Mykola MURATOV
On the Path to an Independent Ukraine: A Look into the Past from Moscow
First, I want to say a little about myself. I was born in 1950 in Yaroslavl Oblast, where my father, Fedir Yakovych Voilenko, a military builder, was involved in the construction of Moscow’s third air defense belt. My father was from the eastern part of Belgorod Oblast, an area heavily populated by Ukrainians where they still speak Ukrainian in the villages today. My mother, Hanna Onykiivna Kuropatkina, came from a family of Belarusian peasants from Mogilev Governorate who had moved to Siberia during the Stolypin reforms of the early 20th century. Both of my parents’ first marriages had dissolved by that time, and under the laws of the day, I was registered under the surname of my mother’s first husband. That is how I became Muratov.
In 1952, my father was arrested for a minor administrative offense and sentenced to 12 years in prison. We (I was 1.5 years old, my sister was 6) were evicted from our service apartment, and our property was confiscated, which consisted of a goat that gave milk to the children and an ARZ radio receiver. After that, my family had to wander around the country; we lived in Belgorod Oblast—our father’s homeland—and then on Sakhalin Island. So I have good reason to “thank Comrade Stalin for my happy childhood.” In 1958, the family moved to Ukraine, to the Donbas city of Stalino, which became Donetsk in 1961. I finished secondary school here and, after working for a year in a mine, moved to Moscow, where my older half-sister lived. In 1969, I entered the Medical and Biological Faculty of the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute, from which I graduated in 1975 with a degree in medical biophysics. As conceived by the faculty’s founding fathers, we, as physicians with fundamental training in physics, chemistry, and biology, were supposed to shake the theoretical foundations of medicine. But personally, I didn’t get to shake anything because I myself was shaken by the communist reality at the very beginning of my scientific career. Unlike most, I could not reconcile myself with the gap that had formed in the country between everyday corruption and the moral slogans of the CPSU. For example, why, with declared universal equality, did a separate system for supplying the population with goods and services exist? Why was trade in the USSR conducted with different currencies, reminiscent of the currency system of occupied territories, as was the case during the war with Germany? After all, as I found out, such segregation did not even exist in the country where apartheid triumphed—South Africa—where passports and registration were mandatory only for the non-white population. Trying to clarify these issues for myself, I began to study Soviet law on my own, poring over all the textbooks for Soviet lawyers and the legal codes. By 1980, my interest in medical and biological sciences had completely waned, and I moved to work in practical healthcare. I had to support two children, so I had to take a job as a laboratory doctor in the Kremlin hospital, where I rose to head of the hormone department. My work at the Central Clinical Hospital of the 4th Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Health (as this medical institution was officially called) coincided with the dying off of the elderly part of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. The “Great Beginning” was started by Comrade Kosygin in December 1980, then it was picked up by Comrade Suslov in January 1982, and in November by Comrade Brezhnev himself. I didn’t get to attend Andropov’s funeral; by that time, I had already been forced to resign. Under the threat of arrest. By then, I had begun to align with the religious sphere of the human rights movement. This was a movement of Christian ecumenists led by Sandro Riga. For about two years, our group of 10–15 people gathered weekly at our apartment and another one for prayerful fellowship. We also discussed general political topics and exchanged samizdat and tamizdat. By early 1984, they had finally “cleaned us up.” Sandro was thrown into a special psychiatric hospital, although I am prepared to vouch that his mental health at that time was better than mine. Several activists were also arrested in Ukraine. Several searches were conducted in our group to confiscate “subversive literature.” Before that, at the Kremlin hospital in January 1983, I was demoted and began receiving reprimands on trumped-up charges, and my immediate superior conveyed some “friendly advice” to resign of my own accord, “otherwise you will be imprisoned.” I made such a compromise, and the repression against me was limited to the fact that I couldn't get any job in my specialty for two months, which, in the absence of savings, plunged me into poverty.
It should be noted that the Chekist pressure in Moscow was lighter than in other parts of the country, especially in Ukraine. Foreign journalists, embassies, and a large number of foreign tourists probably did not allow for the creation of such a dense operational-investigative surveillance network around every dissident as in other places in the country. In our circles, there were even opinions that dissidents with Moscow residency permits possessed some sort of “Roman citizenship” rights, which was especially felt when reading or listening to the “Chronicle of Current Events” on the radio.
At the beginning of 1985, a spirit of change began to blow through Moscow. I felt it in conversations with communists—my colleagues at the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. They stopped shutting me up, threatening me that with such statements I wouldn't last long on the outside, and so on. And when a postgraduate student from Ukraine named Hrunko went to “consult” with the district committee of the CPSU about my anti-Soviet conversations (his counter-argument in our disputes was that we were still living in the first phase of communism—socialism—and in the second phase—full communism—all shortcomings would disappear), he was told that such views were now permissible and much in the country would be reconsidered. Thus began the era of perestroika and glasnost for me.
By the beginning of 1987, perestroika in the USSR had entered a stage of recognizing the existence of a political opposition and political prisoners in the country. A mass release of political prisoners, convicted under Articles 70 and 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code and similar articles of the union republics, began. This was presented as an act of pardon, amnesty, and so on, but not yet rehabilitation.
The long-standing monopoly of the CPSU Central Committee on any political, public, cultural, and generally any social activity in the country led to the fact that the open and unspoken opposition encompassed the entire socio-political, intellectual, and nationalist spectrum of Soviet society, from the guardians of “communist purity” to those who would eventually become “terrorists.”
It was already evident then that the economic theory and practice of real socialism had been disproven by life, and social forecasts, including on the national question, had not been confirmed. A systemic crisis had set in in the USSR; significant changes were brewing in the country, and a tragic turn of events in the form of civil war, famine, and complete economic collapse was not ruled out.
In the circles of the religious, educational, and human rights movement, to which I belonged and in which I had participated since the early 80s, optimistic scenarios of social restructuring along Western lines prevailed: a market economy based on private property, democracy based on political pluralism, separation of powers, and so on. A just national arrangement seemed to follow from democracy and would be a consequence of respecting human rights. The Ukrainian problem, although it was known that almost half of the political prisoners in the USSR were Ukrainians, did not particularly stand out in our circle. Especially against the backdrop of the struggle for the right of Jews to emigrate and the Crimean Tatar issue. Being a Ukrainian by origin, I had lived in Ukraine before moving to Moscow, but in a part of it where Ukrainianness was demeaned to a rural level. My Ukrainian identity was revived by Ukrainian dissidents like Chornovil, Hel, the Horyn brothers, Vasyl Barladianu, and others.
By mid-1987, when the number of released political prisoners in Moscow had reached a certain level and Moscow’s Chekists had stopped barging into dissidents’ private apartments for the purpose of… (they would make up the purpose on the spot, for example, checking passport regimes based on an anonymous call), it became possible to hold public events: seminars, press conferences, etc., in these premises, now freed from the KGB press. One such project was the “Glasnost” press club with a samizdat magazine of the same name. The project was led by Serhiy Hryhoryants and Lev Timofeyev. For December of that same 1987, as a kind of challenge to the authorities, the first-ever open seminar on humanitarian problems in the USSR was planned. Among the 10 planned sections, section No. 3 was formulated as “National Problems.” Viacheslav Chornovil and Paruyr Hayrikyan were approved as coordinators. The subheadings outlined the following topics:
– the current state of domestic legislation in the field of national relations and international agreements on human rights;
– glasnost and national problems;
– legislative, social, general cultural, etc., measures necessary to bring the legal situation on the national question into line with international agreements and pacts on human rights;
– the specific nature of measures for governmental guarantees and public control in the field of national problems.
For historical reference, we note that all seminar sections, except for No. 3, worked on schedule, although the state premises rented for the opening, general discussion, and closing of the conference were closed under fictitious pretexts (sanitary, technical, and fire safety conditions). Everything took place in private apartments. However, the authorities did not even allow the seminar on national issues to take place in private homes. Viacheslav Chornovil, the Horyn brothers, Ivan Hel from Lviv, and other participants and speakers from Ukraine, the Baltics, and Armenia were detained while boarding trains and planes or were removed from trains in transit. Vasyl Barladianu was even held under house arrest for several days. With this, the ruling elite marked the main sore and vulnerable point of the communist regime—the national question—and thus drove the problem even deeper. There were two years left until the beginning of the collapse of the USSR, and another two until its complete dissolution.
By this time, the end of 1987, through the mediation of Vasyl Barladianu and Yurko Rudenko, I was introduced to the circle of Ukrainian national-democratic human rights activists and was publicizing the facts of the persecution of Greek Catholics. From my apartment phone, Yosyp Terelia transmitted the “Declaration on the UGCC’s Emergence from the Underground” to the West in August 1987. In December, I was co-opted as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, representing the Moscow correspondent point for the “Ukrayinskyi Visnyk” (Ukrainian Herald) as the organ of the UHG. From about this time, my three-room apartment in Moscow’s Kyivskyi district, near the “Ukraina” cinema, on a street named after the “Serbian internationalist of Croatian descent Oleko Dundich,” became the representative office of a future independent and democratic Ukraine. I finalized my commitment to Ukrainian affairs in January 1988, having traveled to Lviv. The reception I received gave me grounds to jokingly say to the Lvivites: “You are welcoming me as if I had spent several decades in prison for Ukraine’s freedom.”
In general, I have a penchant for jokes; I could even joke with the agents of external surveillance. I want to tell you about one such joke that, in my opinion, was successful. I remember once, after Viacheslav Maksymovych’s rough deportation from Kyiv to Lviv in 1988, I persuaded him to come to Moscow for “psychological rehabilitation” in the company of Western journalists and diplomats who were eager to hear his account of recent events in Ukraine. After visiting a number of embassies and holding a press conference at my home, Chornovil, a Western journalist who had stayed behind after the press conference, and I left the building and headed for the metro. A young man got up from a bench near the entrance and followed us, unhurriedly, at a distance of about 10 meters. After crossing the street, at the edge of a small park, we noticed a drunken man in his 40s lying on the ground. “This is how you should work, this is a real professional,” I said, speaking deliberately loudly to Chornovil and the journalist, glancing at the tail. To my delight, my companions visibly cheered up, and the little Chekist was smiling too. We walk on. An elderly couple is walking towards us, arm in arm. “Viacheslav Maksymovych!” I say, just as loudly. “They’ve mobilized all their reserves from the depot for you!” Generally, Chornovil called my sense of humor Ukrainian, and he even opened a “humor corner” with it in the “Ukrayinskyi Visnyk.”
Why was such a man and such a place needed in Moscow? Because until 1990, there were no permanently accredited foreign journalists or diplomats from democratic countries in Ukraine who were showing a heightened interest in Ukrainian affairs at the time. Gatherings of oppositionists in private apartments and houses in Ukraine were still being broken up by the police and the KGB; telephone communication with the West was unstable. In the Ukrainian press of that time, human rights defenders were being persecuted just as they were before perestroika. Public opinion was being prepared for the expulsion of Chornovil and Mykhailo Horyn from the country. Greek Catholics were persecuted with administrative fines and arrests of up to 15 days. As an example of this “terrorization,” I’ll cite a case with UGCC Bishop Ivan Marhitych from Zakarpattia. One time in the summer of 1988, after he visited me at my work at the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, where our meeting was documented by the authorities, I was seeing the Bishop off to his train. Once inside the car, he noticed the conductor in uniform and mistook him for a policeman. He quickly handed me some documents and suggested I hurry to another car.
“Your Grace,” I said to the bishop, “that’s just a railway worker in uniform.” And we both broke into smiles.
Anatoliy Dotsenko and I reported all these outrages to Western press agencies, and from the beginning of 1989, Anatoliy began broadcasting news from Ukraine on the airwaves through the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty.
I would like to say a few words about Anatoliy Dotsenko as well. This generally courageous man did a lot for Ukraine, but he had one flaw: he was prone to wasting time in restaurants and the associated amusements. Perhaps this was how he relieved psychological stress. But later this led him to severe alcoholism in the form of binge drinking and a premature death in his early 40s. This was also facilitated by the fact that Anatoliy received fees for his reports on Radio Liberty, and for those times, they were significant sums. But he received the information by phone from various regions of Ukraine as an employee of the UHU information service, and, to be honest, it wasn’t money he had earned. This was some kind of oversight by the UHU leadership, particularly Viacheslav Maksymovych. Dotsenko did not share his profits with his correspondents or the UHU, but usually squandered them in taverns. And he often got into drunken troubles. Moreover, he was jealous of the fact that a large part of the information from Ukraine went to the West through me (we couldn't have handled the entire flow alone), meaning he wanted to be a monopolist, the only source of news from Ukraine in Moscow. I suspected him of organizing several threatening phone calls to me during his alcoholic blackouts. I recognized the voice of one of his drinking buddies, a student from Western Ukraine who was affiliated with the UHU. And once, while drunk and under my psychological pressure, he admitted that they were just drunken jokes from him and that student. Fine jokes: “We’ll cut you to pieces,” and so on. Besides this, I had enough genuine telephone threats from Chekist scum. Such calls really got to me and threw me off my work rhythm. They would start in Ukrainian: “Is this Pan Mykola Muratov?” And then the threats would follow.
Although the relevant authorities could have somehow manipulated Anatoliy, using his weaknesses. They couldn't have ignored the fact that Radio Liberty’s audience in Ukraine numbered in the millions. Dotsenko had good diction, was fluent in Ukrainian, and had all the makings of a radio journalist. His reports were very popular or, as they say now, had a very high rating in Ukraine.
Generally, Anatoliy reached out to us on his own initiative, by writing a letter to Chornovil at his Lviv address, and we went to his home for an initial meeting. Before that, he had been leaning towards Novodvorskaya’s Democratic Union and, according to reports, had behaved provocatively towards the police at their rallies. Psychologically and in terms of mentality, Anatoliy Dotsenko was something of an opposite to me. I am a Russified Ukrainian with a Russian surname, raised in Russian culture, and he was half-Russian, half-Kazakh, but with a Ukrainian surname, raised in a Ukrainian family, so he considered himself Ukrainian. We had an equal relationship; he respected me as an older comrade and accepted my criticism of his lifestyle and drinking, but not seriously and not for long. In the last years of his life, as a doctor, I directly told him about the mortal danger posed by prolonged binges. This form of alcohol dependence is more destructive to one’s health than even daily drinking. On top of that, he terrorized his adoptive parents. All forms of treatment and my life-saving conversations proved futile. About six months before his death, in our last telephone conversation, when he told me that blood had appeared in his urine, I told him directly that this was his second-to-last binge and that he would die after the next one. He agreed and said that his friend, a narcologist, said the same thing. But even the threat of death did not stop him.
In 1988, Moscow was boiling with events and activities organized by dissidents and former political prisoners; political groups and circles were being created almost daily, new samizdat journals were announced, old publications emerged from the underground, they associated and cooperated with each other, unions were formed and dissolved, and so on. In general, a unifying and creative trend prevailed in the development of the human rights movement in the country. The trend towards the collapse of the USSR was not yet clearly visible. It seemed we would all undergo perestroika together. At my home, Ukrainians met with Balts, Georgians, and Armenians, exchanged views and information, and posed and resolved some issues. And it was more than just prison camp friendship. The Lithuanian priest Alfonsas Svarinskas, the future chief chaplain of the Lithuanian army, was emigrating. The send-off and farewell for fellow camp inmates, among whom was a real CIA agent, Norik Grigoryan, took place at my home. Life was humming.
Chornovil appointed me on behalf of the “Ukrayinskyi Visnyk,” and Ivan Hel on behalf of the Committee for the Defense of the UGCC’s organ, “Khrystyianskyi Holos” (Christian Voice), to be a representative in the Association of Independent Press, created by Alexander Podrabinek. I remember that in my speech I complained that for Ukrainian-speaking journalists in the USSR, they don’t even produce typewriters with a Ukrainian font. However, the difficulty was the same for everyone—the state’s monopoly on printing equipment and duplicating technology. Now, few remember that until 1987, the import of personal computers and printers into the USSR was carried out through the permit system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. And there was no access to typographic equipment until 1991.
Mykhailo Horyn introduced me to Paruyr Hayrikyan and Merab Kostava as the representative of Ukraine in the Association for Aid to Former Political Prisoners. Oles Shevchenko also appointed me as a representative of Ukrainian dissidents, but to what, I no longer remember. Merab and I also planned to publish a journal on national issues; more precisely, he proposed that I publish such a samizdat journal in Moscow.
However, I considered my main task to be my participation in the press service of the UHG-UHU, where my boss was Viacheslav Chornovil, and in the Committee for the Defense of the UGCC, where, being something of an expert on Soviet religious legislation, I served as a legal consultant. My boss in the Committee was Ivan Hel.
A flow of humanitarian aid to Ukraine from foreigners and overseas Ukrainians, as well as literature—so-called tamizdat—also went through me. Thanks to me, some Ukrainian dissident authors saw their printed works, published in the West, for the writing of which they had been imprisoned, for the first time.
Part of my work was confidential and sensitive, especially related to receiving books and some sums in foreign currency, which could have led to criminal prosecution. This caused me psychological tension, and at the slightest opportunity, I tried to unwind in Ukraine, where I felt psychologically calmer. Besides, I was fascinated by the work of providing concrete legal assistance to priests and communities of the UGCC in western Ukraine. I wanted to test in practice the effect of the recently adopted USSR Law “On the Procedure for Appealing Illegal Actions of Officials” to stop the administrative repressions against Greek Catholics. However, such lawsuits did not bring the desired result, although the propaganda and psychological effect was undoubtedly present.
In the summer of 1988, having taken my regular leave from work (as a research fellow at the Research Institute of Human Morphology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences), I flew to Lviv, having previously arranged my visit with Chornovil. I settled in Chornovil’s apartment on Levitana Street. The purpose of the trip, among other things, included a vacation somewhere in the Carpathians. This was also part of Viacheslav’s plans, but on the spot, the trip to the Carpathians had to be postponed for about ten days.
At this time, semi-spontaneous rallies began in Lviv, and the authorities were frightened by this turn of events. I call them semi-spontaneous because many people gathered with minimal effort from the organizers. And so, the “disturbers of the peace,” Chornovil and M. Horyn, are summoned to the deputy prosecutor of the region, and they invite me along as a “Moscow lawyer.” As it turned out, the purpose of the summons was not procedural; it was just a conversation aimed at intimidation. Therefore, when I asked the prosecutor to clarify the purpose of the summons and the procedural status of “my clients,” who had not violated any laws, and the right to rallies and meetings is enshrined in the constitutions of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR and international Pacts on human rights ratified by the USSR, the deputy prosecutor of the region became very agitated and demanded that I leave the office. After protesting for form’s sake for a minute or two, I left the office. In short, I acted as a lightning rod, and Slavko and Mykhailo got less of the official’s wrath. Besides playing the role of defender, I also wrote a one-page proclamation about the people’s right to hold rallies, citing the laws of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR. After all, how were the May Day and November demonstrations of workers held in the country then? The city and district executive committees did not give any prior permission. There was no separate legislation on this issue, and the perestroika authorities had put forward the slogan: “Everything that is not forbidden is permitted.” According to Father Yaroslav Lesiv, my proclamation was a success.
At that time, work was also underway in Lviv to reorganize the UHG into an all-Ukrainian political organization, the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. I had not been previously privy to these plans, perhaps for security reasons, so Viacheslav Maksymovych’s request to outline the section on the statutory principles of the UHU (the “Declaration of Principles”) of the future organization caught me by surprise.
He asked me to write the section on human rights based on international pacts. Although I considered myself an expert on this issue, I felt less than confident without the literature I had left behind in Moscow. However, Chornovil reassured me, saying that he was interested in general principles and the names of the documents, without specific references to the articles of the international Pacts on human rights. I wrote such a reference document of several pages by hand. The Horyn brothers, Ivan Hel, Zinoviy Krasivskyi, Vasyl Barladianu, and Stepan Khmara had similar tasks (on other topics). Maybe someone else, whom I don't know about. But what has stuck in my memory is that the main author of the UHU’s “Declaration of Principles” was Chornovil. Having collected this reference and draft material into a separate folder, Viacheslav Maksymovych said that we could now go to the Carpathians via Morshyn. Zinoviy Krasivskyi, who lives there, would drive us further. We took a bus to Morshyn via Stryi. Ivan Svitlychnyi, a famous Ukrainian dissident paralyzed by a stroke, was living with Zinoviy Mykhailovych at the time. His wife was taking care of him. The next day, Chornovil’s wife Atena joined us with her grandson Vasylko, and we set off (not without a Chekist escort) on our journey. First stop—Bolekhiv. We talked with Father Yaroslav Lesiv and found out his attitude towards the UHU. It now became clear to me that, besides a vacation, Viacheslav Maksymovych would also be resolving personnel issues for the future organization. The final destination of our trip was Chernivtsi. While in Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk, organizational matters did not pose any problems, in Chernivtsi, besides Yosyp Zisels, there were no cadres, and Yosyp himself was under administrative surveillance and could not come to either Lviv or Kyiv. Therefore, after visiting Panas Zalyvakha in Ivano-Frankivsk and making short stops in Prokurava and Kosmach, we reached Chernivtsi. The administratively surveilled Zisels agreed to join the UHU and organize a regional branch.
By night, we returned to Morshyn and, after spending the night at Zinoviy Krasivskyi’s, took a bus back to Lviv. The next day I flew to Donetsk, where my family was staying with my sister. When I arrived in Donetsk (the flight was a transit, Lviv-Volgograd), they told me that the suitcase I had checked in as luggage had flown on to Volgograd. They gave me some form to fill out, either for a search request or a claim. However, before I could fill it out, my luggage was “found.” What they were looking for in there, I don’t know. Oh, they really love to rummage through dirty laundry, in the literal sense of the words! All the confidential materials were with me in my carry-on bag. In Donetsk, on Chornovil's instructions, I was supposed to visit a sympathizer (I've forgotten his name) of our movement and give him an invitation to join the UHU. Slavko also asked me to visit Hryhoriy Hrebeniuk in Kramatorsk for the same purpose. I didn't find anyone at the address in Donetsk, and I didn't get to Kramatorsk due to lack of time, as I needed to return to Moscow; my vacation was ending.
Besides myself and Anatoliy Dotsenko, there were about a dozen other people of Ukrainian descent in our circle of Moscow Ukrainians who shared our views to one degree or another. Dotsenko mostly socialized with them; I, due to a lack of time, did so quite rarely. Now, having received the task from Chornovil to create a Moscow branch of the UHU, I began to make close contact with these people. Some of them were Moscow residents, while about half were students who had come to study. Many of them exuded a Komsomol-like zeal. In general, my experience of communicating with Ukrainians in Moscow had been negative. Fate mostly brought me together with careerists and people of a non-dissident mentality, Soviet people in their purest form. The contingent for the UHU needed to be a bit better, and in some, I saw clear KGB informants. But I always tried to ignore this fact, because our activities were completely legal.
In September, we held a founding meeting where, at Dotsenko’s suggestion, I was elected coordinator, the head of the Moscow branch of the UHU. We gathered once or twice a month. The agenda items were mainly about the current events of those days. All I remember is that we protested against the arrest of Ivan Makar by the Lviv prosecutor’s office under Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“spreading deliberately false fabrications”). One of the charges was the dissemination of the UHU’s “Declaration of Principles.” At Chornovil’s request, I started looking for a “well-known Moscow lawyer” for Ivan Makar’s future trial. The trial was supposed to be unique in the sense that it was the only case in the entire country under this article during the perestroika era. Ernest Mikhailovich Ametistov, a renowned legal scholar who later became a member of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation—I knew him from the “Perestroika” club—gave me the contact details of three highly qualified and most famous lawyers of that time—their names were still widely known until recently. For various reasons, they declined to participate in the trial. That’s what I reported to Chornovil. As an option, my own involvement in the case was also considered. Ernest Mikhailovich began to prepare me theoretically for the process. Although I had no experience defending in criminal cases, I did not lack courage. After all, we considered the main factor and method of defense to be giving Makar’s case wide public resonance. This, apparently, was also feared by the prosecution. The case was closed.
The response that came to my home address from the Lviv City Prosecutor’s Office to our letter of protest could not help but bring a smile. Unfortunately, I gave the original to someone in Ukraine without keeping a copy. But it read, almost verbatim, as follows: “To the Moscow Branch of the UHU. We inform you that the case against Ivan Makar under Art. 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR has been terminated due to the absence of a corpus delicti. Prosecutor, signature.” So there, I joked, all it took was for the Muscovites to complain—and the case was dropped.
We also participated with Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flags in general Moscow rallies and demonstrations organized by “Democratic Russia.” The flags were brought by members of the Ukrainian Youth Club, which was affiliated with the UHU. If I’m not mistaken, there was an opinion that the frequency of Ukrainian national symbols appearing at public events in Moscow at that time even outpaced the similar process in Ukraine. However, the central leadership of the UHU wanted more from Moscow and Russia. Mykhailo and Bohdan Horyn regularly reminded me that millions of Ukrainians live in Russia, and we should awaken their national consciousness and involve them in our movement. But I could not do this for two reasons: I do not have the talent of a tribune and a public politician, and second—these are not the Ukrainians we need.
For all our shortcomings, the Moscow branch of the UHU was a fully operational fighting unit. We, in particular, responded to events in the Baltics and other republics where perestroika was being stalled. My person, as its coordinator, was represented on the UHU Coordination Council, and I regularly traveled to Kyiv for its meetings.
I recall how at one of the first meetings of the Coordination Council in Kyiv, in a private house in the Podil district, chaired by Vasyl Ovsienko, two policemen entered. One introduced himself as the local officer and declared that we were holding an illegal meeting because, you see, we were voting on the agenda and other things. The Law on Rallies, Demonstrations, Meetings, and Street Processions had already been passed, which stipulated a permit-based procedure for such events. However, this law did not apply to meetings in private residential premises, and not because it (the Law) was so democratic, but for the simple reason that the constitutional principle of the inviolability of private life and home did not give the same local officer or other operatives legal grounds to enter homes: to peep, to eavesdrop, etc., up to agent infiltration to find out the reasons and pretexts for this gathering. That is, it was impossible to legally establish the illegality of a meeting in a private house, which constituted an administrative offense. It was possible to infiltrate in the above-mentioned way only in the course of investigating criminal cases. In Moscow, this legal principle had already been observed for two years, judging by the fact that the last raid on my apartment under the pretext of checking the passport regime was in June 1987. In Kyiv, however, this was still ignored, and I briefly reminded the law enforcement officers that their actions were illegal. “And as for the purpose of our gathering,” I continued, “we sent some people for vodka and are waiting for them to return.” “And what about snacks?” (The table was empty). “But snacks were abolished back in the last five-year plan,” I finished with a phrase from a well-known joke. Everyone smiled, and the policemen left. We managed to hold the meeting, but later, as I found out, the owner of the house was still fined. (Apparently, this refers to the UHU Coordination Council meeting around April 8, 1989, at Dmytro Fedoriv’s house at 10 Olehivska Street. The owner told the local policeman that we were celebrating Ovsienko’s birthday. That’s how I found myself at the center of the event. But I was not the secretary of the UHU, only a member of the Coordination Council, and later the head of the Zhytomyr regional branch, which was created on July 16, 1989. – V. Ovsienko).
At the peak of my activity, which was from mid-1987 to the end of 1990, I had to work as if I had three jobs: first and second places were taken by the human rights and religious components, but a lot of time was also taken up by the purely domestic aspect: someone was going somewhere somehow, and I had to meet and see off guests. Sometimes tasks overlapped, and I was on the verge of physical and moral exhaustion.
So what did I do specifically? I took and transmitted information to the West, after having processed and printed it for the fax machine. I met with a multitude of journalists, diplomats, and Sovietologist political scientists at their request and on the recommendation of my chiefs from Ukraine. I received and transferred office equipment to Ukraine: computers, printers, fax machines, etc. Having some popularity in Ukraine, I had to receive a lot of petitioners and walkers on private matters. Sometimes there were walkers with requests to publicize their delusional complaints. In this sense, the situation in the country was catastrophic; few believed the official authorities and law enforcement agencies, and often the simple inaction of the authorities was perceived as the machinations of the special services. I do not exclude the possibility that someone specifically sent litigants and mentally ill people to human rights organizations. You know, like “the authorities have installed equipment in the neighbors’ apartment and are irradiating me.” They invariably demanded that the complaints be forwarded to the UN. Here I remembered my university lectures on psychiatry. While in the West, delusional disorders are dominated by business-related plots, in the USSR, the special services are usually woven into the fabric of the delusion. This was the result of the “Chekization and OGPU-ization” of our lives. KGB-mania did not spare the dissidents themselves. There too, mutual suspicions and accusations of collaborating with the KGB were not uncommon. The author of these lines did not escape such accusations either.
In mid-May 1989, a UGCC delegation consisting of two bishops—Philemon Kurchaba and Pavlo Vasylyk—and several priests came to Moscow by prior arrangement for a meeting at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. They had previously been promised a reception and a substantive conversation at the level of responsible officials of the Presidium on the subject of the legalization of the UGCC. However, on the spot, they were denied a reception and sent to the Council for Religious Affairs. The delegates were disappointed by this turn of events. Firstly, they knew what this Council was—it was one of the operational divisions of the 5th Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, and secondly, they had recently been there, six months ago, on the same issue, and had not received a response. At the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, they wanted to appeal, as it were, the inaction of the Council for Religious Affairs. Therefore, the Greek Catholics announced that they would not leave the reception area until they were received at the proper level and declared a hunger strike. After fasting in the Presidium's reception area until the end of reception hours, they left the building and returned home to perform their pastoral duties. News of the hunger strike declared by the bishops and priests of the UGCC quickly spread through Anatoliy Dotsenko to Western news agencies, and the delegates themselves transmitted this information to Ukraine. Believers in Western Ukraine, together with the Committee for the Defense of the UGCC, decided to support the initiative. Thus, from mid-May, a relay hunger strike and simultaneous picketing demanding the legalization of the UGCC began on the Arbat in Moscow. A permanent contingent of 10-15 hunger-striking picketers was housed in several apartments and spent all daylight hours with appropriate posters on the Arbat, at that time the only pedestrian street in Moscow, a landmark most frequently visited by foreigners. I recommended the Arbat to Ivan Hel as the place for the protest, also because the authorities did not require prior permission for any actions there. At that time, informals sang, danced, rallied, picketed, and protested there.
The protest lasted several months and tired me out considerably. Besides, I believed it was diverting protest forces from Ukraine. The Ukrainian authorities at that time needed pressure from below more than the Moscow ones.
I directed most of the participants to the Arbat both directly and by telephone, which never stopped ringing. Some of the hunger strikers spent the night at my place. The infrastructure of my apartment could barely withstand such an influx. Because the hunger strikers constantly occupied the phone, I couldn’t be reached on other matters from either Ukraine or the West. Moreover, I am generally not a supporter of hunger strikes as an act of protest. And considering the growing food problems in the country, demonstrative hunger strikes were beneficial to the authorities. The communist authorities were waiting for the whole country to declare a hunger strike and… thus solve the food problem, I would joke ironically. In addition, the PR effect of the protest began to drop catastrophically. Journalistic interest in it had almost disappeared. In short, I was waiting for the command from Lviv to wind down the picket, although formally and factually I did not coordinate it and did not participate in it myself. And so, sometime in November, Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk, who initiated this protest, called me, and to my question about the hunger strike, which had gone unnoticed, he told me that it was time to end it. Overall, the protest was useful but had exhausted itself. (According to some data, the protest lasted from May 19 to November 24, 1989). And so I began to tell those who wanted to replace the hunger strikers, both by phone and in person.
After this, Stepan Khmara, who coordinated the hunger strike on behalf of the Committee for the Defense of the UGCC and had personally come to Moscow several times, accused me of disrupting the event and “acting on the instructions of the KGB.” He told me this personally at my home. And no references to Bishop Vasylyk satisfied him. The accusation that I was guilty of disrupting the hunger strike, and my, in his opinion, connection to the KGB, offended me, so at the next UHU Coordination Council meeting, I demanded that the chairman, Mykhailo Horyn, include the issue of my being insulted on the agenda. Mykhailo Mykolaiovych put my issue on the agenda and informed those present. During the break, Stepan Ilkovych approached me and, in an apologetic tone, said that I had misunderstood him. My anger had subsided by then, and I asked for the issue to be removed.
Subsequent events in Ukraine, in particular, the more than 200,000-strong demonstration in support of the UGCC in Lviv on November 26, 1989, and immediately following these events, the authorities’ recognition of the legal status of the Greek Catholics, rather confirmed than refuted my assumptions.
The second time I fell under suspicion was due to the Chekists. In the fall of 1989, Taras Kuzio, the director of the Ukrainian Press Agency (UPA) in London, called me. I collaborated with UPA in the information sphere and often received office equipment from them. Taras asked me to be at home today and wait for a visitor. He gave me no other details. In the evening, an unfamiliar Polish student visited me and handed over a compact duplicating machine of the rotator type, weighing at least 20 kg. It needed to be sent to Lviv. To whom and how quickly—the Pole did not know. Vasyl Barladianu was visiting me that day, and he was returning to Odesa later that evening. The train passed through Kyiv, and we decided to send the device there for further transfer to Chornovil in Lviv. The Odesa train stopped in Kyiv for about half an hour; Vasyl managed to put the device in an automatic luggage locker and informed, if memory serves, Mykola Horbal by phone of the number, code, and a request to pass THIS on to Lviv with someone traveling that way. In short, when the people from Kyiv arrived at the station, the locker was empty. A clean job.
The inquiry into this matter was conducted by Zinoviy Krasivskyi, with whom I had very warm and friendly relations, but it was unpleasant for me when he questioned me about this incident. Then I had to justify myself several more times. I acted as quickly as possible in this matter, and the then-forbidden duplicating machine could have been seized on the way to the station or on the train from Barladianu. But they did without procedural formalities, simply by listening to the phone, most likely Mykola Horbal's. It turned out that Bohdan Horyn was waiting for the rotator for himself; I also had an unpleasant conversation with him. It turns out he had picked it out while in the West and suggested this route for its transfer. The only thing I should have done was take the equipment to Lviv by train myself. But a trip was not in my plans at the time, and I didn't know when or to whom I was supposed to deliver it. Although there was no guarantee here either. I had been detained and searched in Lviv before, at the airport and at the train station.
A second case, similar to the first, occurred during the election campaign for the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. As always, unexpectedly, a rather large roll of stickers arrived at my apartment by express mail from the USA. On a background of the Ukrainian national flag, it said “VOTE FOR THE RUKH CANDIDATES!” It needed to be sent to Kyiv urgently. The most convenient way was with a passenger train conductor. That's what I did. I chose a train that was convenient for the people meeting it and called Kyiv. I don’t remember who I called now, but they only agreed to pick up the package after I called a third person. Someone’s phone was definitely being listened to. And when the people from Kyiv came to pick up the package, the conductor said that a young man had taken it at the last station before Kyiv, giving the name of the recipient. I was sincerely sorry that so much propaganda material was lost. This is where our security agencies spent their operational resources. Instead of fighting the nascent organized crime, as the press was reporting at the time.
1989 was the last year when my participation in the national-democratic and human rights movement on the path to an independent Ukraine was necessary. After the elections to the Verkhovna Rada, the positions of the partocrats were weakened, and the information curtain fell. At the end of the year, the repressions against the Greek Catholics also ceased, and the UGCC finally gained legal status. After Levko Hryhorovych Lukianenko was released from exile in early 1989 (he was released 2 years later than the main mass of political prisoners, but even this did not save the communist regime) and took up the post of chairman of the UHU, I noticed a certain alienation of Viacheslav Chornovil from the UHU. I do not exclude the possibility that he began to have friction with Lukianenko, because they are different people in temperament and mentality. Levko is a more practical and pragmatic person; Chornovil is more of a liberal and a romantic. At the same time, they, along with Mykhailo Horyn, are, in my opinion, the trio of the most outstanding political figures of the national-democratic movement of Ukraine at the end of the 20th century. Ivan Hel, Oles Shevchenko, and Bohdan Horyn come very close to them. I would include Stepan Khmara in the second group, but he is far too hot-headed. For a politician of the era of compromise with the communists, he is too temperamental. Vasyl Barladianu, Mykola Horbal, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Mykhailo Osadchyi, and others gave me more of an impression of intellectual oppositionists. And to conclude the personalist part of my memoirs, I want to say a few words about Zinoviy Mykhailovych Krasivskyi. This man possessed most of the qualities I like in people: a sense of humor and self-irony. He passed away early and unexpectedly. In general, by a cruel irony of fate, most of the Ukrainian dissidents with whom I had friendly relations passed away prematurely. Besides Zenko, there were Father Yaroslav Lesiv and Chornovil, who died in car accidents. Ivan Hel and Vasyl Barladianu are also gone now. And Yurko Rudenko has been gone for more than a year.
After the collapse of the USSR and Ukraine’s acquisition of real independence, our relations were interrupted for almost 15 years, although bishops and priests regularly invited me to various events, and I was also invited to Kyiv in 1996 for the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the UHG, when Mykola Rudenko was still alive. The specifics of my work did not give me free time; under capitalism, vacation became no more than two weeks a year. Constant telephone contact was maintained only with Ivan Hel, who celebrated his 70th birthday in 2007. Mykhailo Horyn called me a couple of times in the mid-90s. He probably wanted to connect me with the World Congress of Ukrainians, but I showed no enthusiasm in my voice, and my work commitments gave me no opportunity to be of any use in that sphere.
Summing up, I want to note that the main events that I had to prepare and technically implement were the meeting of leading human rights activists with US President Ronald Reagan, who arrived in Moscow in the summer of 1988. This was an act of de facto political recognition of the Ukrainian opposition by both the West and the Soviet authorities. The second event, of equal importance, which also took place with my organizational support, was the meeting of the UGCC delegation with the Vatican delegation that arrived in Moscow for the 1000th anniversary of the baptism of Rus-Ukraine. This meeting was the de facto recognition of the UGCC, and the issue of the legalization of this important national institution was resolved after this meeting. Fortunately, I have good photographs of both delegations, taken in my apartment just before they left for these meetings, and we can show them to readers. I will only note that the dissidents got to the meeting with Reagan by metro, while we had to hire a taxi for the clergy.
Almost 20 years have passed since the collapse of totalitarianism in the USSR. It is possible and necessary to draw some conclusions. If I ask myself the question: did my hopes and expectations for the changes in the country and the world, which I personally wanted to see and initiated to the best of my abilities, come true? The answer will be: rather no than yes. Let’s take Germany for comparison. 20 years after the fall of the Third Reich, Germany became a completely different country, while in the former territories of the USSR, there is still more arbitrariness than legality. Here, Germany and the USSR are incomparable. Perhaps, there would have been more similarities if Germany had been restructured by numerous... fuhrers and leiters.
The communists have been overthrown and shamed. Isn't that right? So what? For people without a conscience, this is not a problem at all. Even among my former classmates with pro-communist views, with whom I debated in the 70s and 80s, one can find “new Russians.” Capitalism somehow transformed into a decaying and oligarchic one in a moment. Glasnost and democratic procedures in Russia have been reduced to a minimum. The country is once again being ruled by a “leading and guiding force.” And in general, Marx’s theory seems to have been written for modern Russia. Here you have relative and absolute impoverishment, law enforcement agencies at the service of the rich (who are also the powerful). Prices are dictated by monopolies, there is systemic corruption of the authorities, etc., etc. The USSR did not completely disintegrate; there are “products of incomplete disintegration”: Transnistria, Abkhazia, Karabakh, South Ossetia. What to do with them? Russia has chosen a forceful path to solve this problem.
In this regard, an analogy is drawn with Crimea. In my opinion, the Crimean situation differs from, for example, the Abkhazian one in that the Abkhazians did not accept Georgian citizenship at the moment of the proclamation of the Georgian state in 1991, while Crimeans, as far as I know, mostly received Ukrainian passports, so the movement for Crimea’s secession from Ukraine is pure separatism. Now, the Ukrainian state has problems reminiscent of the Soviet ones. Then, many peoples did not want to be forcibly Russified, and now in Ukraine, about half of the population does not want to be Ukrainianized. I am afraid that without a compromise on the language issue, it cannot be avoided here.
Of course, the way of life in Russia now is not at all Soviet-socialist, but there is no smell of social justice. Not only have natural resources been privatized, but also law enforcement activities in the style of a corporate state. The political and information fields have been cleared. The methods of fighting the opposition already resemble communist times. In particular, Kasparov and Kasyanov are denied premises for meetings, as was the case in 1987 with the human rights seminar. With this, there is a complete déjà vu. And all this is against the background of the growing bitterness of the people. Especially in Moscow, where super-profitable, for now, housing construction has led to overpopulation and a transport collapse, and the city’s sidewalks have been sold by officials and turned into an eastern bazaar. The only similarity Russia has with the West is the ever-growing layer of the Muslim-Caucasian population, especially in Moscow. They bring their way of life and its accompanying customs here. But I don’t want to live in the Caucasus, where clan and tribal relations were preserved during the years of Soviet power. The pull to my historical homeland—Ukraine—is growing along with its Euro-Atlantic integration.
Translated from Russian by Vasyl Ovsienko on 03/25/2011. Corrections by M. Muratov made on 03/26/2011.
Photo “To the meeting with Reagan” – Muratov-Reagan-1988.
Mykhailo Horyn, Olha Horyn, Petro Ruban (in the back row), Ivan Hel, Viacheslav Chornovil, Fr. Yaroslav Lesiv on May 30, 1988, in Moscow at Mykola Muratov’s apartment before the meeting with US President Ronald Reagan. Photo by M. Muratov.
Photo “Visit to Yosyp Zisels. July 1988” – Muratov-Zisels-1988
Viacheslav Chornovil, Yosyp Zisels, Zinoviy Krasivskyi. Chernivtsi, July 1988. Zisels, who was under surveillance, agreed to create and lead the Chernivtsi branch of the UHU. Photo by M. Muratov.