VASYL OVSIENKO. A TORTURED UNION
(Ovsiienko, Vasyl. The Light of People: Memoirs and Journalism. In 2 vols. Vol. 1 / Compiled by the author; Art and design by B.Ye. Zakharov. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 300-308
I am among the youngest of the Ukrainian Sixtiers.
My passion-filled roads, over thirteen and a half years of captivity, became closely intertwined with the long-suffering paths of many interesting, even rare, people in the world of that time. Outside, one had to seek out such company with the risk of encountering a provocateur or an informer, but behind the barbed wire—there they were, already present, captured. Such a blessing did not fall to many of my peers, not even from my university circle. So I must thank God for such grace. And I have a duty to people to testify about them as it was, for it has been prophetically said:
Ще кілька літ – і увірветься в’язь.
Колючий дріт увійде в сни діточі
І всі назнаменовання пророчі
Захочуть окошитися на нас.
Vasyl Stus
The reaping of the Ukrainian intelligentsia on January 12, 1972, touched me as well, though not immediately, but during the “clean-up” of those who remained. Awaiting my arrest, I still managed to receive a diploma in Ukrainian philology from Kyiv University and to work in a village as a teacher of an “unpromising” language. I was arrested on the 20th anniversary of the Great Despot's death, March 5, 1973. I was held for over a year in the KGB's pre-trial detention center at 33 Volodymyrska Street—and then, on April 12, 1974, I arrived via transport at the “strict-regime facility ZhKh-385/19” of the notorious Dubrovlag in Mordovia. The village of Lisove in the Tenghushevo district.
They let me into the zone right at lunchtime, and I was struck by the large gray anthill swarming around the canteen in the middle of a vast zone, which it seemed to me after the confines of prison and transport cells. The large, un-barred space, enclosed only by barbed wire and a wooden fence, was overwhelming and even frightening—I instinctively wanted to squeeze into some crevice...
Men, all equally gray, pale, and close-cropped, approached me, asking who I was and where I was from, introducing themselves—and fear seized me again: how would I tell them apart? But no: on the left side of each jacket was a patch with a surname and the inscription “отр…”—”otryad” (squad), that is. And a brigade. A philologist's eye noted: what a mix of nations! And their accents gave them away.
At 5 p.m., the zone, which had seemed so large, suddenly filled to capacity: the first shift returned from work. After dinner and the evening roll call, I was invited “for tea.” About twenty men sat at a long table by a barrack; on the table, a three-liter jar of strong-brewed tea, a small pile of hard (“long-lasting,” as they said there) candies. Each took a candy—the mug went around the circle. I was taught: two sips, and pass it on. Moved by the attention and honor, I started to tell them about my case, but they politely stopped me: another time. I later appreciated this element of prisoner's ethics: there is something unsaid in every case, so one should not provoke a newcomer to be candid in such a large group. They asked for news: who had been imprisoned, whom had I met on the transport. It turned out I had been invited by fellow countrymen, but there were also people from other communities here: Lithuanians, Jews, Armenians, Moldovans, Moscow democrats… Oh, so this is a real international! And yet, the older Ukrainians do not see the need to resort to the “language of international unity.” When I answered, carefully choosing Russian words, a young, pleasant-looking man with a clearly non-Ukrainian surname on his jacket—Korenblit—said in Ukrainian: “We all understand Ukrainian here. Speak your own language. I, by the way, am a Jew from Ukraine.”
On closer acquaintance, it turned out that the division here was not only into national communities, but also by the nature of the charges. Approximately one-third consisted of partisans and underground fighters from Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Another third were accused of collaboration with the German occupiers, mostly from Ukraine and Belarus. These were all older men, with sentences of 15, or even 25, years. And only a third were “anti-Soviets” of various nationalities, mainly from the “seventies,” that is, those who had Article 70 in the criminal code of the RSFSR (in Ukraine, Art. 62). There were a few who had attempted to flee abroad, and occasionally, those accused of “treason.”
Among the “anti-Soviets,” a separate community stood out: the Jews, almost all of whom were co-defendants. The so-called “airplane people” (samolotchiki), convicted in the famous Leningrad trial of December 15–24, 1970. In those days, few managed to leave the USSR—the empire did not release its “labor force.” And Jews, feeling a pull to the land of their ancestors and seeing their lack of prospects in this state, began to strive en masse to leave it. So a group of daredevils decided on this plan. They bought all the tickets for a 12-seater AN-2 passenger plane from Leningrad to Priozersk with the intention of diverting it to Sweden. And then, come what may. They had their own pilot, Mark Dymshits. But a traitor was found, and they were all “busted” at the airport. Mark Dymshits and Eduard Kuznetsov received the death penalty, later commuted to 15 years of special-regime. They are imprisoned nearby, in Sosnovka. In this 19th zone, among the “airplane people,” are the artist Boris Penson (10 years), the dentist Mikhail Korenblit (8 years), the dental technician Anatoly Azernikov (3 years), Lassal Kaminsky (4 years), and Mikhail Goldfeld (3 years). In zone ZhKh-385/3-5, Israel Zalmanson is held; his sister Sylva is in the women's zone next door. On special-regime, there are two other non-Jewish “airplane people”—the Russian Yuri Fyodorov (15 years; we would later be in the same cell in the Urals; he used to say, “I got on the wrong streetcar…”) and the Ukrainian Oleksa Murzhenko (14 years). These two served their sentences “to the bell.”
I quickly got up to speed on zone affairs and within a few months was considered one of their own in the dissident circle, although, of course, not everything was trusted to everyone. The rule from the Decalogue of Ukrainian Nationalists was in effect: “Speak of the cause not with whom you can, but with whom you must.”
I was assigned to hard labor in the boiler room, where I had to work in three shifts. I could neither sleep nor eat—I became utterly exhausted. I started demanding to be sent to the hospital. I succeeded. The hospital was shared by three zones, and it served as a communication channel between them. The second channel was the punishment cell in our zone, also one for three camps. On August 26, the day before my departure to the hospital, Kronid Lyubarsky (a Moscow democrat, an astronomer from A.D. Sakharov's circle) approached me and asked if I could speak English.
“Very limited.”
“Tomorrow you go to the hospital. In the van with you will be Israel Zalmanson, returning from the punishment cell to his zone. You need to tell him something, but in a way the rats won't understand. And don't tell anyone about this: the information is too fresh. We will tell those who need to know later ourselves. Let's learn this phrase… And you also need to pass some candies to Kostia Didenko in the hospital. Just don't eat them or replace them with others.”
In the summer of 1974, Brezhnev had initiated negotiations with US President Nixon for most-favored-nation status for the USSR in trade. Then the talk turned to a conference of European heads of state in Helsinki. Political prisoners served as a bargaining chip in these trades. Rumors circulated about a list of 70 people who were about to be released on the condition that they would emigrate. All the “airplane people” were on it. In the summer, they suddenly started serving decent bread in the canteen, not prisoner's rations. Twice a week they cooked rice or semolina porridge. Several times they gave a cucumber and a tomato. The “commissary,” where one could buy 7 rubles' worth of food per month, became richer. They began to allow letters from abroad. Even with an address like: “USSR, Saransk, to Azernikov” (Saransk being the capital of Mordovia). It was said that in Barashevo of the Tenghushevo district, in the 3rd zone, one of the Jews had even received a letter from abroad with this address: “Mentovskaya ASSR, Dushegubsky district, poselok Parashevo” [A pun: ‘Cop ASSR, Murderer district, Parasite settlement’]. But this soon ended. “Mr. Nyet” (Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs A.A. Gromyko) said at a regular meeting with the Americans: “You misunderstood us. We did not promise you anything.”
The next day in the van, when I told Israel that his sister Sylva had just been released on August 24 and taken abroad, along with the Lithuanian sailor Simas Kudirka, he jumped up, unable to contain himself, much to the surprise of the old-timer prisoners traveling with us.
The Mordovian concentration camps, according to lore, were perhaps one of the first new construction projects of the Bolshevik government. At least, at one of the stations of the railway branch that was densely overgrown with concentration camps, I saw a memorial plaque: the “iron knight of the revolution,” Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, visited here in 1918. Why? Probably to supervise this new construction.
During Khrushchev's “thaw,” when the number of political prisoners dropped from millions to tens of thousands, they were concentrated in Mordovia. In the early 1970s, there were about a thousand of us here—in Mordovia, three strict-regime camps, a women's and a special-regime camp, three strict-regime camps in the Urals, and Vladimir Prison. I am only talking about those who had political articles from 56 to 64 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR. But many others were framed with criminal charges, and quite a few were “slanderers” (Art. 187-1), who were kept in criminal zones. And how many languished in psychiatric hospitals…
For the local Russified and demoralized population, the Mordovian concentration camps became a permanent place of work, indeed, a kind of collective farm from which they could take whatever they needed. The biggest boss in the village was the camp “master.” For a personal job done in the zone for a guard, foreman, or chief, they were paid with permission to take out a piece of sausage from a visit. Some were content with tea, which is a kind of currency in the zones. Still others took money. There was even a rate: for instance, for 100 rubles passed into the zone, they would take 25 for themselves. The more enterprising political prisoners began to use these human weaknesses to send out and receive information. Some channels operated continuously for years. Many verdicts were sent out: although they were fabricated, smart people in the world saw what for and how people were tried in the USSR. Someone suggested I should also pass on my verdict, but I didn't have it, because before being transported, the head of the KGB pre-trial detention center of the UkrSSR, Lieutenant Colonel Sapozhnikov, took it from me. It was too informative, a full 53 pages of text for the three of us—Yevhen Proniuk, Vasyl Lisovyi, and myself. Much later, I learned that the “master” of one such communication channel was the quiet and calm Boris Penson, about whom some complained, asking why he so rarely participated in collective protests. He would cite his long sentence, his health…
In those years, Ukrainian (or rather, anti-Ukrainian) journals and newspapers, like “Zhovten” and “Radyanska Ukraina,” often published feuilletons on the theme of the “union of the trident and the Star of David.” For us, this was information, albeit distorted. That union was indeed strengthening then, both in the West, in the diaspora, and in the East—in the concentration camps. There was a rumor that a monument to Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky had been erected in Tel Aviv. And here, our relations with the Jewish community were perhaps the best. Because we have a common enemy: the Russian empire called the USSR. Not only shared “teas,” but also joint hunger strikes and simultaneous protest statements strengthened this union. These actions only had an effect when information about them reached the outside world, and for this, we most often had the Jews to thank.
Lassal Kaminsky is being released in a few days. He brewed tea, called us Ukrainians over. He says: “Of course, if the call-up is for tomorrow, I’ll be leaving yesterday.” The rats hiss that the Ukrainians kissed the Jews, raised their hands up, and asked Golda Meir (then Prime Minister of Israel) to free them too.
Broader correspondence than ours, a greater international resonance for their cause, and great moral support in Israel gave the “airplane people” spirit and made them optimists. I remember, Mikhail Korenblit once said that the current generation of Jews lives in a happy time, because after two thousand years of dispersal and destruction, the people finally have the opportunity to rebuild their state. It is not a pity to die for such a cause. Isn’t it gratifying to read in a malicious feuilleton that “the Knesset (the parliament of Israel) in full went to shed a tear at the Wailing Wall” for these “criminal offenders,” who, at the cost of self-sacrifice, broke a path to freedom for thousands of Jews? It was gratifying for Boris Penson to receive an envelope from abroad with a stamp bearing his painting or portrait. For us Ukrainians, no prophets predicted anything similar then. Our only comfort was the realization that we had a clear conscience before Ukraine.
On October 30, 1975, for a sharp statement of protest in connection with the Day of the Political Prisoner in the USSR, I was sent to zone ZhKh-385/17a, the village of Ozerne (in Mordovian, Umor. My father, may he rest in peace, said during a visit: “What terrible names they have here: Umor, Mordovia, Tenghushevo. Like they’re from a soul-killer’s book.”) This was a punishment. The regime there was also strict, but in Russian prisons, it was never uniform everywhere, as it depended on the KGB agent's instructions, as well as the local tyrant. Here, such tyrants were the “countryman with zinc buttons” Captain Alexander Zinenko and his subordinate Lieutenant Ulevatyi. And a guard with the characteristic surname Kishka (Gut).
This zone was very small, with only 70 prisoners. Not a single Ukrainian “anti-Soviet.” But on the very first day, a man approached me and greeted me in Ukrainian. Mikhail Heifetz, a writer from Leningrad. Aha, so this is the Heifetz who, I had heard, wrote an essay about Joseph Brodsky and is now imprisoned for it. Upon closer acquaintance, I learned that Heifetz was 15 years older than me, born in 1934. He studied Russian philology at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute. He taught, responded to the Party's call to cultivate the virgin lands (he also taught in Kazakhstan). He was a postgraduate student, from which he was expelled. He worked again in Leningrad schools, but it was hard for him to be disingenuous with the students, so he turned to literary work. In particular, he ghostwrote a book for some general, who did not even mention whose “literary transcription” it was.
Knowing and deeply understanding poetry, Heifetz managed to read in Brodsky's poems what was only hinted at: the Czechoslovak events of 1968. A few conversations, a few notes—and you get a sentence of 4 years in prison and 2 years of exile. But Heifetz perceived this turn of fate as a creative assignment, a fortunate chance for a writer: priceless material was falling into his hands! One only had to experience it oneself… He had the imprudence to mention this to the investigator, which is why he was watched especially closely in the camps.
So, there he was, Mr. Mikhail, walking along the fences in his free time, hands shoved into the sleeves of his peacoat. And that peacoat hung on him as if on a scarecrow, the hat like on a stake, shuffling along in his clumsy boots… We sewed work gloves there—and even those, from under his machine, crawled out like crushed frogs. “You, Mr. Mikhail, must be that legendary Wandering Jew,” I told him. But what high-quality prose was gestating there along the fences, and then quickly written down in large chunks and sent into hiding, because keeping anything written with you was sometimes simply impossible. Here he is, stopped in the middle of the yard by Lieutenant Ulevatyi. He asks or says something, while his hands mechanically rummage through the prisoner's pockets. He takes out a notebook, leafs through it, puts it back—the man is at work, and Mr. Mikhail treats this calmly, with understanding.
We became close on the basis of shared philological interests. Heifetz was keenly interested in Ukraine. It was not without a desire to ease my mental state and give me a chance to speak my native tongue, as I was brought to the 17th zone into solitude, and I felt much worse there than in the 19th. Heifetz asked me to speak Ukrainian with him, as he had previously done with Zorian Popadiuk, who had just been transferred from there to the Vladimir Central Prison. I read Shevchenko's and other poems to Heifetz, shared with him our national problems: the status of the language, culture, the moral problems of an enslaved people. Heifetz was interested in Ukrainian affairs, and his “outside” perspective interested me. He tried to read in Ukrainian, sometimes asking me the meaning of individual words. I spoke slowly and clearly, translating individual words in parallel.
In February-May 1976, I was in the hospital, and when I returned to the 17th zone, Vasyl Stus had already been brought there after a stomach operation. Now he had a good interlocutor in Heifetz, and Heifetz's interest in Ukraine grew, for he saw who was next to him.
His phenomenal erudition and memory were astounding, but soon he surprised me even more.
Sometime in the summer, during a total shakedown (search), Stus's notebook of poems was confiscated and declared destroyed as being of no value (!!!). Similar “verdicts” were issued then in the women's zone for the drawings of Stefania Shabatura, the poems of Iryna Kalynets, and the embroideries of Nadiya Svitlychna. One can imagine the state of an artist whose work has been trampled by dirty guards' boots—it is like a mother learning of her child's murder... But then, in great secret, Mikhail tells me and Roman Semeniuk (a partisan, 28 years of imprisonment) that he has saved the drafts of Vasyl's poems: he had taken them to read before the search. So that these too would not be taken and destroyed, they needed to be memorized. Mr. Roman and I had time to copy only a few before I was taken on transport to Kyiv, “to have my brains washed.” I was returned to Mordovia two months later, but this time to the 19th zone, as the 17th had been liquidated over the summer. Heifetz brings me a notebook, filled with his spidery shorthand, and asks me to rewrite it cleanly, then dictates to me from memory about two dozen more poems in the same spidery Ukrainian, and I write them down, correcting them.
But soon Vasyl returned from the hospital and said that he had been “mistakenly” informed about the destruction of the notebook. That’s how they tormented him. Then I, secretly, just in case, rewrote that entire white notebook of Stus in my own hand, and also duplicated most of the poems with soda solution in magazine clippings, between the lines. In early 1977, I took all of that out of the zone completely legally.
And Heifetz also told me that during a visit, he had recited a poem by Stus from memory to his wife Raisa (she is Russian), a poem about a wife. Maybe this one: “Allow me today, around six o'clock…” Raisa said: “That woman is so fortunate! He has made her immortal.”
I tell these stories as examples of true internationalism.
Mikhail Heifetz used his encyclopedic knowledge and phenomenal memory in the best possible way: a book for every year of imprisonment. Before his prison term ended, his book “Place and Time” was published in the West, with many kind words about us, the Ukrainians. (Back home, in 1977, I heard about myself on Radio “Liberty.”) In 1983, the “Suchasnist” publishing house released his book of memoirs “Ukrainian Silhouettes,” in both Russian and Ukrainian. We, Ukrainians, were able to suffer a great deal in the concentration camps, but we were unable to write about it. Thanks to the Jew, Heifetz: to this day, no one has written better about us. (See the almanac “The Field of Despair and Hope.” Compiled by Roman Korohodsky. Kyiv, 1994, pp. 137-392. Also: Mikhail Heifetz. Selected Works. In three volumes. Vol. 3. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. – Kharkiv: Folio, 2000.) These are living, psychologically and factually authentic portraits of the then-living Ukrainians Vasyl Stus and Viacheslav Chornovil, as well as Mykola Rudenko and Zorian Popadiuk, who continued to be imprisoned under old and new sentences. This is perhaps the best testimony about the Ukrainian resistance movement of the 1970s. In the essays “The Holy Old Men of Ukraine” and “Bandera’s Sons,” we have historically true accounts of the insurgents Mykola Konchakivskyi and Petro Saranchuk, and of the leader of the Ukrainian National Front (1964–1967), Dmytro Kvetsko. The essay about me is titled “Vasyl Ovsiienko—A Martyr of the GULAG.” There are some factual inaccuracies, though not essential to my psychological profile. And it is not seemly to argue with the profile: this is how he perceived me.
On February 9, 1977, I was taken by a special convoy to Zhytomyr. A month before the end of my term, to be released on-site directly into administrative surveillance. Otherwise, prisoners, upon release, had started going on a pilgrimage to Moscow to see A.D. Sakharov and give interviews there. Mikhail was released in 1978 into exile in Kazakhstan, in the city of Yermak. I established a lively correspondence with him, until I was imprisoned again in early 1979.
While still in captivity, I received a fine letter and a photograph from Heifetz, where he is with his wife Raisa—she, like a Decembrist's wife, took both their daughters and went to him in Yermak. He wrote that he had appealed to the KGB of the UkrSSR with a letter in my defense. But in the summer of 1979—it was cut off: a new “case” was being prepared for me (it would keep me in captivity until August 21, 1988).
Meanwhile, I heard that Carter had exchanged the last of the “airplane people”—the Jews Dymshits and Kuznetsov, as well as our Valentyn Moroz and someone else for two Soviet spies sentenced to 30 years in the US. On June 18, 1979, Brezhnev and Carter exchanged a hearty kiss, signing the SALT-2 treaty (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), and the prison of nations froze over for almost another decade...
In March 1980, Heifetz completed his “Soviet universities” and left for the homeland of his ancestors. There, in addition to the aforementioned books, he published “The Prisoner-of-War Secretary” about Paruyr Hayrikyan—the leader of the National United Party of Armenia, an exceptionally talented and colorful figure; “A View from Jerusalem,” and “Regicide”—about the execution of the Russian imperial family. From 1982 to 1990, he was a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then co-published the newspaper “Den” (The Day) with Eduard Kuznetsov, and appears on television—he has become one of the leading journalists in Israel.
After Ukraine's independence, another great champion of improving Ukrainian-Jewish relations, Yakov Suslensky, also a Soviet political prisoner who emigrated to Israel upon his release, established the “Israel-Ukraine” society there. He initiated a Ukrainian-Israeli conference in Jerusalem, to which, among others, nine former Ukrainian political prisoners were invited, including myself. Then, in September 1992, I visited the most sacred places for a Christian: the Garden of Gethsemane, walked the Via Dolorosa, was in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, at Golgotha, and even in the Tomb of Christ. I say that my path to Jerusalem lay through Mordovia and the Urals.
In Jerusalem, I was fortunate to meet Mikhail Heifetz again. In a garden near the university dormitory, we sat, former fellow prisoners Yevhen Sverstiuk, Zinoviy Antoniuk, Yevhen Proniuk, Oleksa Riznykiv, Bohdan Rebryk, Mykhailo Horyn, Yakov Suslensky, Aryeh Vudka, Semyon Mogilever, and Mikhail Heifetz. We recited Vasyl Stus's poems, reminisced about the not-so-distant times when we starved and drank tea together, when with great risk we prepared scarce information and statements to be passed to the outside world, for which we were punished again, when the Ukrainian (or rather, anti-Ukrainian) newspapers and magazines sizzled with talk of the “union of the trident and the Star of David.” This is it—our union against the Evil Empire.
In 1993, I received a letter from Jerusalem. Heifetz wrote that he had started a new book: “I found documents about the life of a remarkable guy. He lived for 38 years and was shot in Kolyma in 1942, and before that he served 6 years on the first go-around and 5 on the second, 11 in total, and well, the third time, naturally, they shot him. He was versatilely talented—an economist and a violinist, a translator and a composer, an artist and a prose writer. In short, I want to leave a trace of this person.”
This person was Veniamin Bromberg. He was born in 1904 in Kherson, first arrested in Odesa in 1926 as an activist of the “Jugend-Z.S.” party (“Young Zionists”). Heifetz asked me to appeal to the Security Service of Ukraine for access to Bromberg's case file, if it had survived. As co-chairman of the “Helsinki-90” committee, I made such a request. The case is in Kyiv, the SBU granted permission, and I was glad to host Mikhail at my home. In gratitude, on September 17, 1998, he brought me his book about Veniamin Bromberg, “The Sad Scroll of Memories,” published in Jerusalem in 1996.
On Human Rights Day in 2000, we had another good opportunity to welcome Mikhail Heifetz in Kyiv: we presented his three-volume set, published by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. On June 29, 2002, he came to Kharkiv at the invitation of the Sokhnut to give lectures—and Zorian Popadiuk, Ihor Kravtsiv, and I went to meet our friend.
Evreiskie Vesti. – 1993. – No. 23–24 (43–44). – December; Ukraine – Israel. Journal of Literature, Art, and Politics. – 1993. – No. 2. – pp. 108–112.
On the KHPG website since February 25, 2008.
Photo: Mikhail Heifetz with his wife Raisa in exile in the city of Yermak (Kazakhstan) 4.06.1979.
