Butin, Semyon Ivanovich

BUTIN, SEMYON IVANOVICH (born October 17, 1927, in the village of Tsagan-Oluy, Borzinsky Raion, Chita Oblast, Russia)
Musician. Imprisoned for a critical poem against N. Khrushchev, a second time for creating the “United Democratic Union” in captivity.
His father, Ivan Semyonovich Butin, born in 1896, was the director of a sovkhoz (state farm) named after the NKVD. On July 5, 1938, the NKVD arrested him. He served 10 years in prison. His grandfather, Semyon Ignatovich, was dispossessed as a kulak and exiled to the town of Tulun, Irkutsk Oblast. His grandmother, Lyubov Alekseyevna, and her family were also repressed and exiled to Tulun.
Semyon finished school, was drafted into the army in 1944, and served for 4 years. In 1948, he entered the Khabarovsk Institute of Culture. After graduating, he worked as a musician in an ensemble. During a tour in the city of Magadan, he met a supposed journalist, Valentin Mamontov, who provoked him into writing a critical poem against N. Khrushchev and sending it to Odesa. On October 13, 1958, he was seized by KGB agents in the “Arktika” restaurant in the presence of this Mamontov. By the verdict of the Magadan Oblast Court on December 29-30, 1958, he was sentenced to 5 years in corrective labor camps under Article 58-10, Part 1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.
Since the political camps in Kolyma had already been liquidated, Butin was sent to Irkutsk Oblast, to Taishetlag, the “Vikhorevka” camp. He was part of a circle of poets that included Yuriy LYTVYN and Boris Vail. There, the Lithuanian Catholic priest Pranas Račiūnas baptized him.
In 1959, Butin was transferred to the Mordovian ASSR. On the train, together with other political prisoners, he wrote leaflets and threw them out of the windows at all the stations. He served his sentence in camp ZhKh-385/10 of the Ozerlag Corrective Labor Camp. In this camp, together with other prisoners, he created a group called the “United Democratic Union,” which aimed to fight the communist regime through non-violent methods, by means of propaganda. Butin was in charge of security. The organization existed for a year: in September 1960, during a search, guards found the organization's program and charter under Yevgeny Maslov’s pillow. Due to this partial exposure, for conspiratorial purposes, the UDU was renamed the “Union of Revolutionary Socialists of Russia.” The organization's leader, Chingiz Jafarov (also known as Jafar-Zade), Vladimir Tunyov, and Semyon Butin were charged with conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and with creating an organization (Articles 70, Part 2, and 72 of the RSFSR Criminal Code). About a dozen members of the UDU testified as witnesses. By the verdict of the Supreme Court of the Mordovian ASSR on September 13-18, 1961, Butin received 3 years of imprisonment, with one year from the previous sentence added. The final sentence was 4 years, with the term beginning on September 18, 1961. Upon completion of his term, having served a total of 7 years in prison, he was released in the settlement of Yavas on May 4, 1965, and left for the city of Tselinograd.
He had difficulties with employment. There were attempts at physical violence against him and interference in his family life. He noticed surveillance and eavesdropping. In Tselinograd (now Astana), he worked for 12 years as a musician in restaurants and led amateur arts groups in clubs.
In 1978, he moved to Kherson and created a wedding ensemble of musicians. In accordance with the RSFSR Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression” of October 18, 1991, the Magadan Oblast Prosecutor's Office rehabilitated him on February 18, 1992, for the 1958 case; the Mordovian Prosecutor's Office rehabilitated him on September 13, 1993, for the 1960 case.
In the 1990s, Butin participated in rallies in support of Ukrainian independence. In 1991, he joined the People's Movement of Ukraine (Narodnyi Rukh) to fight the communists who had ruined his family and broken his fate. The regional organization of the Rukh helped him publish a book of poems, “Abrakadabra. Proza zhizni v rifmakh” [“Abracadabra. The Prose of Life in Rhymes”], Kherson, 2000, which he distributed.
Author: Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. February 12, 2013.
Source: Autobiographical account from February 22, 2001, in Kherson; S. Butin's archive.