YOSYP ZISELS, 72, is a public figure, human rights activist, and dissident. He was born on December 2, 1946, in Tashkent. At the age of one, he moved with his parents to Chernivtsi. There, his father was the head of the supply department at a shoe factory. His mother was a homemaker. He graduated from the Physics Faculty of Chernivtsi National University. He worked as a teacher and an engineer at a television center. In 1978, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. On December 8 of that year, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in a reinforced-regime colony for “slanderous fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system.” After his release, he worked as an electrician at a bus depot. On October 19, 1984, he was arrested for a second time. He served a three-year term in a strict-regime colony in Nizhny Tagil. He did not agree to amnesty because he did not want to sign a commitment to renounce political activity. In 1988, he created the first Jewish organization in Ukraine in Chernivtsi. He later became the head of the Association of Jewish Public Organizations and Communities. His favorite dish is oatmeal. His hobby is mountain skiing. He enjoys the works of the Strugatsky brothers. He loves films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, and Michael Haneke. He is married for the third time. He has five children. Oleksandr, 48, practices folk medicine; Sofia, 36, is an oriental dancer; Tom, 30, is a manager; Veronika, 27, is a television director; and Ahlaia, 7, is a schoolgirl. He has two grandchildren.
My parents came from Bessarabia. My father was from Chișinău, my mother from Căușeni. They lived in Bucharest for a while. My father served in the musical platoon of the Romanian army—he rode a horse and played the violin. Before marrying my mother, he had a family. His first wife and son, Yosyp, died during the Holocaust. We were never able to find their graves.
Before the war, my parents had Romanian citizenship. They wanted to move to Romania, and then to Israel. But my birth got in the way. I was born in Tashkent, where my father was serving. In May 1946, the agreement between the USSR and Romania on the exchange of citizens expired. We settled in Chernivtsi, where my mother had relatives.
My parents did not know Ukrainian. They communicated in Russian. They knew Yiddish, and my father also knew Hebrew. When they wanted to hide something from us children, they would speak in Yiddish.
My mother was ill and died when I was 6 years old. My younger brother and I were raised by a nanny—a Romanian woman named Maria. My father sent Semen to a 24-hour kindergarten because he often traveled for work. He would bring him home on Sunday, when he had a day off. There was a doctor at the kindergarten who grew fond of my brother and paid him a lot of attention. My father noticed this. He married her four years after my mother’s death. That’s how my sister Zhanna came into the world.
My nanny Maria took me to first grade. For the first year, boys and girls studied separately. In the second grade, we were combined. When people ask me if I get bored, I answer: “No, the last time was in first grade, when we studied separately from the girls.”
I wasn’t interested in the humanities at school. I had an aptitude for math and physics. I had a peaceful agreement with my Ukrainian and Russian language teachers. I didn’t write essays on classic stories because I didn’t know them, only on free topics—about space, rockets, synchrophasotrons.
Chernivtsi is a very Jewish city. In my class of 28 students, 24 were Jewish. Most of my classmates now live in Israel, and we get together there every five years. I took our class teacher, Zoya Yakivna, to these meetings several times. She is a wonderful teacher, although we had different views—I have been an anti-communist since school.
My father listened to banned radio stations, including “The Voice of Israel.” He would warn me: “Don’t tell anyone at school or on the street. You can only talk about this at home, you can only trust your own family.” In those days, a kind of socio-political schizophrenia was cultivated—when a person lives two, or even three, lives. But that wasn’t me. If I had an opinion, I expressed it. This caused problems.
The first samizdat book came into my hands in 1961, when I was in the ninth grade. “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak. It was an alternative to the history we studied in school. I immediately felt that this was the truth, and the other was a lie.
I managed to buy “Doctor Zhivago” later. This was already tamizdat—the book was published abroad and illegally brought into the Soviet Union. Later, during one of the searches, I saved it from the investigator. He was sitting at a table in my house. He was looking through papers and books that his assistants brought him. He saw that “Doctor Zhivago” was published in Paris and put it in the pile for confiscation. I instinctively put it on the shelf with the books that had already been checked. The investigator didn’t realize what had happened. I still have the book.
I couldn't get into the university in Chernivtsi because of my nationality—there was state-sponsored anti-Semitism back then. I enrolled in the physics department at Chișinău University. My father was already sick. A year later, I transferred to Chernivtsi University. My father died and left his wife and children, and I had to help them. I studied and worked as a tutor, looking after my brother and sister.
There were four exams in the first semester: mathematical analysis, algebra, physics, and the history of the CPSU. We studied for the history exam with comrades, taking turns reading aloud. The material just wouldn’t stick in my head. During the exam, I drew a question card and realized I knew nothing. I mumbled something. The professor looked at my record book, which was full of A’s, and snapped, “Do you think I’m going to give you an A too?” She slapped me with a C. For the rest of my studies, I had problems with Party history and historical materialism. It was all a lie, and I couldn’t bring myself to repeat it.
They wanted to keep me in my department at the university because I was involved in some research. But the Party bureau decided otherwise. Although I wasn’t engaged in dissident activities, I was considered suspicious. They were watching me. The first entry in my KGB file is dated December 1965. I had spoken at a psychology seminar where we held a debate on the forbidden works of Sigmund Freud. Someone informed on us. I knew that in a group of 17 students, three were likely to be snitches. But there were probably more.
They started actively “hassling” me in 1976. I was distributing samizdat, retyping it, and giving it to others to read. I wasn’t overly cautious. But for the KGB, I remained an enigma. I wasn’t a Zionist, and I hadn’t yet become a Ukrainian nationalist.
My apartment was searched five or six times. During each shakedown, they carried out bags of books, papers, and articles. The authorities were not pleased with Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, or Nabokov. I had correspondence and autographs from Paul Celan, a German-language poet from Chernivtsi who was forbidden in the Soviet Union and lived in Paris. His parents died in the Holocaust, and he had worked in a labor camp in Romania. I knew his friends, and when they left for Israel, they gave me Celan’s archive. They confiscated it during a search, even though there was nothing anti-Soviet in it. The archive was returned after my wife wrote a complaint to the KGB.
I have a homemade volume of Osip Mandelstam’s works. When I demanded they return it, they told me it contained anti-Soviet poems. They pointed to two bookmarks in the book. I tore out those pages and gave them to them, and took the rest.
I never had the desire to flee abroad. I feel good here; I am fulfilling my potential. The KGB and the prosecutor’s office tried to force me to do it—they’d say, “Either leave or we’ll lock you up.” I didn’t leave. And I got locked up.
In the summer of 1976, I was in Kyiv visiting Igor Pomerantsev. I borrowed Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the dissident collection Iz-pod glyb, and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. The books had to be returned in three days. We spent a full day reading The Archipelago aloud in turns. I gave the collection to a friend. The next day he brought it back, looking sullen for some reason. I asked what had happened. “They picked me up with your book. They told me to return it and say nothing to you.” In the morning, I left the house with a pile of empty envelopes and dropped them into mailboxes to attract the KGB’s attention. Then I escaped them through the courtyards, managing to hide the books and warn everyone. But they were waiting for me near my work—they took me by the arms and put me in a car. I was ready for it.
After my detention, I found my modus operandi (from the Latin for “method of operation”—Ed.): I would not speak to them, I would not give testimony, and I would not sign anything. Suddenly, everything became easy. At first, they kept me in an office, then took me to a hotel to sleep. One KGB agent was in the room with me, a second sat on a chair in the hallway. The local KGB didn’t understand what was happening—they had been notified about me from Kyiv. They let me go. I was only given a warning: not to distribute forbidden literature.
I was interrogated 50 times, but not a single official record bears my signature or testimony. I didn’t want to lie, and I couldn’t tell the truth, because that would have meant implicating someone. I approached conflict calmly and without shouting, so the investigators tolerated it. One time, an old-school investigator was questioning me. He was walking around me—I could feel that he wanted to strike me. But he restrained himself, because the times had changed—it wasn't 1936 anymore.
My home phone was tapped, and cars would follow me. I memorized their license plate numbers.
I served my first sentence in a penal colony in Sokyryany, Chernivtsi Oblast, and the second in the Urals. The article for “slander that defames the Soviet state system” was specially introduced in 1967 to hide the large number of political prisoners. It allowed them to place such individuals in criminal zones. People convicted under the article for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” were sent to special camps in Mordovia, and later to the Urals.
My activities created a lot of problems for my relatives and friends. My wife shared my views, but she had to think not only of herself—we had a child. And I couldn’t stop.
When I was arrested for the second time, my son was 13. The war in Afghanistan was going on at the time. My wife worried he would be sent there. In 1987, she managed to leave for Israel. She had to divorce me—that was the condition they gave her. It was very difficult for me to go through that. When I was released, I didn’t want to leave, and she didn’t want to return.
For my second term, I was taken by prisoner transport from a Kharkiv prison to the Urals. I ended up in a transit prison in Sverdlovsk—the largest in the Soviet Union. Ten thousand people passed through it every day. It was horrifying. A cell designed for 20 people held about 60. We slept in shifts, and we might get lunch at three in the morning. I spent almost a week there. The cell had some big shots—thieves-in-law. I told them I was a political prisoner and that this was my second time around. They gave me a good spot where I could lie down. I taught them how to play Preference, because all they knew were some silly games. A guard caught us one time. They lined us all up in the corridor. The thieves gave me a hat and pushed me into the second row so I wouldn’t be recognized. That’s how they saved me from solitary confinement.
In the colony in Nizhny Tagil, I worked as an electrician, then repaired sewing machines. I had never done it before, but I learned.
I ended up in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. I learned that Oleksa Tykhy (a linguist and founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group who died in prison in 1984.—Ed.) had recently been there, brought from the Perm zone.
Mykhailo Horyn introduced me to Viacheslav Chornovil. We would walk the streets and talk. We couldn’t talk at home—we were being bugged. But if we absolutely had to, we had special little notebooks.
I was searching for dissidents who had been persecuted with the help of psychiatry. Nadiya Svitlychna gave me addresses of people from whom I could get information. That’s how I met Zenoviy Krasivsky. He was held in a special psychiatric hospital after a fabricated case. They forced him to take medication that caused him to have two heart attacks. In 1974, the dissident Mykhailo Lutsyk was declared mentally ill and sent to the Dnipropetrovsk psychiatric hospital. He served a total of 32 years. I had 84 political prisoners in my card file. Soviet psychiatrists had invented the diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia.” They were criticized for this in the West and were even expelled from the World Psychiatric Association.
The Chernivtsi KGB agents who arrested me built their careers on it—they became generals. They continued to work in independent Ukraine. One of them, Mykola Kushnir, was the one who rehabilitated me in 1991. He apologized: “We were just soldiers, we were following orders.” I replied: “You’d be better off giving me my operational file.” He said it had been destroyed. It wasn’t until 2008 that I received a portion of the archive from the SBU.
I have never been involved in politics. I left the People's Movement of Ukraine (Rukh) as soon as it began to turn into a party. I can’t imagine being subject to corporate morality—having to vote a certain way because the faction decided so. I was invited to join parliament in 1990. I refused, because it was being filled with former prosecutors and KGB agents.