(Text of a speech at the presentation of Franziska Vu’s photo exhibition, “Under Arrest: Photographs and Testimonies from Stasi Pre-trial Detention Cells,” June 3, 2010.) [1]
“Until we know by name all who became victims of terror, we have no right to forget what happened.”
These words belong to a former Chancellor of the FRG, Willy Brandt, and they actually concern the victims of the Holocaust. But the victims of another period of German history—the period of two Germanys, the period of the Stasi—cannot be forgotten either. Anna Akhmatova wrote the same thing about the victims of the Soviet regime in the USSR in her poem “Requiem”:
I’d like to name them all by name,
But they’ve taken the list, and there’s no way to find out.
For Ukraine, exhibitions like today’s are especially important, precisely because, unfortunately, many of our officials do not want the country’s true history to be restored. It is impossible not to see how sharply the politics of memory have changed since the presidential election. We cannot agree with this.
But let us return to the exhibition. I want to make a brief historical excursus and compare the repressive apparatuses of the GDR and Ukraine, the scale of persecution of dissenters, the methods of the secret services, and so on.
On February 24, 1950, GDR President Wilhelm Pieck signed the document creating the Ministry for State Security. The ministry went down in history as the “Stasi”—a shortened form of the word Staatssicherheit, or state security. Lavrentiy Beria was the godfather of this organization. The alignment with the USSR and its state security explains both the tone and the choice of vocabulary of Erich Mielke, who headed the Stasi uninterruptedly from 1957 to 1989: “Even if we in the republic do not have the conditions for the existence of an internal anti-socialist opposition, there are still enough hostile elements with clear anti-socialist views. We have enough internal enemies of the socialist order. There are quite a few of them, and that’s putting it mildly.” According to far from complete data, there were 3,500 political prisoners in the GDR in the early 1950s.
As early as the 1950s, the Soviet occupation forces began a gradual and systematic transfer of all economic facilities into the hands of the young GDR government. Soviet special camps and prisons were handed over to the justice and state security organs, along with the “special contingent” held within them. Incidentally, these were the same camps—Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Bautzen—where the Nazis had held their opponents. Moreover, some political prisoners who had been sent to these camps under the Nazis remained there under the Soviet occupation authorities and were imprisoned again under the new regime. For example, 2,800 members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church were arrested and thrown behind bars. The church itself, persecuted under Hitler, was banned for conducting propaganda against the existing order and for espionage on behalf of the United States.
On a per capita basis, no country in the world had a secret service as numerous as East Germany’s.
In 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the GDR’s Ministry for State Security had 91,000 employees on its staff, meaning there was one Stasi officer for, on average, every 180 residents of the GDR. But the MfS also included military intelligence services, border guards, and transport troops; with them, the Stasi’s total strength was 218,000 people. If they are included, there was 1 officer for every 77 residents. Even in the USSR, this ratio was much smaller: one Chekist for every six hundred citizens. And, say, in Czechoslovakia, there was one StB officer for every one and a half thousand citizens. Thus, the Stasi broke all records. Its annual budget was almost three billion marks.
One often encounters the following argument: supposedly, one cannot apply double standards to secret services; every country needs them, and the Stasi and the KGB were doing a great, important job, their employees “served the Fatherland,” as veterans now like to say, and so on and so forth. But let’s call a spade a spade. Barely a tenth of the Stasi’s staff was engaged in intelligence and counterintelligence work. We are not talking about “intelligence,” but about a secret ideological police that brutally suppressed any manifestation of discontent, that served not the Fatherland, not the Homeland, and not the people, but the party-state clique—a huge repressive apparatus. The staff of the Committee for State Security at the Council of Ministers of the USSR numbered more than half a million employees. In contrast, all of the intelligence and counterintelligence services of West Germany combined, which, of course, never dealt with dissidents or, say, exit visas (which did not exist in the FRG at all), numbered only 15,000 people, even at the height of the Cold War. This is despite the fact that the population of the GDR was four times smaller than that of the FRG.
The Stasi’s methods were no different from those of the fraternal KGB. Surveillance, intimidation, blackmail, psychological and physical pressure on those who disagreed with the party line. Clandestine searches, clandestine photography, wiretapping of telephone conversations and apartments, interception of mail, visual surveillance, and numerous unofficial informants. The Stasi tirelessly collected compromising material on everyone who came into its field of vision: who was sleeping with whom, who was drinking with whom, who secretly received Western magazines from acquaintances abroad, who bought a pair of shoes from a speculator… “We must know everything,” Minister for State Security Erich Mielke loved to repeat. “Nothing must escape our attention. That, comrades, is the essence of a Chekist’s work.” And so, Stasi officers and their snitches scribbled reports, and the dossiers swelled, stored in the top-secret MfS archive, whose shelves stretched for 180 kilometers. And after gathering information, they made arrests.
In the Stasi’s special prisons, every condition was created to break people. The pre-trial detention centers have been preserved, in particular, the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen prison, which was called the “submarine” because it was underground. It is now a memorial, and Franziska Vu’s photographs were, in fact, taken in this very prison. Solitary confinement cells, completely isolated from the outside world, let in neither light nor sound. Prisoners sometimes spent several years in such cells—without interrogations, without charges—until they broke and began to cooperate with the investigation. Complete isolation was the main means of pressure on the accused, as well as—especially in the 1950s—exhausting interrogations conducted around the clock. Hohenschönhausen also had special rubber cells where traces of torture were found—blood, vomit. During nighttime interrogations, a blinding lamp was shone directly into the accused’s face. An attorney was generally granted access to the accused only after the investigation was complete; this was the case both in the 50s and under Honecker in the seventies and eighties.
The number of political prisoners, counting only from the “Thaw” year of 1960 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, exceeds one hundred thousand. This is a very large figure, the largest in comparison with other countries of the Soviet bloc. The desire to imprison was stimulated by the practice of the FRG government and private individuals buying out political prisoners, thanks to which they usually served from a third to half of their sentences. One gets the impression that the only reason more people were not imprisoned in East Germany was that there was nowhere to put them: unlike the Soviet Union, the GDR authorities could not send their dissidents far away, simply because the country is small. Overcrowded prisons and the enormous costs of the strict regime for political prisoners increasingly forced the Stasi to resort to extrajudicial persecution: people critical of the regime were harassed, fired from their jobs, deprived of all means of subsistence, had vile rumors spread about them, and were stripped of their citizenship…
The Ministry for State Security enmeshed the entire country in a network of informants. Even schoolchildren were recruited. 160,000 people were Stasi snitches. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful revolution in the GDR, scandals involving high-profile exposures of informers erupted almost weekly. On the eve of the first free elections in the GDR, held in March 1990, it became known that Wolfgang Schnur, the leader of the Democratic Awakening party, which headed the conservative electoral bloc (and was mentored by FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl), had for many years supplied the Stasi with information about the dissidents with whom he was close. He even received bonuses and awards for his stellar work. Schnur’s main rival, Ibrahim Böhme, leader of the leftist, social-democratic electoral bloc (also well-known in dissident circles), was already poised to win. But then it turned out that Böhme had also been a state security informant. The Christian Democratic Union won the election, and its leader, Lothar de Maizière, became the head of government. However, de Maizière was later exposed as well…
Attempts by GDR citizens to move to West Germany were considered a crime in the GDR. And escapes became increasingly massive: from 1949 to 1961, almost a sixth of the population—2.5 million people—left East Germany, mostly through Berlin. By August 1961, about 2,000 people were leaving for the West every day. So the government took drastic measures: on the night of August 13, 1961, 40,000 soldiers sealed the border between West and East Berlin, and the construction of the Wall began.
During its 28 years of existence, the Wall was rebuilt four times. The final modification was constructed in 1986. Each new version was harder to escape than the last. Here is a description of the most fortified section.
1. A light, opaque screen, taller than a person.
2. A wire-mesh fence of reinforced steel.
3. A control strip of raked earth (death strip).
4. An electric signal line. Touching the wire would automatically trigger a siren and launch flares.
5. A line of watchtowers and posts with searchlights. In this zone, guards were authorized to shoot at escapees. Specially trained guard dogs on long leashes were also deployed here.
6. A barrier of barbed wire. Immediately behind it, a ditch.
7. An empty space before the final obstacle.
8. A concrete wall one and a half times human height with a mushroom-shaped top to make it difficult to scale.
The Wall wound in a jagged line for more than 50 kilometers around the French, British, and American sectors of Berlin, enclosing them in a ring and separating them from the Soviet zone—the so-called East Berlin. It was guarded by GDR border troops, who, despite all the strictness and preventive measures, were very unreliable. For example, in the first two years after the construction of the Wall in Berlin, as well as in other places along the border between the two Germanys, 1,300 soldiers defected to the West. For this reason, the border troops were later incorporated into the Stasi.
The border guards were under orders to shoot escapees. Nevertheless, despite the mortal danger, about 5,000 East Germans overcame the Wall between 1961 and 1989. But at least 172 people died attempting to cross the Wall. In total, hundreds of people were killed on the border between the two Germanys during this time—the data ranges from 270 to 1,008 people. More than 60,000 people were imprisoned for such an attempt. After all, the GDR criminal code had an article that prosecuted “fleeing the republic,” which stipulated a punishment of 2 to 8 years in prison.
They shot at escapees, even if they were children. An MfS order dated October 1, 1973, was addressed to a special GDR state security unit that existed for more than 15 years, from 1969 to 1985. Although the members of this unit formally wore the uniform of border guards, they were in fact Stasi officers. Moreover, the unit’s tasks included both surveilling the border guards themselves and preventing their escapes from the GDR. This horrifying document literally states the following: “Do not hesitate to use your weapon, even when the border is breached in the company of women and children. Traitors have often exploited this tactic.”
In 1989, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe fell. Thousands of East Germans rushed to the West through Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, which now had open borders with Western Europe. In Berlin, crowds of people pounded the Wall with pickaxes and crowbars, shouting insults at the guards. The GDR government realized it could no longer use force to prevent its citizens from crossing the border, and on November 9, 1989, the barriers at all checkpoints were raised. A year later, when the two Germanys unified, the Berlin Wall had already been almost completely dismantled.
Thus ended the existence of one of the most shameful walls in the history of Europe.
The career officers of the Stasi, with few exceptions, remained unpunished: either their personal guilt was too difficult to prove, or the statute of limitations had expired for crimes such as unlawful imprisonment, blackmail, violation of the sanctity of the home, and tampering with postal correspondence. Or, as in the case of Markus Wolf, the long-time head of the Main Directorate “A,” the Constitutional Court of unified Germany ruled that former GDR citizens could not be prosecuted for espionage against the FRG. Markus Wolf fought for (and achieved in the Constitutional Court) a ruling that people like him could be held accountable only for violating GDR laws. As a result, he was tried for organizing a kidnapping. Under West German law, the statute of limitations for such crimes had already expired, but under East German law, it had not. Wolf was convicted and eventually fled to Russia.
The Stasi chief himself, Erich Mielke, was also not tried for the crimes of the Ministry for State Security, but for the murder of Berlin police officers, with which he had begun his party and Chekist career in the 1930s. But he did not serve out his sentence either; he was released for health reasons.
As Helmut Müller-Enbergs, an employee of the Stasi archives, writes, “one cannot speak of any persecution of the 160,000 people who confessed to their connections with the GDR’s state security. The focus of society and the mass media is on very specific individuals. Besides, it is known that 55% of these people were neither dismissed from public service nor demoted, and received no reprimands or warnings.”
While in Germany the Stasi archive is open to access with very few restrictions, and every victim—every subject of a Stasi dossier—has the right to view their file (and 1.7 million Germans have done so!), in the post-Soviet space, with the exception of the Baltic countries, the KGB archives remain largely closed, and its employees are securely protected from scrutiny and accusations. Therefore, while the main source for studying the history of political repression in the GDR is the Stasi’s archival documents, in Ukraine it is purely dissident sources—samizdat, memoirs, interviews with dissidents, and their letters and documents from personal archives.
The KGB was formed in 1954; its Fourth Directorate was created to combat members of national movements, religious movements, members of political parties released from the camps, and other individuals. The Fourth Directorate had 10 departments. In 1961, it was disbanded, and its functions were transferred to the Second Main Directorate (counterintelligence), where two departments handled these matters.
The notorious Fifth Directorate of the KGB, which dealt exclusively with hunting down dissenters, was created on the initiative of Y.V. Andropov, who was appointed head of the KGB in May 1967. In a memorandum submitted to the Central Committee of the CPSU, Y.V. Andropov noted that work on the ideological front had weakened and proposed the creation of a separate KGB directorate to identify ideological subversives among the artistic and technical intelligentsia and students, to combat nationalist currents and religious and sectarian organizations, to monitor the contacts of Soviet citizens with foreigners, to track down the authors of anonymous anti-Soviet leaflets, and to fight against anti-Soviet organizations abroad. Y.V. Andropov requested funds to increase staff and create 200 new city and district KGB departments and directorates. The CPSU Central Committee made the corresponding decision, and in July 1967, the Fifth Directorate was established, with a chief, a deputy, and six departments totaling 201 people. Corresponding units were also created in all territorial KGB bodies. The leaders of local party organs were informed of the decision to create the Fifth Directorate, and their work was closely intertwined thereafter. By 1982, the central apparatus of the Fifth Directorate already had 14 departments with 424 employees. For a long time (from 1969 to 1983), the Fifth Directorate was headed by F.D. Bobkov, who ended his career as a General of the Army and the first deputy to V.A. Kryuchkov.
The results of surveillance, as well as denunciations by staff and freelance informants—their reports and explanatory notes, often written as a result of crude pressure and threats from the KGB—were entered into operational records files. Most of them have already been destroyed. The corresponding order was given by KGB Chairman V.A. Kryuchkov back in 1989, and few such files remain. But almost all the surviving files remain inaccessible, even those of rehabilitated persons, as all information about operational work is still a state secret.
Political repression in the USSR took judicial and extrajudicial forms. To grasp the scale of the dissident movement, let us provide some general data on the persecution of dissidents in the USSR. From 1956 to 1987, 6,543 people were convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet government (Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, Article 62 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code, and their equivalents in the criminal codes of other republics) [2] and 1,609 people for the dissemination of knowingly false fabrications defaming the Soviet state and social system (Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, Article 187-1 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code, and their equivalents in the criminal codes of other republics) [3]. This does not include other categories of dissidents:
• those convicted of treason (Article 64 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, Article 56 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code, and their analogues)—these articles were used, in particular, to punish those who tried to flee the USSR; for example, 2,240 people were convicted between 1959 and 1974 [4];
• those convicted for refusing military service, as well as those convicted “for their faith” under various other articles of the Criminal Code (Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Greek Catholics, Autocephalous Orthodox Christians, Hare Krishnas, Muslims, Jews, etc.)—according to our estimates, this amounts to several thousand repressed individuals;
• those convicted in falsified criminal cases (one of the KGB’s common tactics);
• victims of “punitive psychiatry,” where healthy people were placed in special psychiatric hospitals and held there until they renounced their activism (some ended up in psychiatric hospitals by court order, others without any judicial decision);
• authors of anonymous anti-Soviet leaflets, letters, and graffiti in public places (this category of persons was sought out by the KGB through various means; for example, from 1975 to 1984, more than 136,000 leaflets, letters, and inscriptions were discovered, and 13,155 of their authors were found, of whom only about 4% were prosecuted and about 15% were sent to psychiatric hospitals) [5];
• victims of extrajudicial reprisals—political assassinations, beatings, etc.
Psychiatric repression reached a large scale—a phenomenon characteristic only of the USSR; in Germany, as far as we know, dissidents were not punished with forced treatment in psychiatric hospitals. The exact number of people sent to psychiatric hospitals for their acts of protest against the Soviet regime is unknown. Lists of victims of politically motivated psychiatric repression, compiled from dissident sources by non-governmental research organizations such as Memorial, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, and others, contain about 2,600 names. Among them, approximately 30% are Ukrainian dissidents.
In addition to judicial and psychiatric repression, the KGB widely used softer, extrajudicial methods of influence and punishment against dissenters. This refers to so-called “prophylaxis,” where certain individuals were summoned to the KGB, to the first department of an institution, or to a party committee for a “redemptive” conversation, to ascertain their attitude toward certain events, and to warn them to immediately cease contact with foreigners and to stop anti-Soviet activities—reading and distributing anti-Soviet books, engaging in anti-Soviet conversations, etc.—or else arrest and the camps would soon follow. At the same time, they tried to obtain necessary information about people of interest to the KGB. From 1967, when the 5th Directorate was created, the KGB divided those being “prophylactized” into two categories: “persons with suspicious connections to foreigners who harbor treacherous intentions” and “persons who engage in politically harmful displays.” The ratio of those “prophylactized” to those arrested under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code and its analogues was approximately 96 to 1, and for Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code and its analogues—25 to 1. That is, one can assume that from 1959 to 1987, about 650,000 people were “prophylactized.” The exact data on those “prophylactized” are unknown, since from 1959, when “prophylaxis” was introduced, until 1967, there was no centralized accounting. From 1967 to 1974, 121,406 people were “prophylactized,” and in the period 1975–1984—an average of 20,000 annually [6]. It should be emphasized that this practice was completely illegal. The KGB had no legal right to conduct such “conversations” and demand “explanatory notes” from those being “prophylactized.” These “explanatory notes” went into operational records files and served as material for further persecution. It is clear that some of those summoned for “prophylaxis” yielded before the “gaze of the sovereign,” but it is also clear that the dissident movement was quite large in scale.
These data cover the entire Soviet space; figures for Ukraine alone for this period are unknown. But in Ukraine, the dissident movement was the strongest compared to other republics of the former USSR. Many sources attest to this, including the memoirs of dissidents. Ivan Hel, convicted in 1966, recounts: “I arrived in Mordovia, in the so-called Yavas-11 settlement. I was brought there by a prisoner transport. And for the first time, I encountered the Soviet concentration camps. The camp, which numbered about 2,000 people, had 950 Ukrainians there” [7].
Given the scale of the Ukrainian movement, one can assume that the Ukrainian “share” among the total number of those who came to the KGB’s attention amounts to at least 30%.
The dissident movement in Ukraine, as a collection of national (the most massive and noticeable), religious, and civic movements, was born with the emergence of ideas of nonviolent resistance in the 1950s. On the one hand, it arose as a continuation of the national liberation struggles of the 1940s and early 1950s, and on the other, as a rejection of armed resistance to Soviet power. As elsewhere, dissident activity was less and less expressed in the creation of underground organizations and increasingly took on the features of open public activism. According to KGB data, from 1954 to 1959, 183 “nationalist and anti-Soviet groups” were liquidated in Ukraine, and 1,879 people were convicted, including 46 groups (245 people) among the intelligentsia and youth [8]. The largest-scale political repressions after Stalin’s death occurred precisely in these years.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the Ukrainian dissident movement was dominated by a national-cultural social movement. In modern Ukrainian literature, the activists of this movement are often called the Sixtiers (shistdesiatnyky). This term has a completely different, significantly narrower, and more defined meaning than that associated with the concept of “Sixtierism” in relation to Soviet culture as a whole in global culturology, which was the subject of lively public debate in Russia. Ukrainian Sixtierism is a movement of the creative (primarily humanities) intelligentsia, aimed mainly at combating Russification and reviving national culture. Its center was Kyiv, although the movement spread throughout Ukraine. The Sixtiers also evoked sympathy from a part of the Ukrainian party-state nomenclature, which is perhaps why until 1965 they were not subjected to criminal prosecution, and many of them made successful careers.
The Sixtiers’ movement was not monolithic. In it, one can find the origins of all currents of political thought in modern Ukraine. The Sixtiers can be divided into “culturalists”—those who came to the movement through literature and art and could not reconcile themselves with the regime, morally resisting it—and “politicos”—those who from the very beginning set political goals and objectives for themselves.
With the end of the “Thaw,” a part of the Sixtiers entered into open confrontation with the authorities. When their works were no longer published in journals and newspapers, and publication of their books ceased, their writings began to circulate in samizdat. Initially, it was purely literary, mostly poetic, but it rapidly became politicized. Political journalism appeared. At first, these were anonymous or pseudonymous articles; from the second half of the 1960s, open statements, articles, and letters of protest against repressions began to prevail. Samizdat effectively became the infrastructure of the Sixtiers’ movement, a means of consolidating the nonconformist intelligentsia. It was focused mainly on the national problem, which was analyzed in political, historical, and cultural aspects; occasionally, one could find socio-economic journalism and philosophical works. Samizdat became widespread; its best works were distributed in thousands of copies and translated into all European languages.
Ideological and administrative pressure on the radical part of the Sixtiers yielded no results, and the authorities moved on to repression. The first wave of arrests took place in August–September 1965. Twenty-five people were arrested. After that and until the end of 1971, only individual dissidents whose activities had an international resonance and those who radically opposed the Soviet regime (members of underground nationalist organizations) were subjected to direct repression. However, in the context of the general toughening of the regime that occurred after the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia, dissident activity could not but lead to a new wave of repressions, which coincided with a general offensive against samizdat in the USSR.
In January 1972, about 20 of the most prominent figures of the Ukrainian dissident movement were arrested in Kyiv, Lviv, and other Ukrainian cities (the arrests continued throughout the year; 100 people were arrested, 89 were convicted) [9]. Hundreds of people were subjected to extrajudicial persecution. The purge affected not only scientific and cultural institutions but also the rural intelligentsia, and party and Soviet workers [10]. A new wave of Russification began at the same time.
Subsequently, Ukraine turned into a testing ground for the KGB to try out new methods of combating dissidents. Strange murders occurred here that remain a mystery to this day (Alla Horska—though this murder happened back in 1970, Volodymyr Ivasiuk, Mykola Zvarych), and for the first time, drugs were planted during searches. The fabrication of criminal cases against dissidents was initiated here—for rape, hooliganism, resisting authorities, possession of drugs, etc. It was in Ukraine that the repressions were particularly brutal. It holds the sad palm of primacy in many respects. The first long-term camp sentence for a woman (Nina Strokata), the first application of Art. 62 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code to a female pensioner—the 75-year-old Oksana Meshko, the first conviction of a woman for seeking the release of her political prisoner husband (Raisa Rudenko). The repeated arrests of former political prisoners who had served their sentences for some minor public activity—by Moscow standards—became a common phenomenon, for example, for a manuscript of camp memoirs (Danylo Shumuk, Yuriy Shukhevych).
However, despite the repressions, the oppositional national movement continued. A new stage was the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) at the end of 1976. The Helsinki stage of dissidence in Ukraine signified the national movement’s adoption of human rights methods and forms. The idea of human rights proved congenial to the Ukrainian nonconformist intelligentsia: for the “culturalists,” it was organic; the “politicos” used the language and form of human rights ideology, understandable to the West, to attract more attention and sympathy to Ukrainian national problems. The UHG focused mainly on documenting violations of national rights. In the early 80s, the UHG’s activities were completely paralyzed: almost all of its members were imprisoned.
As for religious movements, a peculiarity of Ukraine was the presence of two massive religious denominations not recognized by the state: the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, mainly in the west of the republic, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the east. The faithful, and especially the clergy, belonging to these denominations were brutally persecuted. The Greek Catholic Church, officially banned in 1946, existed as a catacomb church, enjoying mass support from a significant part of the population of Western Ukraine, primarily the rural population. The persecution of believers of other denominations was the same as in other regions of the USSR.
In 1987–1988, Ukrainian dissidents who had returned from camps and exile became actively involved in political activities. In practically all political parties of a national-democratic orientation and national parties of a radical direction, former dissidents set the tone and were the leaders of these parties.
In these years, a new, post-dissident stage of the national liberation movement began. It was characterized by the participation of much broader strata of the population, the openness of the political confrontation, and it ended in 1991 with the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
Comparing the dissident movement in the GDR and Ukraine, and the repressions of the Stasi and the KGB against dissenters, one can conclude that the dissident movement in Ukraine was stronger: there was significantly more samizdat here than in the GDR, significantly more public protests, and the Helsinki Group was active. In the 70s and 80s, the KGB uncovered several dozen “nationalist” organizations each year (though it is unknown how many of them were fabricated for the sake of another star on the epaulets and bonuses). If we consider the total number of those who came to the KGB’s attention as dissenters and were repressed or “prophylactized,” the number of such people would be in the range of 150,000 to 200,000. A peculiarity of the dissident movement in the GDR was the desire to leave the GDR and move to West Germany; 60% of convicted dissidents received sentences precisely for attempting to escape the GDR. At the same time, the Stasi, in terms of the number of employees, clandestine agents, and the scale of surveillance, was larger and stronger than the KGB. However, in both the GDR and Ukraine, the totalitarian regimes collapsed.
Uncovering the truth about these regimes and the secret services that protected them is an extremely important task for society. This is understood much better in Germany than in Ukraine, where the main body of documents on political repressions remains classified, even documents from the 1920s–1930s. Moreover, today’s politics of memory does not contribute to establishing historical facts and reflecting on them. And that is why Franziska Vu’s exhibition and similar projects are of great importance for Ukrainians: they are a reminder of the past and insist that it must not be repeated.
[1] This text was prepared using materials from the Deutsche Welle radio website, http://www.dw-world.com/, and the well-known Russian portal Human Rights Online, http://hro.org/, as well as the archive of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group and its portal, http://khpg.org.
[2] Vestnik arkhiva Prezidenta RF, 1995, no. 6, p. 153.
[3] Vestnik arkhiva Prezidenta RF, 1995, no. 6, p. 153.
[4] Vlast i dissidenty. Iz dokumentov KGB i TSK KPSS [Power and Dissidents: From the Documents of the KGB and the Central Committee of the CPSU]. Moscow: Moscow Helsinki Group, 2006, p. 62.
[5] Ibid., p. 61.
[6] Ibid., p. 62.
[7] Audio interview with I. Hel. Conducted by B. Zakharov, 1997 // KhHRPG Archive, p. 6.
[8] Rusnachenko, A. Natsionalno-vyzvolnyi rukh v Ukraini: seredyna 1950-kh – pochatok 1990-kh rokiv [The National Liberation Movement in Ukraine: Mid-1950s – Early 1990s]. Kyiv: Olena Teliha Publishing House, 1998, pp. 325, 326.
[9] Rusnachenko, A., op. cit., pp. 190, 192.
[10] It was a widespread opinion that one of the reasons for P. Yu. Shelest’s removal from office in 1972 was the insufficient zeal he displayed in the fight against “bourgeois nationalism.”