A LETTER FROM THE CREATIVE YOUTH OF DNIPROPETROVSK
(The Ukrainian Herald. Issue I. January 1970)
Repressions in the Dnipropetrovsk Region
The administrative persecutions and harassment of nationally conscious youth in the Dnipropetrovsk region, which have been ongoing for the past two years, have finally culminated in arrests.
On June 17, 1969, Dnipropetrovsk KGB agents arrested the poet Ivan Sokulsky. Sokulsky is approximately 30 years old; he grew up on the outskirts of Dnipropetrovsk in a poor family (his mother is a cleaning lady, with no education). He studied at the philology department of Lviv University and was an activist in the Club of Creative Youth until the Club was disbanded. He transferred to Dnipropetrovsk University, where he stood out like a sore thumb and immediately caught attention with his national consciousness. He was expelled in his fifth year with the usual formulation: “For conduct unbecoming of a Soviet student.” Since then, his wanderings began. He was fired from the editorial office of the newspaper “Enerhetyk” during the campaign surrounding Honchar’s “The Cathedral.” He found a job as a firefighter, but after they learned of his “subversiveness,” he was fired from there as well. Lastly, he worked as a sailor on a river steamship. He was arrested on the steamship during a voyage from Kyiv to Dnipropetrovsk. His mother was notified of the arrest several days later, when they came to search her home. His mother’s home was searched three times. Three typewriters and a number of samizdat materials were confiscated: “Report from the Beria Reserve” by V. Moroz, I. Dziuba’s speech at the evening in memory of V. Symonenko, “A Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” and even Oles Honchar’s speech at his jubilee evening, among others. Notebooks, greeting cards, and so on were also taken.
The investigation was led by investigator Shkonda. The mother was allowed a visit after (as it was said) Sokulsky stopped throwing a chair at the investigator. The KGB agents treat his mother rudely and spread absurd rumors in the village where she lives.
Sokulsky is likely charged under Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR for distributing samizdat materials. There is a rumor that he is being incriminated as the author of “A Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” a document that is in no way anti-Soviet (See below).
In the same case, in Novomoskovsk, Dnipropetrovsk oblast, KGB agents arrested 22-year-old Mykola Kulchynsky, a talented young man who wrote poetry and was interested in the history of Ukraine and the national question in general. He is supposedly charged under Art. 187-1. He suffers from a stomach ulcer and is in great distress from the prison food. He is conducting himself with dignity during the investigation.
In connection with Sokulsky’s arrest, numerous searches have been conducted in Dnipropetrovsk, particularly among university students.
To provide a clearer picture of the situation that has developed in Dnipropetrovsk, we present “A Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” sent to its addressees in 1968. This letter gained wide circulation in samizdat and was published abroad.
To the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, V. V. Shcherbytsky
To the Candidate Member of the Politburo of the CC of the CPU, F. D. Ovcharenko
To the Secretary of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, Dmytro Pavlychko
We draw your attention, as communists, leaders, and public figures of our sovereign state—the Ukrainian SSR, one of the founding states of the UN—to the destructive rampage that has been raging for several months now in the Dnipropetrovsk region, to the wild and senseless persecution of honest Ukrainian citizens devoted to the cause of building communism. This campaign is so shameless and unprincipled that it makes the wildest antics of the world-famous Chinese Red Guards pale in comparison.
A large group of citizens has been slandered at all official and unofficial events of the oblast committee, raion committees, and party committees, each time twisting their “views alien to the people” and immoderately exaggerating, as it suits anyone, the facts that will be discussed below. They have been hounded in the regional press and on the radio, thereby creating the appearance of “public opinion” in the classic model of Saltykov’s “mayor of the town of Glupov.”
The so-called Dnipropetrovsk campaign reached its greatest brutality in connection with the appearance of the new novel by our countryman Oles Honchar, “The Cathedral.”
At first, the regional newspapers “Zorya” and “Prapor Yunosti,” as well as the Marhanets city newspaper, published favorable reviews of this work. But just a month later, at a meeting attended by the secretaries of local party organizations of the Dnipropetrovsk region and senior press officials, the secretary of the oblast committee of the CPU, Comrade Vatchenko, condemned all these reviews and gave the press the command “to prove to the readers” that the “working class” of the Dnipropetrovsk region “does not accept ‘The Cathedral.’” Immediately, the regional newspapers became littered, like pear trees in May, with “opinions of workers on ‘The Cathedral.’”
Thus, “Zorya” alone, within two weeks, organized three brutal and helpless “reviews,” as evidenced by their four-hundred-line tirade, and just as many remained unpublished.
Those letters of response, letters of protest from workers and the working intelligentsia against the vilification of the author of “The Cathedral” were kept “strictly” secret by editor P. Orlyk and the head of the letters department of the newspaper “Zorya,” Ya. Novak, who, after identifying the sender's place of work and address, reported them to the oblast committee and the KGB.
The oblast committee of the CPU forbade the celebration of the writer’s 50th birthday at the history and philology department of Dnipropetrovsk University and at the city library, although this was preceded by numerous announcements. Later still, the dean of the said faculty, Comrade Pavlov, even forbade a discussion of the novel “The Cathedral” that the history students had planned to hold. Anyone who, in any way or form, expressed disagreement with the campaign or even accidentally “struck the wrong note” that it demanded was severely punished. It is no accident that the head of the ideological department of the oblast committee, Comrade Vasilyev, declared at a seminar for cultural workers of the oblast: “The novel ‘The Cathedral’ is a vortex around which everything ideologically harmful and hostile to our reality is clustered.”
And so, S. Yu. Sheinin, an employee of the propaganda and agitation department of the newspaper “Zorya” and one of the oldest journalists in our city, was expelled from the party and dismissed from his job for writing a positive review.
M. T. Skoryk, an employee of the culture department of the newspaper “Zorya,” was expelled from the party for having submitted a fabricated article by the semi-literate worker H. Dihtiarenko and Co. (“I Don’t See Life That Way,” “Zorya,” April 6, 1968) for the slipshod editorial article.
The talented journalist V. Zaremba was expelled from the Komsomol and dismissed from his job for having the courage to rebuff the author of a slanderous article on “The Cathedral,” KGB Lieutenant O. Z. Kyrylenko, head of the information department of the newspaper “Zorya” (“Not a Cathedral—People,” “Prapor Yunosti,” May 7, 1968).
I. P. Opanasenko, an employee of the agriculture department of the newspaper “Zorya,” was dismissed from his job without any grounds.
Ryma Stepanenko, a talented director of the Dnipropetrovsk Ukrainian Theater named after T. H. Shevchenko, was expelled from the party and dismissed from her job for staging M. Stelmakh's play “Kym Koroliu.”
A severe reprimand with a warning was “slapped” on the communist H. Prokopenko, a teacher at the 64th evening school (he insisted on a response article to the slanderers of “The Cathedral,” H. Dihtiarenko and the “philosopher” I. Moroz).
S. Levenets, the executive secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk branch of the Ukrainian Theater Society, was dismissed from his job.
The well-known writer V. Chemerys was dismissed from his job at the Dnipropetrovsk publishing house “Promin.”
The young poet Ivan Sokulsky was dismissed from his job at a Prydniprovsk local newspaper.
M. Dubinin, the editor of the aforementioned newspaper, received a major “dressing down” along party lines for publishing a positive response to “The Cathedral” by workers D. Semenyaka and V. Uniat (“Enerhetyk,” April 10, 1968).
B. Karapysh, an employee of the “Promin” publishing house, received a party reprimand in the heat of the campaign.
And this list, it seems, could be continued!
An ordinary poetry evening at the Prydniprovsky Palace of Culture (of which, according to the palace staff, there had been many) was elevated in the maniacal madness of the campaign to almost the level of a “counter-revolutionary sortie.” For how else is one to understand that at all events of the oblast party committee, as well as at the report-and-election conference of the Dnipropetrovsk branch of the Writers’ Union, this innocent poetry evening, branded with the most absurd labels, became the scarecrow-target at which the “struggle against ideological diversions” was to be aimed.
The participants and organizers of the evening were closely scrutinized by security service detectives; many were summoned for anecdotal interrogations where intimidation was used against completely innocent people.
At all Union and other meetings, the talented poets M. Chkhan and the aforementioned Chemerys are constantly “pummeled” (condemned for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism”). As a rule, such a “dressing down” is accompanied by a visit to the KGB.
Somewhat later, a whole phalanx of Ukrainian creative youth was punished by various methods, usually writers—Hennadiy and Oles Zavhorodniy, O. Ovcharenko, D. Semenko, P. Vakarenko, the aforementioned Sokulsky, M. Romanushko, O. Vodolazhchenko, H. Malykov, and many others. And again, for the same fantastical “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” concocted in the building on Korolenkivska Street, but in reality, for any concern for the fate of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture in furiously Russified Dnipropetrovsk.
One wonders why they so readily, as if it were nothing, deal with people of principle—expelling them from the party, kicking them out of universities and jobs? Are they some kind of criminals? If only!—Real criminals live on without a care.
Recently, the former first secretary of the oblast Komsomol committee, communist A. Hordiienko, and the first secretary of the city Komsomol committee, communist H. Druzhynin, were speeding after a “merrymaking binge” and killed a person in Novomoskovsk. Do you think they were put behind bars?.. The first is now an engineer at the Karl Liebknecht Plant in Dnipropetrovsk, the second—an engineer at the Babushkin Plant. Both remained in the party ranks. Not a single newspaper wrote about these “responsible” hooligans.
And another example. Communists P. Karakash and I. Ostrovsky, employees of the newspaper “Zorya,” stole 25,000 rubles of state money at the new price rate from the editorial office. P. Karakash “managed” as the executive secretary and assigned RATAU materials to his pal I. Ostrovsky. When the embezzlers were exposed, they paid for their unheard-of crime only with reprimands along party lines and were slightly demoted in their positions. And… they continue to work in journalism. Karakash is the head of the industry department at “Zorya,” Ostrovsky is in the industrial department of the oblast radio.
As we can see, there is a place in the party for murderers and profiteers—spiritual dregs—but honest and principled communists are thrown out of the party and their jobs, so that the profiteering, drinking, and mockery of party norms and Soviet laws can continue peacefully.
Not long ago, the public of Dnipropetrovsk University, named after the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia, was outraged by the anti-communist behavior of the then dean of the history and philology faculty, V. Vlasenko. This “educator” tried to turn the faculty into a private harem—systematically debauching his female students. (That’s how he taught morality to the generation that would live under communism!). Around the same time, students also learned of the shameful act of a lecturer from the same faculty, I. Lutsenko. Taking advantage of his position as a thesis supervisor, he tried to rape a graduate student.
Do you think these “educators” had to bid farewell to their teaching careers?
But no! There is a place for such people among educators. For Vlasenko, it only resulted in a demotion to department head. Lutsenko was relieved of the extra “burden” of public work, being graciously removed from the leadership of the literary studio. So, perhaps prostitution and the abuse of official position in its name are not considered anti-Soviet behavior in our country? Or is this “little sin” easily forgiven as an honorarium for political unscrupulousness, for the absence of “harmful thoughts” in their learned heads? Whatever the case, one can be sure that in all instances, such people will support any campaign, as long as the advantage is on its side, and without even considering whether it aligns with the party line or Soviet laws.
In connection with the campaign of vilifying “The Cathedral,” local KGB agents have intensified their “educational” work. And again, the rumor they themselves started about a “nationalist danger” began to crawl around. It is ridiculous even to speak of this “nationalist danger” appearing precisely in Dnipropetrovsk, where for a city of nearly a million people there is not a single Ukrainian kindergarten or nursery, not a single fully Ukrainian school, not a single university or technical college with instruction in the Ukrainian language. Should the oblast committee of the Communist Party not be concerned by such an utterly abnormal, anti-Leninist, and anti-Marxist state of the native Ukrainian language in Dnipropetrovsk? Would it not be more correct to direct their anger and “efforts” not at honest communists and Komsomol members, but at these monstrous violations of Lenin's nationalities policy, where Ukrainian workers barely know their own native language, their native culture, because they are forced to be ground down their entire lives in the reliable, as they were 50 years ago, millstones of Russification?
Are those honest citizens of the Ukrainian SSR who have grasped this tragedy of their people and do not want to renounce their native language, do not want to renounce themselves, enemies? On this matter, the great Russian writer V. Soloukhin said: “If I had been born a Ukrainian, I would never have wanted to become a Russian.”
Does the Soviet patriotism of today’s Ukrainian not include national dignity, national pride for their great and talented Ukrainian people? One could continue these “is it possible that…” questions indefinitely.
One wonders why for the progressive Ukrainian creative youth there is only one path—“Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” (the activities of the Dnipropetrovsk KGB speak eloquently of this), for as we have already seen, a significant majority of them sooner or later end up on it. And a
person with ordinary, undistorted common sense would see here only the feeble зародыш of elementary concepts of national self-worth, and often a sense of national, and thus ordinary human, dignity. Is “bourgeois propaganda” to blame for this? No, it is the reality of Dnipropetrovsk! And if we are Marxists, it must be changed to conform to Leninist norms and Soviet laws, rather than persecuting all progressive Ukrainian citizens loyal to Marxism-Leninism.
At the same time, the question arises, is it that bourgeois ideology only does not affect our Russian comrades? Is this their national exceptionalism?
How else can one explain the fact that in our city, not a single representative of Russian creative youth has been publicly criticized (let alone subjected to administrative punishment) for “deviations” analogous to those of the Ukrainian youth, which should be called “the influence of the rotten ideology of Russian great-power bourgeois chauvinism”? And that such deviations exist is no secret to anyone—just try speaking Ukrainian not only at home!
And how, then, do our responsible comrades understand V. I. Lenin’s instructions that the struggle against local nationalism must be fought on two fronts, primarily by opposing Great-Russian chauvinism, for it is precisely this that gives rise to nationalism?!
The behavior of a certain Krylova, a “research” associate at the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum named after D. Yavornytsky, during the barbaric, if not thuggish, reburial of the grave of the legendary Koshovyi of the Zaporozhian Sich, Ivan Sirko, can only be called Ukrainophobia. Only the most decent operations of this “reburial” were reported by “Literaturna Ukraina” in one of its March issues. Thus, it was bashfully concealed that this “reburial” was done, like all thuggish sorties, at night and that the remains of the world-renowned commander were hastily gathered into a dirty sack (as if they were potatoes!) and kept in such a state until morning in a “closet” of unknown purpose.
And to people who were outraged by such cynical Ukrainophobia, the aforementioned associate (not for nothing is she a scholar!) retorted: “And do you know that he was an enemy of the Russian people?”
And did the Russian tsars and their henchmen—that horde of executioners and enslavers against whom Sirko, after all, fought—love Ukrainians and the Ukrainian people, Comrade Krylova? But perhaps it is precisely they (according to Krylova) who represent the great Russian people! And is it not for this reason that monuments stand to Ivan the Terribles, Peter the Firsts, Catherine the Seconds, Suvorovs and Co., their colonial plunder, Asiatic barbarism, and despotism are glorified in multi-volume novels and multi-part films! And no one will say that they hated with a fierce hatred Ukrainians, Tatars, Byelorussians, Poles, Georgians, etc.?
Why then, in the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum, among many items, is a carriage also exhibited in which the courtiers of the notorious Ukrainophobe Empress Catherine II accompanied her debauched majesty on her journey through a finally subjugated Ukraine? Why do the museum walls “adorn” numerous portraits of various dignitaries and conquerors of Catherine’s era, while for portraits of, say, Ivan Sirko or the last military scribe of the Zaporozhian Sich, the founder of the two largest and most beautiful parks in our city, there was, to put it mildly, no room found?
Furthermore, various frightened people, such as P. Orlyk, the editor of “Zorya,” spread provocative rumors, concocted in the KGB, that “Ukrainian nationalism” most fully manifests itself under the guise of protecting Ukrainian antiquity. So what is one to make of the flood of materials in defense of Russian antiquity in Russian publications like “Komsomolskaya Pravda,” “Sovetskaya Rossiya,” “Literaturnaya Gazeta,” “Ogonyok,” “Sovetsky Soyuz,” “Nauka i Zhizn,” etc.?
What then, according to such rumors, is it—a “nationalist danger” or the plundering of a brutish gendarme—of Great-Russian chauvinism, which is not customary to speak of aloud in our country, lest, God forbid, we offend the Russian people? What tearful politeness! A “nationalist danger” or “national nihilism” and savagery bordering on the spiritual banditry of civilized gangsters, we ask again the authors and spreaders of such rumors.
We, the progressive Soviet Ukrainian youth, were educated in Soviet schools and universities on the works of Marx and Lenin, Shevchenko and Dobrolyubov, and we realize that history is the continuous upward development of humanity, and everything progressive and advanced in this development is worthy of study and respect by us and our future generations. Subsequent epochs on the path to their high and humanistic ideals drew and draw all the best that was in the past.
Therefore, the Zaporozhian Sich, which K. Marx in his “Chronological Notes” called a Cossack republic, is dear to us, as are the monuments of the past, be it a building of church architecture or a Cossack kurin, for the veneration and preservation of which Honchar’s “The Cathedral” fights so powerfully.
The slanderer H. Dihtiarenko, in the already mentioned article “I Don’t See Life That Way,” assures that “in our country, monuments are protected as in no other country in the world...” Well, it is hard for us to argue. Indeed, in our country, monuments are protected as barbarically as in no other country in the world! In the Dnipropetrovsk region alone, almost all monuments of church architecture have been destroyed in recent years under the slogan of “fighting religion.” The year before last, in the village of Sursko-Lytovske, what was probably the last rural church in the Dnipropetrovsk region was blown up with dynamite. The remains of the famous Kodak fortress and the ancient Cossack church did not escape desecration; the one-of-a-kind kurin-building of the Cossack Bily in Nikopol was destroyed, as was the Pokrovska Sich church, which Taras Shevchenko painted, the monument to the Zaporozhian L. Hloba in Dnipropetrovsk, and the Transfiguration Cathedral by the famous Russian architect Zakharov stands half-destroyed, and so on.
In the prospective plan for monumental propaganda in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, you will not find anywhere near the names of prominent Ukrainian figures of the past: the founder of the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum, engineer O. Pol, academician D. Yavornytsky, writers I. Manzhura, O. Storozhenko, V. Sosiura, O. Dovzhenko (their life and work are in one way or another connected with Dnipropetrovsk and the Dnipropetrovsk region), the founder of the Dnipropetrovsk Ukrainian Theater named after T. H. Shevchenko, Les Kurbas; there is no monument to one of the most prominent Bolshevik revolutionaries, the organizer of the revolutionary struggle in Katerynoslav, a comrade-in-arms of V. I. Lenin, Mykola Skrypnyk. But our city will be enriched with another monument to M. Gorky, a monument to O. Matrosov, monuments to Tchaikovsky and Glinka, and others.
Esteemed comrades, please explain to us, what “nationalist danger” are the conscious and unconscious “friends” of the Ukrainian people chattering about? Who gave them the right to trample with their dirty, Russifying boots on the national dignity of the Ukrainian people?
We, the creative youth of Dnipropetrovsk, demand that they and all those who carry out brutal, Ukrainophobic campaigns—witches’ sabbaths on the terrain of Ukrainian culture, who persecute honest and devoted people just because they want to be themselves and nobody else, because they want to raise their children in Ukrainian kindergartens, schools, technical colleges, and universities—be brought to justice.
Forgive us, if you please, for writing to you in such a harsh manner, for to write about such things without indignation is to write nothing at all.
We trust that you will heed our sincere voice and take immediate measures to rectify the abnormal situation in which the creative intelligentsia of our city and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in Dnipropetrovsk and the oblast find themselves.
The Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk
Scanned on 03.17.2008 by V. Ovsiienko from the publication: Chornovil V. Works: In 10 vols. – Vol. 3. (“The Ukrainian Herald,” 1970-72) / Comp. Valentyna Chornovil. Foreword by M. Kosiv. – Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2006. – pp. 87-99.