A CRIMINAL FOR REFUSING TO BECOME AN INFORMANT
Odeska khvylia. Dokumenty, tvory, spohady v’iazniv sumlinnia [The Odesa Wave. Documents, Works, and Memoirs of Prisoners of Conscience] / Comp. P. Otchenashenko, O. Riznykiv, D. Shupta. – Odesa: Druk, 2006. – pp. 145–154
The persecution against me began long before I was born; it was 1937, a year of total repression, and my mother’s breast milk dried up when I was born. But I was saved by a little goat that had just kidded.
The first conscious memory of persecution was etched in my mind when I tried in vain to escape the evil mounted patrolman while gathering leftover grain in the fields, and the even more evil chairman of our “Prosperous (!!) Life” collective farm. From them, besides curses, I first heard words like Balytskyi, GPU, *dopra…* [a pretrial detention center]
Later, the persecution truly got under my skin when the principal of the Mokiyivka secondary school methodically summoned me to his office every day because the tuition fee needed to be paid (for myself and my sister), something I never once did because there was no money to pay with. Every day, I had to walk 5 km each way to school, and then I was forced to miss several classes for these ordeals with the principal…
The persecution made itself known in a very obvious way when I had to enroll in the Admiral Makarov Technical School in Sevastopol in 1956. Sevastopol had the status of a “closed city” at the time, and one could only enter it with a special permit and pass. Just before that, my poem “Teresy” (“The Scales”) had disappeared (it touched upon many sensitive political and life issues), and as I later guessed, it had fallen into the hands of the KGB. Classes at the school had already been long underway when, after numerous visits, the Crimean regional bureau finally issued me a permit and a pass to Sevastopol, where my “bodyguards” were already waiting for me at the school—in other words, I was under constant surveillance.
On May 1, 1958, during a May Day outing outside the city, I was detained by men in civilian clothes and taken to a border guard post, where I was subjected to an inquiry and a three-day background check, after which they finally released me. Realizing the complete futility of my staying in the hero-city, that same year I enrolled in the Simferopol Medical School. There, I was soon taken for an interrogation conducted by KGB officers in the office of Titenko, the head of the regional health department. For the first time, they openly tried to recruit me as an informant, which I refused. The interrogation lasted from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Later, there were other summonses to the same service, but they were also fruitless.
In May 1963, I attended the All-Ukrainian Seminar for Young Writers at the Odesa Writers' House of Creativity, where Vasyl Stus, Borys Necherda, Bohdan Horyn, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Vasyl Zakharchenko, and others were also present. From that point on, I physically felt constant surveillance, which was carried out using tape recorders and photo and film cameras. Provocations, harassment, slander, and rummaging through my personal belongings and notebooks to collect compromising material became a constant. At the same time, I was “supervised” by a KGB curator, Ivan Timofiyovych, the son of the director of the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, as he let slip himself. He never left me in peace, regularly summoning me to a room in the Hotel Ukraina for both “interviews” and interrogations.
With this kind of processing and recruitment, he always drove me to the brink of madness. At that time, I often had to change jobs, and this could not but affect my studies. The pressure from some of my instructors intensified because my name was among the “ringleaders” of a strike at the foreign languages department, when almost the entire group was given grades of “three” [C] as punishment for a serious transgression. I managed to change my “three” only by retaking the exam during the state finals. Meanwhile, the Komsomol bureau and its meetings constantly “roasted” me for not attending a single *subotnik* [unpaid community work day] or any Komsomol meetings. Consequently, they arranged for me to have a psychiatric evaluation to ultimately discredit me and have me expelled from the medical institute.
It was then that one of the instructors told me my name was on the “blacklists” of politically unreliable nationalists.
In parallel with all this, my poetry manuscripts were repeatedly removed from the publishing plan of the Crimean publishing house, where I was periodically slated to be published, starting in 1963. The press and radio would announce that my book of poems was about to be published, and then it would be removed from the plans…
Such ordeals, in their integrated form, did not pass without a trace; situations often arose where I might have taken my own life out of shame. Petro Zayenko, the editor of my first poetry collection, which was later published by “Molod” in Kyiv, witnessed this on multiple occasions.
In 1967, the manuscript of my poetry collection “Ukraino moya” (“My Ukraine”) was torn to shreds at a meeting of the council of the “Krym” publishing house, where the critic Degtyaryov accused me of existentialism, formalism, pessimism, Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, and so on and so forth.
As a participant in the institute’s amateur arts group, I was supposed to recite one of my poems from the stage. Dressed in a Cossack uniform, with a saber at my side and a kobza in my hands, I appeared before the audience and began to recite my Ukrainian poem. Right at the beginning, I was booed by a few provocateurs, but after waiting for things to quiet down, I finished the poem, which earned me friendly applause from my fellow students. I never received the “Certificate of Merit” with which the rector had recognized me in an order for excellent academic performance.
My friends addressed letters to me at the central post office. One day, when I went there with O.I. Hubar, an associate professor at the Simferopol Pedagogical Institute and a member of the Writers’ Union, I was handed a heavy package from an unknown sender. Oleksandr Ivanovych and I opened it while sitting on a nearby bench in the park. The title on the typewritten manuscript read: “Ivan Dziuba. Internationalism or Russification?” Looking around, Oleksandr Ivanovych pointed out several athletic-looking young men who were watching us from a short distance. Realizing what was happening, we quickly disappeared through the doors of the first trolleybus we saw. But I managed to keep I.M. Dziuba’s work, and it was not until 1983 that it disappeared (it is unclear whether the KGB planted that package on me?!).
My studies at the medical institute were coming to an end, and so the pressure and efforts to process me as a future (potential!) informant intensified. I was promised mountains of gold: an apartment in the city center, a teaching position at the medical institute, the regular publication of my collections, and even awards…
After graduating from the medical institute with honors, I immediately left Crimea and returned to my native village of Kurinka with the intention of opening a medical clinic there. But it was not to be—a “seditious” doctor was not needed even there… Again, I was searching for a job, harassed over the housing issue, and changed places of work several times…
Finally, in 1969, I managed to get into a six-month surgical specialization course at the Kharkiv Institute for Advanced Medical Training, which I completed with an “excellent” grade. But Ivan Timofiyovych found me there too, and once again tried to recruit me as an informant, promising me a position as a research fellow at the Institute of Neurosurgery, an apartment in a prestigious part of the city, the publication of my books, and so on.
While on my way to these courses, I had submitted a manuscript of poems to the regional Kharkiv publishing house “Prapor,” which I visited before leaving Kharkiv to inquire about the fate of my work. It happened during the lunch break. The only employee present in the entire publishing house was a man with a spinal injury. In one of the offices, he informed me that the manuscript of my poems had been sent back to the village of Kurinka, and he kindly let me read the editorial review: “D. Shupta’s poems are hostile to the socialist system; they are imbued with the spirit of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism…” The signature “Lopatin” was at the bottom of this denunciation.
At home, however—(a miracle!)—in the folder, my manuscript was accompanied by an encouraging letter from the publishers, stating that the works needed more revision and, with the addition of new ones, the book could be proposed for publication.
At the hospital, after my specialization, I was categorically denied a position as a surgeon and was offered a job as a doctor in a rural district hospital. However, the Poltava regional health department decided otherwise and sent me to Hradizhsk, where, under the well-known conditions of collaboration with the KGB, I was to be appointed head of the surgical department. Since I again refused, I did not get the position. There was a brief period of work at the Hrebinka railway hospital, which, as it turned out, offered no prospect of housing. And finally, I took a position as a staff surgeon at the Yahotyn central hospital in the Kyiv region, where I drank the cup of my fate to the dregs: constant surveillance, baseless slander and accusations, prosecutorial terror, KGB interrogations, sophisticated provocations, brutal humiliation, vile machinations aimed at undermining my authority and disgracing me as a person, the destruction of my family, and accusations of nationalist and anti-Soviet activities, which led to my imprisonment in the Lukyanivska SIZO [pre-trial detention center] and my conviction.
As I later found out, my KGB curators were Borys Mykolayovych Sukachov, Dmytro Hryhorovych Sereda, and Vasyl Vasylyovych Tereshchenko.
All of this began, one could say, from my first days in Yahotyn, once the head doctor and the higher district authorities learned that I was under constant KGB surveillance. It was at this time that I also discovered that the head doctor had started a special file on me, which he kept in his safe, regularly filling it with denunciations, slander, and his own summaries, which he would do demonstratively, even in my presence, forcing disgruntled people or, more often, provocateurs, to write defamatory statements about me at his dictation.
Provocateurs were often sent to me, posing as patients. Some of them looked for me based on these characteristics: a surgeon who speaks Ukrainian, operates in his own way, and even uses “nationalistic” sutures after surgery.
This was proclaimed everywhere in public places by hired criers (or as the dictionary defines them: shrieking women, madwomen, the possessed, the bewitched), thus fueling and shaping public opinion.
And so I ended up in the Lukyanivska SIZO, where I was held from 1983 to 1984. There I lost my sight, my hearing, and my professional capacity—the bones in my hands and my spine were maimed. And the moral damages!
Only the death of Andropov saved me from death and mitigated my fate. My case was tried in the Yahotyn court as that of a common criminal, not a political one. Therefore, I remain unrehabilitated to this day.
Scanned and posted on the KHPG website by V. Ovsiienko on March 7, 2008.
Dmytro Shupta, February 3, 2006. Photo by V. Ovsiienko.
