Valeriy KRAVCHENKO
THE RIGHT TO LIVE (YURIY BADZYO)
Even in the fifteenth year of Ukraine’s independence, the phenomenon of the “Shistdesiatnyky” (the Sixtiers) has yet to be sufficiently studied, but in the perception of Ukrainians who are conscious of their national identity, it remains a bright, heroic, and fiery one. It will continue to attract the attention of historians, philosophers, political scientists, and writers for a long time to come.
The Badzyo couple was always at the very center of those events: protests and direct resistance to totalitarianism, arrests, and the production and distribution of samvydav materials. On April 25, 2006, Yuriy Vasylyovych Badzyo celebrated his seventieth birthday. Congratulating him on this date, it is worth reflecting on the fate of the “Sixtiers,” both in the Soviet era and in the new, now independent Ukraine.
Yuriy Vasylyovych Badzyo was born on April 25, 1936, in Transcarpathia. After graduating from the Ukrainian Department of the Faculty of Philology at Uzhhorod University and teaching for three years, he entered postgraduate studies at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. During this time, he published a series of literary-critical articles that were well-received by the press.
Svitlana Kyrychenko, having graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philology at Kyiv State University in 1957 and been assigned to the academic Institute of Literature, became friends with Ivan Svitlychnyi from her first days of work—they worked together at the institute’s literary journal. From the early 1960s, they jointly participated in events of the KTM—the Club of Creative Youth, which became the crucible of a new Ukrainian revival. In 1961, the young postgraduate student from the Institute of Literature, Yuriy Badzyo, also joined the KTM council, and a year later, so did Vasyl Stus, also a postgraduate student at the same institute.
Svitlana Tykhonivna married Yuriy Badzyo, and they raised two children.
The circle of young freethinkers, affirming their Ukrainianness, expanded. At its epicenter was the Badzyo couple.
Vasyl Stus, along with Ivan Svitlychnyi’s sister, Nadiya, became godparents in name (the Badzyos were not religious) to the Badzyos’ daughter, Bohdana.
Six months before the first post-Stalinist wave of political arrests of young Ukrainians, in April 1965, Yuriy Badzyo, who had already been hired as a researcher at the institute, was fired. The pretext was merely his agreement (!) to give a speech at a Shevchenko evening for machine-tool factory workers (the event itself did not take place—the district party committee banned it). The young scholar, with a completed dissertation, found himself cut off from both academia and his professional work—for a full 25 years.
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September 1965 was a landmark, a turning point in the fate of many future Ukrainian dissidents. The events at the “Ukraina” cinema marked the first open protest against the repressive actions of the authorities. For his participation in the demonstration at the “Ukraina” cinema, for refusing to acknowledge his behavior as anti-party, and also for a sharply political speech at a party meeting where his personal case was reviewed, Yuriy Badzyo, a member of the CPSU, was expelled from the party. From then on, the path not only to academia but to any professional work was closed to both of them. Svitlana resigned from the Institute of Literature. Being non-partisan, they could not apply direct sanctions to her, and for a while, she managed to work at a journal—an organ of the Institute of Philosophy.
New political arrests of Ukrainians—much more extensive than in 1965—were not long in coming. Svitlana Kyrychenko sent an open letter to the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Shcherbytsky. She wrote as a mother, concerning the fate of the two-year-old son of the arrested Nadiya Svitlychna. The “Party” reacted swiftly. On the direct instruction of Serhiy Dorohuntsov, head of the science department of the Central Committee, she was dismissed from the Institute of Philosophy with a “wolf’s ticket”—“For incompetence!” (this after 15 years of work in two academic institutes).
Two weeks after the January 1972 arrests (their entire circle of closest friends was behind bars), Yuriy Vasylyovych began work on the historical-philosophical study “The Right to Live.” For the next five years of his life until his arrest, he was a loader at a bread shop by night and worked on his treatise by day.
In his dissident monograph, Badzyo, substantiating the conclusion about the unequal status of the Ukrainian people in the USSR, applied the principle of analyzing the nation’s existence as a unity of three temporal dimensions: present-past-future. The concept of a “single Old Rus’ people,” later the “reunification” of the “two fraternal peoples,” and finally, the struggle against “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism”—the “fierce enemy of the Ukrainian people,” imposed by the party’s ideological-propagandistic apparatus and enforced by a powerful repressive machine, devastated the Ukrainian past and threatened its present and future.
The Badzyos corresponded with friends scattered across political camps from Mordovia to the Urals. Svitlana Tykhonivna copied Vasyl Stus’s poetry from his camp letters into notebooks. When Stus managed to smuggle out his “Palimpsests” from exile, Badzyo’s wife actively distributed them among acquaintances and sent them to friends in the camps.
In 1977, Yuriy Badzyo nearly finished (four out of a planned five chapters) “The Right to Live.” 1,400 pages of dense, handwritten text. The KGB, which never let the dissident out of its sight for a moment, organized the theft of the manuscript.
Svitlana rightfully calls her husband a Sisyphus. A month later, Yuriy Badzyo began to restore what was lost, effectively writing a new version of “The Right,” while his wife followed the author’s work at night—since their apartment walls had not only listening devices but also viewing devices—making a microcopy of what was written. So at least something would be saved if it were stolen again.
It was not stolen again. On April 23, 1979, they came with another search—they took the 452 pages of the second, started version of “The Right,” they took the microcopy (there were no brave souls to hide it), and they took the author. And Svitlana Tykhonivna was promptly fired from her job—at the time she was working at the pharmacy administration.
The USSR State Security Committee valued “The Right to Live” highly—they gave Badzyo 12 years for it!
* * *
In that same year of 1979, friends arrested in 1972 were released from the camps. Vasyl Stus returned to Kyiv. Svitlana Kyrychenko would write her memoirs about Stus’s nine months of “freedom” in Kyiv in the 90s (“Bird of the Heavens,” Dnipro journal).
May 1980—the new arrest of Vasyl Stus. In October—the trial. Svitlana Tykhonivna was summoned as a witness. She came but refused to testify. They threatened her with arrest—and they did initiate a criminal case against her and put her on trial. Because they could not forgive her for throwing the phrase in the judges’ faces: “I will testify at the trial where Vasyl sits in your place, and you in his.” Strong guards brutally dragged her out of the courtroom as Stus stood up and placed a hand on his chest: “Thank you, Svitlana.” Her last look at him, his last words to her...
For refusing to testify at the trial, Svitlana Tykhonivna was sentenced to forced labor. She served this sentence as an unskilled laborer at a cardboard factory. She wrote to Stus in the Ural camp. But letters to and from him did not get through, only a few to his relatives.
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Yuriy Vasylyovych sewed mittens in Barashevo, Mordovia. The Badzyos’ children were persecuted: a demand was made of their student son to “disown his parents”; the same, only in a milder form, to their school-aged daughter.
Svitlana Tykhonivna declared an indefinite hunger strike. Her son—a public activist, an excellent student—was expelled from the Komsomol; his studies were, for the time being, out of the question.
For three consecutive years, Yuriy Badzyo was denied personal visits with his family. Svitlana Tykhonivna sent her appeals to various international organizations in defense of her husband to the West; they were published by the foreign press and read on Radio “Svoboda” (Liberty), while she spent these years in a constant search for work. If she was “lucky” enough to get a job: whether at the post office delivering telegrams, or as a nanny caring for a small child, and later only as a cleaner in various institutions—all of it lasted only a few months, and then—dismissal under a false pretext because she had a higher education.
1986, seven years had passed, Yuriy Vasylyovych was transferred to exile in eastern Yakutia. His wife and daughter (their son was in the army), without wasting a day, flew to him and stayed by his side. Like a devoted Decembrist’s wife—until his release in December 1988.
Even here, in the distant Yakutsk town of Khandyga, she was “allowed” to work only as a cleaner (they had hired her—with such a diploma—as a proofreader for the local newspaper and as a librarian, but the vigilant eye did not sleep—she was immediately dismissed). Twice she was fired even from the position of cleaner.
Yuriy worked as a cleaner in enormous car garages; the exile was kept under constant surveillance, and various provocations were staged.
In addition, while in exile, they lived in a workers’ dormitory at the place of punishment, which was also a trial, as the environment there was specific.
“Imagine,” Svitlana Tykhonivna once told me, “a dormitory, a room, one of the residents on Yurko’s bed is shaking a can with BF glue, extracting ‘fuel’ from the glue.” However, after the family’s arrival, the Badzyos were moved to separate quarters, and after work, the exile had relative peace of mind and rest.
They endured the trials and provocations to the end. Although for her—a long-time hypertensive patient with cerebral vasospasms—the Yakutian climate was ruinous. She knew this.
* * *
At the beginning of 1989, the Badzyo couple returned to Kyiv and plunged into the whirlpool of revolutionary events. Yuriy Vasylyovych, with like-minded people, created the first party alternative to the CPSU, wrote its “Manifesto,” and was elected its chairman at the Constituent Congress of the Democratic Party of Ukraine. Svitlana Tykhonivna was right there by her husband’s side, working in the secretariat of the DemPU.
But the past caught up with her. Soon she suffered a severe stroke, paralysis. She became a Group I invalid. All her post-stroke years have been a struggle for survival, thanks to the sacrificial care of her husband, Yuriy Vasylyovych. Svitlana Tykhonivna is writing extensive memoirs about their years in the 60s–90s, about their friends—“People Not Out of Fear” (published in the journals Dnipro and Kurier Kryvbasu, and in the newspaper Molod Ukrainy). For these memoirs, Svitlana Kyrychenko was awarded the “Shistdesiatnyky” prize.
Yuriy Vasylyovych is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. His political-ideological works—a profound analysis of historical processes, an intellectual grasp of reality—are well-known to the Ukrainian reader. The article “Thoughts Against the Current” (1994) was first published by the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina and soon released as a separate brochure in a 50,000-copy edition; later, collections of articles “The National Idea and the National Question,” “The Underground Nation,” and “The Ukrainian Choice” were published.
For his dissident monograph “The Right to Live,” Yuriy Badzyo was awarded the Omelian and Tetiana Antonovych Foundation Prize in 2000.
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Today, the devoted Badzyo couple needs care from society and the Ukrainian state, which they have fully earned. Svitlana Tykhonivna, confined to a wheelchair by paralysis, cannot get up without assistance. All household chores and care for the sick woman fall on Yuriy Vasylyovych’s shoulders. Persecuted by the Soviet authorities, they had meager salaries in Soviet times. Currently, considering Yuriy Badzyo’s benefits as a former political prisoner, their pensions are: Yuriy Vasylyovych—371 UAH, Svitlana Tykhonivna—363 UAH (data from March 2006). Yuriy Vasylyovych still works at the Institute of Philosophy, with a salary not much higher than his pension, but he is forced to work because a lot of money is needed for medication. And the Badzyo couple holds on—as it was in Soviet times, so it is now—thanks to a high consciousness of marital duties, strengthened by a common struggle and shared trials.
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By a Presidential Decree of November 26, 2005, Yuriy Badzyo, along with a large group of former political prisoners, was awarded the state honor—the Order “For Merit” of the III degree. At the same time, the head of the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons, Yevhen Proniuk, for reasons known only to him, did not include Svitlana Kyrychenko in the list for the award...
Valeriy KRAVCHENKO, head of the public organization “For the Rehabilitation of the ‘First of May Two.’”
Ukraina Moloda, No. 76 (2863). – April 26, 2006.
Yuriy Badzyo with his wife Svitlana Kyrychenko
Yuriy Badzyo with Vasyl Ovsienko.