You'd think people pressed beneath the heel of autocratic rule for hundreds of years would take to freedom like a duck takes to water. As Topsfield's Selma Williams has discovered, there's actually a very steep learning curve on the path to democracy.

Since 1994, Williams has been traveling to Ukraine and other former Soviet Union satellites to teach journalists how to write when they're no longer being ordered how to do so.

"The Soviet style of journalism is what people were used to reading and enjoyed reading," Williams said.

Oddly enough, for even the best journalists, that style of writing is less about the news than it is the writer's opinion of what's going on.

"When I first started going there, every page was an editorial page," Williams says. "To a great extent, that's still true."

Williams, 76, is well-qualified for this retirement project. She spent 34 years working for North Shore Weeklies, a chain of local community newspapers. From 1984 to 1993, she was editor-in-chief.

Her former publisher, Bill Wasserman, says her personality is a great asset for this work.

"Part of the thing she brings is extraordinary tolerance and patience," Wasserman said. If the Ukrainian journalists aren't responding to her tutelage quickly, she is not put off, he said.

"At her age, it's remarkable she's willing to trot off to these places," he said.

Williams has spent most of her time in Ukraine's capital and largest city, known to us as Kiev but which Ukrainians spell Kyiv. Her first trip there was something of a homecoming, but not one that was cause for celebration.

Her father left the city in 1905, the year a wave of pogroms began in what was then Russia. An estimated 3,000 Jews were murdered.

"It wasn't a great place for Jews at the time," Williams said, adding that she often wonders what her deceased father would think of her assignments in the country today.

Her most recent trip to Ukraine inspired an exhibit of photographs of everyday life there, which is hanging throughout the month at the Topsfield Public Library.

Mistaken identity

It isn't just newspaper reporters who need training in the rights and responsibilities of a free press; readers will have to change their ways, as well, Williams said, and it will likely take generations.

Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, but the Soviet stamp is still very much in evidence everywhere in the former USSR. Nearly every apartment building in every large city is the same "workers' housing," and until very recently, nearly every kitchen was stocked with one of four available china patterns, Williams said.

There is even a popular comedy sketch about Russians' cookie-cutter existence:

A man gets drunk at a bar in Moscow and somehow manages to get on a train bound for St. Petersburg. There he hails a cab and gives the driver the address. When they arrive, he climbs to the third floor, uses his key to open the door and passes out on the couch.

The next morning, a woman wakes him and asks what he's doing in her apartment. He protests and shows his passport as proof he lives at this address.

The woman looks at it and says, "Yes, in Moscow, not St. Petersburg."

What results, Williams said, is a mind-set in which no individual feels capable of effecting any change, and even the concept of voting is anathema.

"That isn't how the world works in their minds," Williams says. "We just have very different preconceptions."

In comparison with American newspapers, Ukrainian papers are small, and generally contain very little useful information about what's going on in the community, Williams said. They are often owned by politicians or business people who use them to advance their own agendas.

"So guess what?" Williams said. "Nobody believes what they read."

Most papers have no sports or editorial pages, no obituaries, no birth announcements and no school lunch menus, Williams said. Even big, catastrophic stories get scant attention from journalists.

"The coverage of what was going on at Chernobyl was ... thin," Williams said of the 1986 nuclear power plant accident that released a radioactive plume that drifted over an extensive part of the world.

Things have improved in the 16 years since the country gained independence, Williams said. When she first started going there, several journalists were being murdered every year, which isn't happening now.

Going home

Williams has lived in her home in Topsfield near Fish Brook since 1954. She officially retired in 1993, but admits it was a somewhat figurative event.

"I'm not a very retiring person," she said, her blue eyes sparkling in the sunshine flooding her living room through picture windows that run the length of the wall.

In 1994, she was awarded a Knight International Press Fellowship to make her first trip to Ukraine, which lasted six months.

"They set me up in a base in Kyiv," she said, "and basically said, 'Go do good things.'"

Despite her long career, Williams doesn't have one thing even reporters in Ukraine have - a journalism degree to hang on the wall. In fact, she never finished college, quitting after two years when she married.

Her first job in the industry was covering her new hometown for a local paper, and she got hooked. She was paid 15 cents an inch for her stories and said she used to cut them out of the paper and tape them together. If the resulting strip reached from the kitchen to the far end of the living room, she figured she would get a pretty good check.

Williams isn't sure if she'll make any more trips, but said going to Ukraine now feels "like going home," and besides, she's not the retiring type.

"I've been saying for some years that assignment was my last one," she said with a chuckle. "I enjoy it tremendously."