Ukrainian Museum-Archives: Saving a Culture the Soviets Were Erasing
Near Cleveland, Ohio
In nineteen fifty-two, a Ukrainian exile named Leonid Bachynsky began collecting in Cleveland. Books, newspapers, phonograph records, postcards, posters: anything connected to Ukrainian history and immigrant life that he could find. He knew that back in Soviet Ukraine, the same material was being deliberately destroyed.
Bachynsky and other displaced scholars who had fled after World War Two founded what became the Ukrainian Museum-Archives. In nineteen seventy-seven the institution became a public nonprofit, housed in a late nineteenth-century building in the Tremont neighborhood, once the heart of Cleveland's Ukrainian community.
Today the archive holds about forty-five thousand books, eighteen hundred periodical titles, two thousand sound recordings, and tens of thousands of stamps, posters, and photographs. It is one of the largest Ukrainian archives in North America, built entirely by people who understood that a culture without its documents is a culture that can be made to disappear.
