To the United Nations Organization
An Appeal
From the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement on the Matter of Ukrainian Independence
Author – Levko Lukianenko. Published: Levko Lukianenko. I Believe in God and in Ukraine. – K.: MP “Pamiatky Ukrainy,” 1991. – pp. 126-131.
The appeal by 19 prominent Ukrainian political prisoners (which I wrote in the summer of 1979) is one of the most significant documents of Ukrainian samvydav. The authors call for the Ukrainian question to be placed on the agenda of the United Nations, authorizing the president of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (WCFU) to take all necessary measures for Ukraine’s secession from the USSR. A portion of the appeal is presented below. Why only a portion? Because our Ukrainian brethren-in-arms abroad were unable to decipher the entire microtext that reached them from the Mordovian prison. I do not know if they still have the original somewhere. In any case, even if they failed to read a few words, it could not have been many. Thus, the text I present below can be considered complete:
“A peculiarity of modern reality is the division into two fundamentally opposite systems—the open world of free enterprise and democratic freedoms, and the world enclosed by barbed wire, of integral, centralized regulation of economic, political, and all spiritual life. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which personify the first and second systems, defines the picture of the contemporary political map of the globe. The Third World and the countries not aligned with military blocs reduce the strength of the opposing blocs but do not diminish the contradictions of modern civilizations, for they themselves do not (and cannot) stand aside from the historical process. The global factor of confrontation, under conditions of modern, extremely high technological development and advances in nuclear weaponry, has led to the emergence of several powerful centers of international politics (USA – Western Europe – USSR – China), and it seems that, out of fear of a worldwide catastrophe, the peoples of democratic states are ready to turn a blind eye to the colossal tragedy of the Ukrainian people and many other peoples who, to the fanfares of cosmic achievements, are suffering a national ruin heretofore unseen anywhere.
The prehistory of our national calamity began long ago, but with the seizure of power by the communists—that vanguard of Russian chauvinists—a real tragedy began for us. The creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918 was perceived by the Russian communists as a brazen assault on their national life, well-being, and their national goal on our part—and with their army, they crushed the weak army of the newly created Republic and once again turned Ukraine into a Russian colony.
Over three centuries of colonial propaganda, Russia managed to impose upon the world many false ideas that have, for this era, acquired the character of indisputable truths. One such idea is the supposedly just resolution of the national question. We could not counter this lie with our own national word because we are mute before the world. We have been mute for a long time. For a third century, Ukrainians have been mute. The occupiers took our language from us. They locked our living word in prison, and the works of our nation’s spiritual fathers they locked away in censors’ safes, and they themselves speak on behalf of Ukrainians, and the world hears only their voice. We are 50 million strong, yet we are the most unfortunate of nations. We tried to break free from the grasping claws of the invaders on our own, while other members of the world family of nations looked on indifferently at our misfortune. And so many of us perished in the struggle for national freedom, but there is no freedom…
And now we, the children of a weak and numerous people, appeal to the UN as the world political forum of state nations, which is called upon to lead colonial countries and peoples out of political nonexistence. With this wish, we beseech you: do not let us perish! Register Ukraine as a Russian colony and help it free itself from the imposed occupation.
Ukraine found itself a part of Russia not as a result of the goodwill of the Ukrainian people, but as a consequence of Russia’s armed victory over Ukraine, and this subsequently led to the physical extermination of the nationally conscious intelligentsia, all Ukrainian political parties, and the more prosperous segments of the population.
Gradually, all Ukrainian state bodies were exterminated, and in their place, an organized occupation administration was forcibly installed, through which all of Ukraine’s national life was subordinated to Russia.
To subdue a great people and prevent organized resistance, Russia stationed its military garrisons in all more-or-less significant cities and organized in Ukraine its own single political party and police force with a vast network of party functionaries and secret agents.
All creative organizations of Ukrainian writers, artists, and theater and film personalities were liquidated, and in part the people themselves were destroyed. In their place, its own organizations were created, which, under party leadership, carry out the ideological stupefaction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the entire people. The national clergy was exterminated and its own was imposed—the Russian Orthodox Church, which, by abolishing the sacrament of confession, obligated its priests to report to the state everything they learned during confession.
All trade unions of workers and employees were liquidated, and in their place, its own were formed from Moscow, subordinating them to the single Russian party.
The general rise of national consciousness at the end of the 1920s and growing discontent with the colonial situation could have turned into a general explosion, and so the occupiers organized a mass famine, thereby reducing the nation by one-fifth. During this famine, the intelligentsia did not die. It was the peasants who died. And then, in 1934, Stalin pronounced the formula: ‘The Ukrainian intelligentsia does not deserve trust.’ This formula served as a signal for a physical reprisal against the intelligentsia, resulting in the repression of about 500,000 people. The people were quartered. Fortunately, the Russian occupation did not extend to the entire national territory of the Ukrainians. A fifth (western) part of the nation lived in freer conditions. It organized an underground national liberation movement that, during the Second World War, acted against one occupier, and after the war, for a decade, against a new one. This movement showed that hot blood flows in the veins of Ukrainians, not water. However, it could no longer change the unfortunate fate of its nation—the occupier defeated us this time as well.
At the end of the war and after, a large Ukrainian political émigré community appeared abroad. It cried out to the entire free world about the brutality of the occupiers and the genocide, but the world did not believe—Russian demagoguery slandered the glorious knights, accusing them of collaborating with the Hitlerites. Long, sad years dragged on. The situation slowly began to change for the better in the 1960s, when a new generation of fighters for national independence appeared. Having no access to any mass media, due to their complete subordination to the CPSU, this generation began to seek ways to inform its brethren abroad and, with their help, the entire free world, and through radio broadcasts, its own compatriots—about the current situation in Ukraine and its main problems.
We do not claim to offer an exhaustive characterization of our Homeland’s situation as a Russian colony; we are presenting only a brief document with a list of the main facts, which are generally known to anyone interested in the history of the Russian Empire and its relations with Ukraine. This time, however, we present them as the foundation for a formal petition to the UN for assistance in the struggle for independence through the registration of Ukraine as a colony in the Committee on Decolonization, the inclusion of the Ukrainian question on the agenda of the UN General Assembly sessions, and other actions that the UN has customarily applied in its practice in similar cases.
The Ukrainian national ideal regarding its internal political status lies in a deep commitment to democratic principles in all spheres of life, ensuring real opportunities for the free play of various political parties and forces, freedom of economic, professional, and cultural activity, and in pursuing a policy of peace and literary and other exchanges with all countries, raising Ukraine’s importance in the progressive movement of the world community towards the ever-fuller provision of spiritual and material needs, and faith in the human being as the highest value on Earth.
As a result of armed intervention, Moscow imposed on Ukraine the treaty of December 30, 1922, on the formation of the so-called USSR and established a harsh, cruel dictatorial regime under which any expression of the people’s will became impossible. The fundamental principle of international law—the right to determine one’s own destiny—has had no effect for Ukrainians throughout the entire period of Russian rule. The norms of international law: the UN Charter (Art. 1, 13, 55, 76), the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference (Section VIII), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Art. 1), and others, sound beautiful, but so far they are merely a mockery of the real situation of Ukraine, whose colonial status is evident from the following facts: the Ukrainian nation does not have its own organs of state power; it is deprived of political sovereignty, and the so-called Supreme Soviet of Ukraine has as its source of power not its own will, but the will of the Central Committee of the CPSU, centered in Moscow—the capital of Russia, which is outside of Ukraine and not subordinate to the will of the Ukrainian people. The authorities of Ukraine are an occupation administration that implements Moscow’s colonization policy on Ukrainian territory.
As a non-state nation, Ukraine does not determine its own political development and conducts neither an independent domestic nor foreign policy. Contrary to its national interests, Ukraine is included in the Russian political system with its imperialist aspirations for world domination, and against its will, with its natural and human resources, it increases the industrial and military power of the empire, thereby increasing international tension and the threat of a new world war, which could bring the unfortunate people even greater disaster than the famine of 1933. Ukraine does not have its own army. The metropole mobilizes our youth into the imperial army, sending the absolute majority to serve far from their native land for the convenience of assimilation and ideological conditioning in the spirit of its expansionist ideology.
Ukraine does not have its own foreign policy. Not a single country in the world considers it an independent state and therefore sees no need to establish diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level, while UN member states indulge the Moscow imperialists by admitting a delegation from Ukraine to the UN that represents the occupation administration, not the Ukrainian people.
Ukraine does not determine the character of its economic development. Contrary to the Ukrainians’ commitment to the ideal of free economic activity, Moscow has imposed on Ukraine rigid forms in the sphere of industrial and agricultural production and itself carries out their detailed planning and management.
The Ukrainian people are deprived of the right to dispose of their own natural wealth and resources.
Ukraine does not have its own financial system or national currency.
Ukraine is deprived of the ability to conduct foreign trade.
Ukraine does not determine its own social development because Ukraine does not govern its own national wealth and does not manage the economy on its own territory; the standard of living of the Ukrainian people corresponds neither to the scale of its national natural resources, nor to its national labor efforts, nor to the conception of a normal standard of living in our era.
Ukraine does not determine its own cultural development. All cultural matters are under the direct leadership of the party, under the vigilant supervision of its censors, who throughout their entire rule in our land have stubbornly and persistently pursued a policy of assimilation and replacement of Ukrainian culture with their own culture. All higher and secondary specialized educational institutions have been Russified, and now they are switching to the Russian language of instruction in elementary and secondary schools. The Ukrainian language has been ousted from economic and scientific life, from medicine, transport, trade, sports, cinema, and other spheres of cultural and public life.
To finally kill national consciousness and destroy the sources of the very thought of a separate national life under the sun, the occupiers have hidden the history of our forefathers from the current living generations and are forcibly trying to present their own ideals and historical goals to the Ukrainian people as its own.
For the uncontrolled conduct of genocide, the Russian colonizers have fenced the external borders of Ukraine with barbed wire and the bayonets of border guards, keeping Ukrainians in complete isolation from the outside world. In the modern era of great development of means of transport and mass tourism, individual tourism and trips by relatives from and to Ukraine are prohibited, and group tourism has been reduced to an extreme minimum. Ukrainians have been deprived of the right to emigrate for permanent residence in other countries.
The goal of our movement is the secession of Ukraine from the so-called USSR and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
As heirs and continuators of the nation’s greatest historical aspiration—the desire for independent state life—we submit this petition to the UN General Secretariat and ask that it be registered as an official document of the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement. For the purpose of verification by a UN Commission of the current situation of the Ukrainian nation from the standpoint of the validity of our petition’s content, we ask the UN Secretary-General to do everything necessary for the registration of Ukraine as a colony of the Russian empire, which exists in the form of the so-called USSR.
Given the anti-colonial orientation of the UN and taking into account the 1960 UN declaration on granting independence to colonial peoples and countries, we insistently ask that the Ukrainian question be included on the agenda of the 1979 General Assembly as an urgent issue.
We appeal to the UN General Secretariat and the governments of sovereign states—members of the UN—with a call to include the Ukrainian question on the agenda of the next session of the UN General Assembly and to take all measures to accelerate the liberation of Ukraine from Russian occupation.
Beyond the borders of the so-called USSR, Ukraine has a large diaspora with a wide network of political organizations united in a worldwide central body—the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.
For the successful realization of the problems posed in this document, we, the undersigned representatives of the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement, authorize the president of the WCFU to carry out the entire range of diplomatic and other work that proves necessary for the secession of Ukraine from the so-called USSR and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
Signed: Serhiy Babych, Anatoliy Bernychuk, Ivan Hel, Ivan Ilchuk, Vitaliy Kalynychenko, Mykola Kurchyk, Levko Lukianenko, Mykola Matusevych, Myroslav Marynovych, Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Zorian Popadiuk, Vasyl Romaniuk, Petro Ruban, Mykola Rudenko, Oleksa Tykhyi, Andriy Turyk, Bohdan Chuyko, Yuriy Shukhevych, Oles Berdnyk.
1979.