Yevhen Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, on “Your Morning” on the TV channel “UA: Kharkiv” – about the differences in dissent in Western and Eastern Ukraine and popular samvydav works.
– Who were the dissidents in the Soviet Union, what distinguished them in the Kharkiv region, and what persecutions did they face? We will discuss this topic with the director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Yevhen Zakharov. Yevhen Yukhymovych, good morning, welcome to our studio.
– Good morning.
– Who are dissidents, and why were they called that? Where does the word come from?
– The word is Polish, it comes from religion. They were those who held non-canonical views, that is, dissidents who, in fact, expressed their thoughts publicly, openly, and so on. In the USSR, dissidents came to be known as those who, in one way or another, spoke out against the single ideology, the single party, for their rights, primarily for freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on. In fact, the dissident movement took such forms. First of all, it was the distribution of samvydav, that is, literature that did not pass through censorship, which official publishing houses refused to publish because it did not correspond to the general party line, and so on, and they distributed it themselves: typewriter, photographic method, and so on.
– And what time frame are we talking about? Dissent was from what year to what year?
– Dissent is counted from the early 1960s to 1987.
– And why did it develop then, specifically in the 1960s?
– There was the Thaw, as is known, after 1956, after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, when it became clear that people knew nothing, or very little, about past history, when political prisoners of the Stalinist period were massively released in 1956. Then people began to think about what it was, what this policy of the Soviet Union meant in general.
– It turns out that the leaders of dissent were, among others, these former prisoners?
– Yes, in particular, former prisoners as well, of course. And, in fact, the Thaw began with the fact that these former prisoners and the youth came together and began to produce various texts, songs, there was samvydav and also tape-recorded samvydav, there were the first exhibitions of nonconformist artists, and so on. This mainly covered the large cities of the USSR: Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, and Lviv, of course.
– By the way, what were the national characteristics specific to Ukraine?
– In the national republics, the struggle for national rights—the national movement—was more dominant. In Ukraine, this was primarily in Western Ukraine, where the traditions of the UPA were still fresh, where it was well known and remembered, but in the second half of the 1950s, a transition to peaceful forms of resistance, to samvydav, had already occurred. In addition, these were young people who still tried, so to speak, to break through officially—to get published, to hold exhibitions, and so on. This was the Sixtiers movement. And so, in Western Ukraine, the national-democratic movement was dominant, while in Eastern Ukraine, it was more of a general democratic movement.
– And what was it based on? You said, there—the traditions of the UPA, and here, in Eastern Ukraine?
– In Eastern Ukraine, people gravitated more towards the Moscow human rights activists, and here it was all based on the traditions of the general democratic movement back in tsarist Russia and the USSR. Here they were restoring the history of opposition parties in the first years after the October coup, and so on. One of the important issues was the history of the country, because it was constantly falsified, turned into something different from what it actually was. This desire to know the historical truth and bring it to everyone was also very strong.
There was literary samvydav—prose, poetry—and historical samvydav; these were quite large historical studies on various topics, primarily on the history of the Second World War. For example, there was a famous book by Doctor of Historical Sciences Aleksandr Nekrich, “1941, June 22,” which was published and then quickly banned, its entire print run was withdrawn from everywhere, and there was a big discussion about it at the Institute of History. There was philosophical and culturological samvydav, and there was publicism, including economic publicism. In particular, there was a book by Mykola Rudenko, “Economic Monologues,” which circulated in samvydav.
In Ukraine, however, the national movement was stronger. Here, people like Ivan Dziuba, with his work “Internationalism or Russification?”, which was the most famous in Ukraine, most widely distributed in samvydav, was translated into Russian and published in the West. But not only that, there was the book “Woe from Wit” by Vyacheslav Chornovil about the first wave of arrests, about those who were imprisoned then, and much more. Here there was the “Ukrainian Herald”—a journal that combined facts about political repressions with literary samvydav as well. This is what distinguished it from the “Chronicle of Current Events,” which only contained facts about political persecution.
– And why didn’t the Soviet authorities ban all this?
– They tried to ban it, and they persecuted the people who were doing it, they imprisoned them. But it's hard to ban a movement when thousands of people are engaged in it, by whom these ideas, so to speak, have already taken hold. You know, this attitude towards the CPSU, towards its leading role, the fact that there was a one-party system, a single ideology, the fact that the economy was getting worse and worse—this was obvious to everyone, and it gradually became more and more of an established fact in the general consciousness.
– Did they realize this “at the top”?
– Of course, that’s where the so-called perestroika came from. Because by 1985 it was clear that things could not go on like this, it had to be changed, otherwise everything would be very bad. That’s why there was this perestroika, when, by the way, Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and others who supported them, in fact, adopted the ideas of the dissidents, in particular, the articles of Andrei Sakharov from the 1960s, and, in fact, they began to develop the country in that direction. At that time, all the samvydav books, for which people used to be imprisoned, were published.
– Yevhen Yukhymovych, regarding your article, I read it on the website “Virtual Museum of the Dissident Movement in Ukraine,” there you wrote about the difference between the dissident movement in Eastern and Western Ukraine, and you wrote that in the East, a human rights movement was added to the national and religious movements. Why this difference?
– I repeat, the East was predominantly Russian-speaking, and the local Russian-speaking intelligentsia gravitated towards Russia, towards Moscow, which was, after all, freer than Ukraine, than Kharkiv, in particular. Therefore, there were significantly more figures of the general democratic movement here, who distributed samvydav, collected historical facts, and when there were repressions, helped the families of the repressed, and so on. There were simply few people who were part of the national-democratic movement. In Kharkiv, only two people were ever repressed for these things, and that was Anatoliy Zdorovyi and Ihor Kravtsiv.
– For what?
– For samvydav. Kravtsiv was incriminated, in particular, with the work of Dziuba, which was found on him, and Zdorovyi as well. Of course, in these circles there were other repressions—extrajudicial ones. But in terms of the general democratic movement, there was much more of that. It started back in ‘69, when four Kharkivites were imprisoned, and a total of ten Kharkivites signed the first appeal of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, that was on May 20, 1969. In total, there were 15 members of the initiative group, and among them was one Kharkivite, Genrikh Altunyan, plus 41 people supported the initiative group with their signatures, including nine more Kharkivites.
– Yevhen Yukhymovych, you were transitioning to Kharkiv, regarding Kharkiv, how numerous was this movement in the Kharkiv region?
– I can't say it was very numerous, because, after all, the people who were at the center of it all, around whom everything coalesced, there weren't that many of them. But I must say that many people read samvydav and distributed it in Kharkiv. Many people gave money to help the families of political prisoners; I personally collected these funds, so I can testify to this. In general, in Kharkiv, as in other cities, the dissident movement enjoyed the tacit support of the intelligentsia, which supported these ideas, shared them, and respected those who were involved.
– How did you become a dissident yourself?
– I was simply born and grew up in a family where many were repressed during Stalin's time, firstly. Secondly, my mother was very close with Larisa Bogoraz and Yuly Daniel. She studied with them in Kharkiv in the philology department. And, in fact, through these friendships, it passed on to me. I was also friends with them, with Yulik, and especially with Larisa. That source of samvydav, all of that, essentially, defined my life as well.
– Thank you for coming.
– You're welcome.