Geography teacher. A victim of punitive psychiatry.
To avoid collectivization and keep his horses from being handed over to the kolkhoz, his father, Ivan Vasylyovych Siry (1892–1973), found a job hauling railroad cars. He later worked as a carpenter. His mother, Liubov Petrivna Lebziak (1902–1992), was a peasant from Ivashkiv, near Kodyma. They survived the Holodomor. From a young age, Vasyl heard about the repressions and knew about the 1920 execution of 156 fellow villagers by the Bolsheviks. He completed seven grades of school before the war and lived in occupied Kodyma.
In May 1944, Siry was conscripted into the Red Army, where he served for six and a half years, first in the infantry, and then completing a tank operator course in the Ryazan Oblast. He once fell into icy water and required a long period of treatment. From a transit point, he was sent to the artillery. After the war ended, his battalion was transferred to Moscow to serve in the internal troops. Siry refused to serve there. Eventually, he declared: “Well, write it down. Just know: if you send me to a prison, I will open the gates at night and release everyone. If you send me to transport a prisoner, I’ll let him go at the first corner.” The battalion commander cursed: “Strike him off the list, to hell with him! His weapons will be a shovel and a stretcher!” Siry was sent to a transit point along with those who had criminal records. He ended up in Noginsk, where he served in an aviation unit until his demobilization. He did not achieve any rank, although he held the position of warehouse manager and worked at the switchboard. He was allowed to attend the local night school.
Siry made several business trips to Odesa, visiting home, where he reacquainted himself with a fellow villager four years his junior, Marusia Shuturmynska. He was demobilized on October 16, 1950, and married her on November 6. Siry organized a group of young people who successfully lobbied for the opening of a night school, from which he graduated in 1951 and enrolled in the geography department of the Odesa Pedagogical Institute.
In 1955, Siry was sent to teach in Semenivka, Kodyma Raion, and was later transferred to the central secondary school No. 1 in Kodyma. He loved his work and was an exemplary teacher. He organized hiking trips and excursions and, under the guise of “friendship of peoples,” arranged for correspondence with children abroad. His sons were born: Borys in 1953 and Oleh in 1956. Everything was going well until 1968, when a new second secretary of the raion party committee, Mervinsky, arrived in Kodyma—an immoral man, but one “with connections”: his relative worked in the Odesa regional party committee as the head of the propaganda and agitation department. The raion committee secretary needed to place his wife in the position held by the non-party member Siry, even though she had no pedagogical education. Siry stated: “No, I do not agree. I have worked well, there have been no complaints against me, only gratitude for my work.” He would have had to look for a job elsewhere, but in the meantime, he and his father had built a house and planted an orchard in Kodyma. Siry incautiously remarked somewhere that party members were allowed to do anything. For these words, he was dismissed from his job in the middle of the school year. He wrote a letter to Leonid Brezhnev. He was summoned to the regional party committee and reinstated. In conversations with colleagues, Siry called the CPSU dishonest. On March 28, 1969, by order of the Odesa Regional Department of Public Education, he was finally dismissed from his position as a geography teacher at Kodyma Secondary School No. 1 under Article 47, paragraph “g” of the Labor Code of the Ukrainian SSR. This was effectively a ban on his profession.
Siry took up his pen and wrote a book titled “The Perniciousness of the One-Party System and Its Consequences,” which included the chapters “The Superiority of Political Pluralism over Monism,” “The Land of Soviets—A Land of Contrasts,” and “Lenin Without a Mask”—the last of which collected Lenin’s malicious anti-human statements and documents signed by him regarding the “Red Terror.” As an example, he cited the execution of 156 residents of Kodyma over two days in 1920. He described the funeral of a raion committee secretary who was killed in the 1930s by a Kodyma resident as revenge for the arrest of his relatives and fellow villagers. Siry classified the party as alien to Ukraine (since it was created in Moscow by non-Ukrainians) and as an organization of professional bandits (a term that would only be used openly 20 years later). He sought ways to smuggle the manuscript abroad for publication. But on the 100th anniversary of V. I. Lenin’s birth, April 22, 1970, Siry was arrested under the following circumstances.
Siry sought revenge. He decided to “set the red rooster loose” (an idiom for arson) on Lenin’s jubilee. He chose October Square, where a new building for the Odesa Regional Committee of the CPU was being constructed, near the monument to Lenin. He had previously driven there in his Zaporozhets car on a reconnaissance mission and used a crowbar to pry loose the lower nails of the fence slats, so that he could enter during the demonstration and set fire to the wooden materials stored there—parquet, baseboards, windows, and frames.
Shortly before the jubilee, Siry commissioned a welder to make two metal casings, which he filled with gunpowder purchased from hunting shops, intending to use them as homemade bombs. He tested one of them in a forest belt in the steppe, and it exploded upon ignition.
On April 22, 1969, Siry put fuel, a sawed-off shotgun, a bomb, and a fuse for it in his car and drove toward October Square. At an intersection where a policeman was directing demonstrators, his way was blocked. A capture team seized Siry and took him to the Ministry of Internal Affairs directorate. About two hours later, he was transferred to the KGB on Babel Street. He was likely betrayed by the man he had counted on as an accomplice.
Siry was charged under five articles of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR: 56—“treason”; 62—“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”; 75—preparation to flee abroad “for the purpose of open struggle against the USSR”; 89, Part 2—preparation to burn an administrative building; and 222, Part 1—possession of firearms and explosives.
During the investigation, Siry declared that at the trial he would expose those who had groundlessly and illegally dismissed him from his job, as well as high-ranking party officials, such as the first secretary of the Odesa Regional Committee of the CPU, Synytsia, who was as much a drunkard as Mervinsky; the captain of the diesel-electric whaling flotilla “Slava,” Solyanyk; the head of the Odesa KGB Directorate, Major General Haidamaka; and the port director. Incidentally, while Siry was already imprisoned, Mervinsky was expelled from the raion committee for immoral behavior, and his wife was fired from her job as a geography teacher for not having a pedagogical education. The aforementioned high-ranking party officials were also dismissed—Siry read about it in a newspaper upon his return from psychiatric evaluation.
Unwilling to publicize this disgraceful case for the “mind, honor, and conscience of the era,” the Odesa Regional Court, at the behest of the KGB, sent Siry for evaluation at the All-Union Serbsky Scientific Research Institute for General and Forensic Psychiatry (the Serbsky Institute), bypassing regional and republican institutions of this type. He was held there for two months—a double term. The diagnosis was “paranoid schizophrenia.”
In the Odesa KGB, the investigation was conducted by Colonel Kaliko from Kyiv, who handled especially important cases, and supervised by a KGB officer from Moscow, Colonel Vasilyev, who tried to persuade Siry to admit to being mentally ill, promising that everything would be attributed to the illness and he would not be tried. They intimidated Siry’s elderly mother, telling her that her son faced execution, and she said that he had complained of headaches in early childhood. His wife, however, insisted that he had no abnormalities.
When Siry was presented with the indictment, seeing how much slander it contained, he tore it up and threw it away.
On October 13, 1970, the Odesa Regional Court (Judge Semyonova, Prosecutor Dubravina) heard Siry’s case without the accused or witnesses. His wife, Mariia Dmytrivna, barely managed to get into the empty courtroom. By court order, Siry was sent to a special psychiatric hospital for an indefinite term. The “treatment” lasted 13 years and 3 months. It was a horrific torture, worse than death.
Initially, Siry was sent to the Dnipropetrovsk regional prison at 101 Chicherina Street, where two buildings housed a special psychiatric hospital, aptly called a "psychiatric prison." Siry’s doctor was the head physician of the Dnipropetrovsk SPH himself, Nikolai Karpovich Alekseyev. They administered Sulfazin (“siera”), a drug banned by world medicine. After a Sulfazin injection, a person’s temperature rises to 40°C (104°F), causing unbearable pain throughout the body. They also used insulin-induced comas. During this, a person loses consciousness and lies tightly strapped to a bed for three hours. They are brought out of this state by pouring glucose into their mouth. It is an unbearable torment. Siry endured 35 such procedures. He survived only thanks to his strong constitution (all his ancestors were long-livers).
Meanwhile, his wife left her father-in-law, who had been paralyzed for 14 years, in the care of her mother-in-law, abandoned their well-established home in Kodyma, took the children, and, like a “Decembrist’s wife,” moved to Dnipropetrovsk to be closer to her husband and help him in some way. She bought a small shed for shelter. She worked at the tram and trolleybus depot. After a few years, she received a cooperative apartment. The head of the tram and trolleybus administration, Oleksandr Yeremiyovych Kolomiiets, could publicly say: “There goes the wife of a murderer and an enemy of the people, a traitor to the motherland.” Once, she confiscated a stolen city transport pass from a passenger. For this, a reward from the regional trade union had been designated. Kolomiiets said: “To anyone, but not to Siry. Siry is listed here as the wife of an enemy of the people.” And he returned the money to the trade union.
His wife came for visits. Sometimes she saw her husband looking normal, and other times she did not recognize him: his face was square and swollen, as was his whole body; he could not speak, only look at her. Tears streamed down his face, foam came from his mouth, his body was like wood, and he could barely shuffle his feet. Denying herself and her children the bare necessities, she brought her husband food packages, but he only got what he ate during the visit. The orderlies took the rest, sometimes giving him a small portion or what had spoiled.
The food in the SPH was poor. The dishes were dirty and sticky, and matches and cigarettes were found in the food. Once, Siry found a salt packet in his food, held it up, and asked, “What is this?” For this, he received another injection of “siera.” The “laryok” (commissary) sold stale, spoiled products. The orderlies openly mocked the prisoners, especially the political ones. By the way, in the Dnipropetrovsk SPH, Siry met Leonid PLIUSHCH, whom his wife, with the help of the international community, managed to rescue from this torture chamber in 1976 and take abroad.
On April 1, 1979, Siry was transferred to the Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital, where he was held for three years. His wife traveled there as well. The regime there was just as cruel. Once, his brother sent Siry a fruit parcel. It was given to him when the fruit had completely rotted.
The name of political prisoner Siry was already known around the world. The Ukrainian diaspora, particularly Olga Shapka, Volodymyr Romaniuk, and Oleksandr Skop, advocated for his release. The governments of the USA and other countries severed trade relations with the USSR over human rights violations. In 1983, under threat of expulsion, Soviet psychiatrists were forced to withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association and did not participate in the World Congress of Psychiatrists in Hawaii, where former SPH prisoners Major General Petro HRYORENKO and Leonid PLIUSHCH spoke.
On February 25, 1983, Siry was released. Shortly before his release, he was transferred to a general-type psychiatric hospital in Dnipropetrovsk. Upon release, he was given no documents, as if he had not existed for those 13 years. On the very first night, he told his wife about the tortures he had endured. The consequences of the “treatment” were severe, and his adaptation was long; in particular, his stomach could not tolerate normal food.
To earn a work record, Siry took a job at a supermarket accepting empty glass containers.
When Siry was released, his son was in prison on fabricated charges. Siry dared to seek help from A. D. SAKHAROV, who was then in exile in the city of Gorky. He hoped to meet him when he went out for a walk. In the city, he found the academician’s address and on September 17, 1985, he entered the building at 204 Gagarin Avenue. Since he was “spotted” there, he took the elevator up. When he came down, he was detained by a man in civilian clothes, taken to a neighboring building, where he was brutally cursed at, searched, taken to the train station, and sent home with a ticket purchased with his own money.
In connection with this trip, on October 25, 1985, Siry was arrested again, right at the supermarket, and held for another 140 days in the regional psychiatric hospital. In total, Siry spent 4,832 days in captivity.
Even during the “perestroika” era, local psychiatrists insisted that Siry appear before a commission to have his diagnosis removed. He did not appear and demanded full rehabilitation. In 1994, Siry voluntarily underwent an examination by the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association. The Association sent a request to the Dnipropetrovsk SPH, but his case file was not sent. The Association independently determined that Siry had never suffered from mental illness.
From 1989, he collaborated with the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and the Repressed. In 1993–94, he established the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, and Kirovohrad regional organizations of the Society. From 1993, Siry was the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional organization, and in 1998, at the VI Assembly, he was elected deputy chairman of the Society.
In 1994, Siry ran as a candidate for the Verkhovna Rada.
Despite meticulous searches, his wife preserved the rough drafts of Siry’s works, which were hidden in a pile of firewood. He restored them and wrote his memoirs, which, we hope, will be published.
In 2006, he was awarded the Order of Merit, III degree.
Bibliography:
1.
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group Archive: Interview with V. Siry, April 3, 2001; Ibid: // Odeska khvylia-5. Dokumenty, tvory, spohady v’iazniv sumlinnia / Comp. P. Otchenashenko, O. Riznykiv, D. Shupta. – Odesa: Simex-print, 2010. – pp. 183–206.
2.
Pliushch, Leonid. Na karnavali istorii [At the Carnival of History].— Suchasnist, 1978; U karnavali istorii: Svidchennia. – Kyiv: Fakt, 2002. – p. 547.
Herald of Repression in Ukraine. Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Editor-compiler Nadiya Svitlychna. New York. 1980–1985. – 1981: 2-202; 4-52; 1984: 11-16.
SIRYJ VASYL IVANOVYCH