimes thought that even though he understood the inner workings of the dissident movements, he didn’t quite understand the ‘big picture’ realities of the constant series and sometimes inexplicable shifts in US foreign policy with respect to the USSR. After all, he was captive to the changing US government political relationships with the USSR and its allies – overtly he was the official mouthpiece of US foreign policy, and that’s what I heard from him most of the time, though I didn’t agree with it. Though we both agreed, when we heard George H.W. Bush’s “chicken Kiev” speech in 1988, that this was a bad sign for Ukraine. The US policy was to maintain status quo – they were afraid of the geopolitical consequences of a fragmented Soviet Union. Pandora’s box was opened, and they were afraid of what was

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within. It turned out it was also bad for Prolog, for the US policy then was not to antagonize the USSR, and further aggravate the dissolution of the USSR. The Administration was afraid of the chaos that would accompany the demise of the USSR, and following that logic dissolved Prolog – it was no longer needed. It was an irony – the ultimate success of a free Ukraine caused the demise of Prolog. He didn’t see it coming, and Roman was left looking for a new job – from President of Prolog to the unemployment office. He landed back on his feet soon after, in 1991, with a job offer to run the Ukrainian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He accepted, and soon expanded with a branch located in Kyiv, and he helped report on the transition period of Ukraine’s independence. Covertly, though, I knew enough that he was a cog in a much larger ‘game’ which I vaguely understood and only casually approved. It was enough to know that he was on ‘our side.’ Over the years, Roman’s role and influence increased, and he became a major player in events that were front page news – especially in the era of Polish ‘Solidarnocz’ and the long period of the Helsinki human rights movement. My friends and I could afford to be those ‘black and white’ guys – sticking to our ‘principles’, naïve as they might have been in Romko’s eyes. For us, anti-communism was a simple black and white issue, and for me, the enemy of my enemy was definitely not my friend. I thought that the policies of Henry Kissinger were too machiavellian, and those of Jimmy Carter and Zbig Brzezinski were simply unfathomable. For most of us cold war ‘foot soldiers’, there was a bright line dividing the good guys from the bad guys. That’s how we were trained at home and in Plast. There were essentially three groups in the Ukrainian émigré anti-communist, anti-USSR movement: the ‘foot soldiers’ of the broad ‘populist’ majority that attended all the demonstrations, marches and community activities; the much smaller quasi-intellectual academic and journalist cadre who wrote long and impenetrable treatises on trivial aspects of the ‘struggle’- essentially cold war ‘oracles’ and Kremlin watchers who could never really figure out America’s ever-changing and feckless foreign policy, especially in the turbulent Vietnam era; and the handful of professional ‘cold warriors’ who were actually engaged in the unpleasant daily work of the sort of ‘soft espionage’ in which Roman was involved. One of the more recent and dangerous activities that Roman was involved in directly, and led to his expulsion from Ukraine was the Kuchma tapes and connection to Gongadze’s murder. Though we all heard of the tapes, and transcripts of portions were made available to the press, I didn’t realize how deeply Roman was involved, and that the affair was to mark the end of his career at Radio Liberty. Again, through a very unexpected turn of events, I had been badgering Roman to visit Orest Fedash at Hunter – either at our ski weekends or the summer, since Roman had a very nice summer home just 2 miles up the road from Orest. I had been traveling back and forth through Kyiv and Prague often, as part of my work, and finally got through to Roman – he promised to visit ‘soon’. He called one day in March, 2001, and said he was staying at Hunter, and if I had a chance to visit him he’d be there for a few weeks. I organized an impromptu ski weekend with Orest, and we showed up at Roman’s house. He looked in bad shape, and was listening to recordings of the Mel’nychenko tapes. That intrigued us, as we had only heard snippets of the tapes. We had a short conversation and he invited us over the next evening for

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dinner that he was cooking – we were to bring the drinks and dishes and silverware. We sat down and talked seriously – Orest, Roman and I about the events and what was happening behind the scenes. Roman mentioned that he was ‘persona non grata’ in Ukraine, and he was afraid to travel back there because of his revealing of the tapes on Radio Liberty airwaves. He returned nevertheless, and one year later, in 2001 was out of a job. Roman had made the decision to reveal the tapes and play them in Ukraine on the Radio Liberty airwaves. This disturbed the Kuchma regime, and they began a disinformation campaign against Roman during the subsequent year, threatening him and following him around Kyiv. It was a terrible time for him, because even the US government wanted Roman to downplay the Kuchma tapes, and he was reprimanded several times by his superiors. He persisted, and was relieved of his position in March, 2001. The danger that Roman was in could be seen from a small excerpt from an interview with Maj Mykola Melnychenko Dec 29th, 2000 in the offices of Radio Liberty (Kyiv and Prague): Boyarko: Mr. Melnychenko, the first tape, which was made public by Oleksander Moroz, mentions Radio Liberty. The point is that the situation around Radio Liberty is rather strange. Over a long time, we have been noticing the activity of special services around Radio Liberty. It is not connected only with the fact that you, Mr. Melnychenko, contacted us, it started earlier. Special services seek direct contacts with RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service employees. As people say, [the secret service] "sounded out" Service Director Roman Kupchinsky in the first place. A special service representative came to Prague for a "heart-to-heart" talk and openly said that the service is rather disliked by the presidential administration and personally the president. And he warned [Kupchinsky] that unless the tone of our programs changes, "softens," those at the top will make every effort to drive Radio Liberty out of Ukraine's broadcasting sphere Ukraine’s independence caught many of us unaware and unsure of what this meant, and how we should respond. After the initial euphoria, we all had to figure out how to turn our opposition into something positive – yet we didn’t quite know how to deal with the new politicians, who overnight turned from communist party appartchiks to the ‘new democrats’ and capitalists. Roman understood what was happening internally, perhaps better than anyone else. After his dismissal from Radio Liberty, he became an active reporter and ‘muckraker’, in the best traditions of that term – uncovering and reporting on the numerous facets of corruption within the successive Ukrainian governments. To the end, he was a brave journalist and patriot. That is why President Yuschenko commended Roman in his remarks. Commencement I heard about Romko’s illness late in October, 2009, as we were discussing a meeting of our small Chornomorska zaloha in Washington DC, set for Friday, Oct 30. Since Roman returned from Europe a few years back, we tried to include him in our gatherings. I didn’t know his illness was terminal when I called Romko from my office the next day, hoping that it was something that could be dealt with by a simple operation or

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medication. We have many friends who are in that category now – it was not unique to hear that one or another successfully underwent a serious operation and had bounced back just in time for our annual ski gathering in Hunter for the Super Bowl weekend, as Yarko Oryshkevych had done recently. I wanted to see what his situation was and whether he could make it to our meeting – plus offer several options to make it easy for him – we could meet at his house, or at a nearby pub. Yarko Oryshkveych had just undergone a serious heart operation and was recovering slowly, so we understood that this meeting would be difficult to organize – two out of our five members were seriously hurting. We tried to get Romko to our meetings on several occasions before, but his schedule never coincided – he traveled a lot to Europe, on assignments – the results of which we read several months later in the Ukrainian Weekly or learned about indirectly through some web announcement .

This time I was determined to drag him out by hook or by crook. He responded in his typical off-handed cryptic and sarcastic manner – not serious at all, almost as a joke - he simply informed me that he couldn’t make it because he’d just been to a doctor, and he told me “my days are numbered, so I don’t want to be a drag on your party”. I was stunned, at a loss for words, mumbling something in response while not fully absorbing the implications of his off-handed pronouncement. He recounted

his recent pancreatic cancer diagnosis, and required treatments, but with low probability of success. What do you say to someone who tells you he only has a couple of months left? The rest of the day was a muddle for me, and I called Romko’s close buddies from his New York days (Kostiuk, Germak, Kolodiy, Denysenko) and we started to organizing a trip to meet with him. In the meantime, Ted Kostiuk, Andriy Bilyk and I met with Romko at his apartment a week later. It’s hard to stand face-to-face and speak with a guy who knows his days are numbered, and knowing this may be our last encounter. No doubt it was harder still for Romko. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind as we embraced for the last time – hoping we’d see each other after his treatments. What flashbacks from our youth were triggered by this encounter? I know that there was a flood of memories and anecdotes that stood out in my mind at that moment. Flashbacks of an early youth packed with fun and frivolity and serious purpose – all randomly flooding my brain. Followed by sadness that Roman’s jokes and impish humor would not be part of our lives. Each time a close friend passes away, a part of your life disappears – for each was an integral part of one’s life – they made my life interesting, for they were all interesting characters. Just a month earlier, we attended the funeral of Stefan Tatarenko, who was one of those interesting personalities that we sought out and who became a close friend. That was a characteristic and implicit requirement for becoming a Chornomorets – you couldn’t be a bore – each

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of us had to have some charismatic attribute that made you stand out – some quality of unique talent that said “I’m different”! Roman was always at the opposite end of the spectrum. There was never a boring moment when he was around. Romko’s passing, and that of Stefan Tatarenko, creates a big void in our collective memory banks and pool of charismatic characters. We spent a pleasant evening with the old ‘Zhulik” and he recounted some of his favorite ‘war stories’ with Gen. Grigorenko and his trip to China. Roman was finally unveiling

some of his escapades from the past. We discussed another gathering a few weeks later with our old NYC buddies, which he gladly embraced. It was wonderful seeing glimpses of the old, impish and irreverent Romko – but he was a mere shadow of his old vibrant, irrepressible self. Alas, our plans for a meeting of Roman’s old Chornomortsi friends were thwarted twice by two huge snowstorms that hit Washington DC. It was not meant to be, though my wife and I, and my father who collaborated with Roman during the cold war years, did get to see him one last time during Christmas, when I invited Roman and Markian over to our house.

I got the call I didn’t want to hear early on Monday morning from Romko’s son, Markian. Roman Kupchinsky (“Hairyman”, ‘Zhulik’) passed away quietly, at 5:00 am that morning of Jan 19th, 2010 at Georgetown U. hospital - a day after the Ukrainian elections, and a day after Martin Luther King Day in the U.S. Thankfully, he didn’t learn of the results of the Ukrainian election – Yanukovych leading with 32% of the vote, and Yulia second with 27%. Yuschenko was put out of his misery with only 5%. A runoff would be needed, but neither candidate is what Ukraine needs. Roman would not have been appalled, though, about the outcome or how the Orange Revolution had dissipated itself into corruption, cynicism and political chaos – he had been writing about this dissolution for a decade. But it always hurt him and all of us – a terrible waste of a series of opportunities and unrealistic hopes, perhaps. Roman’s last two articles on Ukrainian politics appeared in the Jan 10th issue of the Ukrainian Weekly. The first article was about the failed mission of Foreign Minister Poroshenko’s visit to Washington DC with Hillary Clinton, and another article on the disintegration of Ukraine’s armed forces. Both were written as his health declined rapidly before our eyes, as he was undergoing chemotherapy for a very aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. A month earlier, he finally revealed in a Weekly article what most of his close friends knew – his covert work for the CIA centering on the long cold war against the USSR, in support of Ukraine’s perpetual quest for independence.

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During the past two decades, whenever I took my friends and relatives to view the Vietnam Memorial, the thought always crossed my mind that, thankfully, none of my Chornomorets friends names who served in Vietnam appeared on the wall – not COL Orest Hawryluk, nor COL Roman Rondiak, SGT Boris Lewycky or LT Roman Kupchinsky. Roman and I discussed whether he ever visited the “Wall”. He said he did, just to find the names of his friends, but he never returned afterwards – it was too painful for him. I can imagine the time when Romko visited the Vietnam Wall and can see him gazing over the 58,000 names looking for his fallen comrades and tracing his fingers over the names of those he knew. During his time on the battlefields of Vietnam, on many occasions he was just a few feet away from an incident that could easily have put his name on that wall. How many times did the thought occur to him that “there but for the grace of God, go I”, as his fingers glided over the engraved letters of his comrades. How excruciatingly poignant was the difference between the noble heroism of a fallen comrade and one who survived with a desk drawer full of medals, feeling vaguely guilty about standing there, gazing upon that wall, thinking that his was not amongst those names. He could easily differentiate between the Polish, Russian, Serbian, Czech, Hungarian and Ukrainian surnames on that wall. Secretly, he must have been grateful that his name was not inscribed there, because he was able to embark on another mission that would continue the fight that he began on the battlefields of Vietnam. Both the fallen and the living were reluctant heroes in a twilight struggle reminiscent of the hopeless trench warfare of WWI. They did their duty and served their country well and nobly. But after Vietnam, the struggle was just beginning for Roman. When we mourn the passing of an old friend, we simultaneously grieve for ourselves and the decades that crept by silently and the unrealized moments and opportunities that slipped by.. We recall the naively happy moments, as well as the inevitable angst of our teenage years; the escapades and adventures of early manhood, and the lost moments that could have been, but never were during our adult lives. We could have and should have seen more of each other, but somehow there were always excuses. Each of us has their favorite moments and stories about, and with Romko – and most go back to when we remember him as the ‘life of the party’. The photos are reminders of those moments – the exact time and place of our individual encounters and unique memories. Our minds selectively choose and dwell on those silly and happy episodes when we were just naïve boys running around through life’s numerous obstacles on the meandering path to becoming men and responsible citizens. As adults, with families and responsibilities, as hard as we try annually at our ski gatherings, we can never recreate that instantaneous effervescent joy, spontaneity and guileless hope and aspirations that guided our youthful lives. Roman was a catalyst for quite a bit of our youthful effervescence – he brought us out from our reserved, eastern European upbringing and catalyzed the verve and vigor that was bottled up inside us and packaged in a Plast uniform. His harmless impertinence and irreverence drew us out and challenged us to reveal a different side of our nature; to define ourselves as something other than cookie-cutter Ukrainian youths and reveal our true personalities. Opening the door to Chornomortsi was a step that accomplished all

43

that, but still allowed us to stay within our self-imposed Plast ‘corporate structure’. We could be ourselves, but we could also contribute to a nobler cause than ourselves. When a friend or relative passes away, there is usually one bright, often amusing moment or image that lingers in our minds – the benchmark moment that defines that person and their character and their connecting thread to our respective lives. The mind is funny that way – it selectively seeks the bright, happy and often absurd images from our memory bankes to illuminate the personality of that loved one. For me it was way back at the beginning of our friendship- it must have been the annual Plast ‘Sviato Vesny’, that was held at Bound Brook, NJ on Memorial Day weekend, either 1958 or '59. "Hairy Man" was our ‘kurinney’, and he was in charge of disciplining an unruly bunch of about 30 teenage boys and reporting the status of our ‘kurin’ to his ‘commanders’ – the formal ‘zvit’ in front of rows and columns of over 300 scouts, all standing at attention. This was the time of Fidel Castro's insurgency and he captivated all of us youngsters, as a revolutionary hero, before we knew he was a communist. Romko decided that he could adapt his Plast uniform to reflect solidarity with the Fidelista's of that day. He put on a dark blue beret, strapped a huge Bowie knife across his back on a broad black belt, bandolero-style, and stepped out smartly to report on his ‘kurin’. ‘Hairy Man’ had about a 3-days growth of hairy stubble on his face – he was the only one among us who shaved at that time - and his shorts were about 2 sizes too small – he was growing rapidly in girth. He marched out smartly, saluted briskly and crisply delivered his 'zvit' to a startled and amused ‘komanda’. He was already a big guy then, and easily looked like he could have been one of Castro’s Cuban revolutionaries. That day Romko was our Che Guevara, and with that spontaneous act, he established the bold and irreverent personae that I will forever remember. I don’t know whether he planned it that way, or where he got the inspiration for that sort of low-grade defiance, but that was when he became our hero.

ANNEX 22.01.2010 11:37 !"#$-$%&'()*!"#+,-#./)*01")2.,*341/5")*67#.1)

44

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45

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