Introduction

Ukraine is one of the core republics that made up the Soviet Union before it imploded in 1991.  As the USSR's southernmost land, Ukraine always enjoyed a critical strategic importance because it gave the Soviets access to the Black Sea and ultimately the Mediterranean.  It has strong historical ties to Russia as the most eastern country of Europe. The country used to be known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union but it has fallen on hard times beginning, it seems, with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the economic collapse that has occurred in recent years in Russia and the other ex-Soviet satellites.   

Ukraine, like Poland has always been someone else’s battlefield – Russians, Turks, British, French, and Rumanians have all fought each other on her soil and when Ukrainians suffered, no section of the population suffered more than the hundreds of thousands of Jews who made their homes here over the centuries.

We are going to Ukraine to help a friend, Diana, working in the Peace Corps with an educational program and to find out what life is like in a post-Communist country, some nine years after independence.  

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