Against the New Nationalism

The second issue of The Lamp magazine includes an essay by me, responding to Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. Here’s a snip:

The first time that I visited Ukraine was in November of 1998, just a few days before my fifteenth birthday. I was travelling with my family to a Byzantine-Catholic priestly ordination. We took a red velvet upholstered, Soviet era train from Vienna to the Western Ukrainian city of L’viv. At the border between Slovakia and Ukraine, the train was hoisted up on cranes and the wheels changed. The reason, we were told, was that Stalin had had the gauge of train tracks in the Soviet Union widened to discourage invading armies.

Crossing the border into Ukraine in the 90s was like going back in time. As the train rattled through the Carpathian Mountains, we looked out on women in headscarves washing clothes in icy rivers, and horses pulling sledges and wagons. The wagons had car tires on their wheels, but apart from that we could have been in the 19^th century.

At the train station in L’viv we were met by an old man in a towering fur hat, who was to drive us to the house where we were staying, and by a young student who spoke English. The student told us that the old man had spent years in a Siberian labor camp during the Soviet persecution of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. We gaped at this Solzhenitsyn character come to life.

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