LOVE. GOODNESS. FREEDOM
(YURIY LYTVYN)
Once, in the special-regime camp in Kuchino in the Urals—aptly nicknamed the death camp—Mykhailo Horyn showed me a photograph of a man with a high forehead and the enlightened gaze of sunken eyes set in a refined, intelligent face. – “Who is that?” – I did not recognize him. – “And what can you say about this person?” – “This face radiates kindness and intelligence... Why, that’s Lytvyn!”
Later, as a fellow native of his region, I received a similar photograph along with some of the deceased’s belongings, and I delivered them to his mother, Nadiia Antonivna Parubchenko, in whose home I saw an identical one. Later still, Oksana Yakivna Meshko insisted that it was she who, around 1978, had urged Lytvyn to have his picture taken. Today, that photograph is best known as his “canonical” portrait.
Yes, this truly was a man who valued kindness above all else in the world. Goodness, Love, Freedom—these were the favorite subjects of his conversations. “These days, if you throw a stick, you’ll hit someone intelligent, but kindness—that’s a rarity. If I were told to choose between a kind person and an intelligent one, I would choose the kind one, because intelligence can also be evil,” Lytvyn would often repeat. After about the third day of our acquaintance—which occurred under special circumstances, in the transit cell of Lukianivska Prison in Kyiv—I felt the need to confide the secret pains and anxieties of my soul to this man. “Many people tell me their deepest secrets, though I make no effort to elicit them,” Lytvyn said. It was Vasyl Stus who once said of Ivan Svitlychny: “In his presence, even the greatest fool spoke wisely.” In Lytvyn’s presence, it seems to me, bitterness, baseness, and villainy would vanish. When I listened to him, it sometimes felt as if I could see a halo above his brow. Of the people I have known, perhaps only Stus made a similar impression on me.
So it was that on September 5, 1980, I, a “criminal prisoner,” was moved from Vilniansk in Zaporizhzhia oblast (where I had already served a year and a half for allegedly tearing the buttons off a militsia officer’s raincoat) to be transported to Zhytomyr. There, I believed, I was to be placed in the dock alongside Dmytro Mazur for so-called “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and sentenced to another 15 years. Understandably, my spirits were low. And then, with a group of criminal prisoners, I was brought into a large transit cell in the Catherine Wing, which already held about 20 men. Bunk beds lined both walls, with a fixed table and benches in the middle. There were no empty spots, so I stood off to the side, observing and listening, trying to understand where I had ended up. The crowd was settling down in the usual way; someone was getting ready to brew tea near the latrine. My chance travel companion, Volodymyr Yurchenko, who was returning from the Vilniansk psychiatric hospital to a camp in Korosten, led me to a scrawny, unshaven man with a name tag reading “Lytvyn Y. T.” My own “passport” was also on display, and we gladly shook hands, restraining our emotions so as not to be quickly separated into different cells. However, our fears were needless, for the guards were more interested in the brazen thugs than in quiet “Muzhiks” like us, who did not even curse. Until that day, I had only heard Lytvyn’s name and did not know that six months after my own case, on August 6, 1979, a new “criminal” case had been fabricated against him. Given the lack of imagination in the minds of the KGB, it was much like mine: resisting militsia officers with the use of violence, Article 188-I of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. The only difference was that I had “resisted” two militsia officers and one KGB agent, while Lytvyn had resisted five militsia officers. And this—after two operations in the span of one year...
I fear there may be some errors in my account of Lytvyn’s life before I met him; if so, I ask for forgiveness. So little is known about Lytvyn that even the smallest details must be recounted.
Lytvyn has a novella, “Bezumets” (The Madman), written in Russian, but, according to the author, with Ukrainian insertions: the characters sometimes speak Ukrainian. The main character of this novella, Pynchuk, was born the second of two twins, the one they hadn’t expected at all, and so he was deprived of attention after birth. The first child, for whom all available comforts had been prepared, died at one month of age. Thus, these comforts fell to the second Pynchuk, as if illicitly. This fate of substitution, of being perceived inadequately, of being misunderstood, hangs over the hero throughout his tormented life, in which he was constantly forced to be someone other than himself.
In the 1930s, Yuriy’s parents, Nadiia Antonivna Parubchenko and Tymon Lytvyn, were teachers in the Vasylkiv region near Kyiv—in Ksaverivka, Kodaky, Marianivka (the birthplace of Ivan Kozlovsky), and Barakhty. Nadiia Antonivna, who to this day struggles in a rickety hut on a hillside on Prominska Street, (Born October 14, 1914. Passed into God’s care on October 26, 1997. In 1992, the Drohobych regional branch of the “Memorial” society, led by Myron Buchatsky, built a new house for her. It was consecrated on November 26 with many guests in attendance by Father Yuriy Boiko of the UAOC. That same day, a commemoration for Y. Lytvyn was held at the village community center, where SBU Colonel V. I. Prystaiko presented the mother with her son’s rehabilitation papers. A memorial room-museum for Y. Lytvyn has been created in the Barakhty school), recounts the year 1933 with a tremor in her soul: “I taught the primary grades. Of my 24 children, only four remained. We teachers were not paid our salaries for three months, and we too, by the grace of God, did not die...” It was in Ksaverivka, on November 26, 1934, that the Lord sent them twins, the second of whom was fated to walk the difficult paths of seeking truth and to lay down his life on the altar of Ukraine.
From 1937, his parents taught in the village of Vysoke, near Stavyshche in the Brusyliv district of Zhytomyrshchyna. Just before the war, his father entered military service, and the family moved to Zhytomyr. Tymon Lytvyn fought at the front and later as a partisan with Kovpak, but he died of his wounds in a hospital on April 24, 1944. He is buried in a mass grave in Proskuriv (Khmelnytskyi).
During the German occupation, the boy nearly perished: a German accused him and a neighbor’s boy, Ivanko, of stealing cigarettes and had already placed them against a wall to be shot, but his mother, piecing together a few German words, pleaded for their lives. His mother recalls how he once said to a German: “Why have you come to our land? Is your own not enough for you?” Yuriy himself recalled his childhood games of that time: he was always cast as the “German” and, of course, was beaten every time, even though in his heart he was as Soviet a patriot as could be. It was all because he tried to play a true enemy, as he imagined one to be: terrifying and cruel. To the end of his days, Yuriy Lytvyn carried with him a yellowed photograph of his father in uniform, as well as a wartime group photo featuring his maternal uncle, Mykola, who was fortunate enough to survive and later rise to the rank of colonel. This very uncle, Mykola, upon receiving a tearful letter in the famine year of 1946 from his sister Nadiia, saying she could not feed her child, told her to sell his length of suit fabric and send Yurko to him. His mother took the boy all the way to Kharkiv, bought him a ticket and a loaf of bread for the journey with her last pennies, said her goodbyes, and with a broken heart, returned home, clinging somewhere to a locomotive. And Yurko cried: “Mama, how will you get back without any money?”
Twelve-year-old Yurko found himself in the Caucasus, somewhere near Lake Ritsa. The environment, of course, was Russian-speaking, which marked his future paradoxical path as a writer. There, Yuriy was in a car accident: the vehicle caught fire, a tire burst, and he was thrown into a thicket of hawthorn. They remembered the boy only about two hours later... He spent several months in the hospital, for a time even with his eyes bandaged. The incident left its mark on him: a burned body and parts of his face, a barely noticeable stutter that became more pronounced when he was agitated, and a raw sensitivity to human misfortune. It was there, in the hospital, while his eyes were bandaged, that he began to compose poems. He returned to his mother. After finishing the 7th grade in Barakhty, Yuriy went to a mining and industrial school in the city of Shakhty and worked in the Donbas, but his legs began to fail him, and he returned once more to his mother in Barakhty. He was, as he imagined himself, a sincere Komsomol member, even the secretary of the Komsomol organization while at school, but he could not tolerate any injustice. His mother preserved this document:
CHARACTER REFERENCE
For a member of the VLKSM since 1949, card № 30183874
Lytvyn, Yuriy Tymonovych
Born 1934, education
7 grades, Ukrainian, student of the
7-year school in the village of Barakhty.
At the end of 1949, VLKSM member, comrade Lytvyn, Yuriy Tymonovych, was elected secretary of the student Komsomol organization of the 7-year school in the village of Barakhty.
As secretary of the Komsomol organization to the present time, comrade Lytvyn, Y. T., has shown himself to be a good community activist and a responsive comrade, and has been able to rally Komsomol members and non-union youth around him, mobilizing and directing them to fulfill the tasks facing the Komsomol organization.
The Komsomol organization, led by comrade Lytvyn, Y. T., in practice serves as an assistant to the school, the party organization of the collective farm, and the collective farm board.
Comrade Lytvyn has carried out numerous assignments from the Raion Komsomol Committee.
He systematically works on raising his ideological and political level. Morally stable, ideologically sound.
Devoted to the Party of LENIN–STALIN.
Secretary of the Vasylkiv
Raion Committee of the LKSMU
(V. Dmytruk)
(Spelling of the original preserved).
In 1953, the village boys decided to escape from collective farm serfdom and go somewhere else to work. But the chairman refused to issue the necessary permits. Where can you go without a passport? So they—naive children!—protested in an unusual way: they caught a collective farm calf and tied it up in a copse. When Yurko found out, he persuaded the boys to go to the chairman; he went with them and said: “If you treat the youth so unjustly, they will commit all sorts of crimes.” Of course, the collective farm chairman, Nikolaienko, reported the boys to the court, which generously handed them 10-year sentences, giving Yurko 12, so he wouldn’t be so clever. They were arrested on June 24, 1953, and tried under Article 4 of the Decree of June 4, 1947, “On Criminal Liability for the Theft of State and Public Property.” At the trial, Yuriy showed his mother his battered hands...
Yuriy was transported to the construction site of the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Power Plant. Meanwhile, his mother campaigned for her son’s release and succeeded: the once-famous partisan Sidor Artemovych Kovpak, then Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, remembered his brother-in-arms Tymon Lytvyn, and by a resolution of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on January 13, 1955, Yuriy was released on February 1. But as soon as he arrived at his uncle Mykola’s home in Leningrad, a search was conducted there on April 14, and Yuriy was arrested: allegedly, while imprisoned in the Kuneyev correctional labor camp at that same hydroelectric power plant construction, he and his friends had created the “Brotherhood of Free Ukraine,” which aimed to “fight for the secession of Ukraine from the USSR, combat communist ideas, and create an ‘independent Ukraine.’” Of course, only enemies could fight for an “independent Ukraine,” so from September 5 to 10, 1955, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Kuybyshev Regional Court, presided over by Buzanov, convicted 16 Ukrainian boys under Articles 58-10, part 2, and 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“Treason”). Although no materials proving the group’s activities were found, it was “established” that they had an oath signed in blood on a sheet with an image of a trident, as well as passwords, “troikas,” and “desyatkas,” each headed by an “elder brother.” Lytvyn (pseudonym “Kremen,” meaning “Flint”), had allegedly composed two appeals to Ukrainian prisoners, calling on them to join the nationalist organization, drafted a charter, wrote the text of the oath, and wrote and distributed a number of poems. He was the de facto leader of the organization, and with the creation of a headquarters, was elected head of the political department of the BFU. Those who were released were to create cells on the outside.
To “stitch up” such a case, the investigation worked for 11 months. Up to 40 people were “drawn into” the organization (by the brotherhood or by the investigators?). The three leaders, including Lytvyn, were facing 25 years, but the court took into account that the BFU had not carried out any practical work, only organizational work. Lytvyn, as the organizer of the brotherhood, along with five others, received 10 years of imprisonment and 3 years of “disenfranchisement.”
For six months, Yuriy was held in the Medyn camp, then in Vykhorivka (part of “Ozerlag” in the Irkutsk Oblast), and then in the Mordovian camps, among political prisoners. It was likely during this time that Yuriy Lytvyn’s civic maturation took place. Broad communication with a wide variety of people straightened out his national consciousness. In conversation with me, Lytvyn recalled Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka, who was perhaps the most luminous figure among Ukrainians in the camps for a full quarter-century. It is crucial, Lytvyn said, to compile a book of memoirs about him. (Now such a book exists: Lesia Bondaruk. Mykhailo Soroka. Drohobych: Vidrodzhennia, 2001. 296 p.). He mentioned Dr. Volodymyr Horbovyi, who had defended Stepan Bandera at the 1936 trial, Pavlo Duzhy, Danylo Shumuk, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, and many other Ukrainians and foreigners with whom he had the opportunity to converse. He spoke with particular affection of Rostyslav Dotsenko (who was a witness in the “BFU case”). He carried this friendly love in its purity throughout his life, though for long years he had no opportunity to communicate with him. It is no coincidence that he named his son, born in 1968, Rostyslav, and chose Dotsenko as his son’s godfather.
He had written poetry since childhood, in both his native tongue and in Russian. Still, Lytvyn found it easier to write in Russian. It was mainly there, in confinement, before 1965, that he composed his book of poems, “Tragic Gallery,” about the fate of his generation, about the victims of terror. The author later dedicated this book to the outstanding fighter for Ukraine’s rights, Levko Lukianenko. I myself heard Lytvyn tell Levko this through the small window in the Kuchino camp in the Urals, sometime in the early 1980s. The fate of this book is a difficult one. The author did not want to publish the poems in Russian, so he turned to Mykola Lukash to translate them. Lukash took on the task but was later prevented from completing it for some reason. Meanwhile, as a result of searches, nearly all copies of the book ended up in KGB safes. But Lytvyn had a phenomenal memory: he carried the entire collection in his head and recited a great deal of it to me. And I, sinner that I am, did not remember a single poem from his lips. The language barrier played no small role in this. “Why don’t you write in Ukrainian?” I asked him. “I do write in Ukrainian, it just comes out worse. Because I’m afraid of the Ukrainian language. I feel I don’t sense its full depth,” Lytvyn said. This is another element of that paradoxical, “not his own” fate. It is no wonder Lytvyn reflected so deeply on the fate of Gogol, who could in no way renounce his Ukrainianness, yet could not fully commit to Russia either. However, Gogol’s turmoil was foreign to Lytvyn, for not everyone was as clearly aware of themselves as a Ukrainian as he was.
Creative work by prominent cultural figures in a non-native language was not an anomaly in the Middle Ages but the norm. The era of the formation of national cultures based on vernacular languages, however, scattered people far and wide for a long time—only now are we beginning to gather what is ours in spirit and blood, and not merely in language. The tragic figure of Gogol is the first in a line of those we perceive as not entirely our own, precisely because he wrote in a foreign tongue. But if all of Latin American literature is written in a “non-native” language, then Gogol, too, is a phenomenon of Ukrainian culture. Translate Gogol’s works into French or Chinese, and nothing Russian will remain in them. All that will be laid bare is a Ukrainian’s critical view of Russian society. Gogol was the last representative of the multilingual Ukrainian Middle Ages. But if only he had been born not before, but after Shevchenko... Yet Shevchenko himself did not separate Gogol from Ukrainianness, as we do, based solely on the language of the works rather than on their spirit.
There will also be difficulties in perceiving Yuriy Lytvyn’s work. In 1989, the author of these lines asked Lytvyn’s mother for permission to publish his works in the original language, on the condition that a competition for their best translation would be simultaneously announced. The main part of the book “Tragic Gallery” has already been located. A small collection (or selection) of Ukrainian poems published abroad, according to the author himself, did not represent his true creative persona. (We are only aware of the booklet: Yuriy Lytvyn (Portraits of Contemporaries). Compiled by Nadiia Svitlychna. Published by the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. New York, 1980. 32 p. But there are no poems in it). I remember Lytvyn reciting to me a beautiful poem about Ivan Mazepa in Ukrainian, as well as other poems.
It must be said that Lytvyn was unlucky: he had the talent to write, but sometimes lacked the skill to bring what he wrote to fruition. Such people need someone to look after them... “Perhaps 10 percent of what I wrote reached its goal, and the rest is in KGB safes,” Lytvyn said. “But even if only one percent had seen the light of day, it would still have been worth writing.”
Lytvyn has prose books, “The Workers’ Cause” and “The Madman.” This is evidently dense, refined, philosophical prose. There is a “Poem About Snowdrops,” and somewhere a collection of Ukrainian poems, which we have not lost hope of finding, even beyond the KGB safes. It is difficult for me to characterize Lytvyn’s worldview at that time, as for that one would need at least some of his works. One must also bear in mind that in his last years he was deprived of the opportunity to write. But even in our intimate conversations in 1980, something of the Ukrainian free spirit, of spontaneous rebellion, and, I would say, of anarcho-syndicalism would slip out, which Lytvyn did not deny. He considered the state an absolute evil that needed to be displaced, freeing up more and more space for public self-governance.
Later, in Kuchino, we were once discussing the Ukrainian state, which was unable to establish itself in 1917–1920, perhaps because it was… too democratic, because no dictator of its own could be found. “And thank God,” said Lytvyn, “that we didn’t find our own Stalin or Hitler. Because totalitarianism is contrary to the spirit and character of our people. Our defeated nation had to endure a foreign yoke—our own yoke would have been a hundred times more shameful.”
Lytvyn struggled long and hard to shed himself of Marxism, but he took from it a clear understanding of the interests of the working people, exploited by a new ruling class. Lytvyn took the tragedy of socialist doctrine as practiced by the Russian state so much to heart that he would later say Marx had put forward a false idea of a proletarian state. After all, history had not provided a single positive example of such a state. And this was revealed with particular clarity in the Polish events of 1980: the “proletarian state” declared war on the proletariat by imposing martial law. Ultimately, this state of affairs had effectively existed in our country constantly since 1917: the state was in a permanent state of war with its people. In no so-called proletarian state did the ruling “proletarian” parties dare to submit themselves to the will of free elections. In this context, Lytvyn recalled Ivan Franko’s famous warning that people who, with seemingly good intentions to make everyone happy, but who seized power through violent means, would concentrate in their hands such unlimited, uncontrolled power over society that they would never want to relinquish it voluntarily. Society, in turn, would be so paralyzed that it would be unable to fight the usurpers, resulting in the cessation of social progress. So, Franko foresaw the bloody Stalinism and the infamous “era of stagnation” as early as 1905... (See his work “What Is Progress?”).
But let us return to the account of Lytvyn’s biographical data. After his release on June 14, 1965, he went to Moscow, where he managed to break into the Canadian embassy—though he left his jacket in the hands of a militsia officer—and told them about the situation of political prisoners in the concentration camps. To avoid risking a written text, he memorized it. And he had a phenomenal memory. Embassy staff drove him out in a car and gave him a chance to jump out while it was moving. He went to his mother’s in Barakhty. He married Vira Melnychenko. Although their family life did not work out, Yuriy was very happy with his son, Rostyslav. But he soon had to part with his family. You see, he was working at a refrigerator factory in Vasylkiv, at a pipe plant. He was elected to the trade union leadership, and he argued to the workers that the trade union was not a “transmission belt of the party” but an instrument for protecting the economic interests of the working class. This was certainly not his only sin: the authorities threatened that if he did not leave Ukraine, he would be imprisoned. He had to go to Siberia, to Krasnoyarsk, to the Sayan Mountains. When he returned from exile, he found his son already quite grown, and the boy hesitated to call him dad. One day he said: “Father...” And so it remained. His father had high hopes for Rostyslav, but the fate of political prisoners’ children is not an easy one. A teacher would reproach him: “You’ll end up where your father is.” “I will. Shevchenko was there too, and Lenin, and many others,” the boy would say. The “guardians of order” promised that as soon as he turned 18, they would jail him. And so it happened, as promised... Another broken life. (Rostyslav Lytvyn, b. June 19, 1968, d. Jan. 6, 2004, of a stroke at the age of 35.5).
Lytvyn did not live in Ukraine for long. On November 14, 1974, he was arrested by the KGB, and on March 13, 1975, the Kyiv Regional Court, presided over by A. F. Tkachova, sentenced him under the then-popular Article 187-I (“Slanderous fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system”) to three years in a strict-regime camp. The charges included, among other things, his literary works, dozens of which were listed in the verdict, as well as “Theses on the State,” “Anarcho-Syndicalist Manifesto,” and “Notes of a Worker,” in which, of course, he had slandered Soviet democracy, defamed the internal and foreign policy of the Soviet state, the Soviet working class, and especially the international policy of the CPSU in connection with the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At the trial, Lytvyn did not admit guilt and gave no testimony.
He was transported to the Verkhniy Chov camp in the Komi ASSR. At the “labor force” distribution, the chief asked about his specialty. “Poet,” Lytvyn replied. “Poet? Well, I don’t need poets. I need concrete workers. Ha-ha-ha! You’ll be hauling concrete.” In that camp, most of the prisoners were “slanderers” like Lytvyn, or were convicted under other articles but for political reasons. The regime there was harsh, harsher than in Mordovia; the prisoners were deprived of any legal protection. The guards walked around with rubber batons and used them at their own discretion. There, Lytvyn fell ill with a stomach ulcer and underwent a difficult operation, during which he nearly died. He was saved by a surgeon who managed to get permission for his mother to stay by her son’s side for a few days. The vision of death—a white glacier advancing, and his mother’s voice: “You will live... You will live...”—these impressions formed the basis for his “Ballad of Death.”
After his release on November 14, 1977, he once again settled in Barakhty, with his mother in the village, in the small house on the hillside on Prominska Street. He lived there for only a year and a half, under administrative supervision, meaning without the right to appear anywhere outside the village and having to stay at home from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. He worked from home, gluing some sort of small boxes for a factory in Vasylkiv.
That year, a new wave of arrests rose in Ukraine, this time against the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. Soon after Lytvyn’s release, Oksana Yakivna Meshko came to see him in Barakhty and initiated a cautious conversation: there was no one left to work in the Group. Mykola Rudenko, Oleksa Tykhy, Mykola Matusevych, Myroslav Marynovych, Levko Lukianenko had all been arrested... “What is there to talk about, Oksana Yakivna?”—and Lytvyn threw himself into a new battle... Incidentally, he always spoke of Oksana Meshko with love: “She is our Joan of Arc.” He always dreamed of the day when we would gather as a small family at our Cossack mother’s home at 16 Verbolozna Street... Well, we could gather there now, but many would be missing. For the mistress of the house herself left us on January 2, 1991.
Later, in the Urals, Vasyl Stus related that a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, General Petro Grigorenko, held the materials written by Lytvyn in very high esteem. This probably referred, first and foremost, to his article “The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine: Its Principles and Prospects,” dated April 1979. (See: The Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 1978-1982. Toronto-Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1983, pp. 369-378; Yuriy Lytvyn. To Love Is to Live: Publicist Writings. Compiled by Anatoliy Rusnachenko. – K.: KM Academia Publishing House, 1999, pp. 56–62; The Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords: Documents and Materials. In 4 volumes. Compiled by Ye. Yu. Zakharov, V. V. Ovsienko. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. – Kharkiv: Folio, 2001, vol. 3, pp. 177–182, and other editions). Lytvyn sought to place the Ukrainian human rights movement on a serious national ideological foundation, tracing its origins to the natural love of freedom of the Ukrainian people, to the long national liberation struggle, and to the unique phenomenon of the Cossack republic, which had emerged even before the French Republic and had developed its own constitution in 1710, long before the American one. Lytvyn considered Taras Shevchenko the greatest defender of human and national rights. “For where there is no holy freedom / There will never be good for us, / So why deceive ourselves,” Lytvyn would repeat after him. Shevchenko, as a living bearer of folk morality who had assimilated a Christian worldview, Ukrainian scholarly tradition, folk historical memory, and Cossack historiography, summed up the historical Ukraine-Malorossia and gave birth to our nation anew, setting a new rhythm for it, giving it a new ideological basis, and setting a clear goal: national statehood in a circle of free nations of the world, where alone every individual can become free.
He revealed to me ever new facets of Shevchenko. For example, in one of his last poems, “To Lykera,” Lytvyn discovered a view of marriage consonant with his own—as a union of two equal parties, consecrated by mutual love, not by society, and certainly not by a foreign, Russian church. (“People will lie, / And the Byzantine Sabaoth / Will deceive. God will not deceive, / He will not punish or pardon: / We are not His slaves—we are people!”).
During that year and a half of limited freedom, Lytvyn underwent two more operations—on that same tormented stomach—and an operation for varicose veins. Thus, he could barely drag his feet through the world. On June 19, his son’s birthday, he went to the Stuhna River with a relative and an acquaintance. They had a bottle of wine. A car with five militsia officers pulled up (Vitaliy Antonovych Hursky, Oleksandr Ivanovych Tkach, Valeriy Ivanovych Ustiuzhanyn, Volodymyr Borysovych Poliganov, Volodymyr Mykolaiovych Kerner. Some of these “victims” still work in law enforcement in Vasylkiv, having built careers!). They asked who Lytvyn was, shoved him into the car without letting him get dressed; his socks, shoes, and clothes were thrown in after him. It turned out they had brought him to the district department to extend his supervisory regime, but instead, they threw him into a drunk tank. They demanded he undress for a search. Lytvyn refused. So they twisted his arm. He called one of them a fascist. He was tied to the bunk.
– So, am I a fascist?
– A stupid fascist, at that.
A blow to the face.
– You are a fool squared.
A blow to the head.
– A fool cubed.
He could not call him a fool to the fourth power, because he lost consciousness. They extracted a 15-ruble fine from him and let him go home. But on August 6, with the sanction of Vasylkiv district prosecutor Tverdokhlib, Lytvyn was arrested and charged with offering violent resistance to militsia officers (all five of them!). His mother, Nadiia Antonivna, said at the trial: “My son is kind: he would forgive you. But the people will not forgive you.” Lytvyn managed to transmit his “Final Statement,” delivered in court, from the Bucha concentration camp near Kyiv. Vasyl Stus and Oksana Meshko passed it on to the West, and it was published in the massive volume “The Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 1978–1982: Documents and Materials,” compiled by Osyp Zinkevych and published by the Ukrainian V. Symonenko “Smoloskyp” Publishing House in Toronto–Baltimore in 1983, pp. 379–395 (and also in the previously mentioned editions). The reason for the arrest—there is no doubt—was that Lytvyn did not remain silent about the incident: Radio “Liberty” reported on it. Meanwhile, Lytvyn had been announced as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and there was no place for such people at liberty. To reduce the number of these “political prisoners,” they recalled the pretext and fabricated a “case” of violent resistance to militsia officers, Art. 188-I, part 2. Judge A. A. Vasilieva (how many foreigners in Vasylkiv!) composed a two-page verdict on December 17, 1979. The defense attorney was the now well-known V. V. Medvedchuk, head of the Ukrainian Bar Association. (This lawyer, having probably earned his first million defending Yuriy Lytvyn and Vasyl Stus (see numerous publications on this by Ye. Sverstiuk and D. Chobot), has now become the Head of the Presidential Administration and is not averse to becoming president of the people he has robbed. Therefore, I find it appropriate to quote here from Yuriy Lytvyn’s “Final Statement”: ”The provocation committed against me is a deliberate crime carried out by the so-called Soviet authorities not only against me as an individual, as a writer, as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, but also against all those who hold dear the ideals of democracy, freedom, and humanism. The prosecutor built his accusations against Lytvyn not on the basis of objective facts (of which there were none), but on the shaky ground of falsifications and direct perjury from the “victims,” who shamelessly lied in court under the protection of the “Authorities” and the “Law.” And this is further proof that the court and the prosecutor’s office were directly interested parties, that is, participants in the provocation committed against me. My lawyer Medvedchuk’s passivity in my defense was conditioned not by his professional incompetence, but by the instructions he received from above, and his subservience: he dare not reveal the mechanism of the provocation committed against me. The participation of a lawyer in such cases is reduced to nothing—this is yet another testament to the absence in the USSR of a true bar association when considering political cases, where they imprison people for “dissident thinking.” As for the victims, they said more and better about themselves than anyone. Some 60 years ago, Dzerzhinsky (M. I. Kalinin. – V.O.) called the militsia a mirror of Soviet power. Verily, this is true. Here is your mirror of Vasylkiv. The mirror of our power. Shame on all present in this hall. This trial is one of the most shameful pages in the history of jurisprudence in Vasylkiv, and it will weigh not only on the conscience of those who judged me, but also on your conscience, my fellow citizens.)
“Lytvyn offered active resistance to the militsia officers, coupled with violence, grabbing Poliganov and Tkach by their clothes, threatening them with reprisal, thereby obstructing them in the performance of their duties of protecting public order,” “grabbing Poliganov and Tkach by their epaulets,” “used obscene language.” This sounds highly autobiographical for Soviet militsia officers, but not at all characteristic of Lytvyn. The same wording appears in my own 1979 verdict. And similarly, the court disregarded the testimony of the defense. And the punishment was the same: three years in a strict-regime camp.
And here he was before me—a thin little man, radiating love and kindness from within, who openly worshipped freedom, who boldly entered into polemics with criminal prisoners and with guards, dispelling foul torrents of profanity with nothing but the rightness of his cause and his sincere bewilderment at how people could be ignorant of such obvious things. “And how do you know all this?” they would ask. “This isn’t written on the labels of bottles in liquor stores. And the neck of a bottle is too narrow a window onto the world. Forgo so many bottles of vodka, buy a radio, listen to Radio Liberty, and you will know it too.” – “Alright, so you’re such a humanist, but if you came to power, what would you do with us, the criminal prisoners?” – “I will never come to power. I am not a politician, I am a human rights defender, and under any government, my most likely place is in prison. Because any state is an act of violence against the individual, and I will always fight against violence. I do not like politics or politicians.” – “But still, what if you were appointed head of a prison?” – “Then I would release all the prisoners, bring a truckload of explosives to the prison, blow it up, and thereupon resign my authority.” – “So you wouldn’t even punish for clear crimes? You say you are a believer, but even God punishes for sins.” – “A criminal punishes himself by taking a sin upon his soul. And God has never personally beaten anyone with a stick. Besides, I do not recognize a God who is the warden of a prison called hell. For Moses, God whispered in one ear, Satan in the other, and a third part he made up himself and mixed it all together. The New Testament is pure of the idea of violence; I bow to it. You say you are not a believer. But do you believe in Goodness? Do you believe in Freedom? Do you believe in Love? Then you, too, are a believer, for God is Goodness, Love, and Freedom.”
And so, for a full 10 days, we enjoyed the “gifts from the MVD”—our meeting, though not in the best of conditions, was very opportune. For I was being taken to the Zhytomyr prison for investigation in the case of my fellow countryman, Dmytro Mazur, while Lytvyn, it turned out, was being returned to the camp in Bucha, from whence he had been taken to Kherson region for the duration of the Olympic Games in Kyiv. So that he wouldn’t disrupt them. It’s no surprise that I, too, was not put on a transport all summer... An “Olympic purge” was underway in Ukraine. Stalin and Kaganovich had once set out to make Ukraine an “exemplary socialist republic,” but its population was not suitable for this. So it was decided to exterminate it, replacing it with newly bred Homo Sovieticus. In more recent times, Brezhnev and Grishin (First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU) had planned to turn Moscow into an “exemplary communist city.” Shcherbytsky, mimicking the trendsetters, promised to do the same with Kyiv (“A Ukrainian intellectual cannot do without a Moscow conductor. He is used to aping, to repeating what has been done.” Something like that was written by Mykola Khvylovy in 1928. Forgive me for placing Shcherbytsky among the intellectuals...). So the “master” began to cleanse Kyiv and all of Ukraine of “trubolioty” (homeless people), prostitutes, petty thieves, and... dissidents. Especially since the 1980 Olympics were approaching, and some of the games were to be held in Kyiv. Dmytro Mazur, Petro and Vasyl Sichko, Yaroslav Lesiv, Vasyl Stus, and Vasyl Striltsiv fell under this “Olympic” scythe. Those who were due for release were “processed” while still in captivity, given no respite. Olha Heiko took only two steps to freedom—from the gates of the zone to the Black Maria. Mykola Horbal was re-arrested on the last day of his term. A “case” was fabricated against Viacheslav Chornovil in his exile in Yakutia, and for me—in the colony in Korosten... Stories circulate here in Lukianivka about one of the victims of the “Olympic recruitment.” A guard, scolding a slovenly female prisoner, holds up as an example the then-76-year-old Oksana Yakivna Meshko, who was held here for some time in the new wing built for women and minors during the Brezhnev era. There are three wings here: “Katerynka” (Catherine’s), “Stolypin’s,” and “Brezhnevka.” “He has erected a monument to himself,” Lytvyn ironically quoted Pushkin. “This monument is more durable than the one in Dniprodzerzhynsk. It will last for centuries.” (Shortly before this, L. I. Brezhnev, as a multiple Hero of the Soviet Union and of Socialist Labor, unveiled a monument to himself in his hometown).
While still in Bucha, near Kyiv, Lytvyn rewrote a lengthy essay he had begun in Barakhty, taking its title from Dostoevsky: “If There Is No God, Everything Is Permitted.” In it, the author takes the hand of “our dear Leonid Ilyich” and leads him through arrest, investigation, transports, camps, prisons, “rooster coops,” and punishment cells, all designed to set the prisoner “on the path of correction”... They do not correct, but permanently cripple people here, drowning them in a swamp of profanity, violence, rape, and total corruption! Lytvyn said that he had sent that piece to the outside world through clandestine channels, but did not know if it had reached its destination. “However, that is not so important,” he believed. “The main thing is that I fulfilled my moral duty to this absolutely disenfranchised, suffering stratum of our people—the prisoners.” One version of the beginning of this essay did reach its goal and was published in the volume “The Ukrainian Helsinki Group,” pp. 396–404 (and also in the previously mentioned editions).
In Lukianivka, Lytvyn and I wrote statements regarding the “Olympic arrests” and about the fact that the leader of the French communists, Georges Marchais, upon his return from Moscow, had set about organizing a Helsinki Group in France under his own wise leadership. Evidently, in Moscow, he had been taught to compromise the Helsinki movement, which had already become international, in this way. Lytvyn believed that this human rights movement could in no way be political, that no member of any political party could be a member of any Helsinki Group, because they would carry out their party’s policies within it.
Lytvyn was a dreamer. He envisioned the Ukrainian human rights movement as a worthy link in a global movement, represented by the most honest, most dignified, simply impeccable individuals in a moral sense. The intellectual level of the movement had to be high. Each declared member of the Group should be a guiding star, an example for those around them. Under a totalitarian regime, when a declared member of the Group could not remain at liberty for more than a few months, one should not strive for large numbers. It was sufficient to have a small group on the surface, but one that was supported by a wide circle of human rights defenders and freethinkers. “Dissidence,” in reality, is not limited in our country to a “pathetic handful of renegades.” “Dissidents” here comprise a huge majority of the population, because whoever you talk to, almost everyone is dissatisfied with one or another action of the ruling apparatus. It would be more correct to say that the “dissidents” are the ideological apparatus, because they are in the minority.
Incidentally, it was Lytvyn who first clearly told me that I had been accepted “retroactively” as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. From November 18, when O. Ya. Meshko and Olha Babych came to see me in my village. (O. Ya. Meshko’s postcard contained only a hint: “You are in our circle.”). After hearing Lytvyn’s views on what a human rights defender should be, I, remembering that I had done almost nothing for human rights, had not even defended myself from calamity, felt as if I had jumped up, grabbed a rung on the ladder where human rights defense begins, and was just hanging there, unable to pull myself up any higher. But since such an honor had fallen to me, I must now hold myself to a higher standard. Although I had a firm intention not to participate in Mazur’s “case,” or in my own new one, Lytvyn, thank God, greatly boosted my spirits. I set out for a new battle in an elevated mood, with a clear head and without fear. However, everyone is afraid, and whoever says they are not, let them not lie... Courage lies in how you can overcome your fear. I thank God that this time He sent me Lytvyn and through him gave me the strength to endure to the end and to save my soul from false repentance, as had happened to me during the 1973 investigation, when KGB investigator of the UkrSSR Mykola Pavlovych Tsimokh began to blackmail me with a psychiatric hospital, and I gradually had to give way and even “admitted my guilt” in court. Have I atoned for that sin in 13.5 years of imprisonment? I do not know; perhaps for this, I still deserve a million years of purgatory...
At that time, the Polish events were brewing, and Lytvyn painstakingly gleaned scant information about them from random newspapers. He admired “Solidarity.” Trade unions free from party and state dictate had shown the world an example of constructive struggle for the interests of working people, and most importantly, had definitively debunked the false idea of a “proletarian state” under the leadership of a totalitarian-type party. Lytvyn dreamed of a time when our own Ukrainian proletariat would become as highly conscious as the Polish. “Alas,” I remarked. “In conditions of totalitarianism, though progressive ideas may be born in the bright minds of representatives of subjugated nations, their realization must begin in the metropole—we can hardly dream of being first.” But time, as we see now, has shown that this is not always so: in the collapse of the “evil empire,” the Baltic states led the way, and it suffered its final collapse when Ukraine declared independence and confirmed it with the referendum on December 1, 1991. True, this happened in the conditions of Gorbachev’s liberalization, not Brezhnev’s totalitarianism.
Lytvyn had an original view for that time on the origins of European totalitarianism in the first half of the 20th century. He considered the Bolsheviks the first totalitarian-type party: the emergence and rise to power of similar parties in Western Europe was a reaction to Russian totalitarianism. Hitler would not have won the 1933 elections if the Germans had not seen, from Russia’s example, what could be expected from communists. (I later read the same in “Novy Mir,” no. 1, 1981, p. 205).
I have already mentioned Lytvyn’s phenomenal memory. Indeed, what poets did he not recite to me in those 10 days: Shakespeare, Shevchenko, Hugo, Tagore, Franko, Blok, Vinhranovsky... His head contained a whole encyclopedia of world poetry, at which I marveled. “It’s not difficult,” Lytvyn said, “one only needs to frequently ‘replay’ poems in one’s head, rather than thinking about just anything. Believe me, it’s easier to live in the world with such baggage.” He recited several excerpts to me from Lina Kostenko’s then-recent novel “Marusia Churai,” and I memorized them too. Lytvyn considered this work worthy of the Nobel Prize and harbored the idea that the Helsinki Group itself should nominate it. But at that time, all of us who had not gone abroad were in prison.
The fact that we were held together in a transit cell for a full 10 days was due to a misfortune: we were given some rotten fish, the prisoners got food poisoning, so a “Quarantine” sign was hung on the cell door, and no one was taken from there for transport. But all things come to an end: they shuffled me off to Zhytomyr, and Lytvyn to Bucha, near Kyiv.
We met again a year and a half later, in the Urals, in the special high-security camp VS-389/36, in the village of Kuchino, Chusovoy district, Perm oblast. I arrived there on December 2, 1981, and Lytvyn sometime in May 1982. Like all decent people, we each brought a brand new “ten-spot” of a prison term and a “fiver” of exile, and were titled “especially dangerous state criminals” and “especially dangerous recidivists.” So they dressed us in the latest fashion—in stripes. I say “latest fashion” because after that, there is only the “wooden overcoat.”
My new term absorbed 8 months of my unserved “three-year-stint,” while for Lytvyn, it was only 1 month and 12 days, as his new term was counted from the day of his trial—June 24, 1982. According to his mother, he was not allowed to give a final statement, so he wrote it down.
So, Lytvyn was supposed to be here until June 24, 1992, plus exile until 1997. This means that in total, he was sentenced to 43 years of captivity, not counting the year and a half of administrative supervision. He served 20, and lived only 49 years in all. What a horrific criminal one must be to deserve such a punishment! And Lytvyn was imprisoned and died for literary works filled with the preaching of non-violence and humanism, for human rights activities, for critical thinking... A land of wonders! A land of unlimited possibilities...
Lytvyn spoke little about his “case,” but it was clear that everyone involved in the Helsinki movement had to be there. We now know from the verdict that it was his “anti-Soviet” and “slanderous” works: the 1968 letter “To the Fighters for the Freedom and Independence of Czechoslovakia” and, written 10 years later, two “Open Letters...,” “A Word on Penitent Sinners” (this was regarding the repentant statements of I. Dziuba, V. Zakharchenko, H. Sniehiriev), “An Obituary,” a letter to Mrs. Carter, several versions of the work “The Soviet State and the Soviet Working Class,” and the most important— “The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, its Principles and Prospects,” which was published in the journal “Suchasnist” No. 10, 1979, and broadcast on Radio “Liberty.” Lytvyn was restless even in captivity: he tried to send out from the criminal zones a “Second Open Letter to the members of the AFL-CIO and all working people of the USA,” greetings to the Polish “Solidarity,” and the treatise “If There Is No God—Everything Is Permitted.” These materials were “handed over” by convicts whom he had asked to take them out to freedom and pass them on to O. Ya. Meshko or someone else. However, the beginning of the text of “If There Is No God...” did manage to slip out to freedom.
He was also charged with oral statements, attested to by criminal prisoners, with all sorts of distortions and fabrications concocted by investigators. I remember Lytvyn recalling a conversation with investigators about a poem dedicated to the American people, whose sons were the first to set foot on the Moon. It went something like this: “Through the barbed wire and prison bars, I extend my hand to you, working America.” – “So you’re shaking hands with our enemies?” – “Yes, I extend my hand to working America, but who are you kissing?” (Just recently, on June 18, 1979, Brezhnev had given a hearty kiss to Carter, signing the SALT-2 treaty on the limitation of strategic arms).
During the investigation, Lytvyn was blackmailed with the threat of a psychiatric hospital; he was taken to the infamous 13th department of Kyiv’s “Pavlivka” hospital, which was run by Natalka Maksymivna Vynarska. The examination was conducted by a psychiatrist known throughout criminal Ukraine, Doctor of Medicine Lifshits. He questioned Lytvyn: “Why do you blame everything on the party? What does the party have to do with it, when in the next ward there’s a man who, forgive me, raped a goat?” – “And where did he do this, on Red Square?” – “In a barn. And he even locked himself in. The children saw him.” – “So he was ashamed of people? But if he were a believer and knew that God is all-seeing, would he have done such a thing? So tell me, who was it that took the crosses down from the churches, was it not your party?”
I happened to be in the same cell with Lytvyn in Kuchino for several months, from May 1982 to February 1983. I remember they took me away from him shortly before the Shevchenko celebration, which I greatly regretted, because Yuriy Lytvyn, Mykhailo Horyn, Ivan Kandyba, Vasyl Kurylo, and Volodymyr Ostapenko held a fascinating Shevchenko reading in their 17th “hut,” which was remembered for a long time afterward. (Oleksa Tykhy, Akper Kerimov, and Borys Tytarenko were also in that cell with us for some time).
“New thinking” is on everyone’s lips now, but Lytvyn was thinking in a new way back in those dark times when Andropov had brought the whole world to the brink of nuclear war, not realizing that the power concentrated in the atomic bomb had become absurd: it could not be used, for you yourself would perish. Lytvyn admired the activities of the Club of Rome and saw in it the shoots of a new human consciousness, built on non-violence, love, and mutual tolerance. He found ideas consonant with his soul in Christianity, in Buddhism, in our humanitarian human rights advocacy. So when the Moscow Helsinki Group disbanded (the MHG was created on May 12, 1976, to monitor the USSR’s compliance with the humanitarian articles of the Helsinki Final Act. Leader Yuriy Orlov, members included Alexander Turchin, Petro Grigorenko, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Vladimir Bukovsky, Malva Landa, Tatiana Velikanova, and others. In September 1982, Elena Bonner announced the cessation of the Group’s work. It was revived on July 28, 1989, chaired by L. Alexeyeva), and all members of the Ukrainian group were imprisoned and the very existence of our Group was in question, Lytvyn desperately campaigned against dissolution, although, in fact, none of us had even thought of doing so. On the contrary, it was in this context that the Estonian Mart Niklus and the Lithuanian Viktoras Petkus joined us. The KGB threatened Lytvyn and Mykhailo Horyn with a new “case,” alleging that they were orally developing a new program for the Helsinki Group.
I believe that Mykhailo Horyn, with whom Lytvyn formed a great friendship of like-minded souls, can tell about this period of Yuriy Lytvyn’s life far better than I. There, in captivity, Mykhailo wrote brilliant psychological sketches about Yuriy Lytvyn, Oleksa Tykhy, and Valeriy Marchenko. After reading excerpts from them, I was struck by how deeply this man could penetrate the world of other people: I, too, had shared a cell with Yuriy and Oleksa, but I had not observed what Horyn did. Of course, all of Horyn’s writings were confiscated during searches and destroyed. How many times I reminded him, once we were free, to try to write them anew, for who will bear witness for these people if not us? “No,” he says, “I can’t write it like that again: I’ve forgotten the details, I don’t have time, and I can’t wind up the spring of my emotions in the same way again. My heart won’t take it...” After his heart attack, I am afraid to even approach Horyn with this. (And now, to my joy: Mykhailo Horyn did find among his surviving notebooks parts of his sketch about Y. Lytvyn and published them in the newspaper of the Ukrainian Republican Party, “Samostiina Ukraina” [Independent Ukraine], No. 23, June 18–24, 1994. It will also be published in M. Horyn’s book, which I am helping him prepare).
A unity of views and goals, despite some disagreements and disputes, brought these two powerful intellects together. It’s no wonder that, after listening in at the door or through bugging devices to the conversations that took place during work between Horyn, Lytvyn, and Tykhy, the KGB hastened to remove first Tykhy, then me (so that I would not be subject to their “pernicious influence”), and eventually Lytvyn himself.
He found himself in an alien environment. He spent the summer of 1983 in the notorious 12th cell with Oleksiy Murzhenko, who was serving out his 14-year sentence and whose nerves were already completely frayed: sharing a cell with him was worse than being in a punishment cell. In short, Lytvyn had to appeal to the administration to be separated. “Incompatibility of character” is no argument for torturers. They want them to fight—then they will gladly use it for their own dirty propaganda purposes. So, in September 1983, Lytvyn began a hunger strike, which he maintained for about two weeks. At that time, I had jaundice, so one day I was lying under an IV drip in the medical unit when they brought in first Stus for a glucose injection, and then Lytvyn. They were searching for a vein on his arm but couldn’t find one—they were so thin. He was gaunt, his face shriveled like a baked apple. It had an unnaturally dark red color. Lytvyn said so painfully: “I told you, you wouldn’t find it.” They found one somewhere on his leg, which was barely covered in skin. For “violating the regime”—his hunger strike—he was deprived of a visit from his mother, and he was not moved from Murzhenko’s cell. He resumed his hunger strike and continued it for another 26 days. On October 29, they took me, Lytvyn, Lukianenko, and Viacheslav Ostrohliad (Sukhov) to the hospital to break our hunger strike on October 30 (the day of the Soviet political prisoner). As soon as we got into the Black Maria and put some animal hide that was in the van under Lytvyn—so his nearly bare bones wouldn’t bang against the bench—the van broke down. They dragged us back, and the next day they took us again. In the settlement of Tsentralny, at the VS-389/35 hospital, Lytvyn was put alone in a cold, north-facing cell, and the three of us were across from him. We could call out to each other, because the guard didn't sit there all the time.
Lytvyn was force-fed on the 16th and 25th days. Dr. Kharisov explained that an order had come down not to assist prisoners in their struggle against the administration, meaning not to force-feed hunger strikers but to allow them to fall into a coma. “We have the means to bring them out of a coma at the ready,” he said, “but know that people do not come out of a coma normal, only as invalids—physical or psychological.” We tried to persuade Lytvyn that his hunger strike was truly hopeless: we were in such a backwater that the KGB would only be happy at our deaths; that was their goal. So we had to endure, without losing our dignity. Where has it ever been seen that someone won a visit through a hunger strike? On the contrary, they try to hide such events from the world.
Extremely exhausted, Lytvyn was returned to Kuchino in December 1983 and placed in a cell with Semen Pokutnyk (Skalych), where he had some peace. After recovering a bit, he began working on a novella in Ukrainian titled “The Fir Tree,” in which he intended to explore the problem of choosing between a greater and lesser evil and to present it as immoral on the part of the one who forces such a choice. The novella was to be based on his own spiritual drama, about which I know a little more than I can ethically recount here. Ultimately, I refer the reader to issue no. 25 of the journal “Ukraina” for December 1991, where I partially published a selection of Yuriy Lytvyn’s letters to a beloved woman whom he called Yialynka (Fir Tree), because she was a holiday for him. The cold winds from 33 Volodymyrska Street extinguished these warm feelings, and this became one of the reasons for the death of this great dreamer. During one of the searches, about 40 pages of “The Fir Tree” were taken away “for inspection” and never returned. Let us imagine the drama of an artist, remembering what he had said before, that an artist nurturing a creative idea is like a pregnant woman: that work must be born. But just as it is difficult for a mother to see her newborn child killed, so it is for an artist when his work is destroyed. And especially when a premature fetus is torn from the womb by force and trampled by dirty guards’ boots...
And then they threw Vasyl Fedorenko into his cell, a former criminal who could no longer bear to serve out his third decade. For some reason, he grew angry at Lytvyn and attacked him, trying to strangle him... Lytvyn ended up in the largest cell, the 20th, with Ashot Navasardyan, Yuriy Fedorov, Hunnar Astra, Balys Gajauskas, and Borys Romashov.
Early that year, a dentist named Lysenko from the Vsekhsviatska hospital appeared in the zone, promising to make dentures for those who needed them. He filed down Lytvyn’s tooth stumps and then never appeared again... Lytvyn could not put anything cold or hot in his mouth, it was difficult for him even to speak, and he suffered greatly from this, unable to participate in conversations. Stomach pains began, and Lytvyn realized that he would not survive a third operation on his stomach. And the regime was becoming ever more unbearable: lying down on the bunks during non-night hours was forbidden. On May 5, 1984, Ivan Mamchych died in the zone after harsh interrogations by Poltava KGB agents. At the end of May, we received news that Oleksa Tykhy, who had been taken from us on March 7, had died that same day in Perm. In the summer, the hopelessly ill Valeriy Marchenko was taken from us. That same year, Lytvyn received news of the death of his ex-wife, Vira Melnychenko, in prison on April 28; his son Rostyslav was left with his grandmother, and then some unkind people, as Lytvyn believed, took the son in, and on top of that, the boy fell ill with an ulcer... Yuriy also deeply mourned the death of Borys Antonenko-Davydovych (May 9, 1984). In short, a convergence of unfortunate circumstances led to a severe mental and physical state. On August 21, Lytvyn knocked on the wall to his neighbor Mykhailo Horyn, called him over for a talk, and said through the small window that he could no longer walk and could see almost nothing. Dr. Pchelnikov excused him from work. On August 23, after lunch, we all went out to work—and Ashot Navasardyan called everyone for a meeting. The guards didn't interfere, as they needed to report our intentions to the operative. Ashot announced the tragic news: Yuriy Lytvyn had just been carried out on a stretcher. Around 10 a.m., Hunnar Astra returned to the cell from work—his work had run out. Lytvyn was lying alone in the cell under a blanket, delirious. One could make out him asking: “Have they brought the teeth?” Astra tried to call a doctor, but no one came. The camp chief, Zhuravkov, was walking past the windows with his entourage. Astra told them through the small window that Lytvyn was extremely ill. A doctor was needed. No reaction. Only during lunch, at 12 o’clock, when all the cellmates returned, Yuriy Fedorov had the sense to lift the blanket—and saw the cut on his abdomen. There was no blood, but his intestines had spilled out. Dr. Pchelnikov, a stretcher, the Black Maria, and a convoy appeared quickly... Mykhailo Horyn said that as Yuriy was being carried out, he touched the door of his cell—that was his farewell.
For several days, the prison waited anxiously. The administration, particularly the head of our special department, Major Aleksandr Grigoryevich Dolmatov, assured me as late as September 4: “We certainly won’t let him die.” The guards Kukushkin and Chertanov disappeared along with Lytvyn. I guessed they were guarding Lytvyn, because someone had said he was in a civilian hospital in Chusovoy. On September 7, the door to the small yard where we were taken for walks was suddenly opened by Kukushkin—and I recoiled, guessing that the irreparable had already happened. But the KGB agent Chentsov told us of Lytvyn’s death much later, deliberately not giving the exact date. That is why we held his forty-day memorial service approximately on the Day of the Soviet Political Prisoner, October 30, with three days of silence and a one-day hunger strike. As we had done earlier for Tykhy and Mamchych, and later for Marchenko, Kerimov, and Stus...
Later, Viacheslav Ostrohliad was in the same hospital in Chusovoy. He had supposedly swallowed “anchors” and they were removing them from his stomach there. He liked to tell tall tales sometimes, but this time, I think, he told what he had heard there: Lytvyn would have lived with that wound on his abdomen. But he was too weakened. He had to lie only on his back, so his kidneys became congested and failed. That was the direct cause of his death. According to a second death certificate issued by the Barakhty village council, which Yuriy’s mother has in her possession, he died on September 5, 1984, from a “penetrating stab wound to the abdominal cavity with damage to the small intestine.”
Was it a suicide? Possibly. But none of us prisoners can attest to this, because no one was there. The first thing the guards and Dr. Pchelnikov rushed to find was: “What did he cut himself with?” But they found nothing in the cell, neither immediately nor during later searches.
His mother was notified of her son’s death and, by her own account, was treated quite tactfully; she was at the funeral on September 8. “He once asked,” his mother recounts, “that if he died before me, the music should play the ‘Varshavyanka.’ There was no music. But I myself dressed my son in the coffin in my own clothes, and he lay there not in a prison uniform, but as a free man. I asked everyone to step away for a few minutes, said my farewells, and recited the ‘Varshavyanka’ to my son by his coffin.”
It was only around 1995 that his mother dared to tell me this. In Kuchino, she needed to use a public toilet. She had just closed the door when a prisoner in black clothes burst in—a “bezkonvoinik” (one who works outside the zone and sleeps inside).
– Where are you going, don’t you see an old woman has gone in?
– I’m sorry, they did what they wanted to your son. He did not commit suicide, he was murdered. Just don’t give me away, or the same will happen to me.
On September 13, 1995, as I was participating in the opening of the Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repressions and Totalitarianism in the USSR, “Perm-36,” in our painfully familiar Kuchino prison, a Perm journalist, Tatyana Georgiyevna Cherepanova (Chursina), the wife of the museum director, Mikhail Cherepanov (Chursin), arranged a meeting for me with that same former guard, Ivan Kukushkin. At the time, he was working as a laborer in the museum workshop (he is now the museum’s head of security. See more about this in the essay on Kuchino) and was almost a dissident himself. While working in a criminal zone, he had gotten into a fight with another guard, served 4 years for it, and grew resentful of Soviet power. True, such people were held in a privileged, “red zone”—a camp for convicted lawyers, militsia officers, and high-ranking Soviet officials like Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Churbanov, and the second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Moldavia, Vyshka. (Kukushkin was clearly proud of having guarded political prisoners who later became deputies and ministers, and then of being imprisoned with such high-ranking people: “I am, one might say, a historical person...”). And so, when the Perm “Memorial” society began restoring the camp premises in Kuchino, its head, Viktor Aleksandrovich Shmyrov, turned to Kukushkin, who had returned to Kuchino, for advice on how things were set up. Gradually, Kukushkin became involved in the work, working on the reconstruction.
We agreed to a conversation in the presence of several people. The meeting was filmed and recorded: the Ukrainian journalist Vakhtang Kipiani made an interesting half-hour segment from it.
I was particularly interested in the secret of Yuriy Lytvyn’s death. My theory that Kukushkin and Chertanov had guarded him in the hospital turned out to be correct. Kukushkin added the following:
“What I know, I know. I was called into the zone: Lytvyn had cut himself! He had apparently already lost a lot of blood: his cellmates didn't see at once that he had cut himself. He was immediately taken for surgery in Chusovoy, and I accompanied him. He told me everything in the hospital. The doctor gave him pills, and he asked to go for a walk, saying he felt unwell. They let him out not into the exercise yard, but just onto the territory. There he found a blade and brought it into the cell. Since he was walking in full view of the guards, they didn't 'shmonat' [frisk] him, so they let him through like that. He cut his abdomen with the blade and slit the veins on his arms and legs.
The KGB agent ordered me to be present during the operation; I was also with Lytvyn in a small room for two.
When he came to after the first operation, I asked him why he had cut himself. ‘I have a terrible headache. I can’t bear it,’—those were his words.
Then he got worse. They took him for an X-ray and apparently found they had done something wrong. His abdomen was bloating. They took him for a second operation, after which he never regained consciousness.”
Let this version also be recorded here on paper, though I do not know which to prefer. Perhaps it is the version that was “launched” back then—and which it is still frightening to refute?
In any case, a person who has cut the veins on one arm cannot cut the other arm with that wounded hand, because that arm would no longer function.
It is incredible that Lytvyn would have been allowed to walk freely on the territory of the zone, rather than in the “yard.”
And why would a blade be lying around on the territory of the zone, when prisoners were forbidden to have them, and in the bathhouse, blades were under strict control?
According to Yuriy Fedorov, with whom I was later placed in the same cell, their 20th cell was turned upside down for two days then, searching for what Lytvyn had cut himself with, but they found nothing.
There is only one argument against Lytvyn. His mother, Nadiia Antonivna Parubchenko, told me that Yuriy had attempted suicide sometime in January 1966, in Barakhty. At that time, after the aforementioned “visit” to the Embassy of Canada (or the USA), he was expecting to be arrested. He cut his veins, bleeding out. His mother looked for a way to get him to Vasylkiv, but there was a deep snowfall, and cars were not running. They transported him by horse at night; he was freezing. His son also resorted to similar actions (slitting his wrists) while in captivity. Psychologists say this can be hereditary.
But the testimony of the criminal prisoner, the "bezkonvoinik," that Lytvyn did not commit suicide but was murdered, may mean that the murderers tailored their actions to the legend they knew—that Lytvyn was prone to suicide—and cut him while he was unconscious. Let us consider that Dr. Pchelnikov was in the zone at that time.
The “most humane in the world” Soviet law does not permit the body of a deceased prisoner to be claimed until his term of imprisonment is over. That is why the families of Lytvyn, Tykhy, and Stus struggled for so long to obtain permission for reburial in their native land. (See more about this in the essay on V. Stus).
The matter of the works of human rights defenders who died in captivity is even worse: almost everything Lytvyn wrote remains under arrest to this day, if not destroyed. (In 1992, in my presence, SBU Colonel V. I. Prystaiko handed over 42 of Y. Lytvyn’s documents to his mother. They are now in my possession. The most important of them are published in the book: Yuriy Lytvyn. To Love Is to Live: Publicist Writings. Compiled by Anatoliy Rusnachenko. – K.: KM Academia Publishing House, 1999. 96 p. Y. Lytvyn’s fictional prose works are not among them).
The most complete collection of his works was published in the “Prosvita” book series under the title “Premonition”—it has two authors: Vasyl Stus and Yuriy Lytvyn. (Feniks Publishing Center, Lviv, 1991). A more complete book, which I prepared together with Mykola Samiylenko, lies untouched at the “Ukrainskyi Pysmennyk” publishing house. (However, Y. Lytvyn’s friend, Ivan Pashkov, did publish a book: Lytvyn Y. T. Tragic Gallery: Poems. – Kharkiv: MChI “Kentavr.” 1996 – 126 p. A thorough study of Y. Lytvyn’s views was also published: A. Rusnachenko. With Mind and Heart. Ukrainian Socio-Political Thought of the 1940s–1980s. K.: Academia, 1999. – pp. 252–268).
... This bright and kind mind, this idealist who gazed upon spiritual stars, whose God was Love, Goodness, Freedom, this gentle optimist who never resisted evil with violence, so as not to multiply it in the world, dreamed of a free Ukraine that would need no prisons, no police batons, no bombs. For such a Ukraine, he laid down his bright head. Grant rest, O God, to the soul of Thy servant Yuriy, where the righteous repose, and make his memory eternal. And glorious.
The Light of People. – K.: URP. – 1996. – pp. 75–91.
January 31, 1989. Additions from 1991 and 1996. Notes in italics from 2004.
Published:
Ovsienko, Vasyl. The Light of People: Memoirs and Publicist Writings. In 2 vols. Vol. I / Compiled by the author; Art and design by B. Ye. Zakharov. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; K.: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 238–261.
Photo:
Lytvyn YURIY LYTVYN. 1978. His mother sent this photo to her son in captivity. In 1988, the author brought it out of the Kuchino camp.
