HOLUMBIYEVSKA (DENYSHCHENKO), HANNA VIKTORIVNA (born November 27, 1937, in Odesa — died June 19, 1994, in Odesa)
A teacher of Russian language and literature, a participant in the human rights movement.
Hanna’s father was killed at the front, and her mother passed away. She graduated from the Russian department of the philological faculty of the Odesa Pedagogical Institute and taught Russian language and literature at School No. 130 in Odesa. In 1961, while married to the history teacher Holumbiyevsky, she gave birth to a daughter, Anya, but was forced to separate from him.
In 1967, she joined the CPSU, graduated from the University of Marxism-Leninism, and passed the candidate’s minimum examination in philosophy.
Holumbiyevska’s lessons were unconventional. She encouraged children to think and fostered a desire for high culture. She belonged to a circle of critically-minded Russian intelligentsia in Odesa.
When Nina STROKATA-KARAVANSKA was arrested on December 6, 1971, a human rights group was formed in Odesa to defend her, as well as Oleksa RIZNYKIV (arrested October 11, 1971) and Oleksa Prytyka (arrested August 9, 1971). It included people of various nationalities, including Holumbiyevska, Halyna MOHYLNYTSKA, Maria OVDIYENKO, Leonid TYMCHUK, Olena Danielyan, Hanna MYKHAYLENKO, Vasyl BARLADIANU, Zina Dontsova, Vasyl Varha, Tetyana Rybnikova, and Rozalia Barenboim. They all submitted statements in defense of the arrested and, from May 2 to 9, 1972, demonstrated their support outside the courthouse, from which they were barred.
In April 1973, the director of School No. 130 received a written report from teacher P. P. Hrushevska, stating that a lesson by Holumbiyevska on N. Gogol, which she had attended, was “apolitical” and that the teacher had mentioned a writer whose works were first nominated for the Lenin Prize and later declared an “ideological diversion in Soviet literature.” In the teachers’ lounge, the conversation turned to A. SOLZHENITSYN. Holumbiyevska said that she had read his novella ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ and other works published in the Soviet press. She said that she considered SOLZHENITSYN a talented writer.
In May 1973, at a party bureau meeting, Holumbiyevska was “warned” for the “apolitical nature” of this lesson, and the director transferred her to teach in the junior grades.
On March 15, 1974, the party bureau issued Holumbiyevska a reprimand for speaking out in the teachers’ lounge against the expulsion of SOLZHENITSYN from the USSR. In August, she was reproached by the KGB for a “loss of class consciousness.” At the beginning of the school year, her overtime hours were taken away. On November 27, two raion party committee officials spoke with her at the school. They suggested she “repent for what she had done.” Holumbiyevska refused.
According to V. Igrunov, information was being collected on Holumbiyevska to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital and, on this basis, deprived of the right to work in a school. But it would have been difficult to portray this life-loving optimist, beloved by students and friends, as mentally ill.
On December 2, 1974, a party meeting at the school considered the “Personal File of Teacher Holumbiyevska.” The author of the proposal himself voted “for” expelling her from the party and firing her from her job; 11 communists voted to uphold the “reprimand” issued by the party bureau on March 15, and one abstained. However, on December 13, the raion party committee bureau expelled Holumbiyevska from the CPSU and recommended that the raion department of public education fire her. Holumbiyevska disseminated this information in an open letter dated December 25, 1974, addressed to L. Brezhnev. The letter was published abroad.
A representative from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine spoke with Holumbiyevska, assuring her that she could be reinstated in the party if she admitted her mistakes. But Holumbiyevska no longer wanted to return to the party. She maintained contact with Moscow dissidents. Her apartment at 8 Moyseyenko Street became a center of dissent in Odesa. She had access to the underground samvydav library of Vyacheslav Igrunov and read and shared samvydav with her former students (Tetyana Rybnikova, Zina Dontsova-Varha, Vasyl Varha) and friends (Leonid and Valentyna Siri, and others).
The electrician Leonid TYMCHUK discovered listening devices in Holumbiyevska’s apartment, dismantled them, and was subsequently accused of hooliganism on November 23, 1975. During an unprecedented ice storm, Holumbiyevska and her friends H. MYKHAYLENKO and R. Barenboim walked to all the militsiya departments, found him in a pre-trial detention cell, and sent statements to the raion and oblast prosecutor's offices in his defense. When he was serving a one-year suspended sentence, Holumbiyevska participated in guarding him to prevent another provocation against him.
On October 5, 1976, following the example of Moscow dissidents, 11 Odesa dissidents went to the Pushkin monument on Primorsky Boulevard and held a silent demonstration to protest human rights violations in the USSR. Among them were four of Holumbiyevska’s students—Tetyana Rybnikova, Zina Dontsova, and two boys—as well as H. MYKHAYLENKO, V. BARLADIANU, Vasyl Varha, and the workers Valentyna and Leonid Siri. Cadets from a maritime school were sent against them. The women then moved to the front; they were roughed up a bit, but the demonstrators did not succumb to the provocation and stood silently for an hour and a half. These same people laid flowers at the T. Shevchenko monument every year on March 9 and May 22. It was largely thanks to Holumbiyevska that the muffled murmur of resistance to the communist regime in Odesa took an organized form.
At the end of 1976, Holumbiyevska, together with V. BARLADIANU and H. MYKHAYLENKO, created an undeclared Odesa branch of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG), which collected information on human rights violations and passed it on to the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups. O. MESHKO visited them.
On March 2, 1977, Holumbiyevska’s apartment was searched in connection with the case of V. BARLADIANU, who was arrested that day; notebooks, notes, correspondence with private individuals and official institutions, a photograph of A. SOLZHENITSYN, a tape with songs by V. Vysotsky, and the Strugatsky brothers’ book “Ulitka na sklone” [“Snail on the Slope”] were confiscated. In a statement to the oblast prosecutor on November 30, 1977, Holumbiyevska demanded the return of all these items.
The arrested V. BARLADIANU declared an indefinite hunger strike, which he ended at the request of his family after his trial on June 27–29, 1977. On June 27, Holumbiyevska was one of 10 people who signed a statement to the Odesa Oblast Prosecutor protesting the closed trial and demanding that all who wished to attend be admitted to the courtroom. They were not admitted. Holumbiyevska, as a “witness,” came with flowers and asked permission to give them to the defendant. When this was denied, she threw them over the barrier. She read a statement refusing to testify in a closed trial. The court issued a separate ruling regarding her. On July 5, 1977, Holumbiyevska appealed it in writing, stating that the court had no evidence that she had engaged in conversations with BARLADIANU that slandered the Soviet state and social system, that the confiscated manual for a typewriter belonging to BARLADIANU was not proof of criminal activity, and she refuted other absurd accusations.
High school students and graduates gathered around Holumbiyevska. In effect, it was an educational circle that met at her home. Her home was open to people of different nationalities and views, who were treated with tolerance. They discussed new publications in the journals “Novy Mir,” “Inostrannaya Literatura,” and in samvydav. The director of School No. 130 received a letter from the parents of one student, alleging that Holumbiyevska engaged in religious propaganda during and after lessons, spoke about God, and had a harmful influence on students by reading them excerpts from the dubious work “The Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov. On December 19, 1978, the school’s trade union committee discussed Holumbiyevska’s behavior. Among other condemnatory speeches was the remark: “We need to get the whole staff together and go somewhere to ask to be freed from her.” In other words, for the KGB to arrest her. Holumbiyevska was offered the chance to renounce her “immoral behavior” and transfer to a job as a librarian. She was later allowed to teach handicrafts (home economics) in the primary grades.
Despite constant pressure from the KGB, Holumbiyevska continued to participate in numerous protest actions, including against the deployment of Soviet troops to Afghanistan and in defense of Odesa dissidents thrown into camps and psychiatric hospitals. She wrote letters to H. MYKHAYLENKO in captivity, sent her parcels, and on May 17, 1985, she wrote a letter to M. Gorbachev petitioning for her release from the psychiatric hospital.
She took early retirement in 1987. She lived in poverty, suffered from severe cancer, and died after an operation.
Bibliography:
1.
To the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR from Holumbiyevska, A. V. Private Complaint: http://www.igrunov.ru/vin/vchk-vin-dissid/smysl/lett_diss/barladyanu/1077008263.html;
Hanna Holumbiyevska. “Duma pro liudynu [H. Mykhaylenko]” [“A Ballad about a Person (H. Mykhaylenko)”] / Ukrainskyi visnyk, issues 7, 8, 9-10. – Baltimore–Toronto: Smoloskyp. – 1988. – pp. 286-291;
“Vybrannye mesta iz liricheskikh otstupleniy” [“Selected Passages from Lyrical Digressions”] / Odesskiy vestnik], 1990. – Date?
2.
A Chronicle of Current Events, No. 34, 31.12.1974: http://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/Хроника_текущих_событий/34/18;
Visnyk represiy v Ukraini [Herald of Repressions in Ukraine]. Foreign Representation of the UHG. Ed. and comp. by N. Svitlychna. New York. Holumbiyevska, H.: 1980: 3-11, 4-13; 1982: 7/8-48;
Alekseeva, Lyudmila. Istoriya inakomysliya v SSSR [The History of Dissent in the USSR]. – Moscow–Vilnius: Vest, 1992. – p. 272;
“Anna Viktorovna Holumbiyevska.” [Obituary] – Chornomorski novyny, 1994. – June 21;
Interview with Hanna Mykhaylenko on February 10 and 12, 2001, in Odesa: https://museum.khpg.org/1121199690=;
Interview with Vasyl Barladianu-Byrladnyk on February 11, 2001, in Odesa: https://museum.khpg.org/1203669040;
Interview with Leonid Tymchuk on February 11, 2001, in Odesa: https://museum.khpg.org/1186505594=;
Tatyana Rybnikova on the mid-70s in Odesa: “There was a feeling that you were deciding the fate of the country and the fate of the world” http://www.igrunov.ru/cv/vchk-cv-side/vchk-cv-side-rybnikova.html;
From the memoirs of Vyacheslav Igrunov, 2002: http://www.igrunov.ru/cv/vchk-cv-memotalks/talks/about-chronika-et-samisd.html: Anna Viktorovna Holumbiyevska;
Diahnoz KGB: shyzofreniia. Interviu Yuriia Zaitseva z Hannoiu Mykhailenko. Dokumenty [KGB Diagnosis: Schizophrenia. An Interview by Yuriy Zaitsev with Hanna Mykhaylenko. Documents] / Introductory article, compilation, and ed. by Yu. D. Zaitsev. – Lviv: I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, NAS of Ukraine, 2008. – 240 pp. (In particular, pp. 30-31, 179-180, 182-187).