Orders of the Day — Ukrainians, Great Britain

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 16 February 1960.

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Photo of Lieut-Colonel John Cordeaux Lieut-Colonel John Cordeaux , Nottingham Central 12:00, 16 February 1960

I am glad to have the opportunity this evening of making a plea on behalf of 40,000 Ukrainians who are at present very welcome guests of this country. Of all the peoples who have been forced by man's inhumanity to man to seek asylum with us there are none that have a greater claim to our sympathy and understanding than the Ukrainians. None have adapted themselves more easily and happily and unselfishly to our way of life. They are thrifty and industrious people. They are doing a fine job in this country in agriculture, in the coal mines and in many other under-manned industries. One has only to consult the police of the large cities in which they have settled to learn what a high reputation they have and how richly it is deserved.

I believe that the position is the same in all the countries where they have settled. Almost a million Ukrainians form a highly respected party in that nation of many races, the United States. Over 40,000 of them were among the volunteers in the Canadian armed forces in the last war. They fought very gallantly on our behalf in Africa, in Italy, in France and in Germany and they earned many distinctions. However, despite the Ukrainians' happy faculty of integrating themselves into the lives of the nations in whose countries they live, there is perhaps no nation that has such a passionate feeling of patriotism and sense of nationhood as they have. It is a flame which they have kept burning brightly through many hundreds of years of persecution and attempted genocide such as we in this country find difficult to understand.

The story of the mass deportations, the individual torture, the deliberate planned annihilation by starvation which they have suffered in these years at the hands of Communist Russia is perhaps one of the most terrible stories in the world. I have neither the time nor the desire to harrow the House with details of those days, nor do I wish to weary hon. Members with a history lesson. Nevertheless, I think it is right to remember that the Ukraine was the first Christian kingdom of Eastern Europe, and that the Ukrainians have always been and remain to this day a very deeply religious people. The Ukraine was a nation which was greatly respected and of high culture in Europe many years before William the Conqueror conquered this country, and it was indeed a nation of considerable renown in Europe when the Russians, and indeed ourselves, were still in a state of barbarism.

Scattered over different continents, there are about 47 million Ukrainians, and approximately 45 million live in the Ukraine proper. At least they did, though that number has been considerably reduced. It has been reduced by millions by the horrors of which I was speaking earlier. At any rate, sufficient remain there to form a nation not so very much smaller in population than our own, which has succeeded in keeping itself during all that time as a separate nation, with its own traditions, its own culture, and, perhaps most important of all from the point of view of the plea which I wish to make tonight, its own language.

I hope that in these very few words I have perhaps said enough to persuade my hon. and learned Friend that, morally at any rate, the Ukraine has as much right to be considered as an independent nation as any other nation, and indeed a great deal more right than some. Nevertheless, we in this country, for reasons that may seem adequate to the Government, deny them that right, and it was the latest manifestation of this denial that caused me to initiate this debate tonight.

Early last December the Nottingham branch of the Anglo-Ukrainian Society, of which I am very happy to be a member, approached me in very great distress of mind and told me that its members in Nottingham had been summoned to report to police headquarters and had there been pressed to change their nationality from Ukrainian, as then registered, to either Russian or Polish.