When I sent my reply to Gluzman’s obituary article, “My Friend Prystaiko,” to “Krytyka,” I already had material for a broader text before me, but one that was, quite obviously, too emotional. At that time, I decided to limit myself to a reply. Now, my initial emotions have subsided; time has allowed me to distance myself from the very source of that emotional turmoil and to look at the ethical problems of our society calmly and, most importantly, more broadly, in accordance with the “Post Scriptum” of my Reply in “Krytyka.” For the problem extends beyond the story with Gluzman.
The specific feature of human beings lies not so much in their great intelligence, but in the fact that they have a conscience, the eminent psychologist and mathematician Vladimir Lefebvre reminded us. Proceeding from the assumption that the core of the human phenomenon is free will—that is, the subject consciously chooses their actions—he convincingly demonstrated that the human capacity to operate with such polar moral concepts as “good” and “evil” is subject to a clear mathematical schema. This allows mathematical models for studying the human phenomenon of morality and its regulator—conscience—to be added to the mathematical models of the world developed by human consciousness, from purely formal (“positivistic”) positions, just as a theoretical physicist, for example, dealing with the fundamental question of the structure of matter, tries to establish the algebraic laws to which the physical phenomena of the “material world” are subject. Incidentally, the human moral choice “between-between” can also be viewed as a reduction of the wave function.
The structure of human morality has proven to be universal and rigidly independent of the individual and of the prevailing cultural worldview, that is, of a specific culture. But what we call “good” and “evil” is nevertheless determined by the epoch, the country, and the microculture to which we belong. And although moral judgments are not a reflection of something absolute, the formal rules for operating with the concepts of “good” and “evil” derived from them are no less universal than the rules for operating with the concepts of “truth” and “falsehood” in formal logic.
Faced with a moral choice between the categories of “good” and “evil,” under conditions of freedom of such a choice, a person will have only one degree of freedom (either-or), from which the existence of two types of morality automatically follows, depending on the very assessment of the possibility of combining “good” and “evil”: such a combination is either “good” or “evil.” Consequently, the confrontation between “good” and “evil” can also only be assessed as either “evil” or “good.” If our ethical system or ethical philosophy is based on the principle that “a compromise between good and evil is evil” (i.e., the end cannot justify the means), then, according to Lefebvre, this is the first ethical system. If it is based on the principle that “a compromise between good and evil is good” (i.e., the end justifies the means), then this is the second ethical system. That is, in the first ethical system, the use of bad means, even to achieve the ultimate goal, is evaluated as evil. The second ethical system unconditionally justifies bad means by the achievement of a “high” goal of “good.”
Thus, what is at stake is the actual reaction of the subject’s individual conscience to the world according to these two ways of combining moral evaluations. In the presence of two ethical systems, each specific person, of course, adheres to one of them, with its inherent way of combining “good” and “evil” and the resulting attitude of this person, as a subject, toward other subjects who are or may be a source of danger.
A subject who negatively evaluates the combination of “good” and “evil” will inevitably be cautious both in defending the “good” that has been achieved and regarding the means of its achievement. They must be concerned with not generating new “evil” that will spoil the existing “good.” This moral stance gives rise to a desire for compromise, highly valuing the very principle of compromise with an adversary (akin to the Christian principle of hating the sin while tolerating the sinner).
The representative of the second system is clearly oriented toward merciless confrontation, even with those from whom a threat is improbable. A subject belonging to the second moral system, convinced that their “good” will not be spoiled by the addition of “evil,” tries at all costs to protect what they already have, without concern for the qualitative assessment of the means used. That is, they are predisposed to aggressive self-defense, guided by the rule of “not compromising on principles” or “good must have fists.”
Of course, no modern culture is so homogeneous as to produce individuals of only one type. Moreover, every modern society remains an arena of struggle between the two ethical systems. However, it is not difficult to ascertain the fact of the dominance of a corresponding ethical system in any given society (defining it as “first-system” or “second-system”), as well as to identify the presence in each culture of separate subcultures belonging to the other ethical system. That is, the dominant normative character of an individual is determined by their choice of the dominant ethical philosophy.
This does not mean that a “first-system” society desires only adherents of the first ethical system. It only means that in such a society, those who are primarily concerned with the moral climate of cooperation—that is, the adherents of the first ethical system—constitute the majority, but there are also those who react clearly to dangers.
But if adherents of the second ethical system constitute the main or dominant part of society (a “second-system society”), then continuous confrontation with one another to the point of self-destruction becomes inevitable. As a result, society degrades quickly and sharply because the absolute nature of moral prohibitions is lost—and the categorical moral imperative and religious commandments become superstitions—and the action of a morality that serves only practical interests becomes simply destructive. The second ethical system is usually associated with communist ideology and fascism, although it is also characteristic of extremist religious philosophies.
Since ethical and strategic aspects in the process of any individual’s choice of their relationship with a partner can prove to be interdependent, it is necessary to distinguish between two fundamental concepts: the system of values (a kind of list or mental inventory of them) and the ethical system (a set of rules for transitioning from elementary values to complexes).
Until recently, the main formulas of the “sovok” ethical system contained in the “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism” were disingenuously identified in our country with Christian ones. This ignored the fact that at the foundation of Christianity lie the laws of Moses with the Decalogue of Prohibitions: “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal,” etc., which leads to a negative evaluation of ethical compromise and a positive evaluation of ethical confrontation (in other words, uncompromising in ethical assessments and compromising in human relations). The “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” instead of ethical prohibitions, merely declared the need for “good,” calling on a person to be “honest, truthful, morally pure, simple, and modest,” and at the same time to be “irreconcilable toward enemies.” Such formulas lead to ethical compromise, since “evil” is not forbidden and can be used when necessary, seemingly for the “triumph of good.” The values are universal, but the way of combining them is purely second-system.
Thus, two societies with identical value systems will differ significantly if they have different ethical systems. One can boast of sharing European values but remain in the old, predominantly pagan, ethical system. And then be offended when Europeans look at you as not a real, full-fledged European.
By conducting tests in the U.S. among representatives of Western culture and recent immigrants from the USSR, Lefebvre established that Americans, for the most part, are representatives of the first ethical system, while immigrants mainly belonged to the second. The latter, although they considered themselves opponents of the Soviet value system, behaved with new values according to the same system of combining them (the second) that they had previously absorbed. The values themselves change relatively easily, but it is much more difficult to change the way they are combined, because it is very deeply embedded in the human consciousness, continuing to determine the logic of value-based behavior even after the subject has changed their value system.
To be more specific about Lefebvre’s comparative studies of Soviet and American attitudes toward ethical compromise and ethical confrontation, they examined attitudes toward the following four pairs of statements. In each of these pairs, the first statement contained permission to use a bad means to achieve a good end (i.e., a compromise between good and evil), while the second statement prohibited the use of bad means to achieve a good end (a confrontation between good and evil):
- a. A doctor should hide from a patient that he has cancer to reduce his suffering; b. A doctor should not hide from a patient that he has cancer, even to reduce his suffering.
- a. A hooligan may be punished more severely than the law requires if it will serve as a deterrent to others; b. A hooligan may not be punished more severely than the law requires, even if it will serve as a deterrent to others.
- a. One may give false testimony in court to help an innocent person avoid prison; b. One may not give false testimony in court, even to help an innocent person avoid prison.
- a. One may send a cheat sheet to help a close friend on a competitive exam; b. One may not send a cheat sheet to help a close friend on a competitive exam.
(This Ukrainian translation of the test statements is from Vladimir Lefebvre, Algebra of Conscience (translated from English), Moscow, 2003, p. 70, Table 1.1.)
Among Americans (62 individuals aged 17 to 67 were surveyed, of whom 27 were women and 35 were men), the percentage of those who agreed with the “a” statements across all classes of statements was, on average, ten times lower than the percentage of those who agreed with the “b” statements (with a confidence interval ranging from ±6.8 to ±9.9). Among recent immigrants from the USSR (84 individuals aged 19 to 66 were surveyed), the ratio between the percentage of those who agreed with the proposed “a” and “b” statements was almost in the same proportions (with a confidence interval ranging from ±6.7 to ±10.7), only in reverse, as preference was given not to the “b” statements, but to the “a” statements. To be precise, it should be noted that in the last two pairs, the difference between the percentage of support for the “a” and “b” statements narrowed somewhat—to a ratio of 1/3 to 2/3—which indicated a certain increase in these items of adherents of the first ethical system for evaluating the proposed pairs of statements, while remaining within the second-system ethical model.
There is no need for additional commentary here, as the numerical differences obtained during the testing between the adherents of the first-system and second-system ethical worldviews are indeed striking.
Despite the ritualistic and ostentatious, seemingly mass “self-return” to a former religious identity from “Orthodox atheism” in the post-Soviet space, the second ethical system still prevails, and in it, naturally, procedures for conflict resolution are absent. The transition of a “sovok” to the first ethical system from an “atheistic” or “pagan” one is not measured by the number of church visits, nor even by the number of public gestures and formal prayers, but by the facts of a real manifestation of being uncompromising in ethical assessments and compromising in human relations. In a word: without humiliation of human dignity, without deception, without duplicity, by keeping one’s word... While the average person in Western culture evaluates ethical compromise negatively and ethical confrontation positively, “sovoks” do the opposite—ethical compromise positively and ethical confrontation negatively. The aggressiveness and intransigence of the “sovok” are not their personal characteristics; they were normative qualities necessary for functioning in Soviet society. And by inertia, they still exist in our post-Soviet society. The concentration of second-system adherents in our political sphere is particularly striking.
The problem of the seemingly eternal dominance of the second-system ethical model in our public consciousness cannot but trouble our humanities intelligentsia, as it is synonymous with acknowledging our perpetual “Duginist” attachment to the pagan-Orthodox tradition of not distinguishing between “sin” and “sinner.” This immediately touches upon the “unpatriotic theme” concerning the negative influence of the “figures” of our literary or, more broadly, humanitarian sphere on the entrenchment and maintenance of a second-system worldview at a dangerous level in the public consciousness.
Why does the cultural aspect of this moral problem require such attention? Today, the all-Union literary standards of the second ethical system’s normativity are not forcibly “beaten into heads,” not studied in Ukraine, but the former republic’s equivalent of the “all-Union” one—Ukrainian Soviet literature—remains in force. There is also a whole army of its decorated and less decorated “researchers” and “adherents” who are trying with all their might to preserve the continuation of our consciousness in the previous, normatively second, ethical system. I am not seeking to topple from their pedestals, say, Oles Honchar, or any other representative of “socialist realism,” including Alexander Dovzhenko, Yuriy Yanovskyi, or Mykola Kulish. But to fail to notice in their work our fatal pagan-Orthodox-atheistic failure to distinguish between “sin” and “sinner,” as well as the continuation, because of this, of their presence in school curricula with almost no change from the Soviet style of teaching literature—this is indeed a sin. For fiction carries within it deep, informal models of man in the context of moral choice. In the first ethical system, relationships of unity and compromise dominate, while in the second, confrontation and conflict prevail, and this does not depend on the practical benefit associated with the choice of these relationships. After all, it is well known that the standards of relationships between people, like the norms of language, do not belong to an individual, but are predetermined by the national culture of the country where the individual was born and raised. The masters of literature unconsciously, or consciously (?), replicate the second (pagan) ethical system in the public consciousness as the normative one. Why then speak disingenuously about our European strategic goal if, by our actions, we are binding our society to the dominance of the second-system ethics for more than one generation to come?
Of course, the mathematical model described above does not touch upon the normative aspect of human behavior; it does not answer the question of how one should act, but only suggests how a person will behave under certain circumstances, that is, it allows for both explaining and predicting the behavior of representatives of each ethical system in a situation that requires making a moral choice.
The advantage of the formal model outlined above, which characterizes the “automatic” nature of ethical reaction, is that it does not allow for various combinations of “greater and lesser good,” and is therefore much more rigoristic than a real person, who will usually have doubts, being always oriented toward the good. It is worth making one more clarification. The division of people according to their belonging to two ethical systems is associated only with the first two levels of reflection—“evaluation of the world” and “evaluation of the correctness of that evaluation.” Despite the fact that this model is built on the first two levels of reflection, it is very informative, as the tests conducted by Lefebvre in different environments have shown. These first levels of reflection, according to Lefebvre, determine the “fast” reflection, characterizing a person’s seemingly “automatic” orientation in the world of values. However, a specific person may also possess higher levels of reflection, which are capable of blocking an inadequate “fast” reaction.
Therefore, the ethical development of a certain personality in a first-system society may be linked not only, and not even so much, to the transition of carriers of the second ethical system to the first, but rather to the development and increase of the subject’s ability to engage “slow,” “self-critical” reflection, thereby controlling the first, immediate reaction. This corresponds to an increase in the mind’s control over behavior, liberating the person from the power of immediate emotions.
In a “second-system” society, relations between subjects who adhere to different ethical systems, even when higher, “slow” reflections are engaged by the mind, are more complex and are always under threat from the perception of deep ideological-moral differences, recorded even at the stage of “fast” reflection, but which were concealed or categorized as “insignificant differences” by the mind for the sake of initiating conscious cooperation or dialogue. The mind cannot ignore these differences indefinitely, because deep layers of consciousness are touched here, with their corresponding attitudes toward the categories of “good” and “evil.” I have personally witnessed this more than once while reflecting on the causes of my interpersonal disagreements, concluding that in conditions of the dominance of the second-system ethical model in society, this simply cannot be avoided despite all attempts at interpersonal compromises. For “first-system” compromises have a limit—the threat of transitioning to the second ethical system with the degradation of personality.
In conclusion, it can be added that the simultaneous existence in the world of two ethical systems since the emergence of monotheism with its “divine commandments of ethical prohibitions” lies at the heart of the modern moral schism of the world. And man is forced to struggle in his moral choices between “up the mountain” and “down to the valley.” That is, the exodus from “pagan moral slavery,” initiated several millennia ago by Abraham’s Moral Covenant, continues.
These general considerations on the existence of two ethical systems—a truly monotheistic (democratic, dialogic-pluralistic) one and a pre-monotheistic (in various forms: pagan, “RUNVira-style,” sectarian, Soviet, or atheistic) one—seemed to me absolutely necessary for further reflections.
x x x
It is not known whether the dissident (or, more broadly, intellectually oppositional) movement somehow stimulated Vladimir Lefebvre in his attempts to combine the apparatus of mathematics with the problems of ethics and morality. But it cannot be denied that his first works and monographs in this field after his departure from the USSR in 1974—“A Formal Approach to the Problem of Good and Evil” (Lefebvre V.A. (1977). A Formal Approach to the Problem of Good and Evil. General Systems. XXII – 183-185.); “An Algebraic Model of Ethical Cognition” (Lefebvre V.A. (1980). An Algebraic Model of Ethical Cognition. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 22., p. 83-120.); and “Algebra of Conscience: A Comparative Analysis of Western and Soviet Ethical Systems” (Lefebvre V.A. (1982) Algebra of Conscience: A comparative Analysis of Western and Soviet Ethical Systems, p. 182)—appeared in print just before the collapse of the “Evil Empire.”
“Dissidence” is a collective term, and dissidents are not all alike. And dissidents are not angels, but ordinary people. Even undeniable prisoners of conscience. And it is hardly possible to automatically classify every person imprisoned during the period of active confrontation between dissidence and the totalitarian regime as a dissident. On the other hand, fate spared some conscious dissidents, and they avoided imprisonment, not only by leaving the country. Moreover, dissidence is only the visible part of the iceberg of intellectual and ideological-moral resistance to the existing socio-political system, and a clear demarcation of these parts is simply unproductive.
Of course, dissidents differ from the rest in that they at one time came under the surveillance of the special services, which did not necessarily end in imprisonment, but they were also distinguished by a clearer manifestation of moral motivations in their actions and self-reflections.
Of course, in the conditions of the confrontation with totalitarianism at that time, no one differentiated anyone according to the ethical system they professed. All the more so since Lefebvre himself only came to the conclusion about the existence of two ethical systems in the late 1970s. But within the milieu itself, on a personal level, everyone tried to find a kindred spirit by trial and error. Both in the strictly dissident community and in the wider environment. Both in confinement and “at liberty.” For people forced to participate in collective actions (politics), a coordinated understanding of these actions, their desired results, and possible undesirable consequences is necessary, since we are talking about people with very different views on what was happening or is happening, and even on the world in general.
But even then, a “cynic,” for me, was not an unambiguous equivalent of the concept of an “informer” or a “snitch,” because there was a whole range of other variants for his moral self-realization. A cynic simply uses circumstances, trying to obtain some benefits from the existing system. Sometimes it was enough to fulfill a certain social order from the authorities or to serve as a presentable façade for the regime without any externally obvious immorality.
Of course, it is impossible to specially formulate moral norms as some set of recommendations based on certain features of an ethical situation, although in all fairness it must be admitted that such attempts were made in the dissident community, but, thanks to the resistance of more sensible comrades, they failed, thank God. A person's moral development presupposes purposeful self-development and the cultivation of attentiveness to what is happening in reality. All the more so since the evaluation of specific actions depends on the specific context in which they are performed. And the creation of some kind of moral tribunals simply smacks of the Middle Ages.
Elementary recommendations might not be about how to behave morally (since no recommendations relieve one from the burden of free choice), but about the desirability of avoiding ethically tense situations: if possible, one should not get into situations where the temptation of a bad choice is great, and one should not put others in such situations.
But “we are all passing, little by little,” as the poet said—including the era marked by dissidence, which now allows some “connoisseurs of the dissident past” to juggle concepts and terms, giving rise to such a monstrosity as “totalitarian dissidence,” which they use to accuse and beat down those who are not “their own.” This was the case in some publications from last year and the year before when the name of the late Oksana Meshko was mentioned. In a word, there are obvious attempts to form a myth about dissidence to suit themselves. The polarization of the positions of former dissidents in the episode with Oksana Meshko clearly testified to the obvious: on the one hand, dissidents in that totalitarian past were indeed different, also according to the ethical system they professed. And on the other, that dissidence no longer exists today. However, there is a desire on the part of some from the circle of former dissidents or their environment to build for themselves a privileged position in an ivory tower as a haughty critic of “dissidents,” “non-sidents,” or simply “ex-sidents.”
It is not surprising that the new emigrants from the former Soviet Union (among whom were many who consciously opposed the Soviet political system) to the U.S. turned out, for the most part, to be carriers of the second ethical system. What, then, can be said about those former dissidents who did not emigrate anywhere, but chose a convenient position for themselves in the new conditions, acting according to the familiar old Soviet system of combining “good” and “evil,” even as they proclaim an orientation toward new values?
The true development of man and of peoples, in the opinion of Pope John Paul II, is not of a socio-economic, but of a moral nature. Moreover, socio-economic development itself, its depth and effectiveness, are determined and shaped by our moral-ethical development.
And what do we have in that sphere today? Outwardly, at times as if saying goodbye to our totalitarian past, we may appropriately retrieve from memory the well-known call for solidarity—“let's take each other by the hands, my friends, so as not to perish one by one”—and at the same time subconsciously long for that past, which is revealed in our seemingly truly considered practical steps or statements. But are they really considered?
Gluzman’s publication in “Krytyka” of his obituary article about Prystaiko is a wonderful presentation of the self-testing of a carrier of the second ethical system, no matter how many times one hears the emphasis on his being a staunch “anti-Soviet.” This attests to the reality of the challenges to the ethical self-development of our society.
I repeat, this does not mean that if our society is oriented toward joining the European community of first-system societies, we must forcibly drive everyone into being adherents of the first ethical system, because it desires only adherents of the first ethical system. It is only about their dominance to realize the normativity of that first-system ethics in society.
It is precisely here that a clarification is needed regarding the personal identity of the carrier of this or that ethical system and of this or that specific society with which that carrier identifies and will try to support the moral climate of cooperation, or react to the dangers that threaten that society. If a specific subject identifies with Ukrainian society after the referendum of December 1, 1991, is the question for them, as a carrier of this or that ethical system, about an identity with “Europe,” or perhaps, as is customary, with “Asiope”?
The dissident era is in the past. With all its possible quarrels and illusions. But there is an important intellectual achievement from that era in the form of Vladimir Lefebvre's “Algebra of Conscience.” It prompts the thought that we urgently need a purely civic mobilization. Not to fixate on any “Gumilyov-esque” or “pro-Dugin” models of “passionarity” and eternal “civilizational doom,” but to orient ourselves clearly and consistently toward the civic dimension. Mobilization in this dimension is not based on linguistic, religious, regional, socio-economic, political, racial, or cultural grounds, but precisely on ethical grounds, by professing the first ethical system, because we have a terrible deficit here. After all, any socio-political project, whether national or regional, in the spheres listed above, or even those not listed, can have a firm foundation only in the first ethical system. Outside the framework of that ethical system, everything is doomed to turn into the “dust of oblivion.”
Although it is not correct to speak of dissidence in the present tense, the inertia of public consciousness continues to baselessly interpret any attempt today by one of the “formers” to define their current public position on a particular issue more concretely and clearly as some kind of war between dissidents. There is no war, because its subjects themselves do not exist. But there is a real problem of ideological-moral self-reflection for all who have emerged from “second-system ethical slavery,” including former dissidents. This is not a war, not an incitement to war, but only a call for self-reflection and conscious ethical self-development. With an awareness of the ETHICAL DANGER that threatens our society and demands conscious ETHICAL SELF-DEVELOPMENT.
Initially, at least, through a broad public discussion about our optimal paths out of “pagan ethical slavery.”
Remembering that “God always provides a ladder: both up the mountain and down to the valley.” With the freedom of our moral choice. As members of that multitude of peoples who have Abraham as their moral father and profess the one moral God of the Universe, we must, step by step, consciously move “up the mountain” on the rungs of the “moral ladder.” While in constant benevolent dialogue with the faint-hearted supporters of returning down, into paganism.
x x x
After these general reflections on the possibility of the human phenomenon existing in two moral systems, my recollections from the experience of interpersonal relationships will no longer seem overly egocentric. On the other hand, this further confessional story of mine about my relationship with Gluzman, as a relationship between two individuals in two different ethical systems, can be perceived as purely illustrative of Gluzman's aforementioned ethical self-test, presented in “Krytyka.”
Anyone who has at least skimmed the book “Letters from Freedom,” which was published ten years ago, could not have missed the peculiar preface, titled “from the three,” and the symbol used in it of “three warriors, trustfully leaning their backs against one another, without even glancing to see what the other is doing.”
I confess, reading that version of the preface “from the three,” I felt a strange discomfort with the use of that symbol. Firstly, for some reason, I remembered how Svitlychny and I would warm our backs against each other in the punishment cell to escape the cold. Although it is common knowledge that the best way to preserve one’s internal heat is to curl up in a “ball.” Svitlychny had kidney problems, so we were forced to resort to the “back-to-back” option. Although, during this back-to-back union, the thought did flash through my mind that we were thereby replicating, on a personal level, the persistent idea of some “Siamese fusion of Ukraine and Russia into a strange sort of Asiope.”
Perhaps that symbol would have been more fitting for the past dissident confrontation with the authorities? However, even then, it is difficult to imagine that we were shielding or protecting something very important, something “true,” from dangers with our backs, because there could be no “truth” there; we were only searching for that “truth.” And each in their own way. Even then, solidarity was not of backs, but of faces and hands: “so as not to perish one by one.”
After my release, it was just as difficult for me to somehow reinterpret my worldview at the time into some “struggle of warriors” within the framework of the Ukrainian-American Bureau or outside its framework, against something or someone. Here, a model of a round table, face to face, would have been more appropriate, at least for discussing our personal reflections. One can leave a round table in case of serious disagreements and the impossibility of resolving them at a particular moment or at all. Just as one can return to that table on an equal footing under more favorable circumstances.
But here, it turns out to be something like a “round table for backs.” But what can be discussed with backs? Although consciousness somehow tries to justify this option by the “infrequency” of personal meetings and the real impossibility of face-to-face dialogue.
However, this can take on a false note in our present era, which is so highly differentiated in many dimensions, and the significant distance of that once-friendly back could be a temptation for someone to do something behind this or that back. And on the other hand, a temptation to take advantage of the situation for a selectively closer, “Siamese,” rapprochement between individual backs: a stronger and a weaker one. After which the weaker one will no longer be able to move, because the result will be a very unattractive sight. Therefore, it will simply be forced to remain silent.
But the main question is, what can you do when you suddenly feel that the back behind yours seems to profess a different truth. Or perhaps that unexpected otherness only began to be felt at a certain distance between the backs? An otherness when the present-day Saul once again wants to become the former Paul.
After a wave of reflection on the preface text and the absence of another option, I resigned myself to this symbol of the “three backs.”
These are not my feelings of today, but a memory of those from that time. For long before that preface, I had already sensed the danger of such a fusion, particularly when, in an obvious interpersonal conflict that was not my own, I had to unequivocally choose my side between H. and Z. At that time, I chose H., but I hoped that, due to my age, I would be the first to fall out of that Siamese, solidary union around the “main back.”
It seems strange, but (according to my observations) no one then, for some reason, noticed that the “symbol of the three warriors” seemed to contrast the three former zeks with the “non-zeks,” not only in that structure called the Ukrainian-American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights, but in life in general. Everything looked quite natural—“dissidents.” It was truly difficult to perceive it otherwise at the time, a testament to which was my own impulsive, but not logically concluded, statement about resigning my authority as co-chairman of the Public Council, as a kind of psychological self-compensation in the conditions of someone else's conflict between H. and Z.
In the aforementioned “crossroads” situation of choice, I nevertheless remained in the “squad of three.” It seemed to me then that the outburst of aggression toward one of the Bureau's co-founders was caused by a lack of positive emotions in our souls. So I set about creating them. I am referring here to my article at the time, “The Gluzman Phenomenon,” which was indeed met with almost universal approval. I heard only one rather cautious remark, that I had completely removed the obvious negatives and overly thickened the positive colors, because the phenomenon was not created by Gluzman alone. I accept this remark, but from the height of my age, I had the right to just such a concentration, being aware of the well-known effect of additional or advance praise: it usually does not yield negative results. And today, after moving away from that “union of three,” I do not regret this article, to which Gluzman reacted at the time with the words: “No one has ever written about me like that.”
On that high wave of hope for a “new,” “positivized” style of cooperation, our joint work on “Signs of the Times” began then as well.
So it is not surprising that, hoping for that new beginning in the relations of the “three”—although in reality, these relations “of the three” never materialized, neither then nor later, because from time immemorial, probably from the very beginning, they were and remained autonomous pairwise relations—I later accepted that symbol of the “union of three backs” in the preface to the “collective monograph” of the three former zeks.
However, I did not think then that everything that followed would happen exactly as it did, when I would be forced to lay before the people my painful, living interpretation of it.
x x x
As I recall, the roots of my current, purely moral, problems lie in the very history of the birth of the friendly relationship between two generally well-known individuals, not only in Ukraine but also beyond its borders, in the field of human rights protection: Semen Gluzman of Kyiv, executive secretary of the Psychiatric Association of Ukraine, and Yevhen Zakharov, co-chairman of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
It was around them that the Ukrainian-American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights was created on December 10, 1992. Gluzman became the director (this was his categorical condition for agreeing to join the Bureau), and Zakharov became a rank-and-file member of the Bureau’s Public Council and, at the same time, the editor-in-chief of the Bureau’s Information and Analytical Bulletin. According to a prior agreement, Semen Gluzman (who was also the executive director) and Myroslav Marynovych, founder of the first Amnesty International group in the USSR, who lived in Drohobych at the time, were to become co-chairmen of the Bureau's Public Council, both being of roughly the same age.
But Marynovych unexpectedly proposed transferring his functions as Co-Chairman to the then-almost-retired Antonyuk. I resisted, because it was not my role, because I was not used to structured collective activity, considering myself a kind of hermit crab, dependent only on myself and responsible only to myself. My arguments failed, and I had to agree. And later, to agree to the role of a kind of deputy editor of the Bureau’s Information and Analytical Bulletin.
At first, everything went calmly, tolerantly, effectively. The Bureau earned a good name for professionalism and objectivity both among the public and the authorities. Later, small, barely noticeable frictions began between Gluzman and Zakharov. Then everything became visible. Eventually, Gluzman simply blocked the statutory work of the Public Council with his demonstrative non-participation in its meetings. Gluzman demanded from the Kyiv members of the Bureau the removal of Zakharov from the Bureau, even though Zakharov was one of the founding members. Gluzman did not present any truly clear and specific accusations against Zakharov, only hints, promising to later explain everything in detail to each of us. The situation was a stalemate: either the Bureau’s work was paralyzed, or Zakharov would renounce his rights as a founding member and leave the Bureau himself.
Months, then years passed, but Gluzman never announced any arguments or any specific fault of Zakharov's from that time. Each time, he limited himself to vague hints of their grandeur and incredibility, which he or someone else was supposed to reveal later. When you turned to the indicated persons, they would shrug their shoulders, saying that something was supposed to have been communicated to them by so-and-so, but so far there was nothing, and advised turning to the mentioned individuals. And so the very curious were led around in circles, like fools or, more precisely, sheep. Others explained the reasons to themselves: it must be about money. Especially since Gluzman had vaguely hinted at some financial abuses by Zakharov. It later turned out that there were, in fact, no financial claims against Zakharov. But the deed was done! Zakharov was slandered. And Gluzman spread these lies himself or asked others, who did not know the true state of their relationship, to do so. Later, these lies about Zakharov were repeated by Gluzman to several Western embassies which, it was believed, Zakharov also visited.
At first, I interpreted the emergence of the “conflict of the two” as one of them having “done time” while the other “didn't get the chance,” and the one who did time was 6 years older than the one who didn't. But the further development of the conflict pointed to much more serious factors. Because slandering Zakharov and ousting him from the Bureau was not enough for Gluzman. He decided to turn for help to none other than SBU General Prystaiko, to somehow shut down the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group altogether, as it was evidently creating discomfort for the Bureau’s director with its practical work in human rights. I know about this appeal to the SBU from Gluzman himself. At first, I didn't believe it, I thought it was just a psychological self-compensation in front of me. He loved to bluff and watch how the listener’s face changed upon hearing the news. “It turns out they can’t do anything now!” was how Semen Gluzman later summed up his contacts with the SBU.
When, after some considerable time, Prystaiko himself mentioned this during a meeting, I was horrified. Prystaiko said ruefully, you know, we thoroughly checked everything back then, well, there’s nothing on Zakharov! But Gluzman keeps insisting, putting pressure. How can one do that? A conflict arose between comrades. But why involve our service in settling scores?
Something similar happened in the case of Mr. Lisovenko, the chief physician of the Pavlov Kyiv Psychiatric Hospital. Prystaiko touched upon the story with Lisovenko several times; I knew it well but did not want to unequivocally take the side opposite to Gluzman. Because this was a structure with which neither I personally, nor the Bureau as such, had any relations. Semen Gluzman had a relationship with Lisovenko, as the executive secretary of the Psychiatric Association, which was located in one of the buildings of the psychiatric hospital, of which Lisovenko became chief physician at Gluzman's insistence.
The similarity between Lisovenko and Zakharov was that at first there was a friendship with Lisovenko, as long as he listened to Gluzman in everything. But at some point, something in the relationship cracked, perhaps even over some very minor act of disobedience (Gluzman himself spoke of the emergence of excessive appetites in Lisovenko regarding the organization of foreign trips for him and an increase in his financial provision from the funds of the Psychiatric Association). Gluzman said: “I thought he would be grateful to me for bringing him to Kyiv, but he acts insolently with his exorbitant demands and the control he imposes on the association.” Evidently, Lisovenko’s stubbornness in defending his opinion was the trigger for the conflict, in which “money” appeared as an outwardly convincing argument, just as in the case of Zakharov.
Regarding Zakharov, money was only vaguely hinted at, but regarding Lisovenko, it was stated directly, at least in my presence.
From the early 90s, Gluzman constantly said in meetings that he was trying to reform Ukrainian psychiatry. Well, thank God! My friend's intentions looked completely noble, and I could, and was even obliged, to accommodate him and sit for a couple of hours, as a member of the Kyiv City Council, at a meeting of the psychiatric hospital's administrative staff. The matter concerned ensuring transparency in the procedure for replacing the hospital’s leadership.
This was not a sphere of my interests as a deputy. I suggested to Gluzman those of my colleagues from the deputy corps whose sphere was Kyiv medicine, I named names, but he did not want them. He was certain that all of them (professional doctors, not rank-and-file, who worked in specific medical institutions in Kyiv) might not support the leadership change he proposed, because they themselves were connected to the old leadership. I was just supposed to sit at the meeting with my deputy’s pin. Purely abstractly, psychologically, I was on Gluzman’s side, who was striving for change.
Lisovenko seemed like a perfectly decent alternative to the then-ossified leadership of the psychiatric hospital, because drug trafficking was flourishing in the hospital with the knowledge and participation of the chief physician. Thus, the old administration of the Kyiv psychiatric hospital, which Lisovenko was supposed to head at Gluzman’s demand, could attract few to its defense.
I am sure SBU General Volodymyr Prystaiko was the same. But for him, the matter was not in personalities, but in adhering to the existing rules for replacing leaders in their posts. I did not feel in any way involved in the implementation of those rules, wherever they might be. But Prystaiko did. This is precisely the difference in our choices, Prystaiko’s and mine: whose side we were on. Although we both chose the same side—Gluzman’s.
In the conflict that later arose between Gluzman and Lisovenko, I wouldn’t say I was truly on anyone’s side—Lisovenko’s or Gluzman’s—but I was aware that Lisovenko’s victory would mean the departure of the Psychiatric Association from the hospital grounds. But my formal support of Gluzman’s side had no consequences in that struggle between former sympathizers.
Gluzman had no legal grounds for dismissing Lisovenko, and again came the pleading appeal for help to General Prystaiko. They managed to use the facts of humanitarian aid arriving at the hospital with Gluzman's own assistance and supposedly find some violations. As a kind of formal reason for transferring Lisovenko to another job.
In conversations with the general, I saw that he was sober about “Gluzman’s enthusiasms”—he loves to manipulate people, using his name, he makes mistakes himself, and asks for help from those with whom he did not coordinate his actions. But why kowtow to him like that? If I'm self-critical, I kowtowed to Gluzman just the same. At least in three cases: Zakharov, Lisovenko, and the title of honorary Chekist for Gluzman (if Nemirya is a career Chekist, then I should at least be an honorary one, Gluzman sometimes mused aloud). I know from Gluzman himself that the coordination of the wording and form of awarding this title dragged on for at least a year, because one thing or another didn't suit Gluzman, or didn't suit the SBU. I only softly expressed doubt about the appropriateness of that “Chekist” involvement.
I cannot grasp the true meaning of Prystaiko's aforementioned conversation with me. Not then, not now. But the very fact that he told all that to me, not a friend, shows that this, and not just what was mentioned in the obituary article in memory of the general—Gluzman's manipulative involvement of a high-ranking official from the special services in the well-known International Psychiatric Congress—was gnawing at him.
Such are the unfortunate facts for the image of Ukrainian dissidents. Though it might seem to a normal psyche that this is an excessive “densification and generalization” of them.
Besides the story with Lisovenko, I recalled a number of other of Gluzman's “divorces,” in particular with Dr. Grigorenko, whom Gluzman himself had entrusted with a position at the International Rehabilitation Center (which is mentioned in Gluzman's article), Natalia Belitser, Vitaliy Kryukov, or Leonid Finberg (all three were members of the Bureau’s Public Council).
The case with the well-known lawyer Vitaliy Kryukov is particularly striking when I start to replay it all in my memory. When I once asked Gluzman why Kryukov wasn't at the meetings, he replied: “Well, call him and invite him to come.” Like a fool, knowing nothing of the conflict, I called several times and invited him, but Kryukov, without explaining anything, would say “okay” and not come.
Only a few months later, as if in passing, Gluzman says: “Kryukov and I had a nice time together at the restaurant yesterday. He said he decided to focus on the Law Foundation and holds no grudges against the Bureau.”
From all appearances, the case of the silent departure of the well-known sociologist Yevhen Holovakha, who had been a member of the Bureau’s Public Council from its very beginning, also belongs to the category of a kind of “quiet coercion” to leave. Or the case of a rather later member of the Public Council, also a well-known sociologist, Mykola Shulha. After his departure, the Public Council practically ceased to exist, as everything supposedly began to be “resolved in a working manner,” although such a procedure was neither described nor provided for in the charter.
No one wanted to cause a scandal; everyone left silently. What they thought of Gluzman after that (today I understand they thought the same of me, as his fellow zek, at least for my exclusive focus on the Bulletin and my withdrawal from everything that was happening in the Bureau). But all of this formally belonged only to the sphere of the Bureau's executive director—because the charter was drafted that way at Gluzman's own request, on the model of a totalitarian structure, but the founding members paid no attention to that fact when creating the Bureau. And how could one doubt Gluzman, who had such an incredible image as a principled defender of the victims of psychiatric abuse by the totalitarian government? On Gluzman's face, after those partings, there was for some reason never a crumb of regret. “No one will be able to squeak, because it will all testify first and foremost against themselves.”
To say that the “perturbations” in the Bureau’s Public Council concerned some “opponents” is inappropriate, because they were members of the Public Council whom Gluzman himself had initially presented as his friends. I even doubt that (except in the case of Zakharov) the term “reprisal” is appropriate here, because it may only have been a matter of a kind of suggestion to the opponent, why should they waste their time and intellect here senselessly.
The cause of a “conflict” could sometimes be the expression of doubt by a “conditional opponent” about the validity of the director's statements—as one of the co-chairs of the Bureau’s Public Council—at the Public Council itself. At its official meetings, or after them, where the topic under discussion could smoothly transition into private conversations among individual participants. Perhaps even an disrespectful review by someone to whom the director had given his article for review and evaluation. There were simply no other possibilities for disagreement to arise. But then this is just a struggle between two opinions. I consciously “exclude” the difference in the professional level between a member of the Public Council and the Bureau’s executive director. I leave only the feature that one opinion belongs to a rank-and-file member of the Bureau's Public Council, and the other to the Co-chairman of that Public Council, who is also the executive director, that is, the “most important person” in the Bureau. These quiet clashes were not generated by an abstract topic, but by some new ideological-reorganizational or publishing itch. And they never arose at official meetings of the Public Council, which is why they did not grow into a public scandal. Even in the case of Zakharov, everything happened somewhere behind the scenes.
The medieval nature of such consequences of disagreement at the Public Council meetings (or outside them) was not immediately realized, because the conflicts were not overt, and the side that found itself in the “losing” position did not wish to openly demonstrate its “disrespect” for the famous dissident. And quietly left the Public Council.
The “squeezing out” of Leonid Finberg from the Public Council is also striking. A very ugly story. Finberg himself will never voice it, just as Yevhen Zakharov, Yevhen Holovakha, Vitaliy Kryukov, Natalia Belitser, Mykola Shulha, or others have not voiced their stories. Perhaps they all do not want my mention of it here either.
But I can tell about the distribution of a kind of “homework assignment,” as if to schoolchildren, to the then-members of the Public Council, because no names will figure here. Everyone was to prepare an article on a topic of their own choosing for the next meeting of the Public Council. No official evaluations of the results were announced. And only the director's chosen victim knew them.
By the way, the “next meeting” of the Public Council, which was mentioned when the homework was assigned and at which the results of the assignment were to be summed up, never took place. Such was the inglorious end of the Bureau's Public Council, as provided for in its charter. So has this not put a fat cross on the legitimacy of the Bureau's very existence?
Today, I see the reason why the same did not happen to me as to the other members of the Public Council only in my softness (this is true, but how I am tired of constantly hearing it!) and in the existence of some plans for my further use and manipulation. In particular, regarding Sfera and my then-still-close friend Igor Gilbo. This is my later feeling, about which I will tell a little further on.
After the “school assignment” in the style of “do something, I don’t know what, do it somehow, I don’t know how” for the respected and authoritative members of the Public Council and the very humiliating conversations based on the results of the evaluation of that director's assignment, which took place only one-on-one—the all-powerful director and the victim, who was deprived of the very right to appeal—the Bureau lost practically all members of the Public Council at that time.
But this situation of the Bureau’s destruction with the help of a “school assignment,” as I understand it today, was actually set in motion earlier, at least at the award ceremony for Yevhen Zakharov, Semen Gluzman, and Serhiy Holovatyi (the Law Foundation). Because the award to Gluzman was designated not for the achievements in the field of human rights of the Ukrainian-American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights, of which he was the director, but for the achievements of the Psychiatric Association of Ukraine, in which he was the executive secretary. Perhaps on a subconscious level, Gluzman already felt the emptiness that the once-loud name of the Ukrainian-American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights was covering up.
What didn’t Gluzman do then (starting from the preparations in Europe for the award question itself) to get Zakharov thrown out of the list of nominees! This second, now international, slander of Zakharov before the British Embassy proved futile. The “cunning Europeans” stood their ground despite everything—“Zakharov must be awarded.”
Gluzman only managed to negotiate for himself twice the amount of his award.
It is difficult to comprehend anyone's autocratic desire to be the most productive generator of ideas and to concentrate all power in their own hands. But here, no one ever laid claim to the power of the Bureau's director. The irreparable intellectual damage done to the Public Council was “compensated” by the director by formally admitting Tetyana Yablonska and Lyudmyla Milner to its composition, bypassing the procedure. This presence of some other names in the Bureau's composition besides Gluzman and Antonyuk created the appearance of the Bureau's functioning, although one can speak of it only conditionally, “on paper,” when everything was decided, if there was anything to decide, by him himself in a so-called “working manner.” And, of course, what was not forgotten, like a “holy of holies,” was constant “self-PR.” Because the Bureau is the director.
That is all, in the main, that concerns the “history of the conflict” and the “divorces” in the Bureau's Public Council. I turned out to be the only “undivorced lucky one” in the Public Council at that time. Therefore, all responsibility for its inglorious end is focused on me. A purely moral responsibility, from which one cannot hide behind any legal-statutory justifications.
Today I clearly realize that my weak, wait-and-see position in the Public Council at that time makes me morally responsible for everything that happened later with the “Gluzman empire.”
x x x
With Igor Gilbo (creator and first director of the Sfera publishing house, this publishing house is mentioned in Gluzman's article), everything was already happening in a scandalous mode. I became unexpectedly involved in the Gilbo case through my formal membership on the Supervisory Board of that publishing house.
Even before my membership in the Bureau, I knew about the very old and close friendship that united not only Igor Gilbo and Semen Gluzman, but also their families, so I did not later look too closely at the specifics of their relationship in the particular area of creating the publishing house itself. The idea supposedly belonged exclusively to Gluzman, the sponsors also reacted specifically to Gluzman’s name, but the entire implementation of the idea fell on the practical mind, nerves, shoulders, and hands of Igor Gilbo. And would that “idea of Gluzman” ever have been realized in practice without Gilbo? That is what I think today, and that is what I thought back then, when, even before my membership in the Bureau, I first heard Gluzman tell the story of this idea in a very vague form and asked: and who will implement it?
The conflict between the old friends happened unexpectedly for me, as if without a specific moment of its beginning. I did not know the specific reasons, but when I was forced to choose my position in that conflict, I immediately, in a zek-like manner, chose Gluzman’s side, especially since Gilbo himself had proposed me for the Supervisory Board and thereby made me responsible for the fate of the publishing house. Not forgetting to publicly acknowledge Igor Gilbo's special merits regarding the publishing house before everyone—though Gluzman showed no enthusiasm for this, but remained silent—I tried to reconcile the conflicting parties. Surprisingly, at first, Gluzman did not openly object to my attempts to reconcile the situation at Sfera. Obviously, because he had not heard their essence: a mutual recognition of the erroneousness of their actions or words at some point and a conscious mutual apology and return to the pre-conflict positions. When he learned the essence, he immediately stated categorically: Gilbo must go! He has no education at all!
In my private meetings with him on this matter, Gilbo was not against reconciliation in principle—that is, with a return to the initial positions and with apologies—but each time he did not forget to emphasize that nothing would come of it, because, he said, one had to know Gluzman—he never really takes a step back, and never stops until he completely crushes his opponent. Then I asked him to voluntarily leave Sfera and start his own new publishing project, for which he had a sufficient reserve of spiritual and physical strength. But Gilbo was stubborn, saying that he was no longer in his prime, that all that was left for him was to cultivate a plot of land (here he was evidently voicing, as his own, an opinion he had heard addressed to him, as a threat, from Gluzman).
After realizing the real situation and after long conversations and consultations both in Kyiv and in England with Robert van Voren and Robin Jacoby (“Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry,” which supported the aforementioned “Sfera Publishing House”), a plan was developed and approved to resolve the conflict according to the model of a “top-down” resolution, through the Supervisory Board, obliging me to temporarily perform the duties of the publishing house's director, and to forcibly dismiss Gilbo. This was considered necessary, since he did not agree to Gluzman's demand to “voluntarily” leave Sfera.
Yes, he did not want to leave Sfera, because he had invested so much of his time and genuine creativity in it, along with the experienced printer Leonid Kokuev, who was brought in. Although he was aware of the inevitability of his departure.
I was glad then, though it may sound inappropriate, that Gilbo organized his new publishing house after a month or two, thereby putting Gluzman in an unpleasant psychological situation that highlighted the injustice of Gilbo's dismissal—even in the matter of assessing the physical, intellectual, and moral capabilities of his former friend.
I gave my consent to temporarily perform the duties of director at the Board meeting in England for a term of only one year, after which there were to be elections for a new director through an open competition, as was stated in the text of the Resolution itself, sent and announced at Sfera.
The one-year term of the Agreement was coming to an end, but the Supervisory Board and the Director of the Ukrainian-American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights, the structure to which this publishing house belonged, did nothing to implement what was promised to me when I agreed to temporarily perform the duties of director. They did not do so because Gluzman did not want it, as I understand it today.
Sometime in the autumn of 2000, when the SBU was collecting the next printed issue of its collection of documents at Sfera in Gluzman's presence, when asked why Gilbo had been dismissed, Gluzman did not voice any of the heavy accusations that were constantly repeated on any occasion against his former comrade. A bystander might even have thought then that they were still friends. He said that, you know, “our Western partners” had decided so, and he had nothing to do with it. This “pricked me very much,” and became an important notch in my memory for further self-reflection on the situation with Sfera and attempts to bring it to a pre-conflict state.
That is why I insisted on announcing and holding a competition for the position of director.
And then they jointly presented me with an unexpected fact: by fax, the Geneva Initiative had agreed to the results of a supposed competition for the permanent appointment of Antonyuk as the director of the publishing house. Based on a fake decision of a fake competition (because no competition was announced or held)—with fake supposed candidates for the position, among whom was also a fake Antonyuk, because it was without his prior consent or application to participate in the competition. And based on the results of this fake competition, I was appointed permanent director of the publishing house. “What were we supposed to do, and who needs the truth? We decided so and that’s it!” “This lie and failure to comply with the legal procedure specified in the publishing house’s charter will disgrace us before our Western partners.” “What legal procedure? The West will do as we need,” I heard in response to my astonishment at this illegal administrative “audacity.” “You won’t leave us alone, we are one team,” was an additional argument.
This demonstrative disregard for elementary procedures by people who only “for public consumption” officially declared themselves fighters for the rule of law and principled human rights defenders, completely destroyed at that moment the delicate balance between zek solidarity and personal dignity. Who did they take me for? Just a fool?
I swallowed everything silently, but something was noticed, and it was precisely then that a real threat of closure supposedly hung over the publishing house. At least, that's what they told me, referring to Robert and his faxes. The equipment and premises were to be sold, and the money divided. How? After so much work has been invested?! This somehow influenced my decision to postpone my departure for a while, until the threat of the publishing house's ruin had passed. Another compromise. It seemed to me that there would never be an end to the compromises regarding Sfera that had begun in late 1999. It was simply crippling my dignity.
I always remembered the phrase “The West will do as we need,” when Ukrainian tourists from overseas, interested in the distribution of Ukrainian books in the world, would visit Sfera. It was from them that I learned that they had once allocated the sum named by Gluzman for the publication of a more serious book on psychiatry translated into Ukrainian, not Russian. But the book, contrary to the agreement and the promises of an “honest man,” because he was a dissident, was published not in Ukrainian, but in Russian. In response to their outrage and offense, they heard the justification: a certain number of copies of this book were supposed to go to Mongolia, so they decided to print it in Russian, not Ukrainian. And the language issue was decided by Robert van Voren. I had heard this justification scheme from Gluzman himself before. When I repeated it to these Ukrainian tourists then, I heard indignant words: “That is not true! We checked all of Mr. Gluzman's arguments and explanations: it's all untrue. Both about Mongolia and about Robert regarding the language policy.” To my additional attempts to justify Gluzman, showing the book “Signs of the Times” published at Sfera, I heard a cold and unambiguous: “We no longer believe Gluzman!” How difficult it was for my “zek solidarity” then, no one knows. Then, for that symbol “from the three,” present in “Letters from Freedom,” there was simply no place at all, even theoretically. I understand that for some, including Gluzman, despite everything, the Ukrainian book or language is not and will not be a painful issue. And there is no help for it. But why deceive trusting people, take from them the money collected for the publication of a Ukrainian-language book, and then so cynically disregard your promises and their hopes? Why? And also periodically, for PR purposes, call yourself a student of Svitlychny! Perhaps someone still believes in such a discipleship after all this? God be with him!
I will remember all this until my death. And there can be no justification here. This publishing fiasco of Gluzman’s with the Ukrainian diaspora came to mind again when I read in his article about Prystaiko in “Krytyka” an accusatory paragraph against the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the USA, which refuses, you see, to support his publishing project. Because the diaspora no longer believes Mr. Gluzman: “he who lies once is not believed again.” And no hints of a discipleship with Svitlychny will help. Because he is disingenuous, because a student of Svitlychny, even a purely conditional one, cannot in principle behave this way. Not even Svitlychny's.
Still during the campaigns for the director’s position at Sfera, there was the temptation of the possibility of publishing Ukrainian-language books at my discretion. Offers to financially support the publication of a book at my discretion were repeated later. I intuitively felt the insincerity and did not rush with a specific plan in response to the promised support. But I tried to do so when they “cajoled” me into extending my term as director. This was during the work on the publication of V. Menzhulin’s book, titled “Demythologizing Jung: From Apologetics to Critique,” which had Gluzman's full support. I very much wanted to publish Vladimir Lefebvre's book “Algebra of Conscience” in Ukrainian translation. There was already the author’s consent for the translation, even an agreement with the translator for a very high-quality translation. Initially, after voicing the idea and obtaining the author's rights, I did not notice any negative signals from Gluzman. But when the question arose in the concrete terms of launching the book into production, the insincerity of the offer to support the printing of that book became apparent. There was, you see, no money for it. And in general, that person who contributed so much to the realization of that plan with Lefebvre's translation, as it turns out, “should not be trusted.” Exactly as it was once with Zakharov.
This was another blow to my trust. To my dignity, as everything had already seemed to be agreed upon regarding the printing. How will I look now before those people, since Lefebvre himself was supposed to come for the presentation of this book?
Then I remembered the strange story with the publication of the book by a member of the Bureau’s Public Council, Vsevolod Rechytskyi, “Political Activity: Constitutional Aspects.” The book was completely ready for printing, even partially printed, and after some time the “Vidrodzhennya” Foundation even concluded an agreement with the Sfera publishing house for the publication of this book in a circulation of 1000 copies. After a series of interventions in the fulfillment of the publishing house’s obligations regarding the circulation of that book, its print run was limited to the already printed half-run. I have forgotten all the details of the interventions, because this happened back when Gilbo was director, but I remember the fact of the intervention because Sfera then received letters from various institutions and structures, in particular from the Supreme Court of Ukraine and the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, with a request to allocate at least some number of copies of that desperately needed book, with a guarantee to pay the cost. I then had to give away the last control copy stored at Sfera for free.
These publishing pains were only exacerbated by the awareness that I knew of the existence of a huge room in the premises of the Psychiatric Association, stuffed to the ceiling with useless wastepaper, printed at Sfera with the blessing of the very same “all-powerful and good” Gluzman. That room with the wastepaper was a real problem, despite the taboo on “airing dirty laundry,” because it was unknown how to get rid of it unnoticed. The amount of wastepaper was growing, and at the same time, a needed book very often could not appear at Sfera due to purely subjective reasons of “some personal distrust or antipathy” toward the initiator or even just a member of the initiative group for implementing some very socially necessary publishing project.
Both these purely publishing plots and the above-mentioned story with the fake elections for the director's position, with the cynical, ostentatious, and brazen disregard before me of everything, all agreements and guarantees given to me for my consent to be director of the publishing house for a year, forced me to mentally search for the moment when I first stepped into this crap. Now I am up to my ears in it, I see.
I didn't sleep all night. Was that first step—the agreement to join the Bureau—really it? Probably so.
No, perhaps it was the agreement, as a deputy, to do a small favor for a friend by sitting for a couple of hours at a meeting of the administrative staff of the Kyiv psychiatric hospital?
No, maybe my inadequate reaction (more precisely, its almost complete absence) to Gluzman's unexpected, wild-accusatory—just like that, out of the blue—angry outburst at Mykola Rudenko, that the scoundrel, you see, had ruined so many people? At our very first one-on-one meeting near the Kyiv Post Office after his return to Kyiv.
Or maybe that weak reaction to Gluzman’s demands to remove Zakharov from the Bureau? Because at that time I wrote and read at a meeting of the Public Council a statement about resigning my duties as co-chairman of the Public Council, but I did not let the statement proceed, but put it in a drawer. But I should have left the Bureau altogether! But then most of the members of the Public Council at that time would have considered me, not Gluzman, guilty of destroying the Bureau... Well, so what!
I couldn’t do it... Just as I couldn't later refuse the request to head Sfera instead of Igor Gilbo, because he, you see, had become completely impudent, didn't listen to Gluzman, and did whatever he pleased.
Or perhaps some mistake at the very beginning of our acquaintance in political zone 35 of the Perm region? For instance, my ignoring the warning about the danger of friendship with Gluzman, made by Vladlen Pavlenkov, who later, after his imprisonment ended, left for the USA? No, I do not regret ignoring Pavlenkov's warning, even though he repeated it later in the Vladimir prison, where we soon found ourselves one after the other.
But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that my slide downward was indeed long and very gradual, and therefore barely noticeable in the scale of time. Because “God always provides a ladder, both up the mountain and down to the valley.” Well, I deserve it!
x x x
Every time I remember this sham competition for the director's position at Sfera, with its exclusively fake papers, its fake conclusion from a non-existent competition committee, and the supposedly “legitimate appointment” of Antonyuk to this position, I never cease to be amazed that people of a completely mature age, who make ample use of their “image” as decorated human rights defenders (I almost wrote “decorated Chekists”) before Western sponsors, even for private interests, can so cynically play childish simulation games with candy wrappers: “for example, these wrappers will mean different products, and these wrappers will be money,” and so began a children’s game of “make-believe” in plain sight of a condescendingly satisfied adult environment!
Well, with the indulgent rich people in the “rotten and deceitful West,” everything is clear—they don't suffer much inconvenience from these or similar “inauthenticities in the East.” But the players themselves in this game of “make-believe” can suffer. Having grown accustomed to presenting the inauthentic as authentic, they later do not even notice how their own clever students and colleagues, copying that model of transforming inauthenticity into authenticity, foist it upon their “great teacher”-colleagues in the East (not in the West!), acting on behalf of “foolish Western benefactors.”
I remember particularly well the story with the fake charitable cargo that supposedly arrived at Sfera's address. I am urgently called to work to organize the reception of that charitable cargo. I try to express doubt about its authenticity. “No, it's real! So many humanitarian shipments have already arrived at the Psychiatric Association that there can be no doubt.” I am certain that if Gluzman himself had always, or even just once, dealt with receiving humanitarian aid, he would not have been so categorical in his assertions about the authenticity of this one. A mobilization alert was even declared throughout the Psychiatric Association to help Sfera unload a “truck with humanitarian aid.”
I feel like a simpleton, I don't believe in its authenticity because I see no legal signs of authenticity, but the director of the Bureau and his deputy insist: go and get it! (At Sfera, too, there were its own agitators for the cargo’s authenticity!) I even shouted: “Come to your senses! What is there to receive?”
The situation was defused after I gave that “supposedly driver” of the humanitarian “supposedly truck” money for lunch, and he disappeared from the horizon. Leaving a very unpleasant smell in the atmosphere of at least Sfera. Did those who drew both Sfera and the Psychiatric Association into their usual childish games of inauthenticity feel any inconvenience? I think not! Such games are their way of life, as I understand it. “Well, this time it didn't work out, but it always worked out before!” This is an excellent example, in my opinion, of one's own lies and inauthenticity coming back against you. It's strange that the lessons learned are not visible. Do they really live by the principle: “There'll be enough suckers for our lifetime!”?
They might say I was just unlucky. But it wasn't just me who was “unlucky,” but all those who tried to do something together with the “famous Gluzman.” And as a result, he himself, it seems to me, was left completely alone.
If we formally apply the “postulate of non-intention”—where a person does bad deeds only as a result of external temptations, and does not in themselves intend to do evil—to Gluzman, it turns out that it was I who tempted him to do bad deeds, Zakharov who tempted him, Gilbo who tempted him, everyone tempted him...
But then what grounds are there to complain disingenuously before people, along with Irina, that, you see, everyone has abandoned them? You see, “what scoundrels”?! That’s just it! Everywhere there are “scoundrels” and “tempters.”
This is an additional fact-test of our moral systemic difference.
In general, this character, his formally incomprehensible ascents, and his completely predictable fall, amid incredible cynicism and the certainty that he is always right—is worthy of literary interpretation.
“Man is a fraction whose numerator is a man’s dignity and whose denominator is his self-assessment,” is how Leo Tolstoy so vividly defined the essence of man at one time.
х х х
Having accepted my appointment to the position despite its phoniness, I waited for an opportune moment to insist on my own terms and leave not only the director's duties, but to completely dissociate myself from the people with whom I had been for a long time, “even back-to-back,” but whom I did not really know in all their completeness and psychological dissimilarity to myself.
Having once adopted Gluzman’s slogan in solidarity: “We have to survive somehow!” as my own, even temporarily, everything else seemed to cease to concern me. This slogan harmonized well with the principle of solidarity (zek solidarity, in particular). Although in the depths of my consciousness I did not lose a sense of my personal responsibility for everything that was not being done as I imagined, my consciousness only strung together, like notches, those obvious negative facts and my shared responsibility for them. Without any formulation into action. Until there came a sharp sense of conflict between Gluzman’s slogan “We have to survive somehow” and the old, dissident one, “To live not by lies!” That is: either “at all costs” and “we will not stand on ceremony,” or an unslumbering conscience must indeed define the limits of that cost—“Not in lies!” The feeling of that conflict between the habitual and constantly prolonged, for various reasons, compromise and solidarity (which is why it was somewhat lopsided, not equal) and my own human dignity, which was under threat of destruction, was simply horrifying.
The opportunity to break free from the tenacious embrace of solidarity came a few months later, when Gluzman decided that I would no longer resist and began a new pressure in the direction of involving me in some new public structure of his, to which, according to his own words, Ivan Dzyuba, Dmytro Tabachnyk, Myroslav Popovych, Semen Gluzman himself, Vitaliy Nakhmanovych, it seems, also Volodymyr Prystaiko, and someone else were supposed to belong. I unequivocally and categorically refused the offer. Some time later, through his deputy for the position of executive director, Lyudmyla Milner, Gluzman, in an ultimatum-like form, demanded my presence at a meeting of the organizational group and even sent a car for me.
The calculation was precise: I would not be able to refuse a woman. He often used this tactic. But that woman, although she was the deputy executive director of the Bureau, could have been my daughter. And here was such an assertive tone. My whole being bristled: to be spoken to as if by a school pioneer leader to a disobedient pioneer? No, that will not happen! And serfdom was abolished in the Russian Empire almost one hundred and fifty years ago.
Although deep down then I rejoiced at the very fact of her unprecedented pressure, because it gave me the psychological freedom for independent action contrary to the “zek solidarity of backs.”
I immediately issued an order to transfer my duties as director of the publishing house to the chief printer, Kokuev, handed over to him all the seals and keys in the presence of the staff, and with immense relief, I left the Sfera premises.
And I have never been interested in its successes in the six years that have passed since that time. Thank God! I finally dissociated myself from that hellish zek solidarity and the unbearable dependence of the back.
Gluzman explained my departure to people by the state of my health—I myself had once put forward the health argument, but that was before being appointed to the position at Sfera, and a second time when the one-year term of my agreement was ending, but not in this specific, truly unprecedentedly explosive démarche on my part for immediate dismissal. However, I never officially denied Gluzman’s version with the altered timeline of its appearance. Although someone might have suspected that there was something else among the reasons for my dismissal.
It is to the telling of that “something else,” which would have remained outside the official framework of my departure from Gluzman until my death, that I have dedicated these few paragraphs. And if a series of Gluzman’s PR moves had not appeared in the press—as if there were no God—then no one could have dragged that “something else” out of me to the visible surface. I would have died just like that, with my back siamesely fused with other former dissidents.
It is not difficult to see in what has been described a convergence with other, more and less well-known facts in the world of the creation and destruction of myths, as well as facts of the habitual manipulation of people, which is characteristic of supporters and adherents of the totalitarian model of thinking, that is, the second ethical system according to Lefebvre.
Without a doubt, any desire to manipulate people is psychologically very ugly, and “giving in” to this should be described with an even worse word. But you don’t notice it right away—because you need to be constantly psychologically tuned to be “automatically against,” as if before possible hypnosis. But then how to combine this “anti-hypnotic against” with solidarity?
Today, in substantiating that very painful conclusion for myself about a certain inauthenticity of Gluzman's former dissidence from his article about his friend Prystaiko, I am primarily interested in the conflict with Zakharov.
For can this fact, when a “famous human rights defender,” a former prisoner of conscience, seeks to deal with a comrade, or with someone else, with the help of the special services, be interpreted and explained otherwise than I did a few paragraphs above? How little respect must one have for oneself, hoping by extravagant moves to somehow hide one’s moral rottenness!
Of course, these very sharpened reflections of mine are not born solely from Gluzman’s obituary article about his friend General Prystaiko in Krytyka. It is only the trigger.
However, these are not some legal accusations against anyone, but only memories. My memories of rather extreme conditions both initially in prison, and later, illuminated by the old rays of zek solidarity, of my life. And the painful realization of my guilt due to an overly prolonged zek solidarity: I had long since left the zek status, but mentally I seemed to continue to exist in it, to think and to act. After all, everything could have been different if I had left the enchanted circle sooner? But could it really have been?
Despite my departure from Gluzman, I am far from making him into some kind of “devil” (although popular tradition demands that a devil must be called a devil, because he changes his appearance).
The symbol of the “evil genius” does not seem closer to the truth to me, nor does the well-known term that Gluzman himself widely uses for others, even his comrades—“urban lunatic,” but rather the symbol used by Myroslav Marynovych regarding Solzhenitsyn, about the specific combination of light and dark in a person, which comes from the Judeo-Christian interpretation of man as a contradictory being due to the combination of physical and spiritual principles in him. Simply as a combination of light and dark in a person. But this combination can also be expressed through adjacent stripes of white and black. Although on some, that whiteness, upon closer inspection, may turn out to be only grayness. How much of that whiteness is embedded in each, how much is realized, and how much is transformed into grayness or even blackness, only time will show.
I am aware of the different scales and statuses of the subjects being compared, for one can no longer change his black and white stripes, while the other has the opportunity to change, so may he have that opportunity for a very long time. I was only concerned with the symbol itself, because people are not angels.
Gluzman is indeed capable of impulsive help to someone, even someone barely known. I am sure that there will be many people who gratefully remember something good from Gluzman. And I remember Gluzman's kindness toward myself.
But that is not what this is about, because we need to know not only the “pluses,” but also the “minuses.” And the “pluses” cannot cover up the “minuses” (and that is not for us to determine by definition!), especially if those “minuses” nullify or destroy someone's dignity. This is about the civic dimension—the harm of creating idols. It is certain that I have no relation to Gluzman’s “pluses.” And no one has the right to even hint at any share in them. But as for his “minuses,” I am obliged to take them upon myself in solidarity—these are my “minuses” too. Even with regard to the most terrible—the attempts to involve the SBU in the final reprisal against Zakharov after ousting him from the Bureau. Today, Gluzman's “minuses” are even more mine than his. Despite the fact that I was silent about them for so long—but an immediate reaction usually does not generate the need for confession, and here, with each passing year, I feel my guilt more and more, which results in this attempt of mine at confession. It is presumed that solidarity is not one-sided (because then it has another name), but do the parties really feel that solidarity equally? Especially in view of the well-known fact that occurred with a high dignitary who, it turns out, supposedly only “allowed someone to stand behind his back” and that is the only reason they stood there. Therefore, Gluzman may simply not be aware of the “minuses” of his that I have made public as his real “minuses” due to the cynicism in his self-assessments of life events that is obviously inherent to him. But this only sharpens the sense of my guilt in those “minuses”—which an adherent of the second ethical system will naturally interpret as softness or even spinelessness. Evidently, it is precisely here that the inevitable question protrudes: do we profess the same ethical system as a norm? Because the same facts will inevitably have different ethical interpretations depending on which system it is done in.
With the “pluses,” everything seems simpler: they are undeniable “pluses.” But this is only at first glance. Because the second ethical system presupposes “good with fists.” And if this “good with fists” is self-realized in a society where the second ethical system also prevails, then everything looks like the possibility of using “evil” (“good with fists”) to win that duel. Everyone remembers the story on television of the “woman in the mask,” whom her mafia husband was trying to commit to a psychiatric hospital. I am sure that Gluzman’s zeal at the time in defending that woman was motivated not only by the fact that this “woman in the mask” was a relative of Myroslav Marynovych. However, one cannot deny the importance of that fact either, because the very name of Marynovych ensured a powerful growth in Gluzman's PR. Which inevitably played a “negative” role in removing or weakening the “brakes” in the subsequent actions and deeds of the benefactor and their self-interpretation.
And with Lisovenko, Gluzman was both in a streak of “kindness” and in a streak of later merciless “war.” The same with Gilbo. But “one thing” should not obscure the “other.” Only—to shade it. I have never sought and will never seek to humiliate Gluzman. Although he allowed himself to do so, I do not say always consciously (due to professing normatively different ethical systems). I do not regret my manifestations of solidarity. But I do not want anyone to speculate on it. Not to “show off.” To realize that everything has its time, its limits, and its arguments. Arguments purely moral. I only regret that I left the force field of that solidarity too late in general. When the adherence of the “solidarist’s” consciousness to the old and so comfortable idea of “good with fists” and “the end justifies the means” had already become clearly apparent.
I was only concerned with “Not giving in!”
Not to let oneself drown in inauthenticity.
Forgive me for taking so long to bring myself to do all this...