January 12th marks 40 years since the largest repressive action against Ukrainian dissidents, when most of the prominent representatives of the national-democratic movement were arrested simultaneously, and the so-called “general pogrom” of the Ukrainian Sixtiers began. One is inevitably reminded of Moses’s forty years in the desert—forty years of struggle against fear, against unfreedom in the country, against unfreedom within oneself. Much has changed since those times, but, to our great regret, much remains unchanged. Once again, political repressions are taking place in Ukraine, absolutely Soviet in their essence and form; once again, the country is ruled by a gang in collusion with occupiers, but the fear is gone. It was destroyed by those courageous people back in the distant 70s and 80s of the last century. The Sixtiers shattered the utopia of a “new” Soviet culture, of a “new” Soviet man, and returned to words and concepts their natural meaning; they brought back universal human values: faith in God, the aspiration for freedom.
The primary means of the Sixtiers’ struggle against the totalitarian regime was samvizdat. From 1965 to 1972, Ukrainian samvizdat consisted of literary works, documents, and political essays. It vividly reflects the history of resistance of those years, while simultaneously being an integral part of it.
In January 1970, the first periodical in Ukraine began to be published in samvizdat—“Ukrayinskyi Visnyk” (The Ukrainian Herald), modeled after Moscow’s “Chronicle of Current Events.” But unlike the Chronicle, The Ukrainian Herald contained not only information about repressions and the situation of political prisoners, but also presented works circulating in samvizdat—historical research, data on the genocide of Ukrainians, literary studies, poems, and prose. The publication was characterized by a high professional level.
The Ukrainian Herald was created at the initiative of Viacheslav Chornovil, who became its editor-in-chief. The editorial board also included Mykhailo Kosiv and Yaroslav Kendzior[1]. A large number of dissidents took an active part in distributing The Ukrainian Herald. It was also sent abroad.
Attitudes toward the publication of The Ukrainian Herald were mixed. According to Leonida Svitlychna, when The Ukrainian Herald began to come out, Ivan Svitlychny actively distributed it, yet he was against the idea of its publication, believing it would hasten arrests. Subsequent events proved him right[2].
Vasyl Ovsienko recalls: “The Ukrainian Herald came to an end with its fifth issue—it was stopped in mid-1971, because rumors began to circulate that arrests were imminent, and Nikitchenko himself had a conversation with Ivan Svitlychny and said: ‘As long as you were not organized, we tolerated you. Now that you have a journal, we will not tolerate you.’ The decision was made to stop publishing The Ukrainian Herald, but it was already too late”[3].
On January 12-14, 1972, all well-known dissidents were arrested: in Kyiv—Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Vasyl Stus, Leonid Plyushch, Zinoviy Antonyuk, Ivan Dziuba, and others; in Lviv—Viacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Osadchyi, Ivan Hel, Stefania Shabatura, Iryna Stasiv-Kalynets, and a little later, Ihor Kalynets and others. The next wave of arrests occurred in April-May 1972.
The 1972 repressions were an all-empire action. In Moscow and Novosibirsk, arrests were made in connection with the “Chronicle of Current Events” case. Georgiy Kasyanov writes that, according to unofficial sources, on December 30, 1971, the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee “made a decision to begin a union-wide action against samvizdat.” The party leadership of the Ukrainian SSR, led by Petro Shelest, supported Moscow’s initiative, as it had effectively already lost power in the republic[4].
On January 4, 1972, a Belgian citizen, a tourist named Yaroslav Dobosh, was arrested. He was “processed” and forced to confess that he had arrived “to carry out a mission for the foreign anti-Soviet center of OUN Banderites.” Many dissidents have a different opinion about this—that Dobosh was recruited by the KGB in advance. But this, perhaps, does not stand up to criticism.
Here is what Vasyl Ovsienko remembers about this: “As is known, just before the new year of 1972, Yaroslav Dobosh came to Ukraine. He was a member of SUM, from Belgium, 25 years old. He was traveling through Prague. I know that my fellow student Anna Kotsur, a Lemko from Slovakia, went to Prague for the New Year. She had a meeting with Dobosh there, I found out about this later. She gave him the phone numbers of Lviv and Kyiv Sixtiers, including Ivan Svitlychny. It was by these phone numbers that he called Svitlychny in Kyiv, and someone else, and later met with Svitlychny and other people… Later, when I was arrested, I read Yaroslav Dobosh’s testimony and came to the conclusion that he was probably just an accidental person. I am not sure if he was really recruited by the KGB, or if he was just curious out of naivety, or if he had some mission from his superiors or not—God knows. But the KGB used him quite successfully. He told everything he knew and didn’t know, made a statement on television, and that statement was published in the press. He was released, and all this became a pretext for mass arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia”[5].
The arrests of January 1972 were in one way or another linked to the case of Y. Dobosh. Dobosh himself, after his confession, was deported abroad. After days of interrogation, Zenovia Franko (Ivan Franko’s granddaughter) admitted that Dobosh was an agent and that the Sixtiers had contact with him. In general, this was part of the KGB’s plan—to force the granddaughter of Ivan Franko, Zenovia Franko, and the niece of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, to “confess” and “sincerely repent.” A television appearance by these two influential ladies in dissident circles would have dealt a decisive blow to the Sixtiers’ movement.
“Zenia Franko was jailed right away in 1972, and they started on me around March,” recalls Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska. “And I quickly understood the plan they had hatched. The plan that emerged was this: to link my name with Franko’s and put us on television together. You can imagine how much stronger that would have sounded than an appearance by Zenia Franko alone on TV. She had hers, she was there, and I was repressed. Her letter was in ‘Radyanska Ukraina’—but mine was not”[6].
Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska foiled this plan, despite all the threats and tricks of the KGB. Confrontations with Z. Franko didn’t help, nor did even the threats to take away her daughter and strip M. Kotsiubynska of her maternal rights.
During the investigation, those arrested were threatened with execution, physical violence, treatment in a special psychiatric hospital, and most importantly—retaliation against their loved ones. However, of the key figures, besides Ivan Dziuba, no one repented. Dziuba was “broken” from April 1972 to October 1973. On March 16, 1973, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison and 5 years of exile. On October 8, I. Dziuba wrote a request for a pardon. The authorities granted the request. It was beneficial to them (one of the leaders of the resistance movement, the author of the programmatic work “Internationalism or Russification?”, had admitted his mistakes). It should be noted that I. Dziuba wrote exclusively about his own convictions and did not give any testimony against his friends during interrogations.
On May 26, 1972, P. Shelest was dismissed from the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPU, and his place was taken by V. Shcherbytsky. In a short time, Shelest’s entire “team” was removed from power in the republic. Their place was taken by chauvinist-reactionaries—obedient children of Moscow.
Meanwhile, in the summer and autumn of 1972, trials were held. Almost all were convicted under the well-known Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. Mykola Plakhotniuk, Leonid Plyushch, Vasyl Ruban, and Borys Kovhar were sent to a special psychiatric hospital.
In total, according to the Chronicle of Current Events, 100 people were arrested in Ukraine in 1972[7]. According to Lyudmila Alexeyeva, 89 people were convicted. From Western Ukraine—55 (of which 13 were from Lviv). From Eastern and Central Ukraine—48 (of which 28 were from Kyiv)[8]. Between 1972 and 1974, more than 122 people were arrested for participating in the Ukrainian national-democratic movement[9]. According to the latest data from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 193 people were arrested in Ukraine in 1972-1974, including 100 for anti-Soviet propaganda and 27 for their religious beliefs.
The general pogrom of 1972 put an end to the Sixtiers’ movement and at the same time became the foundation for a new era in the history of the resistance movement. In reality, the action against samvizdat was successful. Samvizdat ceased to be the main means of struggle against the totalitarian regime. The distribution of samvizdat decreased significantly for a time. Among those who remained free after the arrests of January 1972, there were attempts to continue the struggle in the old way. In Lviv, issue 6 of The Ukrainian Herald appeared, prepared by Mykhailo Kosiv, Yaroslav Kendzior, and Atena Pashko. This issue was called the “Lviv issue” because almost parallel to it, in March 1972, in Kyiv, Vasyl Lisovyi, Yevhen Proniuk, and Vasyl Ovsienko published a special issue of The Ukrainian Herald with information about the arrests, also numbered 6. Vasyl Lisovyi wrote an open letter to the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPU, after which he was arrested. Yevhen Proniuk was arrested at the same time, and Vasyl Ovsienko—8 months later, in March 1973.
The group of Stepan Khmara was more conspiratorial; they also compiled The Ukrainian Herald: issues 7-9 in 1974-1975. Besides Khmara, Oles Shevchenko, Vitaliy Shevchenko, and Vasyl Karabyk were involved in this work. This group was even closer to an underground movement than to the Sixtiers, both in the political content of its materials and in its means of conspiracy. Issues 7–8 were smuggled abroad on microfilm. Stepan Khmara and the others were not arrested until 1980.
The general pogrom almost halted the dissident movement in the “big zone,” but it only raised the spirit of resistance among the prisoners. Some dissidents themselves recall that, strange as it may seem, the time spent in captivity—in the “small zone”—was the most interesting and even the best period of their lives. Mykola Horbal says: “When I met Svitlychny on the Ural, then Antonyuk, and got to know Valeriy [Marchenko], I had never been so uninhibited, never had so much humor, and never laughed so much as in the camp… I promised myself that I would never complain to God, because God knows best which paths to lead us on. I repeat this phrase often, so that perhaps people might know that you shouldn't complain about your fate. Because if this is the path destined for you, then it must be so. Having a second trial later, I always remembered this, having a third trial... And it saved me. When they gave me a third sentence—not releasing me from the second imprisonment, but trying me a third time—I thought to myself: God, what is this? Well, I survived these terms—it means it was meant to be. And when they put me in a cell with Semen Skalych, I even thought to myself: God, to hear all this—these revelations from this man, I had to get into this cell, and to get in, I had to receive a sentence!”[10]
Ihor Kalynets recalls about this: “In the camp, it was physically hard for us. Let’s say, we were separated from our native land, from our family, from our dearest ones. Communication was difficult. We were in a very dramatic situation when your elderly mother or little daughter comes to visit you, and they travel several thousand kilometers, and they don’t give you that visit, everything falls through. That was hard to bear. But on the other hand, we were somehow free, spiritually free. We, let’s say, cast off the mask we wore there, in that society, before the arrest. Because there, you had to pretend that you were not, so to speak, a bourgeois nationalist, that you were not an enemy of the Soviet regime—that you were a Soviet person, but you thought that politics was not being conducted correctly in the national or some other aspect”[11].
After the “general pogrom,” the resistance movement was reborn in the second half of the 1970s, when the main means of fighting the system became the defense of human rights.
[1] Kasyanov, G. Dissenters: The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Resistance Movement of the 1960s-1980s. – K.: Lybid, 1995. – p. 117.
[2] Zakharov, Y. The Dissident Movement in Ukraine (1954-1987) // http://www.khpg.org.
[3] Audio interview with V. Ovsienko. – Conducted by B. Zakharov, 1997 // KHPG Archive. – p. 5.
[4] Kasyanov, G. Op. cit. – p. 121.
[5] Audio interview with V. Ovsienko. – Conducted by B. Zakharov, 1997 // KHPG Archive. – p. 5.
[6] Audio interview with M. Kotsiubynska. – Conducted by Y. Zakharov, 1997 // KHPG Archive. – p. 6.
[7] Chronicle of Current Events, issue 28. – New York: “Khronika,” 1974. – pp. 18-24
[8] Alexeyeva, L. The History of Dissent in the USSR: The Newest Period. – M.: ZAO RITS “Zatsepa,” 2001. – p. 25.
[9] Ibid. – p. 24.
[10] Audio interview with M. Horbal. – Conducted by V. Ovsienko, 1998 // KHPG Archive. – pp. 12-13.
[11] Audio interview with I. Kalynets. – Conducted by B. Zakharov, 1997 // KHPG Archive. – p. 8.