Orest Pelech of Onancock poses with crosses inherited from his father, who was a Ukrainian Catholic priest. This branch of the Catholic Church allows married priests and is common in western Ukraine, where Pelech's parents were born. / Mark Nuckols image
“Putin is whipping up the most rancid of Russian nationalisms—very xenophobic, very paranoiac, and in my view very mendacious,” says Orest Pelech of Onancock, adding that the Russian president’s schemes in Ukraine may well backfire.
A scholar of Ukraine’s history with a Ukrainian family background, he is probably the Shore’s leading expert on the country.
Pelech was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany following World War II; his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1954, settling first in Bridgeport, Conn., then in Newark, N.J.
He attended a Ukrainian Catholic parochial school from grades 6 to 8.
“I spoke only Ukrainian with my parents,” he says, “and I still speak it with my sisters.”
He earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University with a dissertation on the formation of Ukrainian national identity. He then worked as a Slavic librarian at Princeton before moving to Duke University, where he taught history, Slavic languages, literature and religion, in addition to duties as a librarian.
Pelech married MaryKay Mulligan, then dean of instruction at the Eastern Shore Community College, in 2004. After four years of commuting between Durham, N.C., and Delmarva, Pelech retired from Duke in 2008 and settled in Onancock.
He currently advises ESCC’s chess club and has given several lectures in the Community College’s Science and Philosophy Seminar, including one on Russian history and one on genocide. He will give another on the Ukrainian crisis May 9.
Pelech says that Ukrainian history is “always terribly complicated” and it “depends on which part you’re talking about.” Much of eastern Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire in the 17th century, for instance, while other regions have evolved quite differently.
Most of the southern-central areas lay fallow and empty for centuries, as the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group historically feared for its military prowess, annually raided the frontier regions to capture slaves.
So, much of the area remained unsettled until Russian Empress Catherine the Great finally subdued the Crimean Tatars in the late eighteenth century and incorporated southern Ukraine and Crimea into her realm.
These facts explain why Odessa, a prominent city on Ukraine’s Black Sea Coast, was not established until 1794.
Pelech is fond of pointing out that Onancock, founded in 1680, is considerably older, which is unusual when comparing American and European towns.
Pelech’s father was from Lviv and his mother from a nearby village. He stresses that, although that area is now part of western Ukraine, Poles and Austrians have ruled it for most of the past seven centuries.
“My parents were not touched by the Russian language or Russian culture until the Soviet invasion of 1939. They were fluent in both Polish and German.” Stalin officially annexed that territory in 1945.
The current crisis, Pelech says, “is very much a struggle over history. To many Russians, the Soviet Army and Stalin’s regime are heroic.
To many Ukrainians, especially those who suffered the genocide of 1931-32, the holodomor or Great Famine, or who suffered Soviet occupation like my parents did, the Soviet Army is not heroic.
Rather, the UPA — or Ukrainian Insurgent Army — is heroic. They fought both the Nazis and the Soviets. To say that they were fascists “is playing fast and loose with the facts.”
Putin has resurrected the Stalin-era bogeyman of “Ukrainian fascists” to stir fears of persecutions against ethnic Russians in Ukraine. Pelech says that, in the pro-Moscow narrative, “the present government in Kyiv (called “Kiev” in Russian) is full of neo-fascists and nationalists and anti-Semites.” He cites as counter-evidence the presence of rabbis in Kyiv’s recent pro-Western Maidan protest movement.
Pelech believes that, contrary to Putin’s claims, the new Ukrainian government is perfectly legitimate. He also notes that it is only temporary: “There will be a new election unless there is an invasion between now and May—which is entirely possible, by the way.”
And what might happen then? “If Putin invades eastern Ukraine and goes farther west, he will see what insurgent warfare is like, because the Ukrainians have a tradition of this.”
Still, he says, “there should be an orderly and bloodless way” to transfer territory if Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine desire to join Russia. Furthermore, “If Putin were to seize these lands, as he did with Crimea, he’d be doing the Ukrainians a favor” — at least economically, since they are mostly rustbelt.
There are “tremendous ironies” in what Putin has already achieved, according to Pelech. Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow president of Ukraine overthrown by the Maidan movement in February, “could not have won the last election [in 2010] without the Crimean vote. Now, there will be no Crimean vote in Ukraine. Simultaneously, Putin made Ukraine richer,” because Crimea was a drain on Kyiv’s finances, “he made it more Ukrainian, and he made it more unified facing west rather than east.”
Finally, he adds, Putin’s takeover of Crimea woke up the European Union to its responsibilities in the east and “united the American political establishment in a way that it has not been since 9/11.”