THE ASCETIC (Ihor Kravtsiv)
(Vasyl Ovsiienko. The Light of People: Memoirs and Essays. In 2 vols. Vol. 2 / Compiled by the author; Art and design by B.Ye. Zakharov. – 2nd ed., rev. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 74-76.)
A native of Kharkiv and a civil engineer by profession, Ihor Kravtsiv at the age of 30 restored the letter “i” to his surname (his parents had already written it with an “ov”) and switched to speaking Ukrainian in his daily interactions. That is, he addressed everyone in the language of the titular nation. He would switch to another language only when he was genuinely not understood. Moreover, his speech was exquisitely correct, as is often the case with well-trained foreigners. Such a Ukrainian on the streets of Russified cities would typically be asked: “Are you from the West [Western Ukraine]? Are you from Lviv? Are you from Canada?” Even: “Are you Polish?” Because in the minds of many ignorant Russians, the firm conviction still lingers that the Ukrainian language is Russian mixed with Polish. That the Germans poured the two languages into a bucket and stirred them with a stick…
Back in the 1960s, vexed by similar questions, the poet Mykola Kholodnyi despairingly declared in his poem “To the People of Kyiv”: “I am a foreigner among you.” And when asked something in Russian on the street, he would politely reply in German. Yes, a Ukrainian on the streets of the ancient Ukrainian cities of Kyiv or Kharkiv felt like a foreigner. Ukrainian culture in the cities was relegated to the fringes, and Ukrainian patriotism was labeled nationalism, which in the mind of the average person became synonymous with international butchery. So, the appearance of a nationally conscious Ukrainian, especially in the circle of technical intelligentsia in the Russified, physically and spiritually devastated Kharkiv of the early 1970s, could not go unnoticed. There was no place for such a Ukrainian in Ukraine. Except in prison. But the sovereignty of the Ukrainian SSR was insufficient to hold its political prisoners on its own territory: they had to be transported to the neighboring sovereign Russia.
Kravtsiv was a marvel, but not a unique phenomenon. In Kyiv, three artists—Halyna Sevruk, Alla Horska, and Liudmyla Semykina (whose ancestors were called “Semykin,” meaning Seven-Horse), and with them Leonida Svitlychna-Tereshchenko—similarly astonished respectable citizens. They took Ukrainian language lessons from the philologist Nadiia Svitlychna. The artist Opanas Zalyvakha would travel from Ivano-Frankivsk for these lessons. He was originally from the Kharkiv region but grew up outside Ukraine and only returned to his ancestral land in 1961. These people “demonstratively” spoke Ukrainian in places where it was not considered acceptable. This non-standard behavior, of course, was a protest against the pitiful state of all things Ukrainian in Ukraine. And for this protest, they had to pay a heavy price. Halyna Sevruk and Liudmyla Semykina, artists of high rank, were excluded from artistic life for more than 20 years and had to survive on meager earnings. Nadiia Svitlychna was caught in the 1972 sweep of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and imprisoned for 4 years. Alla Horska was killed on November 28, 1970, under “mysterious circumstances.”
Kravtsiv was also “noticed.” Two years of his “Ukrainophilia,” at the instigation of the KGB, were valued by the Kharkiv Regional Court at five years in a strict-regime camp. The formal pretext: retyping several pages of Ivan Dziuba’s treatise “Internationalism or Russification?” This distinctive summary of the Ukrainian spring of the 1950s-60s can now be read by anyone in the journal “Vitchyzna” from 1990, but back then, it was a “slanderous fabrication that denigrates the Soviet state and social system,” the production, possession, and dissemination of which was considered a “particularly dangerous state crime.”
For such “anti-Soviet” activity, I, too, was brought to camp ZhKh-385/19 in the village of Lisne in Mordovia in April 1974. At that time, there were about 300 men in the camp. Almost half of them were Ukrainians. A third were convicted of collaborating with the German occupiers during the war, another third were Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian partisans from the 1940s-50s, and the rest were dissidents of various nationalities and leanings.
Some, having read 19th-century Western European novels about prisoners in stone towers, sitting in solitary confinement and going mad, thought it was the same in our time. But no, we didn't have enough stone towers for all the prisoners. In Stalin's time, there were consistently 10–15 million people imprisoned; in our time, a million to a million and a half, with only a few thousand of them being political prisoners. On the outside, we had to seek each other out for communication, but here—they were all gathered together. And there was no need to look over your shoulder, worrying that someone would report you for “seditious” conversations. The prisons became peculiar preserves of free speech. They had rich libraries, collected by generations of political prisoners. In the zone, Ihor Kravtsiv seemed to read more than anyone, including in English.
When I arrived at the camp, it immediately struck me that the main representatives of the Ukrainian community in interactions with the Jewish, Lithuanian, Russian, Armenian, and other communities were two men—Ihor Kravtsiv and Kuzma Matviyuk. Kuzma, a teacher from Uman, was a typical first-generation Ukrainian intellectual (he was of peasant origin). Ihor, on the other hand, was from an intellectual but Russified urban family. A highly qualified civil engineer. A philosopher by nature, an economist by interest, in the camp he was assigned to monotonous physical labor: polishing the wooden cases of desk clocks. He performed this work impeccably, and soon the foreman began to accept his products without inspection.
I remember one incident. One day, Ihor noticed that my shorn head was getting cold in the flimsy zek hat. A few days later, he brought me a warmer one he had sewn himself. By hand. I couldn't believe that one could sew so neatly and with such even stitches by hand, as if with a machine. “My mother taught me how,” he explained. That was his character: whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability.
Another case. An old, barely literate zek from the Kharkiv region asked Kravtsiv to write a complaint for him. (He had a simple and clear handwriting, which he had developed himself as an adult: once, a typist at his institute had remarked that his article was illegible, so he created his own copybook and developed a new script). Ihor spent several evenings working on the complaint. “Why are you bothering with that collaborator?” one of his countrymen remarked. “A bad child, but still our own,” Kravtsiv replied.
I became close friends with Kravtsiv, and he repeatedly proved his loyalty to our friendship. When we were already “free” (each under administrative surveillance at home, meaning we couldn't travel outside our city or district), a case was fabricated against me over “two buttons” that I had supposedly torn off a policeman’s coat. Just then, Kravtsiv’s surveillance was lifted—and he came to Radomyshl, where the show trial against me was to take place. This was a risky challenge: after all, showing sympathy for a “criminal” in that country was tantamount to a crime. I value this act of his very highly.
It is understandable that fate brought us together again—this time in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, where Kravtsiv became one of the leading figures. In April 1990, the Group was transformed into the Ukrainian Republican Party (URP). During the challenging period of establishing the Kharkiv regional organization, he became its chairman. In June 1991, he was elected a member of the URP Leadership Council and participated in drafting the party’s Program and Charter. His balanced, moderate position at congresses, councils, and in the Leadership Council contributed significantly to building our party’s good reputation, which stands on established national and universal human values and defends the rights of individuals and the nation.
Ihor Kravtsiv was among the few conscious patriots of Ukraine who embarked on the path of struggle for its freedom and dignity. It is thanks to the efforts and self-sacrifice of such people that society came to understand the need for radical change. We had to achieve this through rallies and pickets, where we were dispersed and beaten, fined, and thrown into punishment cells. But we stood firm. We won the most important freedom—the freedom of speech, which allowed us to make the idea of independence legal and to confirm it in a referendum, an idea for which we were punished not so long ago. We won. But the state structures are still filled with people from the old administration who will impede economic and political reforms, adapting the Ukrainian state to their own interests. To oust them, we need not just brave, morally impeccable, and honest people, but also knowledgeable, highly qualified professionals. The capital of past merits loses its value if it is not supported by competence. In the person of Ihor Kravtsiv, we have a fortunate combination of these two virtues.
Samostiina Ukraina. – 1992. – No. 1 (22). – January.
Posted on the KHPG website on February 26, 2008.
