VASYL OVSIENKO. THE TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR MAN
(Ovsiienko, Vasyl. The Light of People: Memoirs and Journalism. In 2 vols. Vol. 2 / Compiled by the author; Art and design by B.Ye. Zakharov. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 77–82).
In 2002, on St. Michael’s Day, my old friend Mykhailo Yakubivskyi turns 50. For half of those years, he has lived with a stigma worse than mine, that of an “especially dangerous recidivist”… I was rehabilitated long ago, although I am the greater “criminal”: it was through me that, around 1971, as a first-year philology student at Kyiv University, he read a photo-reproduced copy of Ivan Dziuba's work “Internationalism or Russification?”. But as it turned out, this was not his first “crime.”
In the concentration camps of Mordovia and the Urals, I had the privilege of communicating with the best people of my time—Mykhailo, however, fell victim to Soviet punitive psychiatry and was confined among the “violent”…
In these days when we commemorate the victims of famine and political repression, when we recall the Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN on December 10, 1948, I feel obligated to tell this terrible story.
Mykhailo Yakubivskyi hails from Verbivka in the Ruzhyn district of the Zhytomyr region. His grandfather Herasym and great-grandfather Vitsko were “dekulakized,” driven from their homes, and perished during the famine of 1933. His father, Mykhailo, at the age of 22 and just married, was mobilized into a labor army, where he was convicted for acts of protest and deported to Siberia. Upon returning to Verbivka, he worked as a carpenter, fought on the fronts of the Second World War, and managed to build a house for his family, but his health was poor; he fell ill and died at the age of 45 after a failed operation. Mykhailyk, the youngest of four children, was only three years old at the time, but he still remembers doing carpentry with his father. His mother, Domakha Danylivna, a widow, raised all four children and “brought them up in the world.” She gave 40 years to the hard labor of the collective farm, only to earn a meager pension. Mykhailo says she is like an image of Ukraine: she knows countless songs inherited from her mother, Todoska, who died young.
In the fifth grade, on his student map, Mykhailo “separated” Ukraine from the USSR.
His brother Vitaliy, 16 years his senior and a journalism student at Kyiv University, would read and comment on the poems of Taras Shevchenko and Vasyl Symonenko for him. From a young age, Mykhailo wrote poetry himself. He read Oles Honchar's novel “The Cathedral.” He called the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968 an occupation. And when he learned that it was Lenin who had destroyed the Ukrainian People's Republic by declaring war on it in late 1917, he told someone that Lenin was the first enemy of the Ukrainian people.
Somehow, this information reached the child psychiatrist at the Bila Tserkva psychiatric clinic, Halyna Lashchuk. She deemed all of this as actions dangerous to the Soviet government and, without his relatives' knowledge and through deception (“Let a professor take a look at you”), sent him via ambulance in October 1968 to the Kyiv Regional Psychiatric Hospital (in “Glevakha”). There, his attending physician, Zhanna Koretska, after reading Mykhailo's 8th-grade graduation essay on Shevchenko, looked the 15-year-old honors student intently in the eyes: “You have such thoughts, such thoughts!…”
After several months of horrific torture in this “Glevakha,” Koretska gave Mykhailo a pass for life by fabricating a “permanent” diagnosis: “schizophrenia, simple form,” and sent a document to the Ruzhyn district military commissariat, where, among other things, she noted: “From childhood, he began to read philosophical literature.” But, to protect herself, she added: “intellectually preserved,” “has the right to enter higher educational institutions.”
On this basis, on March 15, 1971, the district military commissariat issued the young man a “wolf's ticket” under Group I, Article 4 of the “schedule of diseases” with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia,” noting: “not subject to re-examination.” This was despite the fact that he had not undergone any medical commission at the commissariat and, just that January, after a month-long training for pre-conscription youth, had been awarded an honorary certificate from the DTSAAF (Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Air Force, and Navy) as the best pre-conscript in the district.
In 1970, the essay of the straight-A student Yakubivskyi at the entrance exam to Kyiv University was judged as “ideologically unsound” because it mentioned Oles Honchar's “The Cathedral.” He worked as a literary contributor for the district newspaper “The Banner of Communism” in the town of Chudniv and, the following year, came back with positive references and a large portfolio of his own publications. At the admissions committee, seeing his military ID, they showed him the door: “Look at this, a sick man, and he wants to study at the university!” He had to forge a medical certificate.
He successfully studied for almost three years at the Faculty of Philology of the T.G. Shevchenko Kyiv State University, studying Modern Greek in addition to his native language. That's where we ended up, in room 60 of dormitory № 5 on Lomonosova Street—four fifth-year students and one first-year. Samizdat circulated among us. Ivan Bondarenko confronted me with the fact that he had given Mykhailo Dziuba's work “Internationalism or Russification?”. This seed fell on already fertile ground.
I was arrested on March 5, 1973. They shook down everyone around me. I don’t remember how the investigators learned that Mykhailo had also read samizdat, but the Kyiv Regional Court issued a separate ruling regarding Mykhailo Yakubivskyi in the case of Yevhen Proniuk, Vasyl Lisovyi, and Vasyl Ovsiienko. On March 18, 1974, a Komsomol meeting was held at the Faculty of Philology, where classmates and professors vilified Yakubivskyi for reading Ivan Dziuba's work and for not concealing his sympathies for me.
The “commissar in a skirt,” Professor Margarita Karpenko, said: “You should have reported Vasyl, then you would have been on top… But now we need to fight for the purity of our ranks!” Professor Valentyna Mykolayivna Povazhna uttered the famous phrase: “To live in the same room and not know what’s in your roommate’s briefcase—that, forgive me, is not the Komsomol way!” Associate Professor Oles Ivanovych Bilodid (son of Academician I. Bilodid, author of the infamous “theory of bilingualism” of the Ukrainian people) thundered with angry pathos: “While Soviet people are smelting steel, mining coal, we here are talking about some Yakubivskyi, who, along with Ovsiienko, you see, decided to solve the Ukrainian question! This is a rotten sheep that should not be in our university!”.
So, Yakubivskyi was expelled from the Komsomol and, consequently, from the university by order of the rector M.U. Bilyi, No. 141, dated March 30, 1974.
He found a job as a correspondent for the Zhytomyr regional newspaper “Komsomol Star,” concealing his expulsion from the university. Two weeks later, on May 6, the editor of this newspaper, Dmytro Panchuk (now the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Zhytomyrshchyna”), fired him from his job: “You are no Komsomol member and no student! You are a scoundrel! Your dean called me and said that you need to do physical labor, in production, to wash away your guilt before the Soviet government! And the film ‘The White Bird with a Black Mark’ is not brilliant at all, as you claim, but nationalist!”
Undoubtedly, the order to fire him came not from the philology dean, Mykhailo Hrytsai, but from the Zhytomyr KGB, since the day before, Yakubivskyi had refused to cooperate with KGB officer Borys Zavalnyi.
He managed to get a job as a loader at the Zhytomyr Linen Mill. He worked the night shift. The KGB agents offered to have him inform on the workers' moods, promising reinstatement at the university. He refused and decided to get out of Zhytomyr. But he only made it from the workshop to the checkpoint. There, militiamen twisted his arms, threw him into a barred van, and took him to the preliminary detention cell, and from there by ambulance to “Huyva,” to the third department of the Zhytomyr psychiatric hospital. This happened on June 13, 1974. Supposedly, on that day, Yakubivskyi had given an anti-Soviet speech near the Korolyov monument in Zhytomyr...
Although this was a vile insinuation, the torturer-doctor Pavel Kuznetsov tortured Yakubivskyi daily for three whole months, several times a shift, with potent neuroleptics (haloperidol, aminazine, trifluzine, sulfazine, etc.), after which one can neither lie down, nor walk, nor stand. Minutes seem like an eternity. There is no greater torment in the world. It is no coincidence that prisoners of the Brezhnev-era camps and psychiatric hospitals equate such confinements as 1:10, and some even say that the psychiatric hospital is worse than death. There, Yakubivskyi was tortured with electric shock, tied to a cot with violently ill patients, and hit on the head with something heavy. He thought he would not leave there alive. The bone-breaking orderlies nicknamed him “Independent Ukraine”: “There goes ‘Independent Ukraine’! Heh heh…” The doctor Kuznetsov asked if he heard any voices. He tried to joke: “Only the ‘Voice of America.’” Kuznetsov took sadistic pleasure in the torture: “So—it’s breaking you? Your tongue is your own enemy!”
He was released on September 5, after being injected with some unknown substances from which he took a year to recover. It was difficult to even speak, everything was as if in a fog, his reactions were slowed, and he had some obsessive fears... At the next conversation, the KGB agent Borys Zavalnyi said: “This was done for humane purposes!” And another warned: “Be grateful you're alive. Otherwise, we'll do it differently: you'll be walking along fences with a twig… herding geese.”
The fear in society was so great that during this tragedy, none of his good friends and acquaintances whom he approached dared to speak up in his defense, including the well-known Ukrainian poet Mykhailo Klymenko, university professors Andriy Biletskyi, and the Modern Greek lecturer Tetyana Chernyshova. His roommate from the Zhytomyr dormitory, then a journalist for the regional newspaper “Radyanska Zhytomyrshchyna,” Olexiy Kavun (now a correspondent for “Voice of Ukraine”—he is still nostalgic for the Soviet era), threatened Yakubivskyi with “Huyva” and gloated over his fate. The regional newspaper journalist Mykola Volynets also knew about the torture but did not even offer sympathy.
Later, when Yakubivskyi came to Kyiv to seek protection, he was thrown into Kyiv's “Pavlivka,” where a more “humane” doctor, Daniil Brandus, confirmed the insinuations of Kyiv informants and KGB agents that he had supposedly walked naked in a construction workers’ dormitory when he was looking for a job. In “Pavlivka,” Brandus held him together with the “violent” in the fourth ward. He was brutally beaten on the head, and on the ground—with feet.
In just one year in psychiatric hospitals, Yakubivskyi received over 500 potent pills and injections of neuroleptics.
He had to work as a watchman, a laborer, starve, and be gravely humiliated. Former “friends” fled from him as if from a plague victim. None of the surviving, frightened former Sixtiers whom Yakubivskyi approached (D. Pavlychko, B. Oliynyk, I. Drach—they had known and praised his poems earlier) dared to help him. For two years, he was as lonely as a finger.
In 1976, at the demand of the vice-rector of Kyiv University, Volodymyr Horshkov, Yakubivskyi had to write a “penitent statement” to the effect of: “Accept me into the correspondence department of the philology faculty, I will no longer engage in nationalism.” For reinstatement, they also demanded a certificate from the psychiatric hospital stating whether Yakubivskyi could study...
He found a job as a freelance correspondent for the newspaper “Kyivska Pravda,” but he could not play the role of a deceitful Soviet journalist. So in 1977, he took a meager salary as a research associate at the Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of the Ukrainian SSR. The microclimate of ancient Ukrainian architecture—houses, churches, windmills, trips to collect ethnographic artifacts, communication with their owners, ordinary Ukrainians—was surely a balm to his soul. This helped him survive the terrible Brezhnevite obscurantism. However, even from there, after 15 years of impeccable work, he was fired in September 1992 for attempting to protect the museum from destruction by its administration. Not even a visit to the then Minister of Culture of Ukraine, Ivan Dziuba, helped... He found a job as a correspondent for the newspaper “Zlahoda,” later at URP-Inform, and was an assistant-consultant to People's Deputy Levko Lukianenko. Meanwhile, he got married; he and his wife Lyudmyla have a daughter, Yaroslava (now a university student), and a high-school-aged son, Taras.
Only after 25 years, on August 19, 1993, did an expert commission of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association (S. Hluzman, V. Cherniavskyi, N. Verhun) declare Yakubivskyi mentally healthy: “Based on the study of medical documents and the results of the current examination, the experts have concluded that citizen Yakubivskyi, Mykhailo Mykhaylovych, in the period from 1968 to 1975, did not suffer from a chronic mental illness (schizophrenia) and currently shows no signs of mental illness.”
M. Yakubivskyi published a striking essay, “The Soul-Killing Factory,” in the journal “Zona” No. 3 in 1992. His talented poems “from the drawer” and articles were published in various editions. He spoke out in the press, on Ukrainian television and radio, as well as on Radio “Liberty,” exposing Soviet punitive psychiatry, and appealed to the Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine demanding rehabilitation. But he is not considered a victim of repression! Here is the response from the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office from Justice Counselor P. Yemelianenko dated December 31, 1993: “According to the current legislation of Ukraine, your treatment in psychiatric hospitals does not constitute compulsory medical measures as provided for by Art. 13 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and Art. 416 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine. In this regard, the Law of Ukraine ‘On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression in Ukraine’ of April 17, 1991, cannot be applied to you.”
Indeed, according to this Law, only persons sentenced to compulsory treatment by a court are considered victims of political repression. Those incarcerated without a trial (which significantly worsened their situation) are not considered repressed... In Russia, this error regarding victims of punitive psychiatry has already been corrected. Such a correction is also provided for in a draft law prepared by a number of public organizations and submitted by deputy Les Tanyuk, but for years it has been unable to make its way to consideration. So they continue to stamp out cynical responses on letterheads with the Tryzub, like the one sent on September 1, 1997, by the head of the general supervision of the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office, Justice Counselor L. Nikolenko:
“The Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office, on behalf of the People's Deputy of Ukraine Ye.V. Proniuk and with the involvement of relevant specialists, has investigated the circumstances outlined in your statement regarding compulsory treatment. It has been established that your treatment was carried out from 1968 to 1975. The treatment applied in each case of hospitalization corresponded to the diagnosis and condition, as evidenced by expert opinions. Based on the results of the investigation, the prosecutor's office finds no grounds for taking measures of response.”
And Roman Nikyforuk, acting head of the mental health protection department of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, “comforted” him in a letter dated August 22, 1997:
“The Main Department of Curative and Preventive Care has considered your letter, which was sent to the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine, and informs you that the conclusion of the Psychiatric Association is insufficient to review your diagnosis: it has no legal force. Therefore, we suggest that you address a similar application to the Ukrainian Research Institute of Social and Forensic Psychiatry (Kyiv, Frunze St., 103-A, director of the institute A.P. Chuprykov). You may consider this letter as a referral for a consultative examination at the said institute.”
Today, Mr. Nikyforuk heads Kyiv’s “Pavlivka,” the then Minister of Health of Ukraine, Raisa Bogatyryova, became a people's deputy, and Yakubivskyi's “doctors” and the KGB agents still work in medical institutions or under the sign “SBU” (Security Service of Ukraine); some have retired on a “well-deserved pension.” Only the repressed Yakubivskyi, who has lived half his life with the stigma of a “schizophrenic,” has still not achieved either rehabilitation or compensation for the crime committed against him by the communist regime—a ruined life and undermined health: he recently suffered an acute myocardial infarction and is now registered as a heart patient.
November 19, 2002.
Ukraina Moloda. 2002. – No. 231 (20337). – December 11
On the KHPG website since February 25, 2008.
