A conversation with Kateryna Yushchenko, a former first lady, and an alumna of the Reagan White House, as Vladimir Putin prepares his troops for an all-out attack
Editor’s Note: Below is an expanded version of a piece published in the current issue of National Review.
The story of Kateryna Yushchenko and her family is a very interesting one. It reflects the story of Ukraine over the last hundred years. Mrs. Yushchenko was born in Chicago to émigré parents — who had been through war, famine, and other horrors. She went on to work in the Reagan White House. Then, as a citizen of the new Ukraine, she became first lady. Her husband, Viktor Yushchenko, was nearly murdered in a poison attack — the kind of attack for which Vladimir Putin’s agents are infamous. Today, as the Russian military masses on the Ukrainian border, Mrs. Yushchenko is worried sick: for her children and for every other Ukrainian. She also says she is thinking about her parents — their experiences, their lessons — more than she ever has.
Her father, Mykhailo Chumachenko, was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. His father — Kateryna’s grandfather — was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” in 1928. He had objected to the confiscation of Ukrainian lands. In 1934, they hanged him.
Some 3.5 million people starved to death in the Holodomor, or Terror-Famine, which the Soviet government imposed on Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Though Kateryna’s father survived the famine, his two younger sisters did not. Their names were Kateryna and Klava. Mrs. Yushchenko is named for them (“Klava” being her middle name).
Her mother, Sofia, was born in 1927. Her father — Kateryna’s maternal grandfather — fought in the Ukrainian War of Independence, which took place from 1917 to 1921.
When World War II came, Mykhailo, Kateryna’s father, was conscripted into the Soviet army. He was captured by the Germans, though, and taken to Germany as slave labor. Sofia, too, was taken as slave labor — she was 15. She and Mykhailo met in Germany and married. They had a daughter there, Lydia.
Mykhailo contracted tuberculosis and spent eight years in a sanatorium. His wife worked in the kitchen there. Their daughter lived in a convent.
In 1956, the family emigrated to the United States — Chicago — under the sponsorship of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Kateryna came along in 1961. Her parents wanted to give her the kind of life they could only have dreamed of for themselves.
At home, the family spoke Ukrainian. “My parents never really learned English very well,” Mrs. Yushchenko says. This used to embarrass and annoy her, when she was a kid. But they explained, “Katya, we’ve gone through so much. We had to learn German, and now we’re faced with English. It’s hard to keep changing.” They basically wanted to stay home, says Mrs. Yushchenko. They didn’t go to restaurants, they didn’t travel. They just wanted a stable life.
Today, their daughter Kateryna understands them better than ever.
Though in many respects an all-American girl, “I grew up as a Ukrainian,” she says. Her parents always stressed to her that she had a responsibility: to remember the language, to remember the religion, to remember the history. She took lessons in Ukrainian dance. She took lessons on the bandura, the Ukrainian national instrument. When dissidents from Ukraine started being released from the Gulag and coming to America, the family attended every speech and every event they could.
In those days, says Mrs. Yushchenko, there was a feeling in America that Ukrainians were really Russians, with maybe an ethnic flavor. A feeling that Ukraine was merely a western province of Russia. (That feeling persists, of course. Putin has said, “There is no Ukraine,” and not a few Americans echo this.) Kateryna’s parents told her that she must always fight against this falsity. “One day, Ukraine will be free and independent,” they said, “and you must be ready to play a role in it.”
She first went to Ukraine in 1975, when she was 13. She met many relatives: aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins’ children. It was thrilling to be in the midst of Ukrainian culture, she says today, but there was a dark and creepy side: to be followed everywhere by KGB agents, and to see red placards everywhere, with the face of Leonid Brezhnev — the Soviet chief — on them.
A few years later, Kateryna went to Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. — the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She planned to be a diplomat, sent to the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. She was told, however, that she had little chance of that, because of all those relatives in Ukraine. She might be subject to blackmail. So, Kateryna switched to international economics. Eventually, she earned an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Before that, however — when she was still in her early 20s — she headed the Ukrainian National Information Service in Washington. A Soviet newspaper labeled her a “bourgeois nationalist pygmy.” Forgetting bourgeois, and forgetting pygmy, Mrs. Yushchenko is indeed a nationalist, in the sense that she believes in Ukrainian nationhood.
The Reagan years were “a very special time for us,” she says, “because there was such an emphasis on freedom and democracy around the world.” She went to work for the U.S. State Department — specifically, for Richard Schifter, the assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Born in Vienna in 1923, he was able to leave Austria at 15, after the Anschluss. His parents were able to obtain just one visa — and they of course gave it to him, their only child. They were later murdered in the Holocaust.
Over the years, he wrote to various governments — including the U.S. government, and the State Department in particular — looking for information on lost family members. But he never received a reply. He told Kateryna: We will answer every inquiry that comes to us, as promptly, accurately, and thoroughly as we can. And they did. Kateryna was also charged with compiling lists of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, which President Reagan would present to Mikhail Gorbachev, one of Brezhnev’s successors as Soviet chief, at every meeting they had. (“Too many lists,” Gorbachev grumbled.)
After her stint at the State Department, Kateryna worked at the White House, in the Office of Public Liaison. “It was such an amazing time,” she says. “I remember telling my friends afterward, ‘My life will never be as great as this year I’ve just spent in the Reagan White House.’”
She moved to Ukraine in June 1991. Half her life, she lived as a Ukrainian American; the other half, she has lived as a Ukrainian.
She brought her father for a visit sometime during that first year, 1991. He had never been willing to visit before. The reason was, he had been captured by the Germans in World War II, and the Soviets considered all captives traitors, and he was afraid they would put him in the Gulag, if he returned to Ukraine.
For him, it was miraculous to be in his country once more. But he told his daughter, “I don’t think this country will ever be able to achieve its independence.”
Not long after — on August 24, 1991 — Kateryna called him to say, “We’ve just declared independence.” “We both cried,” she tells me, “and he said, ‘I didn’t think I would live to see this day.’”
In 1998, Kateryna married Viktor Yushchenko, the governor of the central bank. The next year, he became prime minister. Viktor Yushchenko is a pro-independence — pro-Ukrainian, you might say — politician. Naturally, his opponents accused Kateryna of being a CIA agent, planted to influence him and Ukrainian events. She sued a newspaper for libel and won. Her reward? A dollar. It was all she had asked for. “It was the principle of the thing,” she says.
She makes a general point about Kremlin propaganda: It is consistent. Whenever there is a move toward democracy or independence, the propagandists say it is a CIA plot. No call for democracy or independence — in Ukraine, Georgia, or anywhere else, including Russia — can be authentic. It must be organized and financed by the United States. And this propaganda is echoed throughout the world, in left-wing media and right-wing media alike.
In July 2004, Viktor Yushchenko announced his campaign for president. One of the Kremlin’s men in Ukraine said, “He will never become president.” “We understood that as a threat,” says Kateryna. Two and a half months later, Yushchenko was hit with the poison attack. He was taken to Vienna for treatment. “They told us that if we had come eight hours later, my husband would have died.” The poison in his body was a dioxin found only in Russian labs.
Before this time, the Kremlin had interfered in Ukrainian elections, of course. The Kremlin interferes in Ukrainian affairs in any number of ways. But now, in the attack on Yushchenko — a murder attempt — they were using violence.
At the end of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko was elected president nonetheless. I saw him the following month, at an international forum. His face was horribly disfigured. It was hard to look at, frankly. But he carried himself with memorable dignity and grace.
In the first two years of his presidency, he had 26 surgeries, under full anesthesia. (This is more than one surgery a month, as Mrs. Yushchenko notes.) He had to change his shirt several times a day, because they would be soaked through with blood, coming from the sores caused by the poison.
Yushchenko was president for one term: 2005 to 2010. Ukrainians have different opinions about his presidency — how could they not? Disagreement is fundamental to democracy. But few dispute his courage.
He and his allies have long worked to cultivate a Ukrainian national identity. A national spirit. You know who has done more than anyone else to cultivate such a spirit, such an identity? One Vladimir V. Putin. Kateryna Yushchenko and I have a dark chuckle over this. In waging war on Ukraine, Putin has brought Ukrainians together.
Although a wider war is feared — even expected — Ukraine has been at war for eight years. It was in 2014 that Putin annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine. Fourteen thousand people have been killed. Two million people have fled the Russian-occupied lands. They are “IDPs,” or “internally displaced persons.”
In describing the situation today, Mrs. Yushchenko uses a word that many Ukrainians use: “surreal.” They are preparing for assault and subjugation — and to resist those things. Mrs. Yushchenko always told her children that war, dislocation, and the rest were things of the past. Yet, here in the 2020s, they are upon the country once again.
What Putin most wants, says Mrs. Yushchenko, is to remain in power, along with his cronies. A democratic example in a neighboring country scares the hell out of him. What if a “color revolution” — such as the Orange in Ukraine or the Rose in Georgia — comes to Russia? What if a critical mass of Russians gets to thinking that they, too, should have free elections, a free press, and so on?
I ask Mrs. Yushchenko what she wants from the rest of the world, including the United States. She says what I have heard many another Ukrainian say: unity. A solid front of support. “Putin is not an irrational politician,” she says. “He has never been a risk-taker or a gambler, as some people claim. What he does is test boundaries, redlines.” And when he finds no resistance — he plows ahead. That has been the problem over the last two decades, Mrs. Yushchenko says: The West has been weak. Putin has paid no real price for violating borders, downing a civilian airliner, interfering in democracies’ elections, murdering critics — anything.
Ukrainians are scared, yes, says Kateryna Yushchenko. They have trouble sleeping at night. But, even more than scared, they are determined, she says. Determined to defend their country. Determined to have a Ukraine. That’s not too much to ask, is it? To have a Ukraine?