Pochapy

Tucked up in the northwest corner of Ukraine, near the borders with Poland and Belarus, lies the village of Pochapy.   If you go to Google Earth, you can see it for yourself, and there is even a Google street view, if you care to look.  I cared, because that is where the Pochapsky family name is supposed to have come from, and I wanted to see where it lies with respect to the Russian forces massed on the Belarus and Russian-Ukrainian border.   My guess is that if the invasion happens, it won’t go through there, since it is close to a NATO border, and I expect that Czar Vladimir will not want to draw NATO into conflict by accident.   

When I was young, I would ask my dad where our people were from, but the only thing he knew about it was a name, Pochapy, and that it was in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.  However, my grandfather had emigrated to avoid being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army prior to World War I (a good idea, in retrospect), so presumably Pochapy had been part of Poland at some point.  Rumor had it that our ancestral village had been inundated in a Soviet-era dam and reservoir project, but research by my dad in later years had yielded the village location and the fact that it still existed.  Dad learned to speak (or at least write) Ukrainian after he retired, and my parents actually traveled to Ukraine and Russia at some point in the eighties.  I don’t know whether they visited Pochapy, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they had.

I have never felt a strong affinity for my Eastern European roots, nor have I had any urge to visit there.  But I admit to a certain pride at how Ukrainians have managed to show the world that they want to do it their way, and not be beholden to the kleptocrats of Russia.   They have thrown a Russian puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, out of office twice, once through the Orange Revolution of 2004, and once at the ballot box in 2007.   Russia invaded Crimea, then part of eastern Ukraine, in 2014, and since then the eastern part of the country has been embroiled in a low-level war backed by Russia.  I am pretty sure the war doesn’t feel “low-level” to the soldiers fighting it, but Ukraine has made it clear in multiple ways that they don’t want any part of Putin’s nonsense.

In high school, I was the smallest and skinniest kid in my class, and the school greasers decided that, with my glasses and freckles, I was an easy target.   The sophomore Spanish class that I shared with that bunch was hell:  Our teacher, an amputee who of course ended up with the unfortunate nickname of “Uno Leggo”, was unable to intervene to stop the abuse.  This went on until one day I had enough and snapped, and I sucker-punched one of the offenders in the stomach.  I don’t know that he threw up, but he looked like he was going to when he left the room.  After that, I didn’t have any trouble with the group.  I learned an important lesson then: You don’t tolerate bullies, because if you do, they keep coming back. 

Vladimir Putin is the high school bully writ large.  If you try to appease him, he will keep coming back.  He has managed to trash his own country, and the only way he can stay in power is to distract from his mismanagement and to stifle any opposition.   Not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, I got an advertisement from a Russian company trying to break into the scientific instrumentation business, and I remember thinking that maybe Russia had a chance to escape it’s history.  Sadly, that chance has gone, at least for now.  But the United States should do what they can to support Ukraine in an unequal struggle against the neighborhood bully.

The Pochapskys are a scattered bunch these days.  Many of the people who share my last name emigrated to the prairie provinces of Canada, Alberta and Saskatchewan, which have geography and climate not unlike that of Ukraine.  But nowadays you can find Pochapskys in Toronto, Pittsburgh, Philadephia, New York, North Carolina, Missouri and even a few scattered out in the American west.   There is a Pochapsky who is a soloist for the Bolshoi Opera. He plays the heavies, like Prince Igor and Boris Gudenov, and he looks enough like us (and sings bass, like all Pochapsky males) that I guess he is a second cousin.   Probably none of my scattered relatives long to return to their roots, but there is a bit of all of us still in the land from whence we came, and for me it puts a human face on an otherwise faceless and far away struggle.