Tifft.com - Ukraine Photo Gallery

    Into the vacuum created by the Soviet collapse, opportunists, apparatchiks, profiteers, foreign companies seeking quick profits have fed upon the remnants of a once mighty empire. Those in power after the independence have been doing what the Bolsheviks did, but under the guise of Democracy and Independence. Now, eleven years after their “independence” the metropolitan centers have become their own Potempkin villages outside of which the people of Ukraine are truly destitute.

    I have documented what is invisible to the outside viewer, an insight into a country and its people whose rich culture and heritage has been scattered and distorted among the pages of revisionist history. I am not presenting a history of Ukraine, but its portrait, a portrait as seen through its many and diverse people whose lives intertwine in the pages of the past as well as the present.

     Most encouraging is to see the men and women who, when the opportunity arose to personally enrich themselves did not do so, but chose to aid and assist their fellow countryman.

    I have been allowed within the governmental and non-governmental structures on the national, regional and local levels as well as enterprises, both old and new. Documenting many locations that no tourist or casual observer has ever been and is not likely to go, traveling throughout Ukraine to over one thousand three hundred sixty eight cities, towns and villages. I have been received with warmth and graciousness everywhere.

    The only request made of me by the many Ukrainians I have come into contact with in Ukraine has been that I show them and their Ukraine to the “Western World” accurately and honestly so that they, as well as their current hardships, may be better understood.

    In closing I offer the following from “Middlemarch” by George Elliot.
“(the) growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”