(mid-1950s–1980s)
(Introductory article for the publication: The Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords: In 4 vols. Vol. 1: Personalities / Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Compiled by Ye. Yu. Zakharov. — Kharkiv: Folio, 2001. pp. 5–42.
With corrections for the publication: Vasyl Ovsiienko. The Light of People: Memoirs and Publicistic Writings. In two books. Book 2 / Compiled by the author. Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 107–146).
The ideological confrontation between the USSR and the countries of the West, under whose shadow almost the entire 20th century passed, threatened to escalate into a third world war in its second half. However, the inevitability of using thermonuclear weapons, which would be tantamount to humanity’s suicide, compelled a search for paths to peaceful coexistence between states with different socioeconomic systems, toward understanding and détente. On August 1, 1975, after lengthy negotiations and delays, 33 European states (all except Albania), as well as the USA and Canada, signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in the Finnish capital of Helsinki.
The Helsinki Act definitively secured the borders that had formed in Europe as a result of the Second World War (while the nominal statehood of the Ukrainian SSR as part of the USSR, and even as a founding member of the UN, was not taken into account). In addition, the USSR secured for itself most-favored-nation status in trade with the West, to which it was clearly losing in the economic and military standoff. This became a significant victory for Soviet diplomacy in the course of the policy of détente. In exchange, the USSR pledged to comply with the humanitarian part (the so-called “third basket”) of the Final Act, particularly human rights within the framework of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948. The core values of the Helsinki process in the humanitarian sphere were the protection of human rights by building a democratic rule of law and the protection of the rights of peoples by building a just international order (1). The CSCE Final Act stipulated that exposing the persecution of people for their beliefs would henceforth lead to legally justified claims from other parties and would no longer be interpreted as interference in a country’s internal affairs.
Of course, in signing the Helsinki Act, the Brezhnev leadership had no intention of observing it, but the democratic West had its own tactics in its confrontation with the totalitarian USSR: it was crucial to open access to truthful information regardless of state borders—and the communist regime would inevitably lose the ideological battle. The political circumstances of the mid-1970s forced the totalitarian Soviet regime to play the role of a respectable, democratic entity on the international stage. From then on, its demagoguery about “interference in the internal affairs of the USSR” when it came to violations of elementary human rights became untenable.
Since the CSCE Final Act was equated with national legislation, its signing meant that legal opportunities opened up to fight human rights violations legally and entirely lawfully, relying on domestic and international law. The first to realize this were the Moscow human rights defenders from the circle of Academician Andrei Sakharov. At the initiative of Professor Yury Orlov, they created the Moscow Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords on May 12, 1976. As Andrei Amalrik put it, human rights activists brought about a revolutionary turn in the consciousness of a population terrorized for decades: in an unfree country, they began to act like free people (2). They demanded that the state recognize human rights, that is, their legalization, and began to exercise constitutional rights (freedom of speech, press, demonstration, association, etc.) de facto, that is, to understand the laws as they were written. Based on the idea that adherence to the law would mean a change in the nature of power, its democratization, human rights activists compelled the state to comply with its own laws and the international legal acts it had signed.
Second, on the initiative of the writer and philosopher Mykola Rudenko, General Petro Hryhorenko (Moscow), public figure Oksana Meshko, science fiction writer Oles Berdnyk, and lawyer Levko Lukianenko (Chernihiv), the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords was created on November 9, 1976. Its founding members also included biologist Nina Strokata-Karavanska (Tarusa, Kaluga Oblast), engineer Myroslav Marynovych, historian Mykola Matusevych, teacher Oleksa Tykhyi (Donetsk region), and lawyer Ivan Kandyba (Pustomyty, Lviv region). They signed the Declaration of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords—about its creation—and Memorandum No. 1.
To ensure the implementation of the Helsinki Accords, the UHG set the goal of acquainting the public with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, promoting the expansion of contacts between peoples and the free exchange of information, and seeking accreditation for foreign press representatives in Ukraine. Realizing that the nominal statehood of the UkrSSR was a complete myth, the Group, in an era of the collapse of the world colonial system, reminded the world of the existence of a Ukraine enslaved by Russia and raised the question of its recognition by the world community: for Ukraine to be represented at future conferences by a separate delegation. This was a stroke of genius: to place the Ukrainian national interest on an international legal foundation in the context of the democratic West’s confrontation with the totalitarian USSR. And just a decade and a half later, the myth of Ukraine was filled with real substance: it became independent!
The group accepted written complaints about human rights violations in Ukraine and against Ukrainians outside its borders, and passed this information on to the media and to the governments of the states participating in the Helsinki process.
The authors of the Declaration emphasized that the main motive for their activity would be humanitarian and legal, not political. The wording of the Helsinki Group’s documents was very cautious, their goals elementary. But this was the necessary starting point for a people deprived of its own statehood, exhausted by Holodomors, repressions, and wars; a people that had no national political, public, or cultural organizations of its own; a people that did not control its own economy or natural resources, that had neither its own army, nor its own patriotic ruling class, nor an influential intelligentsia; a people not independently represented on the international stage. Ukraine had to reassert its right to a full-fledged life, and for this, it needed the most important of freedoms—the freedom of speech, as clearly formulated in Art. 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
In Memorandum No. 1, the policy of the USSR towards Ukraine was defined as genocide. The second memorandum discussed the formal and declarative nature of the USSR and that Marxist ideology had lost its appeal. The third, using the fate of Yosyp Terelia as an example, discussed the persecution of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and believers in general. Between January and April 1977, the Group issued 10 Memorandums on the persecution of citizens for dissent, particularly regarding Vira Lisova, whose family was terrorized with searches; regarding Nadiya Svitlychna, who was denied registration in Kyiv after her release from prison, was not hired for work, and was threatened with a new imprisonment—for “parasitism”; and several documents in defense of Mykola Rudenko and Oleksa Tykhyi, founding members of the UHG, arrested on February 5, 1977. Memorandum No. 5, titled “Ukraine in the Summer of 1977,” was addressed to the governments of the participating countries of the Belgrade CSCE Follow-up Meeting.
The Helsinki movement quickly became international: on November 25, 1976, a Helsinki Group was created in Lithuania; on January 14, 1977, in Georgia; on April 1, in Armenia. Since September 1976, the Committee for Defense of Workers had been active in Poland, later transformed into the Committee for Social Self-Defense, and in January 1977, the “Charter 77” group was formed in Czechoslovakia. In the United States, a special commission of Congress was created.
Thus, the Brezhnev leadership had made a severe miscalculation: after decades of constant “purges,” people were finally found in society who dared to openly expose the regime’s falsehoods and deceit, by collecting and publicizing facts of human rights violations. Their sacrifice and devotion to their ideals healed the moral climate of society: an independent public opinion emerged. Not all human rights activists intended to engage in political activity, but they began to demand this right for every citizen, including the right to create political organizations as alternatives to the CPSU. People understood that only in a state where political freedoms are observed can citizens effectively protect their economic interests.
Everything that was still alive in Ukraine was drawn to the Helsinki Group. For the first time after decades of repression, such a small number of Ukrainian intelligentsia organized and spoke to the whole world about the slavery and lawlessness of their people. In this sense, the Helsinki movement was far more important for Ukraine than for peoples who had their own statehood, which is why it proved to be the most resilient in our country during the 1970s and 1980s.
The human rights defenders had no illusions that the authorities would allow them to openly defend people's rights by citing the Helsinki Act. They knew they were risking their freedom and even their lives. But they were guided by considerations of a higher order. Besides the fact that it was often a matter of the elementary human dignity of specific individuals (the sum of which, in fact, constitutes the honor of a people), it was also a farsighted political calculation: to draw the attention of the world public to the state of human rights in Ukraine and, with its help, to pressure the authorities to liberalize that power, which would expand the platform for a further assault on the totalitarian colonial system with the aim of destroying it.
The fact that Ukrainian human rights defenders correctly assessed the international political situation at that time is evidenced by the fact that this very path, combined with the economic exhaustion of the Soviet Union and military and ideological pressure from the West, ultimately led to the collapse of the Russian communist empire and the proclamation of an independent, democratic Ukrainian state.
It should be noted that a high cultural and moral atmosphere, sensitive to new ideas, prevailed in the movement for human and national rights. It opposed both the official totalitarian ideology and primitivism. Therefore, the human rights movement in Ukraine united a number of currents (the national liberation movement, the general democratic movement, the religious movement, the socio-economic or workers' movement, and the struggle for the right to emigrate), as well as prominent personalities (Levko Lukianenko, Ivan Svitlychny, Mykhailo Horyn, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Viacheslav Chornovil, Oksana Meshko, Nina Strokata-Karavanska, Vasyl Stus, Mykola Rudenko, Petro Hryhorenko, Mustafa Dzhemilev, Yosyf Zisels, Zinovii Krasivskyi, Vasyl Romaniuk—the future Patriarch Volodymyr, and others). It was a place for Ukrainians and Jews, believers of various faiths and atheists, nationalists and national-communists, social democrats and anarchists. They never declared each other enemies, because at that time everyone equally needed freedom, and the state independence of Ukraine seemed a probable guarantor of such freedom.
Although the Ukrainian human rights movement did not declare its ideological orientations, from the very beginning it was one of the forms of struggle for national liberation. In Western Ukraine, the human rights movement made national rights and religious issues its cornerstone, whereas in Greater Ukraine it had a broader, socio-economic character; in the second half of the 1970s, it closely intertwined with the movement of non-Ukrainian human rights defenders and with the human rights movement in Russia (3). As the Ukrainian political scientist Vasyl Lisovyi noted in one of his speeches, independence was not an end in itself for some human rights defenders, but a means of protecting the unique Ukrainian world, the national experience that unites “the dead, and the living, and the yet unborn” (T. Shevchenko). It was a movement for the freedom of the individual and for the cultural identity of all ethnic and religious groups that have long constituted the population of Ukraine.
They reasoned as follows. As long as a nation has not resolved the question of its statehood, this question will divert all its strength. A national state can be more or less democratic or totalitarian. But there can be no talk of exercising human rights under a colonial situation. An independent Ukraine, judging by its historical experience, was imagined by human rights defenders as only democratic. For whenever Ukrainians achieved even relative independence, they, in accordance with their freedom-loving national character, created democratic state institutions or projects where personal and social freedom were respected (the Princely Era with its veche assembly rule and elected princes; the Cossack Christian Republic, which existed for 110 years; the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk; the Central Rada of 1917–1918; the projects for a state structure of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of 1942 and the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council of 1944; and the current statehood, despite some grotesque phenomena).
The bitter experience of life under conditions of colonial lawlessness and total illegality led Ukrainian human rights defenders to the principled conviction that freedom is possible only where law reigns. In this, they relied on the legal democratic traditions of their people:
For where there is no sacred will—
There will never be good,
Why even fool oneself.
Taras Shevchenko.
Thus, the signing of the CSCE Final Act and the emergence of the Helsinki movement were of such great importance that it allows the history of the human rights movement in Ukraine to be divided into the period before this event and after it.
Prerequisites
As a result of the revolution of 1917–1920, a one-party, totalitarian type of statehood, brought in on Russian bayonets, was established in the main part of Ukraine, which, however, can be seen as a compromise between the awakened Ukrainian national forces and the Russian occupying forces (4). Already in the 1920s, this power, foreign to the Ukrainian people, forced abroad, repressed, or physically exterminated all property owners, enterprising people, all members of Ukrainian political and public organizations (including the Ukrainian Communist Party—the “Borotbists”), all officials of the Ukrainian People's Republic, that is, the national, still small, leading stratum. But to hold on in Ukraine, the Bolshevik party, in which Ukrainians were a tiny minority, had to reckon with the powerful rise of national forces, so it supported the policy of korenizatsiya, i.e., Ukrainization. A current of national communism was forming (Mykola Skrypnyk, Mykola Khvylovyi, Oleksandr Shumskyi). Convinced that the process was becoming uncontrollable and threatened the formation of a modern Ukrainian nation and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state, which would undoubtedly quickly renounce the foreign totalitarian regime, and for the Russian Empire, camouflaged as the USSR, a final collapse, the Russian occupying forces from 1929 went on a decisive offensive against Ukrainianness as such. J. Stalin’s thesis that the Ukrainian intelligentsia did not deserve trust meant in practice the total physical extermination in the 1930s of the new Ukrainian elite, which was already being formed predominantly within the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The beginning of the extermination was marked by the “SVU case”—the completely fabricated “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine” by the Main Political Directorate.
Since the Ukrainian ethnos with its love of freedom, private property mentality, and deep religiosity was generally not suited for creating a “single Soviet people—the builder of communism,” the beheading of the nation was supplemented (under the guise of “dekulakization”) by the liquidation of the best part of the Ukrainian peasantry. Mass resistance to collectivization was broken by an artificially induced famine. As a result of the mass extermination and deportation of the indigenous Ukrainian population to the East (and during the Second World War also to the West) and the mass “additional settlement” (the official term of that time) of a foreign population in its place—a carrier of totalitarian ideology, the gene pool of the Ukrainian people—the carrier of a democratic, freedom-loving, Christian worldview—was severely undermined and significantly changed for the worse. After all, the best element was being destroyed. However, we must agree that Ukrainians as a nation, in the words of Myroslav Marynovych (5), also bear the “sin of communism” and are heavily atoning for it.
Western Ukraine, occupied by Poland, was also subjected to national oppression, but not physical extermination, so it was capable of a powerful resistance to both German and Russian occupation (most notably, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army). Ukraine could not win this national liberation war due to a complete lack of external support, so its consequence was the extermination, imprisonment, and deportation to Russia of the most active part of the population of Western Ukraine. Although the Ukrainian people also lost this round of the struggle for liberation, the memory of this heroic struggle remained forever in their historical consciousness.
Undoubtedly, the level of national consciousness was higher in the western regions, where the national liberation war had just ended. In the 1950s and even in the 1960s, groups emerged in Galicia that considered themselves heirs of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. They conducted nationalist propaganda, collected or intended to collect weapons to continue armed resistance. The critical mass of such groups, as Levko Lukianenko observed, was 8–12 people, with a duration of activity from several months to three years (6). Consequently, the authorities would uncover the underground, typically executing the group leaders and imprisoning the members for maximum terms. According to KGB data, from 1954 to 1959 alone, 183 “nationalist and anti-Soviet groups” were eliminated, with 1,879 people convicted, including 46 groups (245 people) from among the intelligentsia (7). Although this was already a discrete movement of groups not connected in time and space, faint echoes that the struggle for freedom continued were deposited in the consciousness of the people. In the 1960s, the intelligentsia also took over the baton of the national liberation struggle in the western regions, and the movement gradually acquired the character of legally justified political demands.
The unification of Ukraine as a result of the Second World War into one, albeit not its own, state, and the influx of the nationally conscious Western Ukrainian population, caused a deep psychological mutation in Ukrainianness as a whole, giving a new impetus to the consolidation of the nation (8).
The curtailment of mass terror in the mid-1950s spontaneously led to the formation of a new elite, mainly based on the indigenous population: in the mid-1950s, Ukrainians began to predominate in the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Ukrainians by birth finally began to lead it. Although the ruling nomenclature that began to form, given its total Russification, was devoid of a full-fledged national consciousness, it turned out that neither side—neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian—recognized the aforementioned compromise as final. The ideological non-recognition of the USSR as the successor to the Russian Empire, the formal existence of the Ukrainian SSR within a generally democratic federalist constitution of the USSR, the ostensible membership of the UkrSSR in the UN, which had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the appearance of countries of the “socialist commonwealth” on the western borders where there were more freedoms—all these nurtured in Ukrainians the hope of one day filling the myth of a free Ukraine with real substance. Within the sincerely or forcibly communist elite, dissidence was maturing, most often concerned with national-cultural problems (9).
At the same time, the atheist state intensified pressure on believers of various confessions. The UAOC and the UGCC were destroyed, almost all Protestant religious movements were banned, thousands of churches were closed and demolished, countless violators of the ban on religious propaganda and young believers who refused to join the army or take up arms were imprisoned. This caused a massive, sometimes organized, movement for freedom of conscience, which, however, remains little studied due to the mass death of its participants, as well as the fact that this experience was often not consciously recorded by them (the belief was, everything is written in God's book).
Under conditions of relative liberalization, spontaneous workers’ strikes and unrest arose in connection with rising food prices, disregard for safety at work, and the arbitrariness of the authorities (often the police). Strikes and uprisings in the political concentration camps of the Russian North, Siberia, and Kazakhstan in the late 1940s and early 1950s should be seen as a form of workers’ resistance, as a struggle for the elementary rights of the working, enslaved person, where imprisoned Ukrainian insurgents were usually the leading force. Although the strikes and uprisings were brutally suppressed, and the authorities severely persecuted the recording and dissemination of information about such facts, they were nevertheless forced to make concessions, to soften the regime both in the “small” and “large” zones, which became a gain for society in the struggle against the state.
The Sixtiers. The Emergence of the Human Rights Movement
The idea of human rights had been expressed by Ukrainian thinkers as early as the 19th century (Mykhailo Drahomanov, Bohdan Kistiakivskyi, and others); in an implicit form, it became an important component of the 1918 Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. But the movement that consciously set itself the goal of demanding the state’s recognition of human rights, that is, the legalization of human rights, is a phenomenon that arose only in the 1960s, during Khrushchev’s “thaw,” against the backdrop of criticism of the personality cult and “barracks communism.” Since the “Stalinist” and later the “Brezhnevist” Constitution of the USSR contained a number of articles proclaiming freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc., the human rights movement tried to use this circumstance, demanding that they “adhere to the Constitution.” But as the movement expanded, human rights defenders increasingly cited international human rights documents—the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the UN on December 16, 1966, and signed by the Ukrainian SSR on October 19, 1973, and the Optional Protocol to the latter, which entered into force on March 23, 1976.
The human rights movement in Ukraine arose as an integral part of the national liberation movement: it combined the demand for individual rights (civil, political, social) with the collective right to national-cultural identity and national statehood (designated by the term “national rights”). There was also a general democratic trend, a religious one, a socio-economic one (the workers’ movement), and the demand for the right to emigrate (primarily the struggle of Jews for the right to leave).
Since both cultural and political demands could only be formulated and defended with at least such a fundamental right as freedom of speech, the protection of human rights came to be considered a crucial prerequisite. Although different groups assessed the relationship between national demands and human rights protection differently, they ultimately recognized that these two components must be combined.
From a sociological point of view, the dissident and human rights movement consisted of people of various ideological, philosophical, and political orientations, not always explicitly expressed: existentialism, positivism and analytical philosophy, revisionism, etc. Some dissenters gravitated toward rationalism (sometimes combined with atheism), others toward a religious worldview. In the spectrum of political positions, one could distinguish supporters of independence, autonomists, national-communists, democrats (who considered the national question less important or not important at all), etc. But these individual preferences and positions were known perhaps only within a circle of friends, since, for tactical reasons, they were rarely revealed in the publications of that time, in programmatic documents. Ultimately, people of different ideological and philosophical orientations were united by the desire to express their views, which led to the spread of uncensored literature—the so-called “samvydav” (typewritten and photocopied literature of a critical nature).
As soon as the iron shackles of Stalinism weakened during the Khrushchev “thaw,” the few surviving representatives of the Ukrainian creative intelligentsia—Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Maksym Rylskyi, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych—drew attention to the abnormal situation of their people, primarily their culture and language. They became the “spiritual fathers” of the generation that came to be known as the Sixtiers.
Operating within the existing system, the Sixtiers restored the sum of the socio-psychological qualities of the intelligentsia: natural self-respect, individualism, an orientation toward universal human values, rejection of injustice, respect for ethical norms, and for law and legality (10). Its first manifestations were cultural. This included the poetry of Lina Kostenko, Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Ivan Drach, Ihor Kalynets; publicistic writings and literary criticism (Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Ivan Dziuba), and the works of artists Alla Horska, Panas Zalyvakha, Stefaniia Shabatura, and others. In Kyiv, these people gathered at the Club of Creative Youth (1959-1964, president Les Taniuk), which became a national and cultural center: it organized literary and artistic evenings, exhibitions, trips, and caroling. Similar clubs began to operate in Lviv (1962, the “Prolisok” CCY), Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and other cities. But in the fall of 1962, when the president of the Kyiv CCY, Les Taniuk, along with Alla Horska and Vasyl Symonenko, visited the burial sites of victims of the 1930s repressions in Bykivnia near Kyiv and published a memorandum to the city council demanding an investigation into those events, intense pressure began on the CCY, culminating in its closure in 1964, the beating of V. Symonenko, the emigration of L. Taniuk to Russia, and the murder of A. Horska.
The ethnographic museum of Ivan Honchar was active, effectively becoming a club where nationally conscious youth thronged and were educated. The folklore ensembles “Zhaivoronok” led by Borys Riabokliach and “Homin” led by Leopold Yashchenko began their rehearsals.
Although this movement emphasized the appreciation of national-cultural identity, it was not conservatively-restorationist but carried a spirit of renewal in form and content. It was bound to grow into a political, anti-imperial movement, since the colonial status of Ukraine was the main reason for the destruction of Ukrainian cultural identity. The poetry of V. Symonenko was perhaps the first clear evidence of this maturation toward political demands (“My people exist! My people will always be! No one will cross out my people!”). The Sixtiers remembered that the USSR Constitution contained articles confirming the sovereignty of the union republics, including the right to secede from the USSR, but the first political demands were limited to expanding the powers of the republican state bodies. And this, given the state of mass political consciousness, was the correct ideological orientation.
An important component of the burgeoning human rights movement was the defense of the right to freedom of religion. A leading role here was played by believers of the Greek Catholic rite and Protestant churches (Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.).
The Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union (1958–1961, leader Levko Lukianenko) was the first to realize that in the hour of defeat, a nation in its struggle for independence must rely not on physical force, but on the force of law, as enshrined in the Constitution and declared in international legal documents. Citing Art. 14 of the Constitution of the UkrSSR, according to which the republic had the right to secede from the USSR while preserving the existing social order, the UWPU advanced the perfectly legal idea of a referendum on this issue. Of course, none of the UWPU members were sincere Marxist-Leninists or supporters of communism, so the draft of its national-communist program was written as a deliberately tactical one. The authorities understood this well. “The Constitution is for Negroes and for fools like you,” the investigator told the arrested Ivan Kandyba, thereby admitting that the constitution was merely propagandistic fiction. The members of the UWPU were arrested on January 20, 1961, without ever having emerged from the underground. L. Lukianenko was sentenced by a closed court to death, which after 72 days was commuted to 15 years of imprisonment; the other 7 members received from 7 to 15 years of imprisonment. Information about the “lawyers' case” only came out of the concentration camps in 1967 (11), so its activities were virtually unknown to the public at the time. However, the idea of Ukraine’s secession from the USSR and the establishment of a legal state by non-violent, legal means was realized in 1991.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, an open opposition movement appeared in Ukraine. As the noted political scientist Ivan Lypovetskyj observed, against the backdrop of the total destruction of anything showing signs of dissent, this seemed almost a miracle (12).
From the spring of 1962, intensive communication began between the Kyiv and Lviv Sixtiers, and a common line of conduct was developed. The Galicians Mykhailo and Bohdan Horyn proposed resorting to the experience of the OUN underground, but the Kyivans Ivan Svitlychny and Ivan Dziuba considered it more expedient and safer to develop national-cultural enlightenment. This path proved to be the right one. In Ukraine, which was slowly emerging from the dark period of total repression, new people, a young generation of intelligentsia, “grew from lean mothers in a hacked-down garden” (M. Vinhranovskyi), preparing to take on a higher responsibility for the fate of their people. For the most part, these were not outright opponents of communism; some sincerely wanted to improve the socialist system. In their circle, uncensored typewritten and photocopied literature of a critical nature towards reality circulated: poems, articles that could not be published in the official press, historical documents that awakened national consciousness and love for freedom (for example, the brochure “The Deduction of the Rights of Ukraine” published abroad, the late 18th-century historiosophical work “The History of the Rus' People,” the works “Two Russian Nationalities” by Mykola Kostomarov, “What is Progress” by Ivan Franko, and finally, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and others). A kind of outlet where one could express oneself somehow was literary criticism, which, however, no longer fit within the permitted limits—and it too spilled over into samvydav.
An event that stirred the conscience of the Sixtiers was the fire on May 24, 1964, at the V. Vernadsky Central Scientific Library of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR in Kyiv: the department of Ukrainian old printed books and manuscripts, and the archive of the Central Rada, were burned. An anonymous work titled “On the Occasion of the Trial of Pohruzhalskyi” appeared in samvydav, which stated: “Let us not console ourselves with the eternal truth about the immortality of the people—its life depends on our readiness to stand up for ourselves.” (The authors of this document were Yevhen Sverstiuk and Ivan Svitlychny).
To avoid being accused of underground activities, the Sixtiers mostly did not seek to create formally documented organizations. Their circles operated on the basis of interpersonal contacts (friendly, family, and professional). The samvydav materials generally did not raise the question of changing the system, so their distribution was difficult to qualify as “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” (Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR). This, however, did not save the Sixtiers from repression. Because, as Yevhen Sverstiuk once said, when so many intelligent, talented, glorious people come together, something was bound to come of it. The authorities understood this too. Nikita Khrushchev declared in March 1963: “We are against peaceful coexistence in the sphere of ideology.” With his removal from office, the ideological offensive against dissent naturally turned into repression. The authorities themselves pushed the dissenters from communism (one might say, dissidents or revisionists) into the camp of their irreconcilable enemies by arresting dozens of people in August–September 1965. In Kyiv, these were literary critic Ivan Svitlychny, engineers Ivan Rusyn and Oleksandr Martynenko, student Yaroslav Hevrych, and laboratory assistant Yevhenia Kuznetsova; in Lviv, psychologist Mykhailo Horyn, art historian Bohdan Horyn, student Ivan Hel, and university lecturers Mykhailo Osadchyi and Mykhailo Kosiv; in Crimea, writer Mykhailo Masiutko; in Zhytomyr, linotypist Anatolii Shevchuk; in Odesa, writer Sviatoslav Karavanskyi; in Ivano-Frankivsk, historian Valentyn Moroz and artist Panas Zalyvakha, and others.
21 people were sentenced to relatively short terms of imprisonment—compared to the usual Stalinist ones (the longest being 6 years) (13). Judging by this, the arrests were carried out hastily, perhaps even reluctantly, on direct orders from Moscow. The purpose of the repressions was to deliver a preemptive strike against dissent as a social phenomenon in general, before it gained dangerous momentum. Most of the leading figures remained at liberty (Ivan Svitlychny was released after 8 months “for lack of evidence”), so instead of intimidating, these not-so-severe repressions aroused public interest in the arrested and the problems they raised. A whole wave of protests arose, hundreds of signatures were collected in support of the arrested (Lina Kostenko distinguished herself here), and the term “signatories” emerged. Crowds outside the courts in Lviv chanted “Glory!” and threw flowers at the defendants. Such actions already had the character of an organized human rights movement.
The first open protest against the arrests was Ivan Dziuba's speech on September 4, 1965, during a screening of Sergei Parajanov's film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” at the “Ukraina” cinema in Kyiv. He said that this celebration of national art was overshadowed by numerous arrests and began to list the names of those arrested. An uproar ensued, and the cinema director began to pull the speaker off the stage. Dziuba was, by prior arrangement, supported by Viacheslav Chornovil, and Vasyl Stus unexpectedly called on those who were against the revival of Stalinism to stand up.
Those who most actively defended the arrested were themselves subjected to repression: expulsion from universities and postgraduate studies (Vasyl Stus), dismissal from work (Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Yurii Badzo, Svitlana Kyrychenko), cancellation of dissertation defenses (Yevhen Proniuk), and a ban on publishing for hundreds of creative people. In 1967, V. Chornovil compiled a book of materials about the arrested, “Woe from Wit (Portraits of Twenty ‘Criminals’),” for which he too was imprisoned. The artist Alla Horska was later, on November 28, 1970, killed under mysterious circumstances. Such facts stripped the Sixtiers of their ideological illusions about the totalitarian, anti-Ukrainian nature of the government in Ukraine. Thus, the psychologist Mykhailo Horyn, imprisoned in 1965 and 1981, noted: “Later, when we were arrested for the second time, it turned out that you feel very good when you say: yes, I am fighting against you and will continue to fight, because you are criminals. Then everything falls into place and no excuses are needed. But the first period was not like that. Political cunning was to some extent dictated not so much by the level of consciousness as by tactics, an unreadiness to answer for one’s actions” (14).
The prisoners of 1965 brought a new spirit to the political camps, noted Levko Lukianenko (15). These people were already free from “spy-mania” and openly spoke of their connection with the Ukrainian patriotic diaspora, illegally received samvydav in captivity, and, most importantly, established a channel for information to flow out of the zones about human rights violations—both current and from previous times. Since then, the entire history of the concentration camps has been one of protest against inhumane detention conditions, a struggle for the elementary human rights of political prisoners, and a search for ways to transmit information about this struggle to the outside world—at great risk of being punished further. For no protest action, including strikes and long hunger strikes, achieved a positive result unless the protesters were supported by foreign human rights organizations or foreign politicians, unless foreign radio stations spoke about them. This is truly a dramatic and heroic history, associated with the suffering of both the prisoners themselves and their families, yet rarely did any of them fall to their knees. The prisoners of conscience drew strength of spirit from the moral support of the free world, the Ukrainian diaspora, and the presence in the concentration camps of recognized moral authorities—the last of the UPA insurgents, the “25-yearers,” who were also participants in the political prisoners’ uprisings (Mykhailo Soroka, Kateryna Zarytska, Danylo Shumuk, Yevhen Pryshliak, Myroslav Symchych, Stepan Mamchur, and many others), with whom the younger generation quickly found a common language. Representatives of other peoples enslaved by Russia were imprisoned here, in whose eyes Ukrainians had a deserved reputation as the most steadfast fighters for freedom.
Naturally, the opposition of the 1960s started from the political reality—the existence of the UkrSSR within the USSR. It resorted to ideologies understandable to the general public—national-communism, nationalism, social democracy. At that time, “revisionism” gained popularity in the countries of the “socialist concentration camp” as a hope to transform “real socialism” into “socialism with a human face.” In Ukraine, too, some people sincerely advocated for a “true” socialism and a “true” internationalism—as the equality of nations, including the right of each nation to its own statehood.
The most outstanding manifestation of national-communism as a movement for the expansion of national autonomy was the treatise “Internationalism or Russification?,” written by Ivan Dziuba from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint (end of 1965). This work, as noted by Heorhii Kasianov (16), became a kind of manifesto for the majority of critically thinking Ukrainian intelligentsia, who hoped to solve the national, and therefore social, problems of their homeland within the existing system. The familiar Marxist terminology, a series of antitheses (the contrast between the “just” theory of “Leninist national policy” and its unjust practice, “true Marxism-Leninism” and its “distorted version”) were perceived as a tactical device, nothing more, although the author himself tried to appear a sincere Marxist. The author refutes the idea of the “merging of nations,” the myth of the “civilizing mission of the great Russian people” towards other peoples of the USSR, and does so argumentatively, logically, and consistently. He attracted radicals with the sharpness of the questions posed, and moderates with his loyalty to the Soviet system. This was a sophisticated and highly erudite opposition, yet still within the existing system. However, it is known that a system cannot be changed without a transformation in the mass consciousness of people: without the assertion of national and civic consciousness, it is impossible to establish a full-fledged, democratic, independent state (which the 1990s can confirm). Dziuba became the most authoritative figure among the critically minded intelligentsia, especially the youth. Surprisingly, many supporters of national-communism were found in the leading circles of Ukraine (foremost among them, First Secretary of the CC CPU Petro Shelest), and for several years they protected I. Dziuba from arrest, and even—supposedly for the purpose of criticism—facilitated the reproduction and distribution of his work. But when this system felt that national-communism was undermining it and cast I. Dziuba into the camp of its enemies, he began to make excuses, claiming he did not want to harm the existing order, only to improve it. I. Dziuba finally capitulated after his arrest on April 18, 1972, causing bitter disappointment among his numerous supporters (17).
The most prominent representative of integral nationalism was the brilliant publicist and historian Valentyn Moroz, with his philosophical voluntarism, defense of the purity of the national ideal at any cost, cult of the strong personality, and passionarity. His second arrest on June 1, 1970, and sentence to 14 years became a dire warning to the entire burgeoning human rights movement.
Both of these prominent figures—Ivan Dziuba and Valentyn Moroz—followed their tragic paths. And both ended up in a dead end. Because both these branches of opposition were dead ends. Both national-communism and integral nationalism are totalitarian trends, characteristic of the 1920s–40s, but they became obsolete for the Sixtiers. For both communism and integral nationalism justify revolutionary violence, are intolerant of the idea of human rights, and it was precisely they, as Ivan Lypovetskyj asserts, that led the Ukrainian people into a historical dead end (18).
A third path, little noticed at the time, was proposed by the underground “Ukrainian National Front,” which published the journal “Volia i Batkivshchyna” (Will and Fatherland) (1964–1967, leader Dmytro Kvetsko). This was an independent development in the form of “people's socialism,” very close to the realities of contemporary Western European social democracy. It was perhaps the most detailed program of the nationalist trend in the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1960s-80s. The sections of the UNF program, “National Relations” and “Political Demands,” were quite realistic, as noted by Anatolii Rusnachenko (19, 20)—they partially began to be implemented in modern Ukraine.
The main current of the national liberation movement, which became known as the “Sixtiers” and was most vividly expressed in the uncensored typewritten journal “Ukrainskyi Visnyk” (The Ukrainian Herald) (1970-1972, editor Viacheslav Chornovil), was characterized by a combination of the struggle against national oppression with the struggle for human rights. The circle of Sixtiers was narrow. “There are few of us. A tiny handful. Only for prayers and endless waiting” (V. Stus). But they testified to the continuity of the Ukrainian people's aspirations for freedom. It is important that the thread of resistance in our country was not broken after the defeat in the armed struggle, as it was with our neighbors, the Belarusians. The Sixtiers continued, in new forms, the noblest traditions of the Ukrainian national liberation movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, with its democratic and humanistic orientation, the traditions of Ukrainian statehood of the 17th and 18th centuries and of 1917-1920, and the national liberation movement of the 1940s and 1950s.
The second half of the 1960s was a time of intensive multiplication of samvydav literature, specifically within the circle of the Sixtiers. A wide range of people, who were not “lit up” in criminal cases but whose contribution is invaluable, were involved in its production, storage, and distribution. The professionalization of samvydav was greatly facilitated by the emergence of a whole layer of “boilermen with higher education”—creative people who were thrown out of their jobs and had nowhere to apply their potential. The most prominent authors of samvydav were V. Chornovil (“Woe from Wit (Portraits of Twenty ‘Criminals’)” and “What and How Bohdan Stenchuk Defends, or 66 Questions and Remarks to an ‘Internationalist’”—in response to the authorities' clumsy attempt to argue with Ivan Dziuba's “What and How I. Dziuba Defends,” signed with a pseudonym), Mykhailo Osadchyi (the novel “The Cataract”—about the author's arrest in 1965 and imprisonment in Mordovia), Vasyl Stus (“A Place in the Battle or in the Reckoning?”, also in defense of I. Dziuba, and his work “Phenomenon of the Era”—a brilliant literary study on the fall of the brilliant poet Pavlo Tychyna to the level of a court lackey), and the historical study by historian Mykhailo Braichevskyi about the 1654 act, “Reunification or Annexation?”. He and Olena Apanovych also began a series of lectures on the history of the Princely era and the Cossacks. The private ethnographic museum of Ivan Honchar was active, which effectively became a club where nationally conscious youth thronged and were educated. The folklore ensembles “Zhaivoronok” led by Borys Riabokliach and “Homin” led by Leopold Yashchenko began their rehearsals. The tradition of caroling was revived, as was the honoring of Taras Shevchenko on May 22—the day of his reburial in Ukraine in 1861. In 1967, the authorities tried to seize several participants near the monument in Kyiv, but at the call of Mykola Plakhotniuk, about 600 people went to the Central Committee of the CPU building and secured the release of the detained. This was a victory: thereafter, until 1972, the authorities began to hold their own official “festivals of friendship of peoples” near the monuments, and deans warned potential participants of unsanctioned gatherings of expulsion from universities, and heads of institutions warned of dismissal from work. However, in 1970, Volodymyr Roketskyi, and in 1972, Anatolii Lupynis were seized for reading poems at the monument and imprisoned.
A whole series of literary works appeared, carrying ideas of freedom and humanism. The most striking of them, the novel “The Cathedral” by Oles Honchar (January 1968), sparked a lively discussion in society about national spiritual values. Yevhen Sverstiuk clarified these ideas in his profound philosophical work “The Cathedral in Scaffolding,” and in the articles “Ivan Kotliarevskyi is Laughing” and “The Last Tear.” The discussion ended with the withdrawal of the novel from shops and libraries, the defamation of the famous writer in the official press, and the imprisonment in 1970 of Ivan Sokulskyi, the author of the “Letter of the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk” in support of “The Cathedral,” as well as Mykola Kulchynskyi, and the suspended sentence of Viktor Savchenko.
There were strong circles of Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish opposition intelligentsia, where ideas of human rights protection were maturing, in Odesa (Nina Strokata, Vasyl Barladianu, Hanna Mykhailenko, Leonid Tymchuk, Viacheslav Ihrunov, David Naidis, Reyza Palatnyk), in Kharkiv (mainly of a general democratic character, oriented towards Moscow human rights activists—Henrikh Altunian, Volodymyr Nedobora, Volodymyr Ponomariov, Arkadii Levin), in Dnipropetrovsk (Ivan Sokulskyi, Oleksandr Kuzmenko, Mykola Bereslavskyi), in Uman (Nadiia Surovtsova, Kuzma Matviiuk, Bohdan Chornomaz), and in the cities of Galicia.
On the night of May 1, 1966, student Heorhii Moskalenko and worker Viktor Kuksa hoisted a blue-and-yellow flag over the Kyiv Institute of National Economy. They were found after 9 months and imprisoned. Here and there, leaflets against Russification were distributed. For these, in 1968, workers at the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station construction site Oles Nazarenko, Vasyl Kondriukov, and Valentyn Karpenko were imprisoned; in 1969, Levko Horokhivskyi in Ternopil; and for his poems, Mykola Horbal in Borshchiv. Individual patriots, in protest against the violation of the right of Ukrainians to be masters in their own land, resorted to public self-immolation. Thus, Vasyl Makukh did this on Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv on November 5, 1968—earlier than the Czech Jan Palach. Mykola Bereslavskyi from Berdiansk made such an attempt on February 10, 1969, in the lobby of Kyiv University—he was seized at the last moment. On the night of January 21, 1978, after scattering leaflets, former political prisoner Oleksa Hirnyk from Kalush set himself on fire near the grave of T. Shevchenko in Kaniv.
As Roman Szporluk rightly noted (21), in the Brezhnev-Shcherbytsky era, Moscow launched an unprecedented expansion into Ukraine, striving to completely liquidate its linguistic, cultural, and historical national identity. This was done through the destruction of the Ukrainian-language education system, newspapers and magazines, and political purges. As a result, huge masses of the Ukrainian population sank below zero in their national and human self-awareness: they began to be ashamed of and renounce their Ukrainianness.
Later, Vasyl Stus wrote about this oppressive atmosphere: “More than one of us thought in despair that the very spiritual existence of our native people was now under threat. And more than one of us felt: if there is any salvation left, it is only today. For tomorrow it will be too late. And we, the living witnesses of this quiet, secret flooding of our national land, were forced to speak of the phenomena of genocide” (22). Mykola Rudenko, in an interview on the occasion of Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, said: “The Lord snatched us from the very edge of the abyss. One more generation, another 15-20 years—and there would have been nothing left to save, Ukraine would have become unnecessary to Ukrainians, just as Belarus is unnecessary to Belarusians...”
Russian samizdat also penetrated Ukraine, particularly through Leonid Plyushch. It was L. Plyushch who translated the most important Ukrainian works into Russian. Although Ukrainian samvydav was thematically narrower than Russian, as it focused almost exclusively on the national problem, it stimulated the awakening of national, freedom-loving sentiments among other enslaved peoples and revealed to the all-Union reader problems that would have to be solved in the future, first and foremost, the problem of the de-imperialization of the consciousness of the dominant nation in the USSR, the Russian nation.
When the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR was formed in Moscow in May 1969, it included Leonid Plyushch from Kyiv and Henrikh Altunian from Kharkiv (both held general democratic principles). The first actual human rights organization in Ukraine should be considered the “Public Committee for the Defense of Nina Strokata-Karavanska” (a statement about its creation on December 21, 1971, was signed by Viacheslav Chornovil, Iryna Stasiv-Kalynets (Lviv), Vasyl Stus (Kyiv), Leonid Tymchuk (Odesa), and Pyotr Yakir (Moscow)). The Committee intended to act on the principles of the Constitution and international legal acts—the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Its goal was to inform official institutions and the public about the circumstances of the case, to monitor compliance with the law during the investigation and trial, and to collect signatures in defense of the arrested woman. In addition to the statement, the Committee managed to publish a bulletin, "Who is N. A. Strokata (Karavanska)". But by the beginning of 1972, almost all members of the Committee were behind bars.
As we have already noted, until now, the Sixtiers movement had consciously avoided organizational matters, fearing harsh repressions, closed trials, and accusations of “treason.” For instance, Yevhen Proniuk, who back in 1964 had written a programmatic samvydav article “The State and Tasks of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement,” proposed creating an underground patriotic party. The informal but universally recognized leader of the Sixtiers, Ivan Svitlychny, rejected this idea; moreover, he was also against publishing the journal “Ukrainskyi Visnyk” (The Ukrainian Herald) as a sign of organization. And yet, by the end of the 1960s, the samvydav intensively produced by the Sixtiers had effectively turned into the organizational infrastructure of the resistance movement. “Ukrainskyi Visnyk” collected under one cover everything of importance from samvydav, consciously omitting things that could be deemed “anti-Soviet.” When rumors began to circulate about impending arrests specifically related to the appearance of the journal, V. Chornovil halted the prepared 6th issue. But the flywheel of repression had already been set in motion.
The 1972 Purge. The End of the Sixtiers
Dissent was shaking the system and damaging the international reputation of the state, which, unable to withstand economic and military competition with the democratic West, had entered a process of “détente.” Therefore, on June 28, 1971, the CC CPSU secretly passed a resolution “On measures to counter the illegal distribution of anti-Soviet and other politically harmful materials,” which a month later was duplicated by the CC CPU, with the addition of “local material.” A “general pogrom” was being plotted. According to rumors, on December 30, 1971, the Politburo of the CC CPSU decided to launch a union-wide campaign against samvydav with the aim of destroying the infrastructure for its production and distribution. For the Ukrainian movement, a separate “spy detective story” was staged (23). On January 4, 1972, a Belgian citizen, tourist Yaroslav Dobosh, a member of the “Ukrainian Youth Association,” was detained at the border in Chop. After appropriate “processing,” he testified that he had met in Lviv and Kyiv and “exchanged information” with several Sixtiers, including Ivan Svitlychny. Starting from January 12, 1972, about a hundred people were arrested in Ukraine, thousands of searches were conducted, and tens of thousands of people were terrorized by interrogations as witnesses, fired from their jobs, and expelled from universities. The primitive escapade with “spy” passions ended with a press conference by Dobosh on June 2, after which he was expelled from the USSR. None of the arrested were charged with “treason,” only “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” (Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR). But this time, almost all the leading figures of the Sixtiers movement received the maximum sentence (7 years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile) and were transported outside of their homeland—to Mordovia and the Perm region of Russia, then to Siberia (Ivan and Nadiya Svitlychna, Viacheslav Chornovil, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Ivan Hel, Iryna and Ihor Kalynets, Stefaniia Shabatura, Mykhailo Osadchyi, Vasyl Stus, Zinovii Antoniuk, and others). The most stubborn, who gave no testimony (Mykola Plakhotniuk, Leonid Plyushch, Borys Kovhar, Vasyl Ruban), were sent to psychiatric hospitals. At that time, almost everyone accused of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” was openly blackmailed by being sent for psychiatric evaluation. Isolated attempts to protest against the arrests were suppressed with utmost cruelty. Thus, when the talented translator Mykola Lukash offered to be arrested instead of Ivan Dziuba, he was threatened with a psychiatric hospital, and a ban was imposed on the publication of his translations. Philosopher Vasyl Lisovyi, on July 5, 1972, submitted to the CC CPU an “Open Letter to the Members of the CC CPSU and the CC CPU,” which ended as follows:
“Given the conditions under which this letter is submitted, it is difficult for me to believe in a constructive reaction to it. Although I am acting neither as a defendant, nor as a witness, nor as someone in any way involved in the case now called the ‘Dobosh case,’ after submitting this letter I will undoubtedly find myself among the ‘enemies.’ This is probably correct, because Dobosh has been released, and the ‘Dobosh case’ is now simply a case directed against the living Ukrainian people and the living Ukrainian culture. Such a ‘case’ truly unites all those arrested. But I consider myself also involved in such a case—that is why I ask to be arrested and tried as well” (24).
The next day his “request” was granted. With a pile of undistributed typewritten copies of the letter intended for circulation (about 100 copies), Yevhen Proniuk was arrested on July 6, and on March 5, 1973, Vasyl Ovsiienko was arrested in connection with this case.
The social atmosphere, unlike in 1965, was oppressive. Everyone who did not testify against the arrested and showed the slightest sign of sympathy for them was fired from their jobs, expelled from institutes, and any opportunities for career growth and creative publication (printing, exhibitions, etc.) were closed to them. Just as the revival of the 1920s is rightly called the Executed Renaissance, so the revival of the 1960s is called the Suffocated one. Those who wanted to survive had to repent humiliatingly (Zinoviia Franko, Mykola Kholodnyi, Leonid Seleznenko, Ivan Dziuba); others—duplicitously wrote libel against their recent friends or foreign “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists—mercenaries of foreign intelligence services,” squeezed out false odes in honor of the stranglers of their homeland (Ivan Drach, Dmytro Pavlychko); some could not stand the suffocating atmosphere and turned to alcohol (Mykhailo Chkhan) or committed suicide (Hryhir Tiutiunnyk); the most steadfast went into “internal emigration” for a long time (Lina Kostenko, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Valerii Shevchuk), or actually emigrated to Russia (Les Taniuk, Pavlo Movchan).
Under these conditions, tendencies towards curtailing public opposition activities and returning to underground methods became understandable. Thus, the 6th issue of the “Ukrainskyi Visnyk” (Ukrainian Herald), prepared by V. Chornovil but halted, was anonymously published by Yaroslav Kendzior, Mykhailo Kosiv, and Atena Pashko; simultaneously in Kyiv, the 6th issue was published by Yevhen Proniuk and Vasyl Lisovyi. Besides providing the public with truthful information, the publishers aimed to confuse the investigation and divert accusations from V. Chornovil. From 1973 to 1975, Stepan Khmara (Chervonohrad), Vitalii Shevchenko, and Oles Shevchenko (Kyiv) clandestinely published a combined 7th–8th issue of the “Ukrainskyi Visnyk,” and had to destroy the 9th issue just before the searches. They were discovered and convicted only in 1980.
While still in school in Sambir, Zorian Popadiuk and his classmates organized an underground opposition group, the “Ukrainian National Liberation Front” (UNLF; the name was intended to emphasize continuity with the “Ukrainian National Front” of Dmytro Kvetsko and Zinovii Krasivskyi, which was dismantled in 1967). Soon, all members of the UNLF entered universities, and the group grew in size and geography. It published a typewritten journal, “Postup” (Progress). It was uncovered in March 1973. The 19-year-old Z. Popadiuk received 7 years of imprisonment and 5 years of exile, while Yaromyr Mykytko received 5 years of imprisonment. The remaining students were expelled from their universities, and the boys were drafted into the army.
On the night of January 22, 1973—the 55th anniversary of the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic—24-year-old Volodymyr Marmus and eight of his colleagues from the village of Rosokhach raised 4 national flags over institutions in the city of Chortkiv and posted 19 large leaflets: “Freedom for Ukrainian patriots!” (referring to the 1972-73 repressions against dissenters); “Shame on the policy of Russification!”, “Long live the growing Ukrainian patriotism!”. V. Marmus was sentenced to 6 years in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile for “illegal possession of a firearm, creation of an underground nationalist organization, and involvement of minors in a nationalist organization.” Other members of the organization were sentenced to various terms (Mykola Marmus and Stepan Sapeliak—to 5 years of imprisonment and 3 years of exile; Petro Vynnychuk and Volodymyr Senkiv—to 4+3; Mykola Slobodian and Andrii Kravets—to 3+2; Mykola Lysyi—to 1 year; Petro Vitiv, as a minor, was not tried).
National flags were raised in Stebnyk (17-year-old Liubomyr Starosolskyi and Stepan Kalapach, who received 2 and 3 years, respectively) and in Kyiv.
However, the authorities’ hope of eradicating dissent and the human rights movement through repression proved futile. The victims of the 1972 “purge” turned out to be surprisingly resilient. They continued the struggle for human rights even in the camps of Mordovia, the Perm region, and the Volodymyr central prison. Semyon Gluzman attests to this: “While our Chekist guards were enthusiastically fighting the presence of winter underwear and spring-loaded mechanical razors in the zone (‘Not allowed!’), the quiet and externally calm to the point of indifference Antoniuk and Horbal surrounded themselves with a multitude of books and journals and… wrote, wrote, wrote. Their ‘kissyvas’ [messages] carried information to the world about the people of the zone, its life. And this was a terrible weapon. Tens, hundreds of thousands of Chekists and their informers were searching for sedition on the outside, putting people in prisons, camps, and psychiatric hospitals, and here, in the most otherworldly place of complete unfreedom and isolation, they wrote Samvydav!” (25).
Legally criminals, but “convicted for particularly dangerous state crimes,” the political prisoners launched a struggle for the Status of a Political Prisoner, demanding the abolition of forced labor and mandatory production quotas, the establishment of fair wages, the lifting of restrictions on correspondence, the improvement of medical services, the provision of opportunities for creative work, and more. Since the authorities responded to the draft Status of a Political Prisoner, developed in 1975 with the active participation of the “zek general” Viacheslav Chornovil, only with additional repressions, from 1976 onwards, prisoners began to implement it de facto: they went on strike, declared hunger strikes over the denial of visits, tore off the name tags from their uniforms, and refused to wear camp clothing (the famous “kholodovka” or cold-strike: they sat in punishment cells in only their underwear). This provoked additional repressions. Some prisoners of conscience spent nearly half their sentences in punishment cells, cell-type premises (PKT), or on a prison regime, while on hunger strike (for example, Viacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Lisovyi, Vasyl Stus, Zorian Popadiuk).
In the early 1970s, prisoners in the camps marked Soviet Political Prisoner's Day on October 30, Ukrainian Political Prisoner's Day on January 12 (the anniversary of the 1972 arrests), Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Red Terror on September 5 (the 1918 Sovnarkom decree), and Human Rights Day on December 10 with hunger strikes and statements. In doing so, they cited the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the UN on December 16, 1966, signed by the USSR on October 19, 1973, and the Optional Protocol to the latter, which entered into force worldwide on March 23, 1976.
They tried to inform Amnesty International and other international human rights organizations in advance about planned actions. They, and consequently the leaders of Western countries (especially US Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan), put pressure on the USSR leadership, as a result of which many prisoners of conscience managed to save their lives, and some were even wrested from captivity (Leonid Plyushch, Valentyn Moroz), sometimes in exchange for Soviet spies. The moral support from the West gave strength of spirit to the prisoners of conscience. Even those who, under pressure during the investigation and under threat of being sent to psychiatric hospitals, had pleaded guilty, matured into conscious and firm fighters for human rights in the camps. Cases of moral decline and repentance to buy freedom, despite intense pressure, were extremely rare (Vasyl Zakharchenko, later Oles Berdnyk). Here, credit must be given to the KGB: in the 1960s–80s, it selected high-quality cadres for captivity.
In the camp struggle against a common enemy—Russian imperialism—a true interethnic solidarity matured. Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Moldovan, Georgian, and Russian democratic communities took part in joint protest actions. Mykhailo Heifets testified to this well in his “Ukrainian Silhouettes” and other works (26). This experience and this personal friendship proved very useful in the late 1980s for the destruction of the odious “evil empire.”
Women political prisoners like Stefaniia Shabatura, Nadiia Svitlychna, and Iryna Kalynets demonstrated heroic resilience—for they had living examples before them in the OUN underground members Iryna Senyk and Oksana Popovych, who were already imprisoned for the second time, and the 25-yearers Kateryna Zarytska, Darka Husiak, and Halyna Palchak.
The victims of punitive psychiatry were in the most difficult—absolutely lawless (worse than death!)—situation (Mykola Plakhotniuk, Vasyl Ruban, Borys Kovhar, Anatolii Lupynis, Leonid Plyushch, later Vasyl Siryi, Hanna Mykhailenko). In fact, at that time, virtually all political prisoners faced the tangible prospect of being subjected to “punitive psychiatry.” The authorities widely—and shamelessly before the entire civilized world—used this means of blackmail both during the investigation (almost every person arrested on political grounds was put through a psychiatric examination) and against those already convicted. For an independent expert opinion on Petro Hryhorenko in 1972, the Kyiv psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman was imprisoned. Subsequently, in 1981, for an expert opinion on the workers' rights activist Oleksii Nikitin, the Kharkiv psychiatrist Anatoliy Koryagin, a consultant to the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes (which began operating on January 5, 1977), was imprisoned.
The Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords
The authorities were confident that after the 1972 “purge” of the Sixtiers, they would have no trouble with “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism,” as they called everything associated with manifestations of national self-awareness, for another 10 to 15 years. But they were mistaken. The vital forces of the Ukrainian people were not yet exhausted, so to testify to their viability and will to continue the struggle, a new cohort emerged in the concentration camps and prisons (this new Zaporozhian Sich, as Mykhailo Horyn calls it)—the human rights defenders.
The fate of writer Mykola Rudenko is indicative in this regard. The son of a miner, a war veteran, a party organizer of the Writers' Union, he enjoyed all the privileges of the Soviet establishment. But as a decent person, he firmly refused to give negative character references for his repressed colleagues, particularly Jewish writers accused of “cosmopolitanism.” The debunking of the “cult of Stalin's personality” led him to the conviction that the doctrine on which the USSR was built was fundamentally flawed. For his criticism of Marxism, Rudenko was expelled from the CPSU in 1974, and from the Writers' Union in 1975. In the early 70s, Rudenko became involved in human rights work. He had close ties with Moscow human rights activists Andrei Sakharov and Petro Hryhorenko, and became a member of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International. On April 18, 1975, he was arrested for human rights activities, but during the investigation, in connection with the 30th anniversary of the victory, he was amnestied as a war veteran. When Rudenko sought to have his disability pension restored, he was forcibly subjected to a psychiatric examination in a fraudulent manner in February-March 1976. It was only thanks to the integrity of the doctors that he was not confined to a psychiatric hospital.
As soon as Mykola Rudenko announced the creation of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords at a press conference at Aleksandr Ginzburg’s apartment in Moscow on November 9, 1976 (there were no accredited foreign journalists in Kyiv), two hours later, bricks flew through the windows of his home in Koncha-Zaspa near Kyiv, where his wife Raisa Rudenko and Oksana Meshko were staying for the night. The women shielded themselves with blankets and pillows, yet O. Meshko was wounded in the shoulder. This, M. Rudenko jokes, was how the KGB saluted the creation of the UHG (27, 28).
Preemptive searches of the Group's founding members on December 23–24, 1976, did not intimidate them, although 39 dollars were planted on Mykola Rudenko, pornographic postcards on Oles Berdnyk, and a German rifle, long unfit for shooting, was found sealed in clay in the attic of Oleksa Tykhyi’s barn (it was possibly hidden during the war by Tykhyi's brother, who went to the front and died).
The milieu of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group proved to be quite broad and heroically steadfast. It included former political prisoners, their friends and relatives, and young people who no longer wanted to suffocate in the atmosphere of official, deceitful ideology. The Central Committee of the CPSU and its “fighting vanguard”—the KGB—were at a loss. After all, they wanted to maintain a “human face” before the world. However, they could not withstand the pressure and once again revealed their true face to the world: they resorted to tried-and-true methods—arresting the most active, intimidating and firing from jobs and institutes all sympathizers and suspects.
On February 5, 1977, Mykola Rudenko and Oleksa Tykhyi found themselves behind bars. The permission to arrest the leaders of the Moscow Group, Yuri Orlov and Aleksandr Ginzburg, the Ukrainian Group, Mykola Rudenko, and the Lithuanian Group, Tomas Venclova, was given by the Politburo of the CC CPSU on the proposal of the Prosecutor General of the USSR, Roman Rudenko, and the Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. (This became known only after the dissolution of the CPSU). Regarding Mykola Rudenko, it was stipulated: to be tried by the Donetsk Regional Court, for which, allegedly, “there are procedural grounds”: his accomplice Oleksa Tykhyi lives in the Donetsk region. But in reality, they wanted to hold the trial far from the centers.
M. Rudenko and O. Tykhyi were initially charged under Art. 187-I of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR—“Dissemination of deliberately false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system,” for which the maximum punishment is 3 years of imprisonment. Such convicts are held in criminal camps. But during the investigation, the article was changed to 62—“Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Both were sentenced to maximum terms: M. Rudenko under Part 1 of Art. 62 to 7 years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile (although he was a war invalid), and O. Tykhyi—under Part 2 of Art. 62—to 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile, being declared a particularly dangerous recidivist (Tykhyi had already been convicted in 1957 for “anti-Soviet agitation”). This standard, with rare exceptions, was subsequently applied to all members of the UHG.
M. Rudenko and O. Tykhyi were incriminated for the UHG documents they had written and signed (the Group members agreed that each would acknowledge themselves as a co-author, even if they only signed the document; there were also mutual authorizations to sign documents if someone could not come due to administrative surveillance or arrest). In addition, O. Tykhyi was accused of illegally possessing a firearm (Art. 222).
Searches in the Rudenko and Tykhyi case were conducted at the homes of almost all Group members and their acquaintances. Dozens of people from all over Ukraine and from Moscow were summoned as witnesses during the investigation. The formally open, but in reality closed, trial took place from June 23 to July 1, 1977, in Druzhkivka in the Donetsk region, in the “Lenin room” of a department store, filled with a “special audience.” To prevent the institution from being found, the sign was removed. Contrary to the rules, questioned witnesses were removed from the hall; those under surveillance, I. Kandyba and L. Lukianenko, were forcibly sent home after being questioned (29).
The relatives of Rudenko and Tykhyi learned about the trial only on June 25 from summonses for questioning. Tykhyi’s 80-year-old mother and his sons Mykola and Volodymyr were not allowed into the courtroom. Volodymyr tried to hire a lawyer from Kyiv and to defend his father himself, but he was refused. Petro Vins and his companion were removed from a bus heading to Donetsk. They were taken to the police, searched, their money was taken, they were bought plane tickets and sent to Kyiv. Pyotr Starchyk and Kirill Podrabinek were detained “to establish their identity” and sent to Moscow.
A number of documents were not announced at the trial, yet Professor Ilya Stebun of Donetsk University testified as a prosecution witness, claiming that Tykhyi had incited him to hostile activity by giving him his typewritten book “The Language of the People. The People” for review. (This was the man M. Rudenko had once defended against accusations of “cosmopolitanism”).
Despite the measures taken, the trial of Rudenko and Tykhyi was covered on Radio Liberty. It did not disorganize, but rather further activated the activities of other members of the Group, although anyone who was in any way connected to the Group’s activities came under close surveillance, was “talked to,” pressured to become an informer, or was fired from their job, expelled from their institute, removed from the waiting list for an apartment, and so on.
On March 2, 1977, Vasyl Barladianu, a close associate of the Group, was arrested in Odesa. Art. 187-1, three years in criminal camps. Three weeks before the end of his term, on February 29, 1980, he received another 3 years under the same article.
On April 23, 1977, Mykola Matusevych and Myroslav Marynovych were arrested in Kyiv. Both were charged under Part 1 of Art. 62. Additionally, Matusevych was charged under Part 1 of Art. 206, “Hooliganism,” for an incident in 1972. The investigation lasted more than six months in the hope that the young men would not withstand the psychological pressure, would repent, and this could be used to discredit the human rights movement. But M. Matusevych refused to participate in the investigation and the trial altogether, and M. Marynovych gave no testimony. The trial took place in Vasylkiv, Kyiv region, from March 22 to 27, 1978. Like the first convicts, they too did not plead guilty. The sentence was 7 years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile.
In the summer of 1977, Radio Liberty began broadcasting a detailed statement by the writer Helii Sniehiriev (formally not a member of the UHG) renouncing his Soviet citizenship and excerpts from his essay “Ammunition for an Execution, or Oh Mother, My Mother”—about the infamous “SVU case” (“Union for the Liberation of Ukraine”—a case completely fabricated by the GPU in 1929, which marked the beginning of the total destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia). On September 22, H. Sniehiriev was arrested. A new series of searches and interrogations began. As a result of a hunger strike and torture, Sniehiriev was struck by paralysis in March 1978. On April 1, the newspaper “Radianska Ukraina” published a repentant statement signed with his name, shamelessly fabricated by the KGB. Gravely ill, he was transferred to the Zhovtneva Hospital, where he was kept under close surveillance until his death on December 28. His body was cremated.
On December 8, 1977, Group member Petro Vins—son of the imprisoned leader of the Baptists of Ukraine, Georgiy Vins—was arrested in Kyiv. He received a 30-day arrest on charges of “hooliganism.” On February 15, 1978, he received 1 year for “parasitism.”
On December 12, 1977, Levko Lukianenko was arrested in Chernihiv on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda; he had been under administrative surveillance there after his release last January. In addition to the Group's documents, he was incriminated with articles such as “Stop the Injustice!”—in defense of the artist Petro Ruban, “A Year of Freedom,” “Problems of Dissent in the USSR,” and others. During the investigation, L. Lukianenko went on a long hunger strike and renounced his Soviet citizenship. On July 20, 1978, the Chernihiv Regional Court in the town of Horodnia handed down a verdict: 10 years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile, with him being declared a particularly dangerous recidivist. The “openness” of the trial is evidenced by the fact that Oksana Meshko, who was on her way to Horodnia, was taken off the bus and sent in the opposite direction.
In 1978–1980, almost all the founding members of the Group were repressed, but new people stubbornly and devotedly took their places. Thus, Petro Vins (February 1977), Olha Heiko-Matusevych (May 14, 1977), Vitalii Kalynychenko and Vasyl Striltsiv (October 1977), Vasyl Sichko (February 26, 1978), Petro Sichko (April 30, 1978), Yurii Lytvyn (June 1978), Volodymyr Malynkovych (October 1978), Mykhailo Melnyk (November 1978), and Vasyl Ovsiienko (November 18, 1978) joined the Group. Joining the Group in each case was a conscious act of courage and sacrifice: an announced member would remain free for only a few weeks or months. Some worked as unannounced members, leaving a statement asking to be considered a member from the moment of arrest. There were cases of writing a final statement in advance, as there was no certainty that it could be delivered at the future trial.
Countering repressions with legality and legalism, the Group on October 14, 1977, submitted a petition to the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR for its registration as a public organization and for it to be granted official status. After the arrest of M. Rudenko, a new Chairman was not elected, but its informal leaders were Oles Berdnyk (until his arrest on March 6, 1979) and Oksana Meshko.
In the summer of 1978, the Group published a programmatic document, “Our Tasks,” where it declared that it was based on “the principles of unity of universal human and national rights of Ukrainian citizens.” The protection of the national rights of Ukrainians and citizens of other nationalities, as well as religious rights, was placed first in its activities.
The Group, in the person of Yosyf Zisels, defended those confined to “psychiatric hospitals,” in the person of Petro Hryhorenko, the rights of Crimean Tatars, and in the persons of Petro Vins and Olha Heiko, the rights of believers. General democratic tendencies within it were represented by Leonid Plyushch and Volodymyr Malynkovych. Some of its documents dealt with socio-economic rights.
The authorial collective, as the Group considered itself, turned out to be extremely productive: in the first three years, working under conditions of constant risk, it created hundreds of highly qualified, scrupulously verified, and well-edited human rights documents that would fill several volumes. These include dozens of Memorandums and Information Bulletins on violations of the rights of specific individuals.
Materials had to be transported to Moscow, from where they were passed on abroad. An attempt to pass a collection of materials to the US consul in Kyiv ended with the beating and imprisonment of Petro Vins. Many documents were seized during searches and stolen by KGB agents. At Oksana Meshko's house at 16 Verbolozna Street, 9 searches were conducted. Her garden was dug up several times. A post with a night vision camera was set up in the house opposite, and an armed attack was made on her to drive the elderly woman to a heart attack.
To support the human rights movement in Ukraine, the Ukrainian diaspora as early as November 1976 created the Washington Helsinki Guarantees Committee for Ukraine (Bohdan Yasen—pseudonym of Osyp Zinkevych), which, together with the “Smoloskyp” publishing house named after V. Symonenko, collected and published materials of the UHG in Ukrainian and English, popularizing the Group's activities in human rights and political circles around the world. Its most significant works were the publication of books:
The Ukrainian Human Rights Movement. Documents and Materials of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. Foreword by Andrii Zvarun. Compiled by Osyp Zinkevych. “Smoloskyp” Ukrainian Publishing House named after V. Symonenko. Toronto–Baltimore. 1978. 478 pp.;
Information Bulletins of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. Issues: No. 1, 1978; No. 2, 1978; unnumbered, March 1979; No. 1, 1980; No. 2, 1980. Compiled by Osyp Zinkevych. Afterword by Nina Strokata. Helsinki Guarantees Committee for Ukraine. “Smoloskyp” Ukrainian Publishing House named after V. Symonenko. Toronto–Baltimore, 1981. 200 pp.;
The Ukrainian Helsinki Group. 1978–1982. Documents and Materials. Compiled and edited by Osyp Zinkevych. “Smoloskyp” Ukrainian Publishing House named after V. Symonenko. Toronto–Baltimore. 1983. 1000 pp.
Later, the American Public Committee to Aid the Helsinki Accords (Roman Kupchinsky) began to operate. When Petro Hryhorenko (USA) and Leonid Plyushch (France) found themselves abroad, the External Representation of the UHG began to function in October 1978. Nadiia Svitlychna and Nina Strokata-Karavanska joined it. From 1979, the “Herald of Repressions in Ukraine” began to be published abroad in Ukrainian and English (editor-compiler N. Svitlychna). The Group's documents, which arrived secretly from Ukraine, were published in periodicals and came out in separate editions. Nadiia Svitlychna began broadcasting on Radio Liberty about the human rights movement—despite jamming, all thinking Ukraine listened to them in secret.
On May 22, 1978, Viacheslav Chornovil, exiled in Yakutia after his imprisonment, joined the Group. In February 1979, a whole group of political prisoners and exiles declared themselves members of the UHG: Oksana Popovych, Bohdan Rebryk, Vasyl Romaniuk (later Patriarch Volodymyr), Iryna Senyk, Stefaniia Shabatura, Danylo Shumuk, Yurii Shukhevych-Berezynskyi (he now says that they never actually contacted him). In October 1979, Yosyf Zisels, Zinovii Krasivskyi, Yaroslav Lesiv, Petro Rozumnyi, and Ivan Sokulskyi became members of the Group, followed later by Mykola Horbal (January 21, 1980), Mykhailo Horyn (November 1982), Valerii Marchenko (October 1983), and Petro Ruban (1985).
From 1979, the KGB launched a veritable war against the Group. Repressions against those associated with it took on a mafia-like character. A wave of criminal cases against human rights defenders, based on cynically fabricated charges, swept through Ukraine: “parasitism” (Petro Vins), “resisting the police” (Vasyl Ovsiienko, Yurii Lytvyn), “hooliganism” (Vadym Smohytel, Vasyl Dolishnii), “attempted rape” (Mykola Horbal, Viacheslav Chornovil), “violation of passport regulations” (Vasyl Striltsiv), “illegal possession of a weapon” (Petro Rozumnyi), “production, possession, and sale of narcotics” (Vasyl Sichko, Yaroslav Lesiv). Ukraine became a kind of KGB proving ground, where the most brutal methods were tested. Those associated with the Group were beaten by unknown assailants or the police (Petro Vins, Yurii Lytvyn, Vasyl Dolishnii), women were threatened with rape (Olha Heiko), documents were planted (Mykhailo Horyn), and wives were imprisoned for defending their relatives (the same Olha Heiko-Matusevych, Raisa Rudenko), as were mothers (the 76-year-old Oksana Meshko). None of the Group members were released: shortly before their release, or even on the day of their release, a new case would be fabricated against the victim (Vasyl Ovsiienko, Yurii Lytvyn, Mykola Horbal, Vasyl and Petro Sichko, Yaroslav Lesiv, Ivan Sokulskyi, Olha Heiko, Vasyl Barladianu). Only by such methods was the Group's activity effectively suppressed in the early 1980s.
In total, 41 people joined the Group during its existence. (In addition, the UHG was joined by two foreign members in 1982, and at the end of 1987, six more were co-opted). 24 of the 41 were convicted in connection with their membership in the Group. They served over 170 years in concentration camps, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and in exile. In total, the 39 members of the Group have a passion account of over 550 years of captivity. The Group paid with five lives: Mykhailo Melnyk committed suicide on the eve of his inevitable arrest on March 9, 1979. Four prisoners of the special-regime camp VS-389/36 (in the settlement of Kuchino, Chusovskoy district, Perm Oblast) died in captivity: Oleksa Tykhyi on May 5, 1984, Yurii Lytvyn on September 4, 1984, Valerii Marchenko on October 7, 1984, and Vasyl Stus on September 4, 1985. Only one member of the UHG, Volodymyr Malynkovych, was expelled abroad on the night of January 1, 1980, in no small part because he was not Ukrainian.
Here is a far from complete chronicle of the repressions against the UHG after the arrest of L. Lukianenko.
On December 8, 1978, Yosyf Zisels (Chernivtsi), an activist of the Jewish emigration movement and member of the UHG, was imprisoned for 3 years under Art. 187-1. Three years after his release, on October 19, 1984, he received another 3 years under the same article.
On January 9, 1979, Vasyl Striltsiv (Dolyna, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast) was sentenced to 3 months of corrective labor for an “insult” to a school director—a three-year-old incident, and on October 25, he was arrested for “violation of passport regulations” under Art. 196—2 years. On October 22, 1981, he was charged under Part 1 of Art. 62—7 years in strict-regime camps and 4 years of exile.
On February 7–8, 1979, Vasyl Ovsiienko (village of Lenine, now Stavky, Radomyshl district, Zhytomyr Oblast) was sentenced to 3 years on a fabricated case of “resisting the police” (Part 2 of Art. 188-1). On June 9, 1981, he was arrested in the camp and sentenced under Part 2 of Art. 62 to another 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On March 6, 1979, Oles Berdnyk was arrested in Kyiv. Part 2 of Art. 62, 6 years of special regime and 3 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On July 6, 1979, father and son Petro and Vasyl Sichko (Dolyna, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast) were arrested and sentenced under Art. 187-1 to 3 years. The father—to a strict-regime camp, the son—to an intensified-regime one. Their younger son and brother, Volodymyr (not a member of the UHG), refused to serve in the army after being baselessly expelled from the university on December 4, 1981, and was sentenced to 3 years. Without being released, Petro was sentenced on June 16, 1982, under the same Art. 187-1, and Vasyl on December 3, 1982, for “possession of narcotics” (which were planted in his nightstand) to another three years.
On August 6, 1979, Yurii Lytvyn (village of Barakhty, Vasylkiv district, Kyiv Oblast) was arrested on charges of resisting the police (Part 2 of Art. 188-1). He was sentenced to 3 years in a strict-regime criminal camp. Arrested in the camp on March 2, 1982, he was sentenced under Part 2 of Art. 62 to an additional 10 years in a special-regime camp and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On October 3, 1979, Petro Rozumnyi was arrested in the village of Pshenychne, Solonianskyi district, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, for “illegal possession of a cold weapon” (a pocketknife was confiscated when he was visiting political exile Yevhen Sverstiuk in Siberia), Art. 222-3, 3 years in criminal camps.
On October 23, 1979, Mykola Horbal was arrested in Kyiv on a fabricated charge of “attempted rape.” He was sentenced to 5 years in a strict-regime criminal camp. The day before his release, a case was initiated under Part 2 of Art. 62, resulting in a sentence of 8 years in a special-regime camp and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On November 15, 1979, Yaroslav Lesiv was arrested in the town of Bolekhiv, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, on a fabricated charge of manufacturing and selling narcotics (Art. 229). He was sentenced to 2 years of imprisonment. In May 1981, he was arrested again in the camp on the same charge—5 years.
On November 29, 1979, Vitalii Kalynychenko was arrested in the town of Vasylkivka, Dnipropetrovsk region. Part 2 of Art. 62. 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On February 20, 1980, Hanna Mykhailenko, an unannounced member of the Group, was arrested in Odesa. She endured 8 years of torture in psychiatric hospitals.
On March 12, 1980, Zinovii Krasivskyi was arrested in the city of Morshyn, Lviv region, and sent to serve out his unexpired term of 8 months and 5 years of exile.
On March 12, 1980, Olha Heiko-Matusevych was arrested in Kyiv. She was sentenced to 3 years in a criminal camp under Art. 187-1. At the moment of her release, she was arrested under Part 1 of Art. 62 for another 3 years in strict-regime camps.
On April 2, 1980, while in exile in Yakutia, Viacheslav Chornovil was presented with a fabricated charge of “attempted rape”—5 years in criminal camps.
On April 11, 1980, Group member Ivan Sokulskyi was arrested in Dnipropetrovsk, and on July 1, Hryhorii Prykhodko, a close associate of the Group (village of Oleksandropol, Synelnykove district, Dnipropetrovsk region), was also arrested. They were sentenced to 5 years in prison, 5 years in special-regime camps, and 5 years of exile. They were declared particularly dangerous recidivists. On April 3, 1986, Sokulskyi was sentenced in Chistopol prison to another 3 years on a fabricated charge of “hooliganism” (Part 2 of Art. 206).
On May 14, 1980, Vasyl Stus, who had joined the UHG back in the autumn of 1977 while in exile in the Magadan region, was arrested in Kyiv. Part 2 of Art. 62. 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
The KGB agents were not ashamed to sentence the almost 76-year-old Kyivan Oksana Meshko, with particular cynicism on Christmas Day, January 7, 1981, to six months of imprisonment and 5 years of exile under Part 1 of Art. 62, after having held her for 75 days for psychiatric evaluation. She was transported in a prison convoy to the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk for 108 days.
On June 30, 1980, Dmytro Mazur was arrested in the village of Huta-Lohanivska, Malyn district, Zhytomyr region, for cooperation with members of the UHG. Part 2 of Art. 62, 6 years in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile. In exile, he was severely beaten, escaped twice, and was twice (in October 1986 and February 1988) sentenced to 1 year in criminal camps.
On March 23, 1981, Ivan Kandyba, the last founding member of the UHG in Ukraine, was arrested in the town of Pustomyty, Lviv region. Part 2 of Art. 62. 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On August 15, 1981, Raisa, the wife of M. Rudenko—formally not a member of the Group, but its “indispensable secretary”—was arrested. Part 1 of Art. 62, 5 years in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile.
On December 3, 1981, Mykhailo Horyn was arrested in Lviv, with crudely fabricated “anti-Soviet” texts planted on him—in reality, for preparing bulletins 4–7 of the UHG, a crime for which they could not catch him. Part 2 of Art. 62. 10 years of special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist. Formally, M. Horyn was admitted to the Group in the exercise yard of the Kuchino camp in November 1982.
On September 2, 1982, Zorian Popadiuk, a close associate of the Group, was arrested in exile in the Aktobe region of Kazakhstan under Art. 56, Part 2 (analogous to Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR). As someone who had undergone surgery for tuberculosis, he was sentenced to 10 years in strict-regime, rather than special-regime, camps, and 5 years of exile.
On October 21, 1983, journalist Valerii Marchenko was arrested in Kyiv. Part 2 of Art. 62. 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
On November 29, 1985, Petro Ruban was arrested in the city of Pryluky, Chernihiv Oblast. Part 2 of Art. 62. 9 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Particularly dangerous recidivist.
All this time, repressions continued against released political prisoners who showed the slightest signs of nonconformity. They were denied jobs in their fields (Kuzma Matviiuk, Ihor Kravtsiv, Nadiia Svitlychna, Hryhorii Makoviichuk, Liubomyr Starosolskyi, Hanna Mykhailenko, Vasyl Lisovyi, Oles Serhiienko, Yevhen Proniuk, Vasyl Dolishnii, and others). Their administrative surveillance was extended every six months, with its terms being tightened each time, and they were issued warnings under the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 25, 1972, regarding criminal liability.
The Struggle Continues
Meanwhile, seeing the dismantling of the UHG, attempts arose to resume underground activity. In 1979, members of the “Ukrainian National Front” Mykola Krainyk, Vasyl Zvarych, and Ivan Mandryk were arrested in Ivano-Frankivsk—the latter was taken by three unknown individuals under the guise of being summoned for a business trip, and three days later his wife was informed that he had committed suicide. At the trial, it turned out that about 40 people were part of UNF-2; they were engaged exclusively in educational activities, in particular, they published issues 10 and 11 of the “Ukrainskyi Visnyk.”
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a circle of young people existed in several Ukrainian cities who called themselves the “People of Goodwill” (leader – Tetiana Metelova). It conducted educational and human rights work.
The movement of the Crimean Tatars for the return to their historical homeland deserves separate attention.
In 1980, an appeal from the Ukrainian Patriotic Movement appeared. The anonymous authors (it is now known that this text was written by Vasyl Stus) stated that the USSR had turned into a military-police state with far-reaching imperial goals. A free Ukraine could become a reliable defense for the West against communist expansion, so the decolonization of the USSR was the only guarantee of peace in the entire world.
In conditions of total control, attempts to ideologically substantiate the resistance movement continue. Starting in 1973, the philologist Yurii Badzio, earning a living through physical labor, secretly worked on a fundamental historiosophical work, “The Right to Live”—about the situation of the Ukrainian people in the USSR, where they are deprived of a past, present, and future, because they are destined to become material for the creation of a “new historical community—the Soviet people.” The author stood on the positions of “democratic socialism,” used Marxist terminology, but relentlessly criticized Leninism. The KGB stole his manuscript of 1400 pages. A year later, during a search, they took a second version (450 pages), but two months before his arrest (April 23, 1979), he managed to make a third, for which he received 7 years of imprisonment and 5 years of exile. This was a kind of theoretical summary of the Sixtiers movement, a generalization of its historical experience (30).
In a cell of the special-regime camp in Sosnovka (Mordovia), Ivan Hel secretly wrote the work “The Facets of Culture” (31). He researched the origins of the totalitarian Russian system, the ways and methods of ideological pressure on enslaved peoples with the help of science, education, and culture. I. Hel distinguishes between dissidents (who criticize the Soviet system from within) and participants in the national liberation movement. He reproaches the West for consciously silencing the national problems in the empire, and Russian dissidents for avoiding a principled assessment of these problems. After all, at that time, only Andrei Bukovsky had openly condemned the policy of Russification in an open letter to A. Kosygin.
Yurii Lytvyn made a significant contribution to understanding the role of the human rights movement in Ukraine by writing the article “The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, its Principles and Prospects” in April 1979 (32). Generally holding anarcho-syndicalist positions, he viewed the human rights movement as a confrontation between society, which strives for as much freedom as possible, and the state, which tries to move towards despotism. He sees the strength of the Ukrainian human rights movement in the high moral qualities of its activists, in that it is a worthy link in the world movement, and that it is apolitical.
The historian Mykhailo Melnyk, who was expelled from his postgraduate studies, was working on a major study of Ukrainian history (the work was confiscated during a search on March 6–7, 1979, after which the author committed suicide on March 9), and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych was working on his memoirs (they too were stolen).
The theoretical thought of the human rights defenders led to the conclusion that a law-based society in Ukraine cannot arise as a result of reforming the existing system, under the colonial status of Ukraine. This is possible only under conditions of its independence.
Although the authorities managed to suppress the human rights movement in Ukraine through brutal repressions, they did not completely eradicate it. In 1981, on the 9th anniversary of the arrests, leaflets were posted in Kyiv: “Countrymen! January 12 is Ukrainian Political Prisoner's Day. Support him!” This was the work of five young intellectuals, three of whom were Ukrainians and two were Jews. Journalist Serhiy Naboka, translator Leonid Miliavskyi, mathematician Larysa Lokhvytska, and endocrinologist Inna Cherniavska each received three years of imprisonment for “slander against the Soviet reality,” found in their articles and poems. Natalka Parkhomenko, a mother of a young daughter, was released.
Former political prisoner Yosyp Terelia made a desperate attempt to continue open human rights activities in Galicia: on September 9, 1982, five Ukrainian Greek Catholics declared themselves the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Believers and the Church. Stefaniia Petrash, whose husband Petro and sons Vasyl and Volodymyr were imprisoned for human rights activities, became a member. On December 24, Y. Terelia was once again behind bars.
Arrested human rights activists made no compromises. They sabotaged investigations, trials, did not sign interrogation protocols, did not recognize their actions as criminal, and renounced their Soviet citizenship. It was an open confrontation with the occupying authorities. A paradox emerged: human rights defenders protested against violations of laws, and the punitive bodies tried to prove with new repressions that there were no violations of legality...
The Group continued its activities even in captivity. For instance, in 1979, the “Appeal of the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement on the Matter of Ukrainian Independence” (also known as the “Statement of the 18 Political Prisoners,” authored by L. Lukianenko) slipped out of the special-regime camp in Sosnovka (Mordovia), exposing the colonial nature of the government in Ukraine.
Separately, the document "An Attempt at Generalization" by Oleksa Tykhyi and Vasyl Romaniuk (1978) should be mentioned, in which the authors proclaim the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN pacts, and documents on the independence and sovereignty of nations and peoples as the highest principle of public and interethnic coexistence. The authors propose adopting certain norms of behavior for a Ukrainian to save the nation from spiritual and cultural destruction. They are mainly reduced to passive resistance to Russification: to use only the native language, not to serve in the army outside Ukraine, not to go to work outside Ukraine. In addition, to adhere to universal human norms of behavior: not to use foul language, not to drink, not to acquire luxury items, not to accumulate money, but to spend it on good deeds. In conclusion, Romaniuk and Tykhyi write: "There is no need to break the laws. It is enough to use the laws proclaimed by the Constitution of the USSR."
A brilliant example of human rights journalism is Vasyl Stus’s “From a Camp Notebook” (33), which, together with the nomination of his poetic work for the Nobel Prize, cost him his life.
Of all the members of the Group, only one, Oles Berdnyk, repented after 5 years of imprisonment and was released in April 1984 (34).
The bravery of our women is captivating—Oksana Meshko, Olha Heiko, Oksana Popovych, Nadiia Svitlychna, Iryna Senyk, Nina Strokata, Stefaniia Shabatura, Raisa Rudenko, who endured captivity in inhumane conditions to the end and kept their souls unstained. And those women who remained in the “large zone” were the support and mainstay of the prisoners. Vira Lisova and Olena Antoniv, risking their lives every moment, distributed aid to the families of political prisoners, which was collected in Ukraine and came from the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Fund (for trips to visits, for sending parcels). In essence, Ukraine of the 1980s, as so often in our tragic history, rested on Cossack wives, mothers, and sisters, such as Hanna Mykhailenko (imprisoned in 1980 in a psychiatric hospital for 8 years), Stefaniia Petrash (wife of Petro, mother of Vasyl and Volodymyr Sichko), Valentyna Chornovil and Atena Pashko (sister and wife of Viacheslav Chornovil), Olha Horyn (wife of Mykhailo Horyn), Nina and Alla Marchenko (mother and aunt of Valerii Marchenko), Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Leonida Svitlychna (wife of Ivan Svitlychny), Olha Stokotelna (wife of Mykola Horbal), Svitlana Kyrychenko (wife of Yurii Badzio), Nina Obertas, Olha Babych (sister of Serhiy Babych), Tamila Matusevych (sister of Mykola Matusevych), Valentyna Sokorynska (wife of Oles Berdnyk), Nadiia Lukianenko (wife of Levko Lukianenko), Valeriia Andriievska (wife of Yevhen Sverstiuk), Liuba Kheina (wife of Myroslav Marynovych), and others. They traveled for visits, brought out information, passed it abroad, morally supported the prisoners, and suffered along with them, and often worse than them, because the KGB agents blackmailed not only them but also their children.
When the husbands, sons, and brothers went to war—the Cossack mothers, wives, and sisters took upon themselves the burden of their defense, while at the same time raising a new generation of Cossack children (in the Ukrainian language, unlike Russian, “vykhovaty”—”to raise,” means first and foremost to keep children safe from danger, not just to feed them).
As early as September 23, 1981, in a report at the 13th National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Pacific Grove, the renowned political thought researcher Ivan Lypovetskyj noted:
“...the factually confirmed significance of Ukrainian dissidents is beyond doubt. The sacrifice of these brave men and women testifies to the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian nation. Their struggle for human and national rights is consistent with the trend of worldwide human progress in the spirit of freedom. Ukrainian dissidents believe that the truth of freedom will prevail. It does not befit those who are fortunate enough to live in free countries to believe any less” (35).
The elevated style of most of the Group’s documents, noted by Nina Strokata in her 1981 afterword to the publication of the Information Bulletins, leads to such a conclusion (36).
The strength and immense moral superiority of the Ukrainian human rights activists over the regime lay in the fact that they did not become underground operatives, but signed documents with their own names, openly demonstrated legalism, appealing to Soviet law and international legal documents signed by the USSR.
Ukrainian human rights defenders had well-deserved respect and moral support in the democratic world. In 1978, the leaders of the Moscow, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian Helsinki groups were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1985, the literary work of Group member Vasyl Stus was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But Moscow dealt with him in the traditional Russian way: “No man, no problem.” They hurried to eliminate Stus in a punishment cell of the “death camp” Kuchino, knowing that this prize is awarded in October of each year—but only to the living.
The Moscow Helsinki Group ceased its activities in September 1982, as some of its members were imprisoned and others were expelled abroad. The Georgian, Lithuanian, and other groups were also dismantled. Ukrainian human rights defenders, however, had one path—to the Russian concentration camps. Almost all of them, while in captivity, firmly decided not to surrender. The members of the UHG who were imprisoned in the special-regime camp VS-389/36 in the village of Kuchino, Perm region, conferred—and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was not disbanded. (By the way, on the special, cell-block regime in Kuchino, from March 1, 1980, to December 8, 1987—at different times and in different cells—were UHG members Oles Berdnyk, Mykola Horbal, Mykhailo Horyn, Vitalii Kalynychenko, Ivan Kandyba, Yurii Lytvyn, Levko Lukianenko, Valerii Marchenko, Vasyl Ovsiienko, Petro Ruban, Ivan Sokulskyi, Vasyl Stus, Bohdan Rebryk, Oleksa Tykhyi, Danylo Shumuk, and foreign UHG members, the Estonian Mart Niklus and the Lithuanian Viktoras Petkus, who joined the UHG in its darkest hour—in 1982. And Mykola Rudenko was imprisoned in the strict-regime section nearby. A total of 18 people. Nowhere and never did they gather in such numbers). The conditions in captivity were indeed particularly harsh: cell confinement, poor quality food and dirty water, a ban on receiving medicine and literature from the outside, confinement in punishment cells, forced labor, one censored letter per month, denial of visits—some prisoners did not see anyone but their cellmates and guards for years… It is no wonder Kuchino came to be called the “death camp.”
Perestroika came to the strict-regime camps in early 1987 in the form of “pardons,” and to the special-regime camps in 1988. That is, the authorities still considered human rights activists criminals, but showed them “mercy.” They were rehabilitated, for the most part, after the adoption of the Law of the UkrSSR “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions in Ukraine” on April 17, 1991.
In the mid-1980s, even the ruling elite of the USSR became convinced that the totalitarian state had completely exhausted its internal potential, so it had to turn to society to renew itself with its strength. The policy of “glasnost” meant that the state, reluctantly but gradually, was abandoning its total control over the printed word. Society took advantage of this immediately: a mass of publications appeared that would have previously been called samvydav—one-time, occasional, and periodical. They shaped public opinion and became the pickaxe that day after day chipped away at the totalitarian regime—and it began to yield. If people were still arrested—it was for a week or two; if a rally or demonstration was dispersed—the protests were even bigger. The right to freedom of speech, assembly, conscience, and finally, the right to public and political activity, to form political parties, was won by society through the arduous efforts, first and foremost, of a handful of human rights activists—passionate individuals who had been tempered in prisons and concentration camps. They became like apostles, the salt of the earth. More specifically—the moral and ideological core of the many public and political organizations that began to form. On June 3, 1989, the founding meeting of the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons, headed by Yevhen Proniuk, took place on Lviv Square in Kyiv.
As soon as the first Helsinki Group members were released during the period of “glasnost” and “perestroika,” they resumed their human rights activities. On September 6, 1987, Vasyl Barladianu, Ivan Hel, Mykhailo Horyn, Zorian Popadiuk, Stepan Khmara, and Viacheslav Chornovil issued a Statement on the creation of the Ukrainian Initiative Group for the Release of Prisoners of Conscience, in which they demanded the release and rehabilitation of all political prisoners; the removal of articles from the Criminal Code under which opposition members were imprisoned; and the return to Ukraine of the bodies of prisoners of conscience who had died in captivity. On September 8, the Inter-National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners was established in Moscow. The Conferences of Representatives of National-Democratic Movements of the Peoples of the USSR, in which leaders of the Ukrainian human rights movement such as V. Chornovil, M. Horyn, L. Lukianenko, S. Khmara, and others participated, played a huge role in the collapse of the USSR and the democratization of society. One of the first such conferences took place in July 1988 in Lviv.
From 1987, the first so-called informal associations began to emerge, which expanded the boundaries of what was permitted, where pressing social problems were discussed, and where the most important of human freedoms—the freedom of speech—was exercised de facto. Thus, the Ukrainian Culturological Club was established in Kyiv on August 6, 1987 (37), and the Lion Society in Lviv on October 19, 1987 (38).
Simultaneously in Galicia, a powerful movement for the restoration of the repressed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, supported by the UHG–UHS, unfolded. From May to October 1989, the Committee for the Defense of the UGCC (Vasyl Sichko, Stepan Khmara, Yaroslav Lesiv, and others) organized hunger strikes in Moscow demanding the legalization of the repressed Church. On September 17, 1989, a rally of 250,000 Greek Catholics took place in Lviv near the Cathedral of St. George. On June 5, 1990, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was restored in Kyiv. The previously persecuted Protestant churches were legalized.
On December 30, 1987, the resumption of the activities of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was announced. The journal “Ukrainskyi Visnyk,” revived in the summer of 1987 by V. Chornovil, became its print organ, and the members of the editorial board, Bohdan Horyn, Vasyl Barladianu, Pavlo Skochok, Vitalii Shevchenko, Stepan Sapeliak, and Mykola Muratov, became new members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
On March 11, 1988, an “Appeal of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group to the Ukrainian and World Public” regarding the resumption of the UHG’s activities was published, signed by Mykhailo Horyn, Zinovii Krasivskyi, and Viacheslav Chornovil. The appeal was supported by UHG members Levko Lukianenko (who was still in exile in the Tomsk region at the time), Oksana Meshko (Kyiv), Mykola Matusevych (in exile in the Chita region), Zinovii Krasivskyi (Lviv region), Viacheslav Chornovil (Lviv), Mykhailo Horyn (Lviv), Petro Rozumnyi (Dnipropetrovsk region), Vasyl and Petro Sichko (Dolyna), Yosyf Zisels (Chernivtsi), Yaroslav Lesiv (Ivano-Frankivsk region), Olha Heiko-Matusevych (Kyiv), Vasyl Striltsiv (Ivano-Frankivsk region), and those co-opted into the UHG in December 1987: Vasyl Barladianu (Odesa), Bohdan Horyn (Lviv), Pavlo Skochok (Kyiv region), Vitalii Shevchenko (Kyiv), Stepan Sapeliak (Kharkiv), and Mykola Muratov (Moscow). A total of 19 people. L. Lukianenko was declared the chairman of the UHG, with his consent. The Executive Committee consisted of three working secretaries: M. Horyn, Z. Krasivskyi, and V. Chornovil. The External Representation of the UHG was active, comprising Mykola Rudenko, Nadiia Svitlychna, Leonid Plyushch, and Nina Strokata-Karavanska.
The Executive Committee undertook to draft a new programmatic document—the Declaration of Principles of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. It was developed by Viacheslav Chornovil, Bohdan and Mykhailo Horyn. The principles were partially announced at a 50,000-strong rally in Lviv on July 7, 1988, by the Horyn brothers, who managed to get a chance to speak, while V. Chornovil distributed the text of the Declaration. From this moment, the history of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union begins, which, in fact, had already set clear political goals. That is, it was a proto-party, proof of which is the refusal of the International Helsinki Federation in the summer of 1989 to accept the UHU into its circle. On April 29, 1990, the Constituent Congress of the UHU transformed it into the first political organization in Ukraine, an alternative to the CPSU/CPU—the Ukrainian Republican Party.
To continue the tradition of the non-political human rights movement in Ukraine, the Ukrainian committee “Helsinki-90” was created on June 16 of the same year at the initiative of Oksana Meshko.
Thus, the human rights movement in Ukraine was an integral part of universal human progress in the spirit of freedom. It arose on the ground of the national liberation movement and dissent that opposed the communist ideology, which was outlawed by the totalitarian state, out of a societal necessity to protect elementary human rights from constant violations by the state—in the socio-economic, national-cultural, and religious spheres (39).
The Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords holds a prominent place in the history of the Ukrainian national liberation and human rights movement. It can be compared to the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (1845–1847). But while the Brotherhood left no organizational structures after the arrests, in the UHG we see in embryonic form the origins of most of the human rights organizations, national-democratic, and nationalist parties currently active in Ukraine, which, along with other factors, led Ukraine to independence, where the opportunity opened up to build a law-based society that corresponds to both the freedom-loving spirit of the Ukrainian people and the letter of international legal acts.
Bibliography
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2. Alexeyeva, Lyudmila. “Istoriya inakomysliya v SSSR. Noveishii period” (The History of Dissent in the USSR: The Modern Period). – Vilnis-Moscow (VIMO), 1992, p. 191.
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5. See: Marynovych, M. “Spokutuvannia komunizmu” (Atonement for Communism). Drohobych, 1993, 45 pp.
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7. Zakharov, Ye. Op. cit.
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9. Ibid., p. 466 and others.
10. Kasianov, Heorhii. “Nezhodni: ukrainska intelihentsiia v rusi oporu 1960-80-kh rokiv” (The Dissenters: The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the 1960s–80s Resistance Movement). Kyiv: Lybid, 1995. p. 30.
11. Published under the title: “Ukrainski yurysty pid sudom KGB” (Ukrainian Lawyers on Trial by the KGB). Suchasnist, 1968.
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13. See about this: Chornovil, Viacheslav. “Lykho z rozumu (Portrety dvadtsiaty ‘zlochyntsiv’)” (Woe from Wit (Portraits of Twenty ‘Criminals’)). A collection of materials. 1968. Republished by “Memorial” in 1991 in Lviv.
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17. See, for example, “Vidkrytyi lyst do Ivana Dziuby” (Open Letter to Ivan Dziuba) by Vasyl Stus. Works in 6 vols. 9 books. Lviv: Prosvita, 1994-99. Vol. 4, pp. 441–443.
18. Lypovetskyj, I. “Istorychni ese” (Historical Essays), vol. 2, pp. 480–481.
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22. Stus, Vasyl. “Tvory” (Works). Lviv: Prosvita. Vol. 4, p. 443.
23. Kasianov, H. “Nezhodni...” (The Dissenters...), pp. 119-121.
24. Lisovyi, Vasyl. “Vidkrytyi lyst do chleniv TSK KPRS i TSK KP Ukrainy” (Open Letter to the Members of the CC CPSU and the CC CPU). – Zona, 1994, No. 8, pp. 125-148.
25. Gluzman, Semyon. “Uroky Svitlychnoho” (Svitlychny’s Lessons). In the book “Dobrookyi. Spohady pro Ivana Svitlychnoho” (The Kind-Eyed Man. Memoirs of Ivan Svitlychny). Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo “Chas,” 1998. – p. 478.
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29. “Ukrainska Helsinska Hrupa. 1978-1982. Dokumenty i materiialy” (The Ukrainian Helsinki Group. 1978-1982. Documents and Materials). – Baltimore–Toronto: Ukrainian Publishing House “Smoloskyp” named after V. Symonenko. 1983. pp. 605-624, 779-781.
30. Badzio, Yurii. “Pravo zhyty. // Ukraina v skladi SRSR, liudyna v systemi totalitarnoho sotsializmu” (The Right to Live. // Ukraine as Part of the USSR, Man in the System of Totalitarian Socialism). – Kyiv: Takson, 1996. – p. 400.
31. Hoverlia, Stepan. “Hrani kultury” (Facets of Culture). – London: Ukrainian Publishing Union. 1984, 184 pp.; Hel, Ivan (Stepan Hoverlia). “Hrani kultury” (Facets of Culture). Lviv: Shevchenko Scientific Society. 1993. 216 pp.
32. See in the book: Lytvyn, Yurii. “Liubliu – znachyt zhyvu. Publitsystyka” (I Love, Therefore I Live. Publicistic Writings). Compiled by Anatolii Rusnachenko. – Kyiv: Vydavnychyi dim “KM Academia,” 1999. pp. 56–62.
33. Stus, V. “Tvory...” (Works...), vol. 4, pp. 485-502.
34. O. Berdnyk's statement was published in the newspaper “Literaturna Ukraina” on May 17, 1984.
35. Lypovetskyj, I., “Istorychni ese” (Historical Essays), vol. 2, pp. 486-487.
36. Strokata, Nina. Afterword to the publication: “Informatsiini biuleteni Ukrainskoi hromadskoi hrupy spryiannia vykonanniu helsinskykh uhod” (Information Bulletins of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords). Compiled by Osyp Zinkevych. Ukrainian publishing house “Smoloskyp” named after V. Symonenko. Toronto–Baltimore, 1981. p. 175.
37. Naboka, Serhii. “Ukrainskyi kulturolohichnyi klub” (The Ukrainian Culturological Club). – “Ukrainskyi almanakh.” 1997. Warsaw: Association of Ukrainians in Poland. 1997. pp. 154–156.
38. Romanyshyn, Yurii. “Tovarystvo Leva” (The Lion Society). Ibid., pp. 157–159.
39. Lytvyn, Yurii. “Liubliu – znachyt zhyvu” (I Love, Therefore I Live). p. 56.
1992–2004. With corrections from 2007. On the KHPG website since Feb 26, 2008.