Interview with VADYM VASYLOVYCH PAVLOV
V.V. Ovsienko: March 10, 2007. Vadym Vasylovych Pavlov is speaking. Vasyl Ovsienko is recording.
MY FAMILY
V.V. Pavlov: I was born in the city of Kyiv on August 21, 1951. My father was Russian, originally from Russia; he ended up in Ukraine after the war and married my mother here. My father, Vasyl Illich Pavlov, born in 1925, served seven years in the army and was a front-line soldier. After his military service, he worked at a military plant as an instrument test mechanic and, unfortunately, died tragically; he drowned in 1961. My mother was of mixed origin: on her father’s side, she was of Swedish descent, Olha Adolfivna Savost. The surname had already been Russified. She was born in 1924 and now, thank God, is still alive, retired, in her eighty-third year. She is of mixed origin; as far as I know, her ancestors included Ukrainians, Russians, and even French, but unfortunately, there are no documents. But from what I know from stories, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side was of Cossack descent; her surname, I believe, was Sukhoruchenko. By the way, my great-grandmother’s nephew was repressed back in 1918, shot. Somewhere at the Lukianivske Cemetery in Kyiv, they were shooting people, and he died there because he was in the army of the UNR, under Symon Petliura.
My father died early, but my grandfather, Adolf Savosta, was still alive. He was an artist, a pre-revolutionary intellectual. He and my mother, as I heard from childhood, were critical, and even more than that, opposed to the Soviet government, to communism, and this probably influenced me.
I started school in 1959 and studied until 1969, finishing ten grades. I studied well, mostly getting fives, with only two fours.
My grandfather spoke critically while he was alive—unfortunately, he died in 1963, when I was about eleven and a half. If he had lived longer, I would have asked him much more. He was a very interesting person, studied a lot his whole life—both at the art institute and at a military academy before the revolution, and was a participant in the First World War. Unfortunately, I don’t know for sure, but he took part in the events in Kyiv during the time of independent Ukraine, but I don’t know for sure whether it was under Hetman Skoropadsky or in other Ukrainian military organizations during the UNR. I was still small when he told me about his participation in those events. My grandfather had a great influence on me. He told me a lot about pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary events. By the way, my grandfather did not want to join the Communist Party because he did not recognize the October Revolution. He was an artist, and they told him: “If you join the party, you’ll be in the Union of Artists, you’ll have privileges.” He refused and worked more as a decorative artist, restoring churches; he worked at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, St. Sophia’s Cathedral, and St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral. I remember when I was little, he and my mother told me that he was arrested sometime in December of ’thirty-six or January of ’thirty-seven. As a decorative artist, he had once decorated Yakir’s office, and when he was arrested, they wanted my grandfather to give some testimony against Yakir. They came at night, arrested him, and he was interrogated all night, but as far as he said, he gave no testimony against Yakir. He was eventually released—he was a good specialist, an artist, and somehow it worked out.
There was another interesting incident with him. As an artist, he completed some job, and then went to a café to celebrate after they got paid. He was sitting there with friends and telling some joke, or something about Stalin. A plainclothesman “from the agencies” came up (they say that such employees often sat in cafes and restaurants back then, keeping an eye on things). He says: “What was that you said? I’m going to arrest you right now.” But it was only because another artist, Karl Welke, was there with my grandfather—an old Bolshevik who used to transport Lenin’s newspaper *Iskra*, but when Stalin came to power and the repressions began, even this old Bolshevik became disillusioned with his communist cause... So he said that they hadn’t heard anything, and so my grandfather was saved a second time. And the NKVD man said: “It’s a pity I don’t have a witness with me, or I would have taken you.”
V.O.: And did you mention that grandfather’s name? Or say the years of his life?
V.P.: My grandfather, as far as I know from the documents, was Adolf Vilhelmovych Savosta. They distorted the surname. My mother is listed as Savost, but my grandfather as Savosta. That happened with foreign surnames. He was born, according to the documents and his own words, on August 20, 1891, in Stockholm, Sweden. He was a Swede by nationality. Before the revolution, there was a large emigration from Sweden to various countries, so he came here, studied here in Ukraine, lived here, got married, and lived his life here.
V.O.: It was enough to be a foreigner to be shot. He lived until 1963?
V.P.: Yes. The only thing that saved him was that he was a very good specialist, a restorer, a decorative artist, and somehow it passed him by. Of course, after the fall of the UNR, he did not actively oppose the government.
V.O.: “There are no indispensable people,” said Comrade Stalin.
V.P.: Well, somehow he was lucky, he survived. He had a very great influence on me. He told me about one incident. An acquaintance came to his house in the thirties, when the massive Stalinist repressions had already begun. He came and said: “Adolf, what is going on, they are even destroying their own?” And my grandfather says: “And didn’t you greet the Bolsheviks in eighteen with bread and salt?” And the man says: “Well, who would have thought it would turn out like this!” Many people were deceived. The Bolsheviks promised a happy life and everything, and then it was too late to turn back.
And my mother also learned from my grandfather. By the way, my mother told me a lot in my childhood about the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, so I knew about that too. Well, the details, that it was planned by the Bolsheviks—of course, ordinary people didn’t know that then. Even in Kyiv, my mother said, many people were starving. Those who worked in production still got some sort of ration so they wouldn’t die of hunger, but many people, especially from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, the elderly, or those who absolutely did not want to cooperate with the Bolsheviks, had a very hard time—people sold their last valuables. My mother told me that before the revolution, my grandfather graduated from the Kyiv Art School (it was a branch of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts) with a gold medal. He even went to Italy—it was a kind of reward: after graduation, a group of students went to Italy for practical training. He had a gold medal, so he turned it in to a *torgsin*—there were such stores then—so as not to die of hunger. There were also some silver spoons and forks. His wife didn’t want to give them up, saying, we have two daughters, they need some dowry, as was customary before. My grandfather said: “Well, if we die, there will be no us, no daughters, and nothing. But if we’re alive, we’ll somehow earn a living.”
My mother told me this. During the revolution, many buildings in Kyiv burned down: there were the Reds, then the Poles, then the Germans, then the White Guards—many buildings burned down. So they settled with relatives—there was a small hut in Predmisna Slobidka, which is now Hydropark. There, my mother says, about 30,000 people lived before the Second World War.
V.O.: In Hydropark?
V.P.: Yes. There were private houses, many people lived there. My mother says, probably sometime in December 1932 or January 1933, there was a blizzard at night, a snowstorm, the dogs were barking, and someone was knocking at the gate. They went to open it—a young girl, 16-17 years old. She says: “Let me at least spend the night, to warm up, I’m very cold. There’s a famine in our village, people are dying out, I’m going to Kyiv,” she says, “to find some work so I don’t die of hunger.” Their situation was also difficult, because my grandfather didn’t officially cooperate with the authorities as an artist, and in those days even the churches were closed, so there was no way to earn extra money. Before, they would restore something in the church, icons or paintings. They were selling the last of what they had. But they shared what they could with this girl, she spent the night, got warm, and left the next day.
And another man, now deceased, our neighbor, Volodymyr Vasylovych Voronovych, a Kyiv native born in 1924, told me that even—he was still a young boy then, during the Holodomor—in Kyiv, special trucks would come in the morning, many corpses were just lying on the streets, so they would collect these people’s bodies and take them somewhere. That’s how it was. My mother told me about the repressions of the Stalinist era, too.
And the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia had a great influence on me. I was in the ninth grade when the “Prague Spring” began. There were great hopes, especially among the youth and intelligentsia, that if it succeeded there, maybe we would have some changes for the better here. But, unfortunately, they crushed that uprising of the Czech and Slovak peoples. I was very upset about it, even wrote a long poem about these events, and read it to my friends. But, unfortunately, I didn’t have any acquaintances or friends who truly understood what was happening in the country, who were critically and actively opposed to that Bolshevik government.
In the sixties and seventies, I listened to “Voice of America,” Radio “Liberty.” Although they were jammed, you could sometimes hear something, even though the receiver was old, but not bad, a “Riga-6”—the Balts still worked conscientiously, they hadn’t unlearned how to work conscientiously from pre-Soviet times. So it was a good receiver, you could sometimes listen to something, especially around midnight, after midnight. Of course, these events had a great influence on me. I was very upset after the suppression of the revival in what was then Czechoslovakia. I read this poem to friends—I had a few friends who were somewhat critical of the Soviet communist system of the time, but there were none with whom I could form a group or some organization, or actively oppose the government, to do something. Well, we were finishing school, planning to continue our studies, in institutes, in universities—to live as all Soviet people lived then. I was very lonely, I experienced all this. And so I finished school.
My father died tragically in sixty-one, he drowned. Of course, my mother wanted, like all mothers, for me to study further, to have an education. But at that time I already understood a lot, I was critical of that communist system. Although, of course, there was strong propaganda in school, on television, on the radio, in newspapers, so there were some illusions. Especially among some old people who gathered for some holidays, for a birthday. Some said that, well, maybe if Lenin had been alive, maybe things would have been better, maybe there would have been more justice. Such illusions lived among the people, because Lenin was in power for a short time. People didn’t know the truth; it’s only in recent years that the archives have been opened, and we learned what orders he issued. But then people knew little, so for them, Lenin was something of an ideal in contrast to Stalin and his repressions.
Before that, I attended an archeology club at the Palace of Pioneers, I was interested in ancient history, archeology, but in recent years I became more interested in philosophical problems, philosophy. On the other hand, I understood that both history and philosophy—all of it was permeated with the official communist ideology, the Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
YOUTH
Since I was born seven months premature and had poor health from childhood, my mother sent me to school at the age of eight. I finished ten grades right at the age of 18. I still couldn’t decide what to do next. On the one hand, I wanted to have an education, to study, and on the other hand, there was a certain aversion to that system.
It so happened that it was time to serve in the army. In 1969, I went into the military. First, I was in a school for junior aviation specialists, in 1969-70 I studied for seven months as an aircraft electrical equipment mechanic, then I served in a military unit in the Kaliningrad region. I served for two years. True, I developed a stomach ulcer in the army, my health was undermined.
I returned from the army, still had some illusions, thought maybe something would change for the better, maybe there would be some reforms in the country. By then I had heard a little on Radio “Liberty,” on “Voice of America” about the Ukrainian dissident movement. They were starting to talk a little about Sakharov then, about Solzhenitsyn.
V.O.: And you weren’t acquainted with anyone? And didn’t seek such acquaintances?
V.P.: I already said that among my friends and acquaintances, there was no one like that. In the archeology club, we had two comrades, Leonid Zalizniak and Mark Horovskyi. Mark Horovskyi once told me, when we were in the ninth or tenth grade, that his father had studied at Kyiv University before the Second World War in the history department, he raised some national issues, so, it seems, he was exiled from Kyiv to Siberia. He wasn’t imprisoned, but he was still subjected to some repression. And Leonid Zalizniak’s father was convicted twice in the Stalinist era—before the Second World War and after the war, he served many years in prison. But even these children and their parents, who had served their sentences, showed no activity. Maybe they were afraid for their families, for their children, they didn’t want trouble, because they had already suffered enough. Although I didn’t know the specifics of their personal lives at that time. I didn’t have such friends. There were thoughts, especially after the Czechoslovak events, of creating some youth organization, but there were no like-minded people. Some shared my critical thoughts about the government of the time, but there were no such like-minded people.
After serving in the army, I thought and thought about what to do next... My mother raised my brother and me alone, so I had to enroll in a correspondence course.
V.O.: And did you mention your brother’s name?
V.P.: My brother is Yurii Vasylovych Pavlov, born in 1953, a year and a half younger than me. I thought that I should help the family, so I enrolled in the correspondence department of Kyiv University, in the history department, in 1972.
V.O: And I had already graduated from there in 1972 with a degree in philology…
V.P.: I had doubts about whether to go into history. I was also interested in philosophy, and at first, I thought about enrolling in the philosophy department, but I understood that it was very connected with the communist Marxist-Leninist ideology. So I even thought that maybe it would be better to study by correspondence, there I would be somewhat detached from that system. There was hope that over time, maybe something would change for the better. By then, Solzhenitsyn was heard of in the world, they wrote about him in the Soviet press, of course, the information was critical, and they sometimes mentioned Sakharov, and Ukrainian dissidents.
V.O.: And did you hear about the arrests of 1972 in Ukraine?
V.P.: Yes. They reported it on Radio “Liberty,” the BBC. If someone had approached me then with a proposal to sign a letter or an appeal to the Soviet authorities protesting the repressions against representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, I most likely would have signed such an appeal. But I myself probably lacked the courage then to come out with some protest on my own. The people who surrounded me then believed that it was pointless to fight the existing communist government, that this government was invincible. Even my mother’s own sister, Liubov Adolfivna Tkachenko (née Savosta), who had suffered a lot from the so-called Soviet, communist government, when she learned about my critical speeches against the CPSU and so on, once told me that I had probably really gone mad, because I went against such a powerful force, a whole system.
By the way, it’s interesting to recall: I returned from the Armed Forces in November 1971, and in May 1972 I was preparing to enter Kyiv University. On May 22, 1972, I was near the Shevchenko monument. But I couldn’t get close. There were a lot of police, people in plain clothes, obviously from the KGB. Anyone who tried or managed to break through closer to the monument was grabbed by the police, people in plain clothes.
I also remember my first visits to the monument of Taras Shevchenko on May 22, 1969. I was finishing the 10th grade then, and also studying in the archeography club of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers. Once, Leonid Zalizniak, the son of the former political prisoner Lev Zalizniak, told me and a few other boys from the archeology club that on May 22, Ukrainian patriots would gather near the monument to Taras Shevchenko. Mark Horovskyi and I went there. Leonid Lvovych Zalizniak was there, well, then he was just Lionia Zalizniak, now he is a professor, a doctor of historical sciences, a lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. By the way, there we met Mark Horovskyi’s father—he was a former repressed person, a historian. Lionia Zalizniak’s father, Lev Zalizniak, was also there, I don’t remember his patronymic anymore. There were quite a few, two hundred, maybe more people. Of course, there were a lot of police, they surrounded the area. They sang Ukrainian songs, but they didn’t let anyone speak. And they didn’t even let people get close to the monument. But right at the monument, there was a small number of people, mostly young, probably students. Most likely, they came to the monument very early. But they were tightly surrounded by police and people in plain clothes. There was an interesting moment. One young man—I don’t know his last name, patronymic—approached, laid flowers at the Shevchenko monument, crossed himself, bowed, and wanted to say some speech, but some people in plain clothes grabbed him and took him aside. People surrounded him, didn’t give him up, they defended him. He somehow broke free. These were probably KGB agents in plain clothes. People were there for several hours, but it was impossible to hold a rally. Then they began to disperse.
And a few days later, Leonid Zalizniak told me an interesting story about that day. These KGB agents, the police, tried to track down at least a part of the people—where they were from, who was present at this gathering near the Shevchenko monument. The number 12 trolleybus ran there, there was a stop near the university, and, he says, a lot of people, young people, crowded into this trolleybus. And these KGB agents, the police, also got in there. They realized that they would be riding and watching them. So some boys climbed onto the back of this trolleybus, pulled down the poles, the driver had to open the doors, get out to fix these trolleybus poles, and these boys got out and ran away, everyone scattered. Most of them still escaped. Later they said that many students were expelled from the university for participating in such events.
V.O.: Interestingly, what time of day were you there on May 22, 1972?
V.P.: Around, I think, about twelve, maybe at eleven in the morning. In the first half of the day.
V.O.: Because around 5 p.m. I had a meeting with a friend, Petro Ostapenko, in the Botanical Garden, which is nearby, I was supposed to get some *samvydav* from him. They even tracked me down there: a policeman came up to check my documents, saying I looked like someone. I got the hint and didn’t go to the monument.
V.P.: It was about one o’clock, maybe eleven, sometime in the first half of the day. There’s a park there, people were relaxing, playing chess, checkers, so many people gathered under the guise of relaxing. They walked around, so as not to stand in one place, to somehow show that they had supposedly come here to walk, to relax. Such were the events.
V.O.: Were there no consequences for you for appearing there?
V.P.: First of all, I didn’t speak out myself, I was there among the people, and maybe because I’m short, one meter sixty-two, and looked very young... When I was finishing my service in the army, one officer said: “Oh, he’s so young, he could be drafted again for a new term.” So maybe the KGB agents took me for some schoolboy, because I looked about 16, I was very small. So it somehow worked out.
In 1972, I enrolled in Kyiv University in the history department, in the correspondence department, and studied. But, honestly, the situation was oppressive. I heard on Radio “Liberty,” on “Voice of America,” on the BBC: arrests began in Ukraine, seventy-two, seventy-three. It was clear that the situation was unlikely to change for the better.
V.O.: That’s when they nabbed me too, in seventy-three. You studied by correspondence, so you worked somewhere, right?
V.P.: Yes, I worked. Even before entering the university. I came back from the army in November 1971, so I took exams for the university the following summer. A relative, my father’s sister, got me a job through connections at the Fourth Medical School in Darnytsia, in the social sciences department. They taught Marxist-Leninist philosophy to the female students there—why they needed it, these future nurses and paramedics? I worked there as a lab assistant. What’s interesting, there was a philosophy teacher there, a woman—I can’t remember her name now—she was a philosopher herself and, obviously, a member of the CPSU, she taught Marxist philosophy. Brezhnev was in power then, and she was very critical of him. This also influenced me, as a young man. Sometimes we talked about political topics. Once she came and said: “Well, they’ve praised this Brezhnev to the skies, pinning all the medals on him, so distinguished. And what,” she says, “can we do? We just have to wait until he dies.” Those were the thoughts, such passivity was among the people. It was perhaps easier for her to wait, she was already a woman of a certain age, almost 50, married, maybe she had a family, children, and, of course, she treated it as, we’ll wait and see what happens. Well, I was still young, so I wanted to change something for the better. On the other hand, I had, of course, heard from my mother that my grandfather was arrested, and other people.
By the way, there are no documents about this, unfortunately. Maybe somewhere in the archives. I should look for them somehow. And people were afraid to talk about it. Only in 1990, shortly before her death… My father’s sister, Paraskoviia Illinichna, who went by her husband’s name Ivanova, died at the age of seventy. She told me that my grandfather, Illia Pavlov, worked as a train driver in the thirties, right when the Holodomor was happening. They transported grain through Ukraine and from Ukraine to the Polish border, where it was reloaded onto foreign trains. And he also supposedly expressed himself… They were traveling through Ukraine, saw corpses lying around, people were hungry, dying, so he said something like: “How can it be that people are dying of hunger, and we are transporting grain, selling it abroad?” And he was also arrested, repressed, and nothing more is known about him, where he ended up or what happened. And even her mother didn’t tell the children what happened to their father, she said he went to Siberia to earn money. Only shortly before her death (she died around 1980, she was already 83) did she tell this to her daughter, my aunt Paraskoviia Illinichna Ivanova, that their father was repressed in the thirties. People in those times were even afraid to talk about such things.
Of course, all this influenced me. On the one hand, I wanted a different life, freer, more democratic, and on the other hand, I also wanted an education. I often thought about this, talked with some friends. To write some protest… Well, I wrote critical poems, read them to friends, but to speak out somewhere, maybe I still didn’t have the courage.
By the way, in 1968—I was only 17 then, right on August 21, my birthday—I went in the morning and bought some newspapers, and there were many pages of these documents about the Czechoslovak events, about the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia—that was the “gift” the Soviet government gave me for my birthday. Of course, this somehow influenced me, I thought, what to do next?
And in 1973, a friend, Yurii Volodymyrovych Voronovych, also born in 1951, his grandfather was also repressed, his grandfather’s surname was Lypskyi… He was from a wealthy family, maybe even of Polish origin, because his grandmother, his grandfather’s wife, was a Pole from Warsaw. Before the revolution, he graduated from some junker or military school, he was still a young boy. He did not recognize the Soviet government, often criticized it. And someone informed on him, he was arrested—and so he perished in the camps, it’s not even known how he died or where his grave is. He was such a brave man that even from prison he wrote to his wife, that’s my friend’s grandmother: “Send me some rope so I can hang myself, because I can’t, I don’t want to see these bandits”—that was his attitude to that government.
FIRST BRUSHES WITH THE AUTHORITIES
Of course, these people were afraid of repression, they tried to adapt to that communist-Bolshevik government, although they themselves were from families of the repressed, their parents and grandfathers had suffered, and they, of course, couldn’t get a good education. And so he, Yurii Voronovych, worked at the Institute of Hydro-Melioration as a lab assistant, and traveled to Crimea. In Crimea, some old library was closed, and they found Stalin’s works there. Under Khrushchev, they had already been thrown out of libraries, written off. He brought them to me, and out of curiosity, I looked through some of them. I was very impressed that in one of Stalin’s works, *On the Foundations of Leninism*—these were written as lectures that Stalin gave at Sverdlovsk University after Lenin’s death—that Lenin had introduced something new to Marxist doctrine. There I read one article—Stalin’s work on the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is an interesting thesis there—by the way, he referred to Marx and Lenin, that they had introduced such a thesis into their doctrine. Stalin writes that, since the party is the instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat, then with the construction of a classless society, with the abolition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the communist party also withers away, all power is transferred to the people, there will be a republic of Soviets. This interested me so much! I thought that I should take some part in public life, do something. And I began to read some other works by Marx, Engels, Lenin. There too I found confirmation of this thesis about a classless society, about the withering away of the party. And since under Khrushchev it was declared that we no longer have exploiting classes, that we are already moving towards a classless society, that the difference between workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia is small, these are not antagonistic classes, I seized on these theses and first wrote to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, that it’s interesting, if even Lenin, Stalin, Marx wrote that with the withering away of the dictatorship of proletariat, with the construction of a classless society, the communist party is no longer needed, then, obviously, it should be dissolved and power transferred to the people. They didn’t answer me for a long time. Then I wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to Shcherbytsky, to the Central Committee in Moscow, I wrote that since I am studying in the history department, it is interesting for me to know this, both from a historical point of view and as a citizen of my society, my state—I would still like to receive some clarification, an answer. How is it that Marx, Lenin, even Stalin, wrote that the communist party should be dissolved with the construction of a classless society, and now—on the contrary. This was right under Brezhnev, 1973, there were already articles by Suslov and Brezhnev that the role of the communist party would increase as communism was built—and how to understand this, it’s a contradiction?
At first, they summoned me to the city party committee, but there was essentially no conversation there; a man of advanced age was sitting there, he didn’t give his last name, some Fedir Ivanovych, it sounded something like Shaliapin—Fedir Ivanovych. He asked where I studied, who I was, what I was, who my parents were, and had a chat with me like that. I said that I had written to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, wanting some clarification. He says: “Wait, maybe you’ll get some answer.” After some time, a letter came from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. They wrote that the struggle with international imperialism was intensifying in the world, and therefore it was necessary to strengthen the leading role of the party to help other countries fight for revolution, for socialist transformations. And there were such general, evasive replies.
PUNITIVE PSYCHIATRY
But after that, they summoned me to the psychiatrists. Or rather, how? They summoned me to the military enlistment office, supposedly for some check-up. I went to all the doctors, everything was normal—this was in 1973, sometime in the fall. I had already gone to the head of the enlistment office to have him note that I had been examined. He looked and said: “Something’s not right here.” The girls who worked at the enlistment office started running around. A girl comes into the office and says: “You need to see the psychiatrist a second time, she didn’t finish examining you.” We went to the psychiatrist’s office, there was an old grandmother there, smiling like that, she looked at my eyes, nose and said: “You need to go to the district clinic, to the district psychiatrist.” I lived then (and live now) in the Moscowsky district, now Holosiivskyi.
I went to the district clinic, to the psychiatrist. There was a doctor named Zhadanova. She looked me over, but couldn’t decide anything and sent me to Darnytsia, somewhere behind the “Yunist” market there is a psycho-neurological dispensary. I don’t know if it’s still there, but back then, in seventy-three, it was. A doctor named Kryzhanivskyi examined me there. There was another doctor there—unfortunately, I don’t know her last name, and I didn’t know it then, Sofiia Vasylivna. My mother told me that Kryzhanivskyi was inclined to either put me in a psychiatric hospital or give me some psychiatric diagnosis, but that Sofiia Vasylivna thought I was a normal boy, well, interested in politics, various issues. And since they couldn’t agree, they conferred and decided that I should be examined at the Kyiv Central Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital, they sent me for a consultation.
My mother and I went there, and they told us to come on a certain day, there would be a professor, his name was, as far as I remember, Baron. But when we came for this meeting a few days later, they told us—a doctor said it sort of secretly—that Professor Baron had refused to engage in such consultations. Maybe he was an honest man, and they were pressuring him, probably, to give me some diagnosis, so he refused. Then they scheduled another meeting for us. Unfortunately, I don’t remember now—there was another professor.
V.O.: Not Lifshits, no?
V.P.: No, not Lifshits. There was some Solomon Moiseyevich… His surname was Ukrainian, Polishchuk, I think. Have you heard of him, was there such a person?
V.O.: I recall something like that.
V.P.: Yes, Polishchuk, a professor, if I haven’t forgotten. And so we came—I was there, my mother, and also my father’s sister, my now-deceased aunt Paraskoviia Illinichna Ivanova. I went into a large office. Dr. Kryzhanivskyi was sitting there, there was another doctor—I don’t know his name, there was this professor Polishchuk, and there was another man, maybe 40, 45 years old—a white coat was thrown over his shoulder, but you could see that under the coat he had some kind of uniform.
V.O.: A psychiatrist in uniform.
V.P.: Yes, with epaulets, it seemed. Whether he was from some “agencies,” or from the prosecutor’s office, or from the KGB—I don’t know. Polishchuk began to ask questions, what, how. Well, I told him. Kryzhanivskyi and that other doctor—they kept interrogating me—he says: “What are you, a young man, just started studying at the university—and you’re already lecturing Brezhnev, writing to him how to understand Marxist-Leninist doctrine, telling everyone what to do.” And Polishchuk asks: “Maybe you know, in psychiatry there is a concept like ‘overvalued ideas’?” I say: “I’m not a specialist in psychiatry, but I think it means a person has a very high opinion of himself, probably that he’s a genius of humanity, that he can teach everyone—that’s how I understand it.” He says: “You understand correctly.” I say: “But I’m not teaching anyone on my own behalf, I just read—I can name the works of Marx, and Engels, and Lenin, and Stalin—they wrote it. So I’m interested, why did they write that way then, and now they write that the role of the communist party should be strengthened, not the other way around. It’s interesting to me as a future historian and as a person interested in philosophy, as a citizen of my country, my society.” Professor Polishchuk didn’t answer right away, he says: “Let me examine you, listen to you.” He listened to my heart, says: “There seems to be a little tachycardia, you should see a doctor.” He says: “Take an academic leave, get some treatment, rest and think about how you plan to live your life, what to do.” And I say: “And what about the questions I raised? You’re a psychiatrist. I don’t understand at all why I was summoned here and who should be giving me these answers. I would understand if the Party Central Committee or the city party committee held some discussion.” He says: “Well, they used to write that way, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, maybe someday it will be like that, but,” he says, “now it’s Brezhnev, we are guided by his instructions, then maybe there will be other leaders, the doctrine will develop,”—that’s how he answered. And the one who seemed to be in uniform sat and listened attentively, mostly silent, watching. Polishchuk said: “I don’t find anything wrong with you from a psychiatric point of view. Go on, take an academic leave, get a little treatment, rest. I have no complaints against you.” I came out satisfied: everything was normal.
V.O.: You said your mother came with you…
V.P.: They didn’t let her in, she and my father’s sister were in the corridor.
V.O.: And also: did the hand of the KGB show in this story, besides you seeing that man seemingly in uniform? Who sent you there?
V.P.: You see, I wrote letters to the newspapers—to *Pravda*, *Izvestia*, to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, to Shcherbytsky at the Central Committee of the CPU, to Brezhnev at the Central Committee of the CPSU. Of course, these letters were forwarded somewhere, but they summoned me directly to the city party committee for a conversation.
V.O.: You weren’t a party member, were you? Well, you were in the Komsomol, right?
V.P.: There was an interesting story with the Komsomol too. My mother used to say, when relatives and acquaintances gathered, she would recall the past, that she hadn’t joined the Komsomol. She always somehow refused. She would say at school that she wasn’t ready for that step. Her homeroom teacher once came to their house and saw that they had many icons. Her father had painted some of them himself. My mother’s godfather was a priest. And her grandmother, Paraskoviia Stepanivna, was very religious. And this was 1938. I heard all this from childhood. My grandfather Adolf often said that the Bolsheviks were bandits and bums, riff-raff. Although in school, since the “Khrushchev Thaw,” all crimes and troubles were blamed on Stalin, Beria, and their cronies. We were promised communism (paradise on Earth) by 1980. Everyone wanted to believe in a better future. Although at home there were also talks about the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Of course, at that time it didn’t affect my child’s consciousness much. Although, obviously, something was gradually being deposited in my head.
There was another incident. When I was in the first grade of Kyiv’s school No. 143 in 1959, for the New Year’s party at school, my grandfather Adolf and my mother Olha sewed me a clown costume from a UkrSSR flag. Grandfather Adolf got the flag from somewhere at work and brought it home. My mother sewed the costume: one half was blue, and the other was red. Grandfather Adolf painted large stars on it with silvery bronze. He drew me a clown mask, made a clown’s cap. Now I think it was a very bold step. Because if some outsider had found out about it (and I was 8 years old then. I could have told the children at school what my clown costume was made of), they could have sent my mother and grandfather to prison! It’s a good thing that even at the school’s New Year’s party, no one paid attention to it, at least to the colors of my clown costume. I was just a few votes short of getting the first prize for the best masquerade costume. Of course, this was not a deliberate anti-Soviet action with this flag. But, I think, in what happened, one can trace my relatives’ attitude towards that communist-Bolshevik government and its symbols.
It cannot be said that I was such a staunch anti-communist from childhood, but I was not drawn to the Komsomol either. Now, analyzing my past, I think that I am generally not inclined to be in the ranks of any parties, organizations with strict discipline, a certain totalitarian ideology. The world is boundless. It is obviously impossible to know it completely. As long as I can remember, I have always been and am in the process of learning about this world, in search of the Truth, in reflections on the most acceptable society for people, the structure of the state, and so on. Somehow I did not want to join the Komsomol. Maybe on a subconscious level. Despite the attractiveness of communist ideas at that time, the Soviet totalitarian, repressive system frightened off many people, especially thinking ones. For about two years, I managed to avoid joining the Komsomol. Only in 1967, in the 8th grade, in the spring, on March 1, was I accepted into the ranks of the VLKSM [All-Union Leninist Young Communist League]. And if our homeroom teacher, Lidia Zakharivna Prokhotova, had not detained us in the school cloakroom and taken us to the meeting of the school’s Komsomol committee, where they were already approving candidacies for membership, then maybe I would have finished school without being a Komsomol member. But I didn’t have the willpower to refuse to join then, unfortunately. I studied well. The homeroom teacher pressed me. She even asked my mother once why I wasn’t joining the Komsomol. And by then, in 1968, during the Brezhnev stagnation, joining the Komsomol was more of a formality that didn’t obligate anyone to anything. And how were people accepted into the Pioneers then? They were told to come to school on a certain day with Pioneer neckerchiefs. That’s how they were accepted into the Little Octobrists too. And in the summer of 1973, I submitted a statement to the Moscow district committee of the Komsomol in Kyiv and to the Central Committee of the VLKSM that I did not believe in the possibility of building communism in the USSR or anywhere else and was leaving the ranks of the VLKSM.
When I got a job at the Kyiv Film Copying Factory, in the standard application in the “VLKSM membership” line, I put a dash. Later, around 1975, when my confrontation with the Soviet communist government was gaining momentum, I was officially expelled from the Komsomol. By a decision of the Komsomol organization of the Kyiv Film Copying Factory—somehow they found out that I had once been a member of the VLKSM. Formally, for non-payment of membership dues. By the way, at the same factory, several other people were expelled from the Komsomol along with me for non-payment of membership dues. That was the easiest way to leave the Komsomol then. The Soviet communist system was already slowly falling apart then.
Let’s return to my letters. Since I touched upon problems of party history, Marxist-Leninist doctrine in those letters, they first forwarded the letters to the city party committee. But they didn’t summon me directly to the KGB. For some reason, they attributed these “overvalued ideas” to me and sent me to the psychiatrists. Not even directly, but through the military enlistment office.
V.O.: As a rule, that’s how they did it—with someone else’s hands.
V.P.: Polishchuk said that everything was normal. I came out, told my mom and aunt that everything was normal, and we went home. And then I needed a certificate for work… An interesting story came out of it. On the one hand, they probably still had reasons to put me in for an examination. So Dr. Zhadanova said: “Don’t go to work for now, stay at home, and we will figure out where to conduct the consultation.” They sent me to Kryzhanivskyi in Darnytsia, then to the Pavlov hospital. I didn’t go to work for about 10 days or more, as they said. Then Zhadanova said that the military enlistment office would give a note that I had been for an examination. I went to the enlistment office, they gave me a certificate there. Zhadanova at first gave me some kind of sick leave note. And I say at the enlistment office: “I wasn’t on sick leave, I was for an examination, so I don’t know if such a certificate is needed.” Well, they gave their own certificate from the enlistment office for my place of work, that I had been for an examination.
And they took my military ID card, then brought it back, gave it to me, without saying anything. I came home and—I don’t remember if it was that day or the next—I thought: why did they take my military ID? I started flipping through it, I open the 16th page and read—in Russian, they wrote everywhere then, even in Ukraine in state institutions—it says that “By the Medical Commission of the Moscowsky RVC, Kyiv, on February 11, 1974, declared unfit in peacetime. In wartime, fit for non-combatant service under Art. 8-B, group 1/224, 1966.” This must be a medical resolution from 1966. I looked at it and thought: no one said anything, but they wrote this.
Then I appealed, I think, to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine: I was for an examination, Professor Polishchuk told me that everything was normal, there were no claims against me from psychiatry, especially since I had served two years in the army, everything was normal—and here such a diagnosis: “unfit for military service”? They didn’t answer me at all. I wrote to Moscow to the Ministry of Health, they forwarded it to Kyiv—there was a whole correspondence. Zhadanova didn’t really say anything to me either—I went to her. My aunt, my father’s sister, asked some doctor acquaintances, and they said that this 8-B means something like psychopathy, that such people cannot be given weapons, which is why they deemed him unfit for service in peacetime, and for non-combatant service in wartime.
I already see that I’m on the psychiatric register, so what to do next? In Kyiv then, of course, there were no foreign correspondents, and I didn’t have any acquaintances to contact someone. I thought, if there is some glasnost, then maybe it would be possible to somehow influence, to review these issues. Nothing could be done. I wrote complaints to various authorities, and one day a paramedic came to me, he seemed to have worked with Zhadanova at first, and then in the inter-district psycho-neurological dispensary, his name was Voziian. And he told me: “If you keep writing, they’ll lock you up in a psychiatric hospital altogether. It’s better to stop all this, because you won’t achieve anything, it will only get worse.”
This was already, probably, in February 1974, it was cold. Nothing could be achieved in Kyiv. I got on a train and went to Moscow. I thought, maybe I’ll meet a correspondent somewhere near an embassy. I walked around like that all day. I had heard somewhere that the American embassy was on Tchaikovsky Street. I walked around it, there were plenty of police, nothing happened to me. I walked around there and returned to Kyiv. I thought, what to do? I need to continue to defend my rights, to fight, to do something.
They summoned me to the city party committee again, this Fedir Ivanovych. He had some letter with a red line on it. And it was written there—I peeked— “Gather information on the author of the letter to the CPSU Central Committee.”
V.O.: Interesting, that it had a red stripe.
V.P.: Yes, a red stripe like that.
V.O.: For example, for a prisoner, a red stripe on the file means “prone to escape.” So were you also considered dangerous?
V.P.: I don’t know what that red stripe was on that paper. He was already old, and he himself had forgotten that he had a conversation with me last time, and he forgot to gather information about me, so he summoned me a second time. He asked who I was, what, who my parents were, where I worked, where I studied.
I thought that the situation was already complicated. Especially since at that time, even before the psychiatric examination, there was such a rise in the cult of personality of Brezhnev, they were already praising him, starting to hang medals on him. I wrote to Shcherbytsky at the Central Committee: what is going on, you are supposedly communists, democrats, you say that you need to learn modesty from Lenin, and what is happening, they have inflated such a cult of personality of Brezhnev, how is this possible, it’s terrible, and people are laughing, they started telling jokes about Brezhnev. And I even wrote that maybe if Brezhnev has become so arrogant, he should be removed from his post, and a more decent person put in his place. This may have been such youthful épatage. But nothing else could be done.
I will, by the way, go back a little. When I learned on August 21, 1968, about the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops… It was right on my birthday, so I remember it very well. Regarding this invasion—when I read about it, I went to see some comrades. But it was summer, and we had returned from an archaeological expedition in the Odesa region at the beginning of August, everyone had gone on vacation, some to a dacha, or to a village to relatives, or went to the Dnipro, maybe. So I didn’t find Horovskyi or anyone anywhere. I walked along Khreshchatyk, but I didn’t see anyone. Maybe if there had been some protest rally, or something, I probably would have joined.
V.O.: You should have gone to Moscow, there was the “demonstration of the seven.”
V.P.: That was later, a few days later, in the evening.
V.O.: Yes, on August 25, 1968.
V.P.: I heard about it later on “Voice of America,” on Radio “Liberty.”
V.O.: You wouldn’t have made it, the demonstration lasted a few minutes.
V.P.: By the way, I recently read that in Kyiv on Khreshchatyk, one man unfurled some poster against the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia. He just unfurled it—and he was grabbed in literally a minute.
V.O.: And on those same days?
V.P.: Yes, literally on the 21st or 22nd. I read somewhere in the press that such an incident happened.
V.O.: That was Vasyl Makukh. Only he set himself on fire on Khreshchatyk on November 5. He supposedly ran and shouted slogans against the Russification of Ukraine and against the occupation of Czechoslovakia. So that was on November 5, 1968. The student Jan Palach set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1969. And Oleksa Hirnyk set himself on fire near the grave of Taras Shevchenko in Kaniv on January 21, 1978.
V.P.: I walked along Khreshchatyk like that, there was no one anywhere. And I was still 17, still a young boy, probably didn’t have the courage yet to write something myself, to speak out. Well, I did write a poem, I read it to friends.
V.O.: Interestingly, in what language did you write?
V.P.: Then, unfortunately, still in Russian, because, you see, I was born in Kyiv, in a Russian-speaking family. Kyiv was generally mostly Russian-speaking then.
V.O.: And your school was Russian, right?
V.P.: The school was Russian, yes. Kyiv was Russified, of course. My father was from Russia. He tried to learn Ukrainian, we had books at home—both *Kobzar* and Ukrainian fairy tales my mother read. My mother was also of mixed origin. So Kyiv was also Russian-speaking before the war. They taught a little Ukrainian in school before the war, so she knew a little Ukrainian, we had Ukrainian books. I read them when I started school. Then in the Russian school, they studied Ukrainian from the second grade.
V.O.: I hear you have such a natural Ukrainian language.
V.P.: Probably some genes from my mother’s side. Somehow I picked it up well, despite the fact that there was nowhere to communicate in Ukrainian in Kyiv. May Leonid Zalizniak, the professor, not be offended, but when he was a young boy, he also spoke Russian. Maybe at home he spoke Ukrainian with his parents. But I don’t know this for sure. I only studied it at school. Since I had already started studying Ukrainian at school, we had Ukrainian and Russian books at home, Ukrainian folk tales, so I immediately read all the books at home, at relatives’, neighbors’, acquaintances’, and signed up for the children’s library—I was about 11 or 12 years old then, then the adult one. I, of course, took any books, as long as they were interesting to me, whether in Ukrainian or Russian. There was also Ukrainian radio, it helped a lot, because on television—even the Dovzhenko Film Studio then made a lot of films in Russian.
V.O.: Some Ukrainian films have only survived in Russian versions, and they are still shown that way.
V.P.: And there was practically no one to communicate with in my circle. I’m saying: there were no such ardent Ukrainian national-patriots that one could join, communicate with. So then I wrote poems, of course, in Russian, although a few poems—I was inspired—I wrote in Ukrainian. In our school (it was Kyiv school No. 110, Russian-speaking), when I was in the 5th grade, there was a good teacher of Ukrainian language and literature. Unfortunately, I don’t remember her name now. It seems to me she didn’t teach us for very long, a year or two, not more. But she organized a Ukrainian literature club at the school. Not very many, but maybe 15-20 students attended this club (this was from three fifth-grade classes, in which a total of more than 100 students studied). We studied the works of Ukrainian writers there that were not in the curriculum, learned to write poems in Ukrainian, participated in amateur performances. So, in March 1964, for the 150th anniversary of Taras Shevchenko’s birth, a festive evening was held at the school. I think, thanks to this teacher. I played the role of the young Taras in a small play. I didn’t have a vyshyvanka, so a student from our class, Valentyn Doroshenko, lent me his (what an irony of fate, that a boy with such a surname studied in a Russian-speaking school, because those were the times). Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska spoke at this evening. I think that our teacher was acquainted with her and invited her. And a few years later I heard on the radio how the Soviet authorities were slandering her for nationalism, for some anti-Soviet actions. Such was our complicated and confusing life in Soviet times.
V.O.: Let’s return to 1974, after the trip to Moscow.
V.P.: I went to Moscow, returned to Kyiv, thinking, I need to do something further, to defend myself somehow. Nothing is working out with psychiatry either. I took an academic leave from the university. I already understood that history, and especially philosophy, were very politicized sciences in our country. I thought, since I’m already on their hook, they are unlikely to let me finish.
V.O.: And how many years did you complete, one year?
V.P.: Only the first year. I think they are unlikely to let me finish, and even if I do, I won’t be able to work against my conscience anyway. If I become a research fellow—I’ll have to write and say what they tell me. Even if I teach at school, I’ll have to teach what is written in the communist textbooks. I thought about this for a long time, and in 1974, somewhere in the summer, I wrote a statement to the rectorate of Kyiv University that since my views had changed greatly, I do not recognize Marxist-Leninist theory, I consider it some kind of myth and an unrealistic doctrine, I wrote that I do not believe in communism, in the construction of an ideal society on Earth. Therefore, I ask to be expelled from the university. Because I understood that it was only a matter of time, they would have expelled me anyway.
V.O.: Interesting, what was the reaction?
V.P.: In principle, there was no reaction, because I was already on the psychiatric register then. There was no answer and, by the way, my high school diploma, my school certificates, documents are still lying there in the archives, if they haven’t been destroyed.
V.O.: And was there an order of expulsion?
V.P.: I didn’t even inquire about it.
V.O.: They didn’t even inform you?
V.P.: They didn’t inform me of anything, I wasn’t interested, the only thing is that I still have a certificate at home for when I submitted my documents—the diploma, two certificates, other things—I didn’t even pick up the documents, somehow it wasn’t the time for that, and then, I thought, maybe something will change. Maybe I should inquire somehow. I don’t know if they are in the archives, or if they destroy them after some time, or if they keep them there forever.
After I found myself in such a situation… And the main thing was that I was alone, there was no help from anyone, no connections, nothing. Sometimes I would hear on the radio that so-and-so was imprisoned, so-and-so was imprisoned, and what to do?
LETTERS
I continued to write, mostly to newspapers—Russian, Ukrainian—critical remarks, responses to articles in a critical spirit. I criticized the Soviet government, the policy, what was being done in our country. I listened to “Voice of America,” “Liberty” on the receiver. When Sergei Kovalev was arrested in Lithuania, I wrote a protest to the prosecutor of Lithuania in support of Sergei Kovalev. Then I wrote letters in support of Mustafa Dzhemilev, when Mykola Rudenko was arrested—I wrote letters in support of Rudenko to the prosecutor’s office, to other authorities—many. Whatever I heard—I responded, wrote, but to distribute it, to give it to someone—there were no such people around me. My friends were even afraid to take these critical poems for themselves, to keep them. Love poems, something like that—I would give them to read, but critical things, of course, they were even afraid to take to keep. Nobody wanted to.
V.O.: Did you write by hand or on a typewriter?
V.P.: By hand. A lot, when you remember all this, it took so much effort and time. Wherever something happened—I tried to respond somehow, to write something.
When they put me on the psychiatric register, they would summon me to the psychiatrist, sometimes to the city party committee, but for some reason, they never summoned me to the KGB. Maybe because I was on the psycho-register. Then I, of course, already saw that the situation was difficult. But I couldn’t do anything here. Time passed, there were no such friends.
Just then, the movement for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union began. I worked as a lab assistant at the medical school, and there were even girls there, maybe of Jewish origin—their relatives were leaving. I thought that if I can’t do anything here, if there’s no way out, if Jews are going to Israel, then my grandfather was from Sweden, even though I’m of mixed origin—my father is Russian, my mother is also of mixed origin. I wrote, I think, to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that if in the Soviet Union I cannot freely engage in history, for example, to write a work about the need to dissolve the Communist Party, or, for example, when I was still studying at the university Engels’s work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Engels was not as dogmatic as Marx, he sometimes had interesting thoughts. He described how the state arose, that it was not just as Marx or Lenin-Stalin wrote, that exploiters wanted to exploit people and therefore created the state, that the state is an instrument of exploitation of enslaved people. By the way, even in this work of Engels, it is written that the state arose historically, that people at first had a certain community—at first there were tribes, clans, there were separate social functions, a need arose to somehow organize their lives. Therefore, unlike the Marxist dogma that over time, under communism, the state will wither away, I believed that the state might exist forever, or for a very long time, because there will always be some criminals, some other functions will exist. Even if the bodies are self-governing, they will still be bodies of power. It can’t be that large nations, millions, tens, hundreds of millions of people—without any management. There will still be some bodies of self-government. I wrote that I would like to study something in this direction, to research, but here it is impossible, because it contradicts Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Moreover, I wrote that they gave me a psychiatric diagnosis. This is a stain—at work, everywhere. Even if people don’t know what it is, they already look at you as if you are abnormal. Of course, it was very difficult for me. I wrote that if Jews are allowed to leave for Israel, then my grandfather was from Sweden, maybe I could leave for Sweden. I thought that even there I could somehow help the democratization of Soviet society, somehow influence these problems, and I would be engaged in science more freely.
They summoned me to the Kyiv OVIR [Department of Visas and Registration], said: “If you had close relatives there, even then they wouldn’t let you go alone, because you are on the psychiatric register, if the whole family were leaving…” They said a lot of things, made it clear that there were no chances. What was I to do next?
V.O.: What year was it when you applied to leave?
V.P.: It was somewhere at the end of 1974. I continued to work, to write to Soviet newspapers, to criticize the problems that existed, letters in defense, regarding the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn then I wrote. By the way, what’s interesting, when Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Prize, I—unfortunately, I didn’t know his address either—I sent him a postcard. At first, it was spontaneous, so I sent an open postcard to the address of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and wrote a congratulation, and then I thought that it was an open postcard, it definitely wouldn’t arrive. Then I put it in an envelope and wrote: Academy of Sciences and, I think, I wrote not to Sakharov’s name, but to the name of its then-president, Keldysh, and asked that it be passed on to Sakharov. I don’t know where it ended up.
By then I had left the university, so it was already inconvenient to work in this social sciences department, especially at the medical school. I resigned from there, although they didn’t want to let me go—they saw that I was a decent boy, studied well, even the head of the social sciences department, a front-line soldier and a retired colonel, told me: “We can even give you a recommendation for the party.” I didn’t know how to refuse, I kept wriggling, and then I said that the salary was low here. Because then lab assistants—they say that life was good under the Soviet government—but in 1972-74, I, a lab assistant in the social sciences department at the medical school, received 65 rubles. That was the rate, and from that rate, they took several rubles in taxes—income tax, single person tax, trade union, Komsomol dues, and it came out to about 59 rubles. So life wasn’t so good then either. For example, my mother’s aunt on her mother’s side, now deceased, she died at eighty-five in 1994, Ksenia Afanasiivna Onyschenko, she worked as a nanny in a kindergarten, and in the late 50s and early 60s, her salary was 300 rubles, this was before the reform. If people now receive 300 or 500 hryvnias, the prices are also like that now. But then, after the reform, it was 30 rubles. She was born in 1910, retired at 55. She had such family circumstances that she had to retire in 1965. So she received a pension of 30 rubles, and then a few years later they added, she received 45 rubles for about twenty years. Then later, when prices rose, they added a little. And when the communists say that it was good then, I have to say that people lived hard then. For example, when my father drowned in the Dnipro in 1961, died tragically, the state assigned me and my younger brother a pension of 34 rubles 68 kopecks for the two of us—that’s 17 rubles 34 kopecks per child per month, and you live as you wish. That’s how the communists cared for people.
By the way, back in 2002, before the parliamentary elections, there was a large article in *Holos Ukrainy* by Petro Symonenko with some other communist historian, which was called, I think, “Who is to Blame and What is to be Done?” They wrote there that the Rukh members were to blame for everything, that everything was good before, and they ruined everything. So I wrote a response to this article to *Holos Ukrainy* and described how people lived, what the prices and salaries were, something from my own experience, relatives, acquaintances, neighbors. There were people whose documents were lost during the war, not to mention those who lived in the village: they received pensions of 5-10 rubles. And about those whose documents were lost, and people were already old, there were also those who were 80-90 years old, they worked before the revolution, so that work experience was also lost, the Bolsheviks didn’t count it. And if documents were lost during the war, they received pensions of 9-12 rubles, so they survived as they could. And now they say that everything was good.
Then I was forced to leave my job at the medical school and worked from the end of 1973 as a film developer at the Kyiv Film Copying Factory, because it was close to me. The salary there was also not high, because salaries in general were not high then. I received 100, then 130-140 rubles.
When I wrote a congratulation to Sakharov for the Nobel Prize, I once came home from the night shift and was still sleeping. Someone was ringing and ringing the doorbell. And I, half-asleep, fell asleep again and didn’t get up. And then during the day, my neighbor Vitalii Pavlovskyi, who lived next door and still lives there, came to see me. He was a young boy then and could be a bit of a troublemaker. Someone had rung his doorbell that same morning as mine. He says, I open the door, and there stands a major in a police or some similar uniform. So he thinks: if I did something wrong or drank too much, or got into a fight, it’s unlikely they would send a major for me. And the major asks if Pavlov lives here, in apartment twenty-four. Vitalii answers yes. “And what kind of people are there, who lives there?” So he didn’t say anything bad. Then I thought that this could be related to the letter to Sakharov, because I wasn’t summoned anywhere else. By the way, in the newspaper, I don’t remember exactly, either in *Pravda* or *Izvestia*, right in those days after Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Prize, there was a large article called “To Whom Are Nobel Prizes Awarded?” They mentioned everyone there—some odious figures, to show that the Nobel Committee is such a Western bourgeois organization, it doesn’t give prizes to any good people by Soviet standards. So I wrote to them that a few years before that, Nelson Mandela received the Nobel Prize—he is such a person that even formally the Soviet communists supported and praised him, that he fights for the rights of blacks in Africa. I brought up a few more names in that letter—I tried to react to events, to express my thoughts.
HUNGER STRIKE
This was already 1975. From the beginning of the year, there were rumors that discussions were underway and soon agreements on human rights in Europe would be adopted, there were agreements between European countries. The Helsinki summit of European leaders took place around July 29 – August 1. Right on those days, from July 29, I declared a hunger strike and a strike in protest of human rights violations in the Soviet Union, I wrote about it to various authorities—the CPSU Central Committee, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, some newspapers. I wrote there about the persecution of famous people in the then-Soviet Union, and something from my own experience. Around the third day of the hunger strike, at the beginning of August, the party organizer of the workshop and a woman—the party organizer of the copying factory where I worked—came to see me at first. They asked what was wrong and what the matter was—obviously, some signal had been sent to them. I told them that since the Helsinki conference on human rights was taking place, Brezhnev had signed documents on behalf of the Soviet Union, they promised that they would fulfill all the provisions of these documents, and in the Soviet Union there were human rights violations everywhere, and not just hearsay that I had heard on some radio stations or from someone, but I had seen, understood, and felt from my own experience what it was, what kind of government it was and what it did to people. The party organizer of the Kyiv Film Copying Factory said: “These are your personal affairs. When we go to work, nobody asks us if we’ve eaten or not, so you must come to work, and if you don’t, we will simply fire you for absenteeism. And there will be such an article in your record that you won’t be hired anywhere. So decide for yourself.” I said that for now, I had decided to continue the hunger strike.
V.O.: Did you go to work?
V.P.: No, I didn’t go to work. I declared a hunger strike and a strike.
V.O.: Well, for a strike, you have to be at your workplace, but not work.
V.P.: Since I was on a hunger strike, I didn’t go out. I think I even wrote to the factory administration, and that’s when they came. She talked like that, said that I should decide for myself what to do, and they left. A few hours later, an ambulance arrived. They wanted to take me to Pavlivka right away, demanded that I stop the hunger strike, said that they would force-feed me there anyway. I said that I refused, but I would think about what to do. The bad thing was that even in such a situation, I had no connections and no support.
V.O.: Such things have some effect if there is support.
V.P.: Yes. You see, I didn’t want to live like everyone else, every day from work—to work, and be silent, and endure.
There was such a problem. My grandmother died before the war. Ksenia Opanasivna Onyschenko, my grandmother’s sister, my mother’s aunt—she was like a real grandmother to me, she told me everything—about Jesus Christ, and all sorts of religious things. In Soviet times, when I began to understand and be interested in something more or less, I always wanted to read the Bible or the New Testament, but it was impossible to get it anywhere, it was a problem. Not to mention that if a person wanted to read the Quran out of curiosity, or some other religious texts, or some Western philosophers. For us, everything was presented only in the interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, as they understand it. I simply did not accept such a life, I could not live in such a system, I wanted to turn the world upside down, but you can’t do it alone.
PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
The next day, Dr. Zhadanova came and said: “Well, you won’t achieve anything, because if you continue the hunger strike, they’ll take you away anyway, they’ll give you injections, force-feed you, they’ll only ruin your health, and you won’t achieve anything.” She said: “Think about it. If you stop, then come to my office.” My mother was at work, so I went with my father’s sister, Paraskoviia Illinichna Ivanova. We went to see Zhadanova, and she, seeing that there was no point in talking to me, talked and talked with my aunt, and then they explained to me that since my body was weakened, they cleverly said that somewhere in the direction of Pushcha-Vodytsia there is a psycho-neurological hospital, you’ll stay there for a bit, get some treatment, because your body is weakened after the hunger strike. And they called an ambulance to take me there. When I arrived, I realized that they had brought me to Pavlivka! I don’t remember what number the ward was, it seems they were organized by districts before, those buildings. Some ward, I don’t remember if it was the sixth or the eighth—it was called the rehabilitation ward. And there was also a semi-basement room there, surrounded by a fence and barbed wire. They told me that in 1975 they kept prisoners there who were undergoing forensic psychiatric evaluation. And I was kept on the upper floor.
V.O.: I think the forensic evaluation was the thirteenth ward.
V.P.: Maybe the 13th ward was downstairs. And when I was there in 1975, they didn’t have the new buildings yet. This ward was in the basement. And what’s interesting, a doctor came to me from that basement, not from the ward where I was staying.
V.O.: I was in the 13th ward for forensic psychiatric evaluation in the summer of 1973, and it wasn’t a basement room.
V.P.: It was already new?
V.O.: Who knows what it was like. What did I see there? Only my cell. And under the window—a fence.
V.P.: When I was there in 1983, there was already a new building. And in 1978, they brought me here for an evaluation to this semi-basement room. Maybe only the experts’ offices were there.
V.O.: Maybe—I didn’t see anything there.
V.P.: And then they said that some forensic medical evaluations are also conducted in the basement, and a doctor came to me from there, from the basement. What were the conditions? They gave me some injections. They said it was some vitamins for me after the hunger strike to restore my body. I don’t know if there was anything else there, not just vitamins. They gave some pills, and from these pills, languor, drowsiness, and a kind of indifference set in, you walk around somehow relaxed and almost sleepy. Of course, I tried to somehow take it into my cheek when possible, and then spit it out…
V.O.: And they watch for that.
V.P.: They watched, but sometimes I succeeded, I tried to get out of it somehow. And the light is on 24/7 in the ward, you can’t get a proper sleep.
V.O.: And how many people were there?
V.P.: There were a lot of people. There were large wards with 10-15 men in each. There were different people, but I didn’t meet any political prisoners there. There was one, Oleh Ostroukhov, he studied at Kyiv University, he was interested in yoga, all sorts of Eastern teachings. So they put him in there for that.
V.O.: For “unhealthy interests”?
V.P.: For practicing yoga, vegetarianism, and various exercises—they sent him there. It’s interesting, I don’t know how true this is or not, maybe this information exists somewhere—there was a man there with the surname Shevchenko, what was his first name—Valentyn, I can’t say the name for sure—he was already, probably, almost 50 in 1975. He said that he was supposedly a descendant of Taras Shevchenko through his sisters. He said that they lived in the building where the SBU, the former KGB, is now, or next to it, where there is also an SBU building now, an old building—somewhere on that spot, as he said, it was built, of granite. His mother was some kind of employee—a local historian or something like that. Because when the war started and there was an evacuation, he was still a young boy, they traveled in echelons to evacuate with these valuables somewhere to the east—his mother was a research fellow. They were bombed by planes, he was slightly shell-shocked. After the war, on the basis of this shell shock, he sometimes had sad moods. After the war, he worked on repairing some road—then they sent young people, Komsomol members. He says that it was hard and hungry, and cold. He went to his foreman and said that it was so hard and difficult for him that sometimes he wanted to throw himself under a train, because he had no strength to endure after this shell shock. And the foreman immediately sent him to a psychiatrist, they gave him some diagnosis, and now he has this diagnosis for life and can’t get rid of it. He wasn’t kept in the hospital permanently, but he had to voluntarily come once a year, supposedly for a re-examination or a re-commission for a month. He said he lived somewhere in Darnytsia. He said that in the seventies, national-patriotic organizations in Canada wanted to take him, but it didn’t work out. He had such democratic views. He said that somehow he had to survive and endure all this. I don’t know how true this is or not: he said that he was from the family of Taras Shevchenko (a descendant of one of his sisters).
But there were no political prisoners like that.
V.O.: And how long did they keep you there?
V.P.: I was there for a month. They gave me pills, gave me injections…
V.O.: And were there any consequences? What was the conclusion?
V.P.: They asked me every time what I would do next, how I would live—they were interested in that. I told them I would work, and we’ll see what happens next. I was there for about a month. They didn’t let me out on my own. It was difficult for my mother to leave work, so my father’s sister, my aunt Ivanova, came and took me from there under her signature. That was 1975.
In 1976, I think, when information about the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group began to spread on Western radio stations, of course, I wanted to somehow join this or get in touch with these people—the organizers and participants. I asked friends, acquaintances…
V.O.: Did they broadcast Oksana Meshko’s address on the radio? 16 Verbolozna Street?
V.P.: I personally heard about Verbolozna only when perestroika began, when I returned from prison. But then—I don’t know, maybe I just missed it, because they jammed it terribly, especially the Ukrainian service—not so much the Russian service as the Ukrainian one. For the Russian one—you could sometimes hear something.
V.O.: Yes, and they jammed it especially in the city. In the provinces, it was somehow easier.
V.P.: Well, I didn’t have anyone I could go to. I listened mostly in the city, and they jammed the Ukrainian service terribly. You could hear something around two or three in the morning.
V.O.: In 1977-78 I was at home, in the village, so I mostly oriented myself in the situation through the radio. In the village, of course, it was easier.
V.P.: An interesting story happened. I once borrowed Mykola Rudenko’s poems from the library, read his poems and his fantasy works with a subtext of criticism of the personality cult. I read his “The Magic Boomerang” as a teenager, read his wonderful poems. And I thought—there were information bureaus in Kyiv then, booths on every corner—I didn’t even know Rudenko’s year of birth and didn’t know if they would give information about him at the information bureau. I once took a book of his poems, and there he wrote in a poem that in 1941 he was 20 years old. And I roughly thought that he was born in nineteen-twenty or twenty-one. This was already, probably, 1976. I went to the information bureau, writing that it was Mykola Danylovych Rudenko. They didn’t give it to me for a long time, asked me to come back in an hour or later. They gave me an address in Koncha-Zaspa. But you see, like any average Kyiv resident, I had the impression that only the “big shots,” the party bosses, live in Koncha-Zaspa. I thought it might be some kind of trap. Who knows if he lives there. Especially since I knew that he was already in disgrace, expelled from the Writers’ Union. I thought, you’ll go there—and maybe some KGB agent lives at this address? I had never been to Koncha-Zaspa, how to get there—maybe there’s already some checkpoint where a policeman stands and watches who enters and leaves? Will they even let me into that settlement where the bosses mostly live? And will they let me to this house, or is there a policeman or a plainclothes KGB agent standing by his gate? I was thinking about it like that, and I had already looked near the bus station, I think bus 41 went to Koncha-Zaspa. And I was still thinking of going there at least for reconnaissance. But while I was thinking like that, they had already reported that Rudenko was arrested. I wrote a letter to the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine in defense of Rudenko. By the way, this letter is in my criminal case file. And again, I couldn’t make contact. What to do?
V.O.: This is 1976-77, and you were arrested only in eighty-three?
V.P.: Yes, a few more words need to be said here. In 1976, I saw that everyone was being arrested, the Helsinki Group, there were no connections, it wasn’t working out for me. I saw that things were getting worse, so I wrote that in protest against everything that was happening in the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, I did not want to be a Soviet citizen at all and renounced my Soviet citizenship. By the way, I still have this card from 1976: Moscow, Kremlin, where I sent my renunciation of Soviet citizenship on July 29. They sent me a postcard saying they had forwarded it to the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. From the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, they summoned me to their local subdivisions and asked me what I wanted. I said that, firstly, I saw no point in being a citizen of the Soviet Union, because in fact I have no rights, I can’t even resolve anything with the psychiatrists, especially since people are dragged around and put in prisons, in psychiatric hospitals and so on for expressing their thoughts. What to do, I don’t know. They replied that a person without citizenship will simply be limited in their rights. You won’t even be able to leave the settlement where you will live, whether in Kyiv or somewhere else, without our knowledge. You won’t be able to go anywhere without special permission, because these people are under special surveillance. I then again raised the question of the possibility of leaving, at least because my mother is Swedish on her father’s side, so it would be possible to leave for Sweden. They said: “These are your personal problems, you solve this issue yourself.” Since there were no connections, because my grandfather came before the revolution, before the October coup, then there were wars…
V.O.: So you couldn’t have had any call or invitation?
V.P.: Yes. They summoned me again to the city prosecutor’s office and there they said that even if you were leaving the Soviet Union, it would only be with your mother, because your mother has, firstly, more right to leave, because she is the daughter of a father who was born in Sweden, and, as they said, according to those Soviet laws and by-laws, the third generation has no rights anymore. Of course, my mother didn’t want to, especially since my brother’s daughter had already been born, and she had worked her whole life, was about to retire. So nothing came of it, and I declared a hunger strike again. It happened that they summoned me to the OVIR, at first on Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Street—this is the Department of Internal Affairs of the city of Kyiv. There were some two lieutenant colonels, they talked and talked and said: “You see, the issue of renouncing citizenship is considered by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and we believe that you have no serious reasons for renouncing citizenship. Your views are your problems. If, they say, it was a family reunification, we would recognize that, but in your case, we believe, there are no reasons.”
I again declared a hunger strike in protest, an ambulance came again and said: “If you continue, we will take you and force-feed you there, and it will be of no use.”
In August 1976, I resigned from the film copying factory. Since I insisted that I was renouncing my citizenship, I even wrote that since my rights were being violated, and where there are no rights, there can be no obligations to the state, so I also renounce all obligations to the Soviet state. I resigned from my job and for some time I didn’t work—I wrote these letters, petitioned for the possibility of renouncing citizenship, for leaving. I even went to Vyborg, to the Soviet-Finnish border. I wanted to cross the border. But I saw that it was a difficult matter, especially without knowledge of the terrain. So I returned home to Kyiv.
FIRST TRIAL
At the end of February 1977, the district police officer, Vasyl Ivanovych Sydorenko, summoned me and said: “What you are writing and trying to achieve there are your personal problems, but if you don’t go to work, you could be imprisoned under the article for ‘parasitism,’ or whatever the court decides.” I, of course, should not have aggravated the situation, but simply gone to work somewhere, although with such a biography you can’t get a good job anywhere. I wrote an explanation that since I had renounced my Soviet citizenship, I demand that my issue be resolved, and I will continue the hunger strike. The ambulance came, the doctor came in and said that if I continued, they would take me away. I had to stop the hunger strike, but a few days later they took me to the Pavlov psychiatric hospital again anyway. I was there for 2.5 months, then I got out, they summoned me to the police—this was in the then Moscowsky district, now Holosiivskyi. Some police chief there asked if I would continue these affairs of mine—to further petition for renouncing citizenship. I said that the law allows it, it’s my right—it’s another matter, by what methods. He said: “Look, because if you continue and you are not working now, we can open a criminal case against you for not working.”
V.O.: “Social parasitism?”
V.P.: Yes. And he asked what I was living on. I said that I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I’m a modest person, and while I was working, I was saving money, because if they had allowed people to emigrate, they charged a lot of money—500 rubles to renounce your citizenship, for visas, for this and that, so you needed quite a bit of money.
V.O.: I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t eat—you don’t need money for a hunger strike...
V.P.: So we talked, and he said, “Well, go home and think about it, and you’d better find a job somewhere, or you’ll have trouble.” I looked and looked, and then, indeed, I found a job at the Kyiv Library Collector—they assembled book collections for libraries. It wasn’t far from us, near Rylsky Park.
But as soon as I got the job, it turned out that while I was in the psychiatric hospital, they had already formally opened a criminal case against me. This was already 1978, the month of June. I wondered: why did they let me go? It turned out that right at that time, the King of Sweden and his wife came to the Soviet Union for the first time on a state visit and were in Kyiv. A colleague of my mother’s had married a Swede who had come here as a tourist, so my mother got the phone number of the Swedish embassy from that woman. So when the doctors asked me what I was going to do next, I said that if they continued to mistreat me, I would have to contact the Swedish embassy. I don’t know what role that played, but a few days before the King of Sweden’s arrival, they released me from the hospital.
I had already started my job when a court summons arrived at my workplace. To this day, I still don’t understand it. In Soviet times, I wrote complaints to various institutions, but nothing was ever really resolved. In fact, I had been working as an assembler at this Kyiv Library Collector since June 12, 1978, but they summoned me to court around the end of June. The lawyer was Natalia Indychenko from the Pechersk office—at that time, it was right across from the Officers’ House, in a basement. They said that because I hadn’t worked for a period of time, they had the right to punish me as a violator of the law. But the lawyer argued that I had been living on my own money—it wasn’t like I was involved in some illegal activity or anything. Well, the court reached a Solomonic decision: since I was already employed, they couldn’t imprison me or send me to forced labor, so they ordered monthly deductions from my salary for a year—that was the type of punishment.
V.O.: Interesting...
V.P.: Yes, it was a ridiculous situation for them. I was already working (I even had to ask for time off to go to the trial; I was too embarrassed to say I was being summoned to court, so I lied that I had a toothache and got an appointment slip from the clinic for a specific time). I had just started the job, I’d only been there for two weeks. The trial lasted about two hours.
V.O.: So, what kind of court was it—a district court?
V.P.: Yes, of the Moscow District.
V.O.: And do you remember the date?
V.P.: I don’t remember exactly, it was sometime at the end of June 1978.
V.O.: And so, what was the verdict?
V.P.: The verdict was a 20% deduction from my salary, because I was already employed.
V.O.: For how long?
V.P.: For a year. I later tried to appeal it to the city court and the Supreme Court, but nothing came of it. After a while, the conviction is expunged.
There was another interesting incident. In 1973, I read the New Testament; I managed to read some of the Gospels. It made a very strong impression on me, and I even wrote poems on religious themes, back then in Russian. At the time, the Kyiv Metropolitanate published a journal. I sent one poem to this journal. I received no reply. I wrote again, but instead, I was summoned—I don’t know what it was called then, it was on what is now Prorizna Street, then Sverdlov Street, on the corner with Khreshchatyk, the State Committee for Publishing or something like that. They summoned me there. I went in, I think it was on the second floor, and there was one man there, I don't remember his last name, in a small room. I saw all sorts of religious books—on religious themes, critical works, and copies of the *Orthodox Herald*. I realized he must have been the one overseeing these matters for the Party’s Central Committee, or the State Committee for Publishing, or someone. He didn’t ask anything directly either—he asked about this and that, what I was doing. Then he said, “So, you write poems?” “I do.” “And on what themes?” “Various ones, sometimes romantic, sometimes religious.” I didn’t mention the political ones. “And so, do you have any problems?” I thought about what problems I had, trying to remember. I said, “Ah, yes, I sent a poem on a Christian theme to the *Orthodox Herald*, but I haven't received any reply.” “Well, that’s their business. But you write about love, about other things? We have various publishing houses—maybe you could try them? There’s ‘Molod,’ there are other publishers. Maybe they would print some of your poems?” “Well, you see, I’m the kind of person who can’t divide himself—be one person at home and another on the street. If I lived in a free country, I could (of course, it depends on the quality of the work, but if a work is good, it shouldn’t matter if it’s on a romantic theme, or about nature, or religious, or political)—I could live and publish freely. But I can’t live like that, which is why I sometimes raised the issue of leaving this country. Because when a person writes and writes for the drawer their whole life—that’s a different story…” We talked like that, and he advised me to read Zenon Kosidowski, whose books about the disciples of Jesus Christ, about the apostles, were being published then. We said our goodbyes.
About a week or so later, I received a letter from the Kyiv Metropolitanate—I have it at home somewhere, but I looked for it recently and couldn’t find it. I have both the envelope and the letter, a small sheet of paper, handwritten. It said: “Dear Comrade Pavlov, the *Orthodox Herald* of the Kyiv Patriarchate does not publish poems in its publications. You can try contacting the Moscow Patriarchate; they also have a herald.” I contacted them too, but I never received any reply from Moscow at all.
By the way, at the trial, the lawyer Natalia Indychenko (she was a decent person and a good defender, in principle, she had nothing against me) said: “Well, the man lived on his savings; moreover, the man writes poetry.” I had given her a few poems on Christian themes. I was told that these poems could not be published in the *Orthodox Herald* or anywhere else. It was only later that I read Soviet publications on religious legislation in the USSR, where it was written that since the church is separated from the state, religious and literary activities had no place at all in the Soviet Union. Moreover, you couldn’t teach children, or even adults, in any kind of Bible courses. In fact, you couldn’t do anything.
V.O.: Freedom of conscience in the USSR meant that you could conduct atheistic propaganda, while religious propaganda was prosecuted as a criminal offense.
V.P.: And what’s interesting is that while it was written that there was freedom to practice religious rites, in reality, during major holidays, policemen would even surround the churches, especially St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral. I remember my friend and I went several times for Christmas and Easter, and whenever you arrived, there were several rows of police, and booths, and police vans. There were some brave souls who would jump over the fence. Of course, they were immediately grabbed, thrown into those police vans, and given 15 days or so, and then their school or institute, the university, would be notified. That was the kind of “religious freedom” we had.
I worked at the library collector. It was an interesting situation: when they received the order for the deduction from my monthly salary, they panicked. Why? Because the city library collector selects books not for district libraries, but for all the central ones—the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Ukrainian government, the Verkhovna Rada, the KGB. By the way, what’s interesting is that they had a very rich section for the KGB—the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB had the largest literature procurements. And the Supreme Court—they supplied books for all such institutions.
V.O.: So you couldn't work there, because you could have planted an “ideological bomb.”
V.P.: And they panicked—who had they hired, such an anti-Soviet person? And now how could they fire him? Fortunately, our department head was Nina Borysivna Filipova, and she stood up for me. They probably could have found some reason, although there was no reason to fire me. I worked there for several years, and as long as they kept me, I restrained myself a bit, wrote a little less. I wrote critical comments to newspapers, but not as sharply. But eventually, I had to leave that job too, because there was constant pressure. I would be summoned, then the party organizer would ask what I was writing, then the deputy director—there were always problems like that. After that, I worked at the trade union printing house—as a loader, mind you, but I had to work somewhere. For a while, I worked as a packer at a margarine factory. And what happened? In 1982, I saw that the regime was tightening, when Andropov was transferred from the KGB to become one of the secretaries of the Central Committee. I understood that this was obviously in preparation for him to replace Brezhnev, because you don’t just leave a position like that to become a mere secretary of the Central Committee. He could have combined the two positions, but to leave such a post... Well, the situation in the country was oppressive. I wondered what other action I could take. I was always alone. Unfortunately, that’s how it was, but in all that time, from 1973 to 1983, when I was actively trying to do something against the existing regime, not a single piece of samizdat material ever fell into my hands—there was just no one like that among my relatives, acquaintances, or friends. The only thing was, once, at the end of the seventies, my neighbor, Tetiana Voronovych, a young girl who worked as a lab assistant, I think, at the Institute of Oncology, somewhere on Vasylkivska Street, told me that a colleague from her institute had tried to distribute some samizdat literature, but it never reached her; they were exposed and arrested. And there were public condemnations, speeches at meetings at that Institute of Oncology about what had happened.
V.O.: Well, let's talk about the 1983 case.
V.P.: We're getting to it, yes. At the end of 1982, I was thinking about what other action I could take. I had periodically written before, since it was stated even in official Soviet communist sources that the leading role of the Soviet government and the Communist Party needed to be strengthened. And the new 1977 Constitution also reinforced the leading role of the Communist Party.
And two more words about the Constitution. I submitted a great many amendments—both to the Ukrainian constitution and the all-Union one. I wrote about a multi-party system and about eliminating the leading role of a single party, that the Communist Party was no longer needed, and so on.
I was still in a Russian-speaking environment; I didn’t encounter any nationalists, patriots in the good sense of the word. But sometimes you could listen to either “Ukrainian Radio Canada” or Radio “Liberty” in Ukrainian.
When the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR was being discussed, I wrote one of the amendments and sent it to newspapers, to *Pravda Ukrainy* and other papers, to the Constitutional Commission of the Ukrainian SSR, to the Central Committee of the CPU. I wrote that since the Constitution of Ukraine—this draft, as well as the old Constitution—guaranteed the right of republics to freely secede from the USSR, it was necessary to add to the Constitution that this right should be somehow guaranteed. First, people should have the right to officially agitate for the separation of Ukraine and its secession from the Soviet Union, and second, so that it wasn't just a formal entry, referendums should be held periodically. On the one hand, there should be agitation, so that these ideas could be brought to the people, and on the other hand, once the agitation was carried out, referendums could be held periodically, and then the people would express their desire—whether they wanted to be part of the Soviet Union or not. As it was, it was just formally written that the republics had the right to freely secede from the USSR, but how to implement this in practice—there was nothing about it anywhere. I understood that this was a trick by the communist authorities, that they never even intended to give this right to anyone. But since such a discussion was going on, I felt it necessary to express my opinion. Well, I received responses from everywhere, saying that my appeals had been forwarded to the Constitutional Commission and so on.
I think there were other people in Ukraine and in other republics of the Soviet Union who wrote articles about abolishing the leading role of the Communist Party. Brezhnev, when he spoke at the final discussion of the draft Constitution, either after the adoption or before the adoption of the prepared draft, said that during the discussion of the draft USSR Constitution, there had been proposals to abolish the leading role of the Communist Party. Brezhnev said that the Party is the heart of our people, of our state, and how can the people and the state exist without a heart? So after that speech, I wrote a letter to Brezhnev, saying that there are cases when the heart is very sick and requires an operation. There were interesting things like that.
By the way, in December 1981, when the “Solidarity” movement in Poland was suppressed and martial law was declared, I wrote a letter to the embassy of the Polish People’s Republic in the USSR in Moscow and to the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the USSR (the leadership of the trade unions), in which I declared that I was leaving the trade unions in protest. And I destroyed my trade union card.
There was another thing. Sometime in September 1982, I went to Moscow, climbed over the fence of the Austrian embassy in the USSR at night, sat there until morning, and handed an embassy employee an appeal to the participants of the Madrid Meeting of leaders of the states that had signed the Helsinki Accords. In the appeal, I cited numerous examples of human rights violations in the USSR concerning other people and my own rights. I wrote that the leadership of the USSR could not be trusted, for although the leaders of the USSR signed the Helsinki Final Act on human rights in 1975, they were not fulfilling any of it. When I left the embassy grounds, I was detained by policemen and taken to the 60th police precinct in Moscow. They interrogated me there, and I wrote an explanation of my actions. They let me go so I could return home to Kyiv. Perhaps they wanted to see if I was connected with any dissidents or human rights activists.
Also in the fall of 1982, I wrote a letter to the newspaper *Izvestia*, where I proposed a discussion on the topic of dissolving the CPSU and the need for democratic reforms in the USSR. I wrote that if there was no such discussion in the pages of *Izvestia*, I would be forced to appeal directly to the people, to the public. I also wrote about this to the newspaper *Pravda*, and to M.S. Gorbachev—he then held the position of Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet Committee on Legislative Proposals. It had some interesting title like that. I wrote a letter to the UN General Assembly with a proposal to condemn the communist Marxist-Leninist ideology as a racist ideology, because it divided and set people against each other based on political and religious views and class affiliation, and persecuted them for it. But I don’t think I managed to send that letter. I understood that this letter would not reach its addressee through official mail. And I had no illegal connections with foreign countries. I was going to send one copy of it officially by mail to the UN. I don’t remember now if I sent it or not, because I was arrested shortly after. However, this letter did not appear in my criminal case. And after my arrest on May 19, 1983, my mother destroyed many of my papers. It’s a good thing they didn’t search my home then for some reason. Maybe because of the psychiatric diagnosis. Because I had many anti-Soviet poems. In particular, in 1983 I wrote what could be called a prophetic poem, “На смерть Андропова-тирана” (On the Death of Andropov the Tyrant). At that time, there were rumors of an assassination attempt on Andropov, who was then the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Less than a year after I wrote that poem, Andropov died. For this and other poems, they could have sentenced me to much more than 3 years.
ARREST. INVESTIGATION. SECOND TRIAL
In the fall of 1982, there was a final stage, one might say, of my activities while at liberty—I prepared a letter in which I again wrote that the leading role of the Communist Party should be abolished, the Communist Party should be dissolved, all power should be given to the Soviets, at least for the time being, and perhaps a multi-party system should be introduced and democratic reforms carried out. I wrote all this by hand and sent these letters to all 15 republics, to all the first secretaries of the Central Committees of the republican communist parties, then to all the capital city committees of the republican communist parties, to all the first secretaries, to all the heads of the capital republican city councils, and also to the newspapers *Izvestia* and *Pravda*, to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine and the USSR—to as many bodies as possible. That was the action.
After that, on May 19, 1983, I came home from work, I think from the second shift. I was working at the Kyiv Margarine Plant as a packer at the time. In the morning, two men came to my house, I think from the Kyiv City Prosecutor’s Office, and told me to get dressed. They didn’t even say I was under arrest or anything, just that we were going for a talk at the prosecutor’s office. I got dressed, said goodbye to my mother, and asked them if I should take anything with me. They said it wouldn’t be long, so I didn’t take anything. We went outside, a black “Volga” was waiting, we got into the black “Volga” and drove to 11/13 Riznytska Street. I think at that time the city and republican prosecutor’s offices were in the same building. They took me to an office, I think on the second floor. They showed me some of my letters, primarily all the appeals regarding the abolition of the leading role of the CPSU, the dissolution of the CPSU, and so on. They asked if they were my letters—I said they were mine, I didn’t deny it. I had written them under my own signature, they weren’t anonymous, and I signed the envelopes with my home address—so what was there to deny? What’s interesting is that even though I signed, acknowledging the letters were mine, they still sent them for a graphological examination. And another interesting point. One of the investigators, I think his name was Liashenko, Serhiy Mykolayovych—he was still young then, about 30 years old, and there was another young man with him—when Liashenko stepped out, someone called the office, and the other man picked up the phone and said that Liashenko was out. They must have asked who he was, and he replied that he couldn’t say, conditionally calling himself a trainee from Moscow. What kind of trainee from Moscow he was—whether he was from the KGB, I don’t know. Liashenko came back and said, “We’re going to the hospital.” They took me, and as we were approaching, I saw that they had brought me to Pavlivka.
V.O.: And did they formalize the detention in any way?
V.P.: Liashenko had stepped out of the office to sign some papers—evidently, a warrant for my detention or for sending me for an examination. But if they were taking me to the prison ward, there must have been a warrant. They signed the papers and brought me to the psychiatric hospital. From the stress, I had a fever of 38°C (100.4°F). Probably from the nerves. It was May 19th, it was already warm. They handed me over to the doctors in the thirteenth ward, the prison ward for forensic medical examination. I was there from May 19th until, I think, August 1st.
V.O.: Wow! That's June, July—more than two months.
V.P.: Yes. A long time. And they usually say an examination takes about twenty-one days, not more.
V.O.: In 1973, they held me for 18 days.
V.P.: During those more than two months, three doctors changed—probably no one wanted to take on the case, because a diagnosis, a conclusion had to be made. By the way, we could read newspapers there, even though we were kept behind bars. Each room was separate, behind bars and locked, and the windows had bars too. It was during those days—it must have been in June or early July—that the international conference of psychiatrists was held in Honolulu. 1983. They couldn’t cut it out of the newspapers, because it was printed, I think, in *Izvestia*, that the World Psychiatric Association in Honolulu had condemned the use of psychiatry for political purposes in the Soviet Union. The article was written, of course, to say that this was an incorrect decision, that Soviet psychiatrists were protesting.
V.O.: That's when Soviet psychiatrists withdrew from the International Association to avoid being expelled.
V.P.: Maybe that had some influence, because psychiatrists were different kinds of people too—some more decent, some less. In those two months, three doctors were changed because, probably, no one wanted to take on that responsibility, because it was, after all, a responsibility. Especially since the orderlies there were probably from the police, if it was a prison ward. Because one orderly would come every time and keep asking: “So what will you do if the decision is this, or that?” I said that in the worst-case scenario, my mother would call the Swedish embassy, because she is Swedish on her father’s side, and we have the phone number.
They kept me there, I think, until August 1st, and then they transferred me to Lukianivska Prison. I still didn’t know what the decision was, because they didn’t tell me anything there. By the way, people there told me that just a few weeks before me, in the very same ward, there was a teacher from a Kyiv school. He was still young, unfortunately, I don’t know his last name. He taught either physics or mathematics to high school students. Sometimes, maybe when he had time, he would talk about life, a little about politics. And someone, probably one of the children, told their parents at home, and parents are different, some are KGB employees or zealous communists. Eventually, the “organs” became interested in this teacher, threw him into this psychiatric hospital, and declared him mentally ill, transferring him from the prison ward (this was before my arrival) to some therapeutic ward in the Kyiv Psychiatric Hospital. They said that nearby, not far from us (we had no contact), a young woman was being held in the women’s ward at the same time for political activity against the Soviet government. This was from May to August 1983. They even accused her of some kind of espionage. Unfortunately, I don’t know her last name either.
There was another doctor, he was some kind of activist in the World Esperanto Association, an Esperantist. He was also thrown into a psychiatric hospital because he corresponded with people abroad; he was also persecuted and put under observation and before a psychiatric commission.
In Lukianivska Prison, I was initially in a general cell. It was the time of the Andropovshchina, and all the cells were overcrowded. There were two-tiered bunks, and practically no free space in the cell, just these double-decker iron beds. Crowded, of course. They took us out for an hour-long walk.
V.O.: And how many people were in the cell?
V.P.: Oh, I almost forgot. At first, I was in a tiny cell—on both sides, there were only two two-tiered bunks and a passage that wasn't even a meter wide. A very small cell, and there were two other men there. They kept me there for maybe two weeks or more. There was one big guy who tried to pressure everyone, threaten them, and ask all sorts of questions. One time, it happened that the other inmate and I went for a walk, and the big guy wasn't there—he had gone to the doctor or was summoned somewhere. And that man told me that he was supposedly from Leningrad, had supposedly committed some crime. And he advised me to be wary of the big guy, because he was a “stool pigeon,” he was trying to get information out of everyone. In principle, I talked to them; I had nothing to hide, because I had already written everything I wanted to various newspapers and institutions. So I had no secrets, especially since I wasn't connected to anyone, so I couldn't betray anyone and there was no need to pressure me.
A few weeks later, I was moved to a larger cell, with maybe fifteen men. Also two-tiered bunks and very little free space. The men in the larger cell were criminals, but they took the fact that I opposed the communist government normally; there was no pressure like, “Oh, you're against the Soviet government.” I remember in Pogodin’s *Kremlin Chimes*, when the Bolsheviks wouldn’t give the engineer Zabelin a job, even though he was an expert on power stations, and they fired him, he went to the market to sell lighters, and he would talk there and criticize the Bolshevik government. And another man who was also selling things there listened to him and said, “You are not a normal Soviet speculator!” So there was this notion among people that you could be a normal Soviet thief, or as the Bolsheviks said, socially close, but there were also abnormal criminals, and those were the anti-Soviets.
V.O.: Did any of your cellmates like the Soviet authorities?
V.P.: Ah, some of them even gave me advice on who to turn to, that there were some international organizations that help political prisoners, but for that you needed to have some kind of connection.
So I stayed there until the trial. The trial was on September 6, 1983, held in the Kyiv City Court, the criminal division. The judge was Draga, the people's assessors were Korobova and Kobzarenko, the secretary was Humeniuk, the prosecutor was Abramenko, and the lawyer was Lamekin. What’s interesting is that the prosecutor Abramenko spoke so insistently against me, saying, “This is such an anti-Soviet!” The penalty under Article 187-prime of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR ranged from a warning and a 100-ruble fine to three years of imprisonment—and he demanded three years of “special regime” for me.
V.O.: Special regime means cell confinement; it's for recidivists.
V.P.: And he said that this was such an anti-Soviet, three years of “special regime.” By the way, when this lawyer, Lamekin, first came to see me in Lukianivska Prison, I refused his services. I asked him, “Can you defend me? Because I do not plead guilty.” He said, “I cannot defend you that way.” I refused the lawyer, but prosecutor Abramenko said that since I had a psychiatric diagnosis of “mosaic circle psychopathy,” I could not defend myself without a lawyer, even though I was the defendant—such a double standard, and a state-appointed lawyer was provided for me. He was a decent man, he didn't say anything against me, but when we spoke before the trial, he said he wanted to consult with other lawyers about whether it was even possible to try me under this article, because formally that article was for spreading slander against the Soviet system and various state institutions. But I mostly wrote only to various institutions, newspapers, and party bodies, and the Constitution guarantees the right of citizens to appeal with statements, complaints, proposals, and so on.
V.O.: You didn't give them to anyone else to read, right?
V.P.: I gave them to friends, but that wasn’t documented—my friends were decent people, no one betrayed me. And even when my relatives were called in, they said they didn’t know what I was writing, only that when things got tough for me, I wanted to leave, wanted to renounce my citizenship, but they didn't know the substance of what I wrote. Some knew, but didn't betray me. So Lamekin said he wanted to consult with other lawyers about whether it was possible at all to try someone for this kind of activity under that article. So someone—I don't know who, maybe Abramenko or someone else in the prosecutor's office—told him, “If you show these letters from Pavlov’s criminal case to anyone else, you will go down with him in the case for distributing these materials.”
V.O.: Is that so!
V.P.: That's how it was. I remembered: when the investigator Serhiy Liashenko from the Kyiv Prosecutor's Office and the lawyer Lamekin came to Lukianivska Prison before the trial to close the case, the lawyer looked at my file and asked the investigator how it was possible to try someone for such things under such an article. Liashenko told him: “We’ll just run it as a test—if it works, it works.” So, apparently, they themselves weren't one hundred percent sure if anything would come of it, but it was one of those Andropov-era actions. I was later told that in the year Andropov was in power, more than three hundred people were arrested and convicted in Ukraine alone—this included many representatives of various churches, those who refused to serve in the army, who conducted religious propaganda, which was forbidden, as well as others—dissidents, political figures. More than three hundred people, and that was in about a year of Andropov’s rule.
At the trial, Abramenko proposed three years of “special” regime for me, saying that I was particularly dangerous to society. My lawyer defended me, saying that I had good character references from the army and from my places of work...
V.O.: You had a rather illiterate prosecutor, because the special regime is under Article 26 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, for a recidivist—a criminal who has repeatedly committed a serious crime. It’s cell confinement.
V.P.: How did he justify it? He was obviously referring to the fact that in 1976 I had renounced my citizenship and for a time had not worked, and the trial actually took place when I was already working at the library collector. They sentenced me to a 20% deduction from my earnings. But in fact, it was a criminal conviction.
V.O.: Ah, so you were already a recidivist?!
V.P.: Although it had already been expunged, meaning in the documents I was listed as having no prior convictions.
V.O.: But he wanted to make you a recidivist?
V.P.: You see, it was even written in the verdict of my 1983 case, No. 2-135: “having no prior convictions in accordance with Article 55 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR.”
V.O.: Well yes, because that conviction had already expired. And to be recognized as a recidivist, the first conviction must also be for a serious crime and not be expunged.
V.P.: Apparently, even though the conviction had been expunged and I was considered to have no prior convictions, it was all still on their records. V.O.: They remember everything!
V.P.: They remember everything, yes. There were many accusations in the criminal case—I’ll read a little, a few points:
“Point 2. On October 21, 1976, a so-called ‘open letter,’ in which the defendant Pavlov revises the Marxist-Leninist doctrine on the construction of a communist society in the USSR, stating that communism is allegedly a myth in theory and practice, slanders the Soviet state system and the activities of Soviet law enforcement agencies, the domestic and foreign policy of the CPSU, and sent it the next day to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper *Vechirniy Kyiv*.”
So *Vechirka* betrayed me after all.
V.O.: So it turns out you're a revisionist?
V.P.: *Vechirka* forwarded my letter to curry favor and show that they were “being vigilant.”
V.O.: Yes, “bdyat”—what a rich word!
V.P.: “Point 4. On November 16, 1976, a letter titled ‘Statement,’ in which he asserts that the USSR Constitution allegedly codifies discrimination against the Christian faith, and sent it the next day to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper *Pravda Ukrainy*.
Point 5. On December 19, 1976, a so-called ‘Open Letter,’ in which he indicated that the USSR mass media allegedly ‘disinform’ the masses, praised and justified renegades who had been brought to criminal responsibility, and after that sent the letter to the General Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR.”
There are many more similar critical appeals to various bodies, institutions here...
V.O.: We'll copy the verdict.
V.P.: The only other thing I’ll read from here is an interesting point:
“Point 15. In October-November 1982 (they list 6 copies here, but in fact there were dozens, but apparently there were more or less decent people who did not hand over these letters and appeals of mine to the KGB or MVD) titled ‘Open Letter,’ in which, in particular, he asserts that the CPSU has fulfilled its historical mission and should supposedly declare its self-dissolution. Spreading slander against the Soviet state and social system, during the same period of time, he sent the prepared copies of the letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, the Ashkhabad City Committee of the Communist Party of Turkmenia, the Tbilisi Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, the Alma-Ata City Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, the chairman of the executive committee of the Vilnius Council of People’s Deputies, and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper *Kyivska Pravda*.”
In reality, there were many more, because I sent them to all the leaders of all the republican organizations of the CPSU, all the heads of the supreme soviets of the republics of the Soviet Union, all the heads of the city committees of the capital councils of the republics of the Soviet Union, to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Central Committee of the CPSU, to *Pravda*, *Izvestia*, *Kyivska Pravda*, *Vechirniy Kyiv*, the Kyiv city committee of the Communist Party, and many other bodies...
V.O.: That was so much work! You wrote each copy separately? How long was the letter?
V.P.: It was done over several months. The letter wasn’t very long, a page and a half to two pages at most. V.O.: Still—that's so many to write!
V.P.: I don’t remember, but it’s possible I even wrote several copies using carbon paper—or maybe each one separately. I don’t remember anymore. I have it in my criminal case...
V.O.: Approximately how many letters were included in the criminal case?
V.P.: In the criminal case, they write six copies.
V.O.: That’s six copies of one letter. But how many letters in total were you charged with in the verdict?
V.P.: In the verdict? You see, it lists from 1976 to 1983.
V.O.: So there were dozens?
V.P.: Maybe even hundreds. It actually began in the fall of 1973, when I first wrote about the need to dissolve the CPSU, and then about Brezhnev’s resignation—that was in the fall of 1973. But then they sent me to a psychiatrist, so I don’t know where those letters are now. When I was on the psychiatric register, they didn’t take me seriously. By the way, Dr. Zhadanova—I don’t know how true this is—later told my late aunt, Praskoviia Ivanova: “With this psychiatric diagnosis, we saved him to some extent, because if it weren’t for us, he would have been imprisoned back in 1973.” So who knows if it was for the better or for the worse.
V.O.: How long did the trial last?
V.P.: The trial lasted several hours. This is how it went. First, I refused the lawyer. Second, they had the accusation, they had the text, and they had photocopies of my letters. But they didn't give me anything. Abramenko didn't read the letters aloud, so I said: “If you are going to accuse me in court, then let’s examine each letter separately, by the text, for what reason it was written and what is written there, and then we will consider whether it is slander, or what, or how. Because according to the Constitution, I have the right to appeal to various bodies with complaints, with statements, remarks, proposals, and so on.” But Abramenko didn't go for it. He probably had everything prepared, because he didn't even read any quotes from the letters, but simply read out, as I am reading now, that on such and such a date there was such and such a letter and there were such and such slanders. So I said, how can I remember from a decade ago, how can I defend myself and make my case? What kind of trial is this? You give me unsubstantiated accusations, and I am supposed to remember what I wrote in 1976 and on what date, when it is already 1983? He read all these accusations in one go. I can briefly mention the last one here:
“Point 16. On January 15, 1983, a letter titled ‘Note of Protest,’ in which he expresses slanderous and defamatory fabrications against the Soviet state and social system, comparing it to a fascist dictatorship, and sent it on January 16, 1983, to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR.
Point 17. On January 15, 1983, a letter with a similar title, in which he slanders the activities of Soviet law enforcement agencies, stating that there is an alleged violation of democratic rights and freedoms of citizens in the USSR, and sent it the next day to the Prosecutor General of the USSR.”
Well, I did not plead guilty. The prosecutor demanded three years of “special” regime. The witnesses testified to nothing. Only, you see, the great guilt was that a person listened to Western radio stations like the BBC and the “Voice of America.” The verdict stated: “Moreover, witnesses Pavlova and Savost testified (Savost is my mother, Olha Adolfivna, and Pavlova is my brother's wife, they lived with us for a while) that the defendant engaged in listening to certain foreign radio stations.” So even listening to Western radio stations was already a crime. “Moreover,” Pavlov listened to these Western radio voices.
And the verdict: “Based on the foregoing, guided by Articles 323, 324, 327 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Ukrainian SSR, I sentence Vadym Vasylyovych Pavlov under Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR to three years of imprisonment in a general-regime corrective labor colony.”
What's interesting is that I was under psychiatric evaluation for almost three months, and at first they didn’t want to count that time. But I said I was in prison confinement, under guard. But their verdict was probably prepared in advance, so they wrote that “the term of punishment shall be calculated from September 1, 1983, and the time Pavlov spent in custody in a medical institution from May 19 to July 31, 1983, shall be credited toward his sentence. The material evidence in the case, the attached letters, shall remain with the case. The sentence may be appealed through the Kyiv City Court, the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR within seven days of its pronouncement, and by the convict within the same period from the day of receiving a copy of the verdict.”
The Supreme Court of Ukraine left everything unchanged. But what’s interesting, and I’ll read it here, is how much it got to them, that the decision of the Supreme Court in my case states:
“Case No. 5/983K83. Verdict delivered under the chairmanship of Draga V.N., rapporteur Antonov N.F., decision in the name of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the judicial collegium for criminal cases of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR, consisting of chairman Antonov N.F., court members Kononenko V.I., Smorodinov V.D. with the participation of prosecutor Pohorelov V.P….”
By the way, Pohorelyi—I don’t know where he is now—was still working in the prosecutor’s office during perestroika. In his responses to my mother’s and my complaints, he signed as the prosecutor of the department for supervision of investigations in the security organs. It turns out that the KGB did have a connection to my case after all, even though I was under investigation in Kyiv’s Lukianivska Prison.
V.O.: Pohorelyi figured in many cases of political prisoners.
V.P.: By the way, after my release, when I was seeking rehabilitation, the responses often came from Pohorelyi, even during perestroika, stating that I was convicted correctly, in accordance with the law. And it continues:
“Considered in a court session on October 6, 1983, the criminal case on the cassation appeal of the convicted Pavlov against the verdict of the judicial collegium for criminal cases of the Kyiv City Court of September 6, 1983, by which Pavlov V.V., born in 1951, a citizen of the USSR, was convicted under Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR to three years of imprisonment in a general-regime colony, Pavlov is found guilty...”
What's interesting is what is written here: “Pavlov's punishment was assigned taking into account the heightened social danger of the crime committed and data about his personality.” That is, in Soviet times, even writing some appeal, letters to newspapers, to Soviet institutions—this was already a heightened social danger. So what can be said about people who had the opportunity to contact the West or published and distributed some publications, underground journals, leaflets, etc.? They must have been such malicious enemies of the Soviet system that if they could, they would have shot them.
V.O.: What was the date of this Supreme Court hearing?
V.P.: October 6, 1983.
V.O.: So that was for the cassation appeal?
V.P.: Yes, they responded to the cassation appeal that everything was in accordance with the law.
IMPRISONMENT IN RAFALIVKA
And then I was transported to Rafalivka—it’s a camp in Rivne Oblast, there’s a station called Rafalivka...
V.O.: Yes, yes, that’s a well-known camp.
V.P.: What's interesting is that when I arrived at that camp, all the camp chiefs and commanders gather and assign people to “squads,” or detachments. When they called my name, the camp warden, whose name I unfortunately don't remember, but he wore a deputy's pin—whether he was a deputy of the Rivne Oblast Council or some other, he had a deputy's pin—began to speak out against me, saying that this was a malicious anti-Soviet, and we must keep him here with an “iron fist.” He turns to me: “You'd better not engage in any propaganda or agitation here, or it will be bad for you, and now, under Andropov, a new regulation has come out that even if you violate the rules, not to mention propaganda, we have the right to hold a trial right here in the camp and add another three years to your three years, and we can keep adding on so that you never get out of here.”
V.O.: That's Article 183-3, the Andropov-era law.
V.P.: That’s how they tried to intimidate me. And I thought, I have nothing to lose, so I said: “If you are greeting me like this, with such threats, then I don't want to enter your camp.” I had heard on the transport that sometimes prisoners say they don’t want to go into a certain camp. Maybe there are other problems, but I had heard of it. I said: “I don’t want to enter this camp at all, I am declaring a hunger strike and I demand the status of a political prisoner. I didn't rob anyone, I didn't steal anything, I didn't rape anyone—if you've convicted me for my letters, what kind of criminal am I?” I understand that according to the law back then, there were no political prisoners in the Soviet Union. But still, I said that I demanded political prisoner status and was declaring a hunger strike.
They took me to the guardhouse, to a separate cell, stripped me down, gave me some slippers to wear on my bare feet, a thin pajama-like outfit with nothing underneath—except maybe underwear and a t-shirt, but nothing warm—and locked me in this cell. And this was already October 23, 1983, it was already quite cold. I began the hunger strike. For the first few days, they didn't bring me food because I refused—they couldn't enter the cell, and I wouldn't take it. But after a few days, probably to provoke me, they would open the door and put the food on the floor near the door and then close the door. The first few days were more or less okay, especially since I had experience with previous hunger strikes, so I tolerated it reasonably well. But the cell was so damp, it wasn't heated, it was already cold, the end of October. There were these bunks that folded up into the wall. And, of course, these bunks were very heavy, made of oak or some other wood, with iron trim around the edges. A lot of iron on the edges. When they were set up, there was a leg underneath, also made of iron. That’s how they stood. There was no bedding, nothing.
V.O.: So it was a punishment cell?
V.P.: Yes, a punishment cell. And there was no bedding. The first day of my hunger strike, I somehow managed to handle them. I’m short, about 162 cm (5'4"), and I didn't weigh much, always around 56-57 kilograms (123-125 lbs), sometimes less. The first two days, I could still lift these bunks, because you had to close them during the day, and you had to walk around the cell all day, there were no chairs, nothing to sit on. And at night, you had to open them again. So by the third or fourth day, I barely managed to close them in the morning, but I already felt that if I opened them in the evening, I wouldn't be able to close them in the morning. And they were very strict about it: you had to close them. I asked the guard: “What should I do? If I open them, I won't be able to close them in the morning.” He said: “If you don't close them, it will be worse for you.” He advised me not to open them at all. I thought: it’s better if I don't open them, because I don't know how long I will be on this hunger strike, I won't have the strength. And if I open them, they might fall on me. I might not be able to handle such a weight. It was about two meters long and a meter wide. A huge mass. So I said: “Fine, I won't open them.” And I had to sleep on the floor.
V.O.: Was the floor wooden?
V.P.: It's a good thing the floor was wooden, and there was some tiny radiator in a corner. So I would curl up into a ball, there were some newspapers, I laid them down and so I spent the whole night on the bare floor in those pajamas, in slippers on my bare feet, freezing by that radiator, trying to get a little warm. By the way, it was even a little better than lying on those damp bunks, because they were in the wall all day and when you opened them, they were wet. The cell was generally damp, because the radiator had maybe three or four sections, very small, near the door, so there was practically no heat. It wasn't winter yet, but it was already chilly.
Some of the camp staff, officers, and the camp warden came to see me. The warden came—it’s a shame I don’t remember his name. I have a piece of paper here with a signature, but it doesn't say whose. He was some kind of deputy, from the regional council, he walked around with a pin. He said: “You won't achieve anything, you'll only make it worse for yourself.” And he told me: “We had Barladianu here before you.” He was a well-known human rights activist, as I later learned. He got three years under the same Article 187/1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. He said: “He was already finishing his sentence, and we found witnesses”—he said it just like that—“we found witnesses and we re-sentenced him right here in the camp, gave him another three years—and that was it. The same will happen to you. And what's a hunger strike?” he said. “Nobody knows about you, you'll either die here or become exhausted, and we'll send you to the hospital, feed you with a tube, ruin your health, and you won't achieve anything.”
I managed to last ten days on the hunger strike, but at the beginning of November, I thought, what should I do? It’s true that no one knows about me here and I won’t achieve anything. There’s no one else in the cell at all. So I decided to end the hunger strike, and then I would think about what to do next. I thought, if I’ve ended up in this camp, I should at least get out and see what it’s like.
I ended the hunger strike, stayed in the punishment cell for a few more days, and they started feeding me some kind of broth. They gave me some broth from soup, tea—I started to feel a little better. They released me from the punishment cell right around November 7th—a kind of communist amnesty. And they sent me to the eighth detachment. This detachment worked in a workshop, there were various jobs—they assembled crates, those with a trade did welding, and other things. When I returned home, I saw an official notice my mother had received, which said that I had arrived at their facility on October 23, 1983, and was assigned to the 14th detachment. I read this after I returned from imprisonment. It was sent to my mother so she could write letters or send a parcel. But in reality, I was in the eighth detachment. There were “local zones” there, each detachment was separate. It was a two-story building, so two detachments were in one fenced-off local zone. The 14th detachment was separate. I later found out that the 14th detachment was the worst. This Rafalivka camp was notorious for its quarry, where they extracted granite, and it was very hard labor. Since I wasn't in that detachment, I don't know for sure, but people said—you’d see someone in the dining hall, exchange a few words—that a lot of the work was manual. They chiseled this granite, and the quota was three cubic meters per shift. That’s a huge quota—three cubic meters of this heavy granite had to be loaded onto a truck with shovels, and someone had to chisel it out. At least one, and sometimes more, men died there every week. There were constant accidents—someone would be buried in a rockslide, someone would collapse from exhaustion, because the food was very bad: some broth or a little bit of porridge. The camp warden himself sometimes said at meetings that the camp was overcrowded. It was designed for a maximum of about one and a half thousand, but there were more than three thousand people.
The camp warden himself once spoke at a meeting (I was still in the punishment cell, this must have been a meeting on November 7th) and said that an anti-Soviet like me had arrived, and he told them, look, if he tries to agitate you, don't listen to him and report everything to me, it's better not to have any contact with him. He said, this is a real criminal who has come to us, but you, what kind of criminals are you—someone got caught for a sack of beets, or potatoes, or some petty speculator—what kind of criminals are you, he said. But this one, he said, these are the real criminals, they need to be watched.
The camp was indeed overcrowded. The building was quite large, but there were no empty spots. There were two-tiered bunks everywhere. Two-tiered iron bunks in four rows with narrow passages between them. In the passage between the bunks stood one nightstand. If there weren't enough nightstands, they would stack two—one on top of the other. Very narrow passages, and these two-tiered beds…
When our transport arrived at the end of October 1983, there weren't even enough places for everyone. There were jobs where people worked in three shifts, in those workshops. So it was arranged that one person would go to the night shift, and the one who came from the second or first shift would sleep in his place. Then that one would come back, this one would go to work, they would switch—that’s how it was.
The food was bad. My job was more or less okay—we nailed crates together. There were some good people there, they even sympathized with people like me, anti-Soviets. Even though they were imprisoned for other articles, they tried to help somehow. Someone who worked in the dining hall would try to give me extra food sometimes, or find me an easier job. Later, I worked for a month—though the work was hard, it was somehow more independent: we whitewashed the premises, then painted. True, we had to carry all the materials from far away on stretchers—earth, sand. Still, it was a bit freer, there wasn't constant supervision. But the people, especially in the 14th detachment, with the stone quarry—they were constantly dying. And the poor nutrition, they were exhausted, they would get caught in rockslides. There were constant commissions, almost every month, even from Kyiv. I myself saw a deputy minister who came several times. Well, the parents were worried, they wrote complaints, so they had to react somehow.
And something else came to mind. There was once a Soviet film based on Sholokhov's “A Man's Fate.” The main character, maybe he also worked in Rafalivka under the Germans, in the same quarry. And there was the same quota: three cubic meters per person. Just as the quota for Soviet prisoners of war and other inmates was under the Hitlerites, the same quota remained in Soviet times—three cubic meters. Such harsh conditions.
The prisoners treated me more or less well, especially those who were also political prisoners. There were no others like me there, but there were Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals, who were mostly convicted for refusing to serve in the Soviet army, for agitation. For example, Anatoliy Uhrin. He was a little younger than me, in 1983 he was about twenty-something—twenty-one, twenty-two. Despite the fact that he had a wife and two small children (and according to Soviet law, someone with two children was not drafted into the army), a criminal case was opened against him. Maybe it was before he was married, or when he had one child. But when two children were born, he thought they wouldn't imprison him, and he came out of hiding. They took him anyway, convicted him, gave him three years. The religious prisoners stuck together, there were several of them, young guys, so it was somehow easier. Their community helped them, supported them somehow. There was also Vitya Dovhan, Anatoliy Ivashchenko, a Baptist.
V.O.: But weren't parcels only allowed after half the term was served?
V.P.: No, on the general regime, I think you could receive a small parcel once a month. A small one, but once a month. And correspondence was unlimited on the general regime. This was in the eighties. They were also often put in the punishment cell, these religious convicts, because they refused to work on Saturdays and Sundays. But since they were good workers, obedient people... Because the criminals—they could do something, cause trouble, or sharpen knives for themselves—but these religious ones were calmer, they were law-abiding, but they observed all their holidays. If it was Sunday or Saturday, or some religious holiday, they refused to work. So they eventually made some concessions to them, because if a person is constantly in the punishment cell, they're no use either. So they tried to schedule them for the night shift or something... I socialized with them more, because they were spiritual people, so it was easier for me to find a common language with them, especially since they were also effectively against the godless Bolshevik, communist government.
The criminals were also different kinds of people; some understood and were sympathetic. There was one interesting case. A man, maybe in his forties, was about to be released. I don't know what was on his mind, I didn't talk to him, but he was from our detachment, so he knew why I was there. He was supposed to be released the next day, I think. We were standing by the door to the courtyard, someone was smoking, we were talking. And he said: “I can still understand when someone steals something somewhere, wanted to live better, but people like this, who speak out against the government, these politicals—even I, a criminal, I hate them.” So there were all kinds of people, even among the criminals.
I continued to write appeals from the camp to various authorities, stating that I did not admit guilt—in that spirit. There was one incident. I wrote somewhere, to the General Prosecutor's Office or somewhere else. But all letters had to be dropped in the box unsealed.
V.O.: Except to the prosecutor. You could send sealed letters to the prosecutor.
V.P.: I don't remember, I think I wrote to the prosecutor's office or some other body. That is, I wrote one letter in my case to some authority. They summoned me to the special section and said: “Why are you writing this, it will only make things worse for you.” I said: “If I think it's necessary, I'll write.” He said: “Well, this letter”—I don't remember if it was to the prosecutor's office or some other body, I think the prosecutor's office—“maybe you'll take this letter back, so we don't send it?” I said: “Well, if I've already written it, let it go.” So I don't know if they sent it or not, but they at least wanted me not to send it. Maybe it would have been better for them, for the camp. Because they also got in trouble from their superiors for complaints, for not educating the criminals properly.
V.O.: Were you ever put up for parole?
V.P.: This is how it happened. My mother was alone, already retired, in poor health. My brother was married, he already had a young daughter, they lived separately, and my mother was worried about all of this. By the way, literally in the same days when I was arrested, she still dared to write to all the authorities—prosecutor's offices, courts: “Why are you prosecuting my son? If he wrote something, expressed himself...” She received replies from everywhere (I have them here, I'll show you the papers later) that first the investigation was ongoing, then that he was convicted according to the law, everything was correct, there would be no review—in that vein. My mother wrote, and I wrote. Well, they probably wouldn't have released me at the halfway point, because I was constantly writing complaints. But no one in the camp betrayed me. I mostly socialized with those believing guys who were convicted for religious issues; you could speak the truth with them. With the others, the criminals, I had no common interests to talk about. Sometimes I talked a little with someone, but it so happened that no one betrayed me. Maybe someone was called in, but they didn't tell me everything. There were hints, people were pointed out to me, that these ones work for the special section.
By the way, there was an interesting incident. I don't know how true it is. This was in 1983-84. This camp, in Rafalivka, is called “Institution OR-318/76.” I was told that there were two guys there—Ivanov and Motorkin, those were their last names. This Ivanov approached me once, and then Motorkin approached me. They asked what I was in for, what and how, and said that maybe they would even try to pass information about me to the outside world, that I was here under such-and-such an article. But of course, I didn't know who these people were. What their article was, how much time they got for it, I don't know, maybe up to three years too. Sometime around 1979-1981, as they told me, they crossed the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, made it all the way to Budapest, and wanted to get into the American embassy to escape abroad and tell about Soviet life. But they failed to get into the American embassy, were arrested, and ended up in this camp. Ivanov worked in the bread-cutting room, so I had some doubts about whether they were just trying to get something out of me. Maybe they were sent. That's what they told me about themselves.
V.O.: And you spent all three years in this camp, right?
V.P.: No. What happened was, since my mother wrote everywhere... Ah, she came to visit me—it was in the winter of 1984, it was still cold. Maybe it was February or March when she came. How did it happen? I was considered a good worker. I didn't try too hard to work for the Soviet government, but there were no reprimands. And when, on February 23rd or whenever, they were announcing commendations for work and discussing some issues, I asked if my mother could come visit, because the time had passed, it was already allowed. But the detachment commander, a captain, I think, or a senior lieutenant, I don't remember his name, said: “But you were in the punishment cell when you arrived.” That was recorded as a violation of the rules. He said: “You're not getting anything.” But later he approached me somehow and said that there were no complaints against me. The production department—those were civilians, all those foremen or whoever was on the construction site, the crew leaders, the master—they were all civilians. And they somehow sympathized with me, treated me well, and said that for February 23rd we can give you a commendation to make things easier for you. And the commander said: “What do you want, a commendation or to have the punishment cell violation removed?” I said: “Better to remove it.” Because if they didn't remove it, they might not even allow a visit from my mother. So they—about half a year had passed—as a reward, they removed that violation. But before they removed this violation from my record, my mother and my brother came to visit me, but they were not allowed to meet with me. And they went home without having seen me.
Then my mother came with my brother. For the second time. She tells me she was on the train to Rafalivka. There were some young guys on the train, and she says they were having such a good time. She asked them: “What's going on, why are you so cheerful?” And they said: “You haven't heard? They've already announced on the radio that Andropov is dead.” My mother told them about me, and they were very kind to her. They even said they were going to party all night, and Rafalivka is a small station, the train only stops for a few minutes, so they said: “Don't worry, we'll wake you up, everything will be fine.” My mother says: “I thought maybe they would forget, you know, young guys, they were drinking, celebrating, having fun, but no,” she says, “they came and woke me up.” They were some guys from Western Ukraine, they spoke such beautiful Ukrainian, and they woke me up.
So my mother was there for the visit, she told me she was writing everywhere. But she was alone, my brother had his family, well, he would visit sometimes, but she had been through a lot, she was worried, writing, and she started developing all sorts of illnesses.
EXILE
When I had served half my sentence, they, as a form of mitigation, sent me to Perm Oblast for logging.
V.O.: Was that through a court?
V.P.: Well, yes, there was a commission...
V.O.: “Conditional-early release.”
V.P.: It wasn't “early,” it was considered a settlement colony.
V.O.: Ah, a settlement colony, I see.
V.P.: And what’s interesting. The detachment commander—he may have been a decent man, he sympathized with me—he submitted my name the first time, but I was rejected. They asked: “Will you continue to write, to appeal the verdict?” I said: “I will write, because I do not consider myself guilty. Therefore, I will continue to write.” So I was rejected.
But the second time—this was after Andropov, so maybe they themselves were hoping for some leniency. Chernenko was in power by then. My mother wrote to Chernenko, and I wrote, saying I was imprisoned innocently. The second time, this detachment commander—well, he was also covering himself a bit—recommended me to the commission in such a way that I thought they wouldn’t release me anywhere again. Because he said: “Pavlov said that he will not engage in agitation in the camp, but he will continue to write that he considers himself not guilty in his case.” So I thought they wouldn’t even release me to a settlement colony. But they approved my transfer to a settlement colony. Maybe they were tired of me constantly writing complaints from the camp.
And what’s interesting. At first, they assigned me to Krasnoyarsk Krai. Everyone said that although it was far, the conditions there were supposedly better for work and for living. Because there were large logging operations there and it was somehow easier with housing, food, with everything. But what happened? They brought us by train to Lviv, to the Lviv prison, and said we would be there for just a day or even less, and as soon as there was a train, we would continue on. Someone said that the documents stated we had all been selected—there were several dozen men from Rafalivka—for Krasnoyarsk Krai, for logging. They said we would leave that very evening, but they kept us for a day, two, three, five days passed, and no movement. So by the second or third day, the guys—well, I didn’t smoke, so it was easier for me—started to make noise, saying, they told us we would leave in the evening or in the morning, and they had turned in their cigarettes, those who had them, with their belongings somewhere in a basement storage room. They said: “We need our cigarettes, we want to smoke.” And someone else wanted something else. I, for example, didn't take any slippers with me, because I thought we would be leaving in the evening—why would I get them out of my backpack. And somehow it happened spontaneously that our whole cell, about thirty men, declared a hunger strike. Everyone declared a hunger strike, demanding cigarettes, or something else, or to get their belongings. A day later, it's true, the guys were allowed to get their cigarettes, but they kept us for several more days. Some chief came, and they were whispering something in my direction, talking in a menacing way. Apparently, they thought I had incited the men. Although I don't smoke, so I didn't care about that. But I supported them, I also went on a hunger strike with everyone. And a few days later—we were in that Lviv prison for about a week—they told us we were being sent to Perm Oblast. We left, they took us in a “Stolypin” car to Perm Oblast. I have a piece of paper left from that time, my mother wrote it down once. The reason I kept it is because it has the address: Perm Oblast, Nyrob settlement, Cherdynsky District, institution Sh-320/8-6.
V.O.: Oh, so we were neighbors. I was in Kuchino, Chusovskoy District of the same oblast then. There's even a date here.
V.P.: Yes, September 7, 1984.
V.O.: So you were there from that day on.
V.P.: Yes. In fact, I was under psychiatric evaluation for about three months, then I was in Rafalivka for almost a year, and after that, from September 1984, I was at the logging site. They transported us across all of Russia, stopping in some places. Well, it was terrible: with dogs, a stop, they take you out, “Get down!”, the dogs are barking, you can’t take a step, you can’t do anything. They would take us to spend the night in some barracks, full of bedbugs. Some kind of wooden, one-story, dreadful barracks, with continuous plank beds, a crowd of people piled on—terrible. In some places, they stole things, books, they stole a very valuable book from one guy, and he was told not to mention it, because you won't get anywhere, and we'll beat you up on top of it. It was terrible in that “Stolypin” car. We traveled for a long time, because of the frequent stops, they move the cars to sidings, let passenger and freight trains pass—we traveled for a long time.
V.O.: So with transit prisons? Did they stop you somewhere or not?
V.P.: Yes, they stopped us for several days in various cities in Russia until they got us there.
V.O.: And what were the conditions like at the logging site?
V.P.: There were old one-story barracks, enclosed by a high wooden fence. The police were armed. In fact, there was nothing but forest for hundreds of kilometers. They took us to work with armed police, but there wasn't a reinforced guard. The work was hard: we trimmed branches by hand. We traveled for several hours to get to the forest, and several hours back from work, a very long time, because the areas had already been worked over. There was little forest, the quotas were high, we constantly failed to meet the plan because there was little forest, it was already sparse. There’s the Kolva River there. This is on the northern border of Perm Oblast. Every day, many people were put in confinement. There was an unheated punishment cell, a small, self-made wooden building. Every day, many were put in there for not meeting the quota, and in the morning, they were sent back to work. The only thing was that there was some pay, a small amount. Of course, they didn’t pay as much as they paid the volunteers at the logging operations. They probably earned well. But our rates were low. Later, under Chernenko, they introduced Saturdays off. This was a settlement colony, so Saturday and Sunday were days off. When we arrived there, Saturdays soon became working days again. We worked eight hours, sometimes more, on all Saturdays, and if the plan wasn't met, they would take us out on Sundays too.
V.O.: And could you leave the camp on your own?
V.P.: There was a headcount several times a day. Between the headcounts, when there was an hour or two of free time in a day, you could walk around the territory. And although there was a high wooden fence, even with barbed wire on top, at the exit there was a small hut, and beyond that—a few more small houses for the police officers, the guards, the kitchen staff—a small settlement. It was called the Severny settlement. There were literally just a few small houses there. Theoretically, you could ask the guard for permission to go outside the fence; you’d walk a little way, and immediately there was forest.
V.O.: Nowhere to go.
V.P.: Right. You could say, “I'll just go out and sit for a bit.” In the summer, there were all sorts of berries, you could pick some, but in reality, there was nowhere to go. They knew you wouldn't escape anywhere. Because there was only one narrow-gauge railway, it went further to the Kolva, carrying the timber. They said a railway line passed not far from there, so I sometimes thought: if I escaped, there’s still only one railway in the north, and everything there was guarded. And when it approached a populated area, of course, there was security there too. So in fact, there was no point and no possibility of escaping.
But here’s what happened to me there. Literally a few days, not even a week had passed, when they assigned me as a branch trimmer, and took us to work in the forest. There was a guard there too, but he didn't watch us constantly. They were felling trees... I sort of felt it... They did it in a way that was more convenient for them… They would saw down a tree with a power saw, it would fall, and we would chop the branches. It would have been better, it seemed, if they had gone ahead and the tree had fallen not towards us, but away from us, and we would have followed behind them and chopped the branches. But I don't know if it was on purpose, or by accident, or due to inexperience that it happened this way—well, all the guys from the transport were young—they cut down one tree, another guy and I were chopping branches, and they went behind us. And it happened that they cut down a tree and directed it towards us. When the tree started to fall and they saw that it was falling literally on us, they shouted, “Run!” The other guy, Shtepu, a Moldovan, was further away, so he got away, but I was closer. I was somehow stunned—and the tree fell on me. I only felt something hit me. And the only thing I had time to think was, “This is it, the end.” And I lost consciousness. I don't know how much time passed, but I came to and saw this Shtepu next to me, other guys were running over: “Well, say something, how are you, how are you?” And my pulse was so rapid, my breathing so fast, that I was just lying there and couldn't say anything. This went on for a long time, maybe 20 minutes or more I lay there unable to say anything, my breathing was so fast. And then I slowly came around. It was a good thing the guys didn't panic; they took the locomotive without the cars, and on the fast track, the direct line, the “green line”—they took me to the medical unit. There was a criminal camp not far from us. A strict-regime one, I think. They took me there. In our settlement colony, we only had a paramedic, one of the prisoners. But they took me to the camp, where there was a small wooden one-story infirmary or hospital. A doctor examined me there. I couldn't walk on my own, I was bedridden for a long time.
V.O.: Were you injured?
V.P.: Later, when they did an X-ray, it seemed there were small cracks in my ribs, but supposedly no fractures. They were afraid of fractures, but it seemed there were none, but my lower back was in a lot of pain. What saved me was that I was hit by a side branch, not the trunk. That's why I lost consciousness, but then I recovered.
For two weeks or more, I couldn't even stand up. Then I slowly started to walk, I had to go for injections... I needed injections, but the nurse wasn't allowed to enter the ward, because it was a prison hospital. It was a wooden one-story building, there were six or seven of us in the room. They brought food there, handed it through a small window, and locked us in. The doctor would come and examine us.
And the nurse—I don't know if it was against the rules for her, or if she, a young girl, was afraid to enter a room with criminals, who knows—to give an injection, I had to at least go out into the corridor. So the guys would help me out, holding me by the arms, she would give me various injections, and then they would carry me back. I was there for about a month. Then they took me to Cherdyn, to the district prison hospital, where I was also treated for more than a month. And I still could barely walk, slowly, shuffling along the floor.
They treated me a bit, then took me back to this settlement colony. This was the “Severny” settlement. It's written here, “Nyrob, Cherdynsky District.” Nyrob is a small town. And this was called the “Severny settlement of Cherdynsky District, Perm Oblast.” They brought me back—well, what could I do, I couldn't work. I stayed there a little longer, lay around, the guys fed me. There were even a few guys from Kyiv there. And then I needed some kind of work. So when the head of this settlement colony was away, someone solved the problem like this: they put me on the switchboard. There was a small local switchboard there. I had to connect calls from various places, from the little houses where the police officers lived, to the authorities, they would call each other. Or someone would call from Nyrob—there was a larger settlement further on, where they floated the timber down the Kolva River. That settlement was bigger, our bosses were there. I don't know who arranged it, maybe the political officer, I don't remember his name. He was called a political officer or deputy for educational work, a captain. He himself was a decent man, unfortunately, I don't remember his name now, he was from Western Ukraine, I think from Chernivtsi. He had messed up somehow, he was a police officer. And in general, in this settlement (Severny settlement)—they were all such offenders. There were police officers who maybe had done something that should have gotten them tried, so to avoid a trial, they were sent somewhere far away to the North, to such camps. He was a decent man, sometimes we talked a little about life, about politics. He said that there were many bad things, but what can you do. Maybe it was him, maybe someone else, but they put me on this switchboard. It was easy, I quickly learned to connect the calls, it was written there who to connect with whom. But a few days later, Lieutenant Colonel Utkin returned—they said he was a Yakut, he had narrow eyes. A big, fat guy. And they told him that Pavlov was working on the switchboard. He raised such a scandal, saying: “How can this be! An anti-Soviet on the switchboard! He’ll listen to all our conversations, all our secrets, he’ll know everything. Remove him immediately!”
V.O.: Yes, and pass them on to the enemy!
V.P.: He was so furious, he said, “Let him go...” There was an on-call attendant at the station, who dispatched the cars with timber when the trains arrived. And there was also a guy called the “on-call man,” a guard. He was supposed to chop wood, heat the stove, and if one of the prisoners needed to be urgently called to work, or one of the bosses to the station, or to inform the bosses of something—he lived and slept right there all day and night. He had a small, terrible, dark closet there—and that’s where he spent the night. He was an Azerbaijani, no longer young. Utkin said: “Let Pavlov go be the on-call man in that closet.” Well, they told me to go, so I went. But I looked—first of all, that Azerbaijani man started complaining to me that it was a good job for him, because he didn't have to go to the forest and freeze. He would chop some wood and sit in the warmth. He’d run off to call someone—and that’s how he was serving his sentence. And for me—I looked: I couldn't even bend over, I could barely walk, and I had to chop wood, huge logs. And if I was “on call,” I could barely walk. I said, I can go slowly, the distances aren't that far, so I can go call one of the workers to work. But I wouldn’t be able to chop wood. I told him, that Azerbaijani man, that I wasn't after his job, because he was so angry. I said: “I don't need this, especially since I can't do it.”
So the two of us were there for a few days, then they sent me back to the switchboard. I was there for a few days, and then they found me a job at the same station—measuring timber. Because sometimes they work in the forest at night, it's dark, and they can't always measure accurately. So they gave me this job, where a train with timber arrives, and I have to measure each log. Depending on the type of wood, there are different coefficients and different cubic volumes, depending on the length. The work wasn't hard, the only thing was that I had to work around the clock, and I was alone. It meant I didn't get any normal sleep, because it was like this: the prisoners go to work early in the morning, come back late in the evening, and after them, the timber starts to arrive. And while they are working there, timber is also coming in during the day. But more timber comes in at night, when the night shift loads it and brings it in. So you sleep for an hour here, half an hour there, sometimes two—and they're already calling you, get up, because a train with timber is coming, you have to measure it. I had to put up with it, what else could I do.
So I served out my term. Well, I also wrote cassation appeals to the prosecutor’s office from there. I wrote to the Serbsky Institute to have my psychiatric diagnosis removed, and they replied—I have the response here somewhere, I’ll show it to you later—that this issue had to be resolved separately.
So I sat and worked until Gorbachev’s perestroika. An officer was leaving for home, so we all chipped in and bought his old, cheap television, and then we could watch. In principle, there was a television in the Rafalivka camp, but it always showed Brezhnev… And here were these speeches by Gorbachev on television, there were some newspapers, it seemed like perestroika, glasnost, had begun. So I wrote a letter to Gorbachev, and to some other places: “Why am I imprisoned? We have glasnost now, perestroika, they’re criticizing the Stalinist repressions… Why am I imprisoned? Especially since my health is ruined, I suffered an injury, my mother is also sick, alone. Maybe they could release me early, or something.” Some chief came from Perm itself, he checked and checked, looked things over, then said: “Well, it’s still unknown what will come of this Gorbachev, and you don’t have much time left on your sentence, so it’s better not to write anywhere, just sit, serve your time, and then you’ll go home.”
I served out my term—May of 1986 was approaching...
V.O.: Does that include the two and a half months in the psychiatric evaluation, or not?
V.P.: I insisted, so they counted it. At first they didn't want to, but then they even wrote it into the criminal case file, to count it. They call me into the special section: where are you going home? I say: “I was born in Kyiv, I’ve lived there my whole life, my mother is in Kyiv, I have no other close relatives. I had distant relatives in various places, but no close ones,” I say. “So I would like to go home, where I lived, to Kyiv.” Some time passed, they call me in again, and say: “Kyiv refuses you.”
V.O.: Is that so.
V.P.: “Why?” I say, “My mother couldn't have refused, most likely.” It's strange: perestroika, Gorbachev, glasnost, and here on August 6, 1985—a decree from the USSR Council of Ministers, No. 737, which, as they explained to me, meant that under my article, 187-prime, and other state criminals could not reside in Moscow, in the capitals of the Soviet republics, in port cities, and in border cities after their release from imprisonment—that's how it was. Well, where could I go? I had distant relatives on my father's side in Leningrad—also not allowed, because it's also a major city. I had distant relatives on my mother's side in Yevpatoria, and it wasn't even certain they would agree to take me in, but that was also not allowed, because it's a coastal city. What was I to do? Stay there—what was there to do there? What kind of work? Logging again? I don't know how they agreed. I took a map—they found one, of the Kyiv Oblast or Ukraine, I looked for what was closest to Kyiv, and said: “Well, Fastiv is near Kyiv. Put me down for Fastiv.” I would go to my mother’s, and then I would start petitioning, because I didn't understand why it wasn't allowed. They showed me this decree only later. Because even they didn't know, when it was already time for me to leave this settlement, why I was being refused. They said, maybe your relatives don't want you. I said: “Write down Fastiv, I'll go there, and then I'll go to my mother's and sort it out.”
FREEDOM
I went to Kyiv. They told me there was such a decree, go wherever you want, go to Fastiv. I went to Fastiv, registered there. They said: “What can we give you? Our town is small, there's no work of that kind. We don't know what to do,” he said, “but we'll put you on the register.” I said: “At least put me on the register, because I need to be registered somewhere. Here is my certificate of release.” They put me on the register, but they said I had no housing, no job, I should go look for something myself, maybe I'd find something. I went to some factory. They said: “Without a residence permit, without housing, we can't hire you.”
I came to Kyiv, started writing again. It’s a long story, but this went on until the spring of 1988. I later worked in Brovary at a production facility, they gave me a job, but not a spot in the dormitory. I don't know if it's true that there were no places, or if they were afraid. The manager there said: “I have no places in the dormitory.” The work there was unloading railcars with cement, gravel, and timber. We worked a full 24-hour shift—and had two days off. According to the law, it should have been three days off, but they hired people like me, who had nowhere else to go. Maybe someone else was officially registered, but we worked for a day and were home for two. Well, Brovary is closer to Kyiv, I would take the metro to the last stop, and then a bus. And since it was once every three days, it was manageable. I said: “I don't need a dormitory, I don't need housing, I'll be commuting from home anyway. As long as I'm registered somewhere, have a temporary residence permit, so the police don't hassle me.” Because the police would come to my home and start: “You are not supposed to be in Kyiv, leave Kyiv, or there will be trouble.”
For example, on February 11, 1987, I received a document from the chief of the then-Moscow, now Holosiivskyi District, Department of Internal Affairs of Kyiv, Dmytryk. He wrote to me that regarding my letter, “addressed to the Council of Ministers of the USSR, on the instruction of the Moscow District Council of People’s Deputies, has been reviewed, and I inform you again that you were convicted under Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. The issue cannot be resolved favorably, as persons falling under the restrictions provided for in paragraph 2 of the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 737 of August 6, 1985, are not subject to registration in the city of Kyiv.” And further: “In case of continued residence without a residence permit, you will be brought to criminal responsibility under Article 196 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR.” That’s for being homeless, or however they classified it, for being without a permit.
V.O.: Yes, yes, “Violation of the passport regime.”
V.P.: And so I suffered like this. And I was already working, it would seem, what more do you want? But I had to travel, hide everywhere. For example, on July 1, 1986, I was summoned to a commission of the Moscow District Council and given a warning: to get out of Kyiv within fifteen days, or there could be a fine. There would be trouble. I signed it. And it was constantly like this. I went to the police myself, I said, help me with a job so I can have a residence permit, because what am I to do? They found me a job all the way in Obukhiv, with the “chemists.” These were also prisoners, they called them “chemists.” It was a more lenient regime. I worked in construction. Only after several months did they finally give me a residence permit.
V.O.: In Obukhiv?
V.P.: Yes, in a dormitory. And even then, there were no spots in the dormitory, they said maybe there was a cot somewhere in the corridor for now. And then maybe a spot would open up in a room, and they would give it to me. I said it wasn't essential for me, I could also commute to Obukhiv. I had to get up early, but it was okay, I traveled to work from Kyiv every day, I worked there. And again, I wrote about the residence permit, about this and that—I have many different documents here. And only in 1988, in the spring, after I received a good character reference from work, and by then perestroika was gaining momentum, did they finally give me a residence permit in Kyiv.
Well, they gave me the residence permit—that made things a little easier, but I wasn't rehabilitated, and with such an article, where could I go to work? I worked in a store, unloading bread, then at a boat station on the Dnipro, they barely hired me there, and I didn't tell them I had a criminal record. It's interesting how it turned out that in my work-record book, they wrote that I had resigned of my own accord… They took me in the morning after I came home from the second shift. At work, they didn't know why I hadn't shown up. I don't know how it happened, whether it was out of the kindness of their hearts, but they wrote down that I had resigned of my own accord. Can you imagine? And then at the trial, the prosecutor asked: “We received a notice that you resigned from your job of your own accord.” I said: “How could I have resigned of my own accord on May 19, 1983, when I came home from the second shift on the 18th, and on the morning of the 19th they came and took me, and I wasn't at work anymore? I was in a psychiatric hospital, then in Lukianivska Prison.” Well, they didn't delve into that question. And when I returned to Kyiv from imprisonment, I went to get my work-record book from my last place of employment. I arrive, take the book, and it says I was dismissed of my own accord. I told the head of the HR department: “But I didn't resign of my own accord. I was imprisoned, here is the certificate of release.” And the man said: “Well, this is actually better for you, because you'll be looking for a job, and if they write…,”—I don't know how they write it, that it was due to a conviction, or how they write it...
V.O.: Due to arrest.
V.P.: Yes, dismissed from work. “So,” he said, “this will only be worse for you.” On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, no matter where you go to get a job, they ask: “You were dismissed in 1983, and it’s already 1986—where were you for three years?” You have to make something up, and some will believe you, some won't.
My mother’s aunt worked at the Podil department store, so she got me a job there as a loader through her connections. I worked there. I had a stomach ulcer. I worked there for a while, and then I injured myself at work. Because it was like this: when the whole team works, it's one thing. But Saturday was a day off, so they would leave one worker just in case, because sometimes deliveries would come on Saturday, sometimes not. And one time they brought knitting machines, which are heavy, about 50 kilograms (110 lbs), in a large package. And I myself weighed just over 50 kilograms. And I had to unload this machine by myself, and my stomach ulcer flared up badly, I strained myself at that job. A few months later, I had a complication, the doctors diagnosed me with some kind of vestibulopathy, because I had dizziness and vomiting. I was bedridden at home, then in the hospital, and as a result, I became deaf in my left ear. I was at the Institute of Otolaryngology in Kyiv and everywhere else. A professor even told me: “You can't hear, and you won't hear.” So to this day, I can't hear in my left ear, that's how my health was ruined.
By then, of course, perestroika had begun in Ukraine. Especially in 1989. People started coming out to rallies, demonstrations, I started writing to newspapers in Moscow and Kyiv, collaborating with various publications, I wrote and published a lot. And I started writing poems in Ukrainian, because people began to gather near the Verkhovna Rada, on what is now Maidan Nezalezhnosti near the Main Post Office. There were already many patriotic people, speaking Ukrainian, and I socialized more with them.
I wrote about rehabilitation to find a more decent job because I was rejected everywhere. I went to see the same Abramenko, the prosecutor who had acted as the accuser at my trial. It was already 1989-90, supposedly the era of *perestroika*, but he looked at my case and said, “You were convicted correctly.” I said, “How could it be correct when they are now writing and admitting that there were many violations? Gorbachev is saying it, and the newspapers are writing much of what I wrote about.” He replied, “On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, not quite.” And then he said something like, “It will be as Moscow decides. You’ve written to Moscow and everywhere else.” I had written to newspapers, to *Moskovskiye Novosti*, to magazines, and to other publications. I even latched onto the fact that Chebrikov, who was the head of the KGB, had admitted—either at the 27th, the last, Congress of the CPSU, or at a party conference in 1988—that there had been violations of socialist legality even during the Brezhnev and Andropov eras. So I wrote to him in Moscow, too: “You yourself stated that there were violations—so sort this out.” But Abramenko just said, “It will be as Moscow decides,” and that he himself wouldn’t decide anything; he was washing his hands of it. It was right at that time that I fell ill, went deaf, had dizzy spells, and was in the hospital for over a month. After I got out—it was not until July of 1990—I received a notice that I had been rehabilitated. It states here: “Decision of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR dated May 11, 1990,” but the document was signed on July 23, 1990. So, for more than two months, they had supposedly rehabilitated me but were seemingly waiting for something, perhaps thinking the government would be overturned and everything would go back to the way it was. They sent it on July 23, and I received the document sometime in August. And, of course, there was no apology, nothing. They didn’t even specify the article of the law. By the time I achieved rehabilitation, my health was already ruined.
In 1989, I became a member of the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and the Repressed (headed by Yevhen Vasylovych Proniuk). I participated in its congresses and in the world congresses—the first and second congresses of political prisoners—and in the meetings of the Society’s active members.
V.O.: I used to attend those as well.
V.P.: I saw you there often, but I never had a chance to speak with you up close. I remember at the first Congress, Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil was standing in the registration line with everyone else. I walked up and said, “Viacheslav Maksymovych, does this mean I’m in line behind you?” That’s how it was. But I didn’t know him personally. I met with Lukianenko, with Oksana Meshko, with Anatoliy Lupynis. I had more frequent opportunities to speak with Yevhen Proniuk, as he was the Head of the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and the Repressed.
V.O.: Did you receive any benefits or compensation in connection with your rehabilitation?
V.P.: It’s interesting that they rehabilitated me, but they didn’t write that I was supposed to receive any financial compensation or anything. But there was a deadline; I had to apply for compensation within six months of receiving that certificate. If I had missed that deadline, they wouldn’t have given me anything at all and would have said it was my own fault. But they hadn’t indicated anything. And the situation was unstable; that was when Nina Andreyeva’s famous letter came out, which frightened many people.
Then the thought occurred to me that since I’d been rehabilitated, maybe good times were coming, and in my old age, I could sit down and write some memoirs. Since I was rehabilitated, I wrote an application to the Kyiv City Court to have my letters returned. I thought they would either destroy them or they would just get lost, but this way, I would have a memento, and maybe it would be useful for something. I submitted the application. I was summoned around the end of August 1990. The deputy chairman of the court said that the letters might be returned after all the reviews were complete. At that time, the “Law on Rehabilitation” didn’t exist yet; there was just the criminal procedure legislation, under which any person who had served a sentence on a criminal charge and was later rehabilitated and found innocent was entitled to some compensation awarded through the court. The judge, Ivanova, I believe her name was, said that I needed all sorts of certificates: from my last place of employment, for the last year of work, from one prison zone, from the other, what my salary was there. Because the laws were so cunning that before paying anything, they would calculate everything I had earned there, every last kopek. They started gathering these certificates. I don’t know if they were unenthusiastic about it, but it dragged on from August 1990 all the way to June 1991—more than a year. And it was only around the end of June 1991, I think June 21 or so, that the court hearing took place. By then they had received all the documents, reviewed them, and calculated the compensation. The sum turned out to be considerable because at my last job before my arrest, when I worked as a loader at the trade union printing house, I had earned a bit more, especially in the final months when we worked on weekends because of some trade union conference. The sum was quite good, but when they started deducting taxes—for small families and others, and trade union dues, and something else—I still received a little over three thousand. But by that time, Pavlov’s monetary reforms had already begun. I went to the bank to get the money, and they told me there was no money in the bank. And if I hadn’t received it that day, the money would have been lost, just as many people’s savings were. I then went to the district office; they made a call and told the bank to record it as a debt with some kind of red ribbon, and they paid me the money. And I did a good thing by not putting the money into a savings account. I never trusted that Soviet government because my mother used to tell me that during the monetary reforms of 1947 and 1961, people were also deceived, and their money was lost. So I just held on to it. Of course, prices were already starting to rise, so I was at least able to buy some things, some food for the time being, before the inflation surged. I didn’t gain much, but at least it wasn’t completely lost.
Since 1989, I’ve been in the Society of the Repressed, then in the Kyiv Society. I took part in all the pickets, in all the events, I wrote to both Moscow and Kyiv newspapers; they printed what they liked. I wrote poems, distributed them, and some were published. My health, of course, was already poor, so it would have been difficult for me to do any organizational work.
V.O.: Were you in any political organizations? Or only civic ones?
V.P.: I thought about joining one. On April 22, 1988, I wrote a letter to *Literaturna Ukrayina*. Many people were writing there at the time, and they had started publishing articles on political topics. So I wrote to them that it was time to do something like what they were doing in the Baltics, a Popular Front or some other organization, to rise up, to get organized, to unite. I don’t think they even answered that letter, because I took a very anti-communist stance, writing that we needed an organization to overthrow this communist government and follow an independent, democratic path. But when they started creating the *Rukh* in the fall of 1989, their initial program was in support of *perestroika*.
I remember the debates between Popovych and Kravchuk. I supported all these events. On May 22, 1989, near the monument to Taras Shevchenko, perhaps for the first time in Kyiv during *perestroika*, yellow-and-blue flags appeared. The police were still confiscating them. There was a scuffle with the police.
At my workplace, some wanted to create a *Rukh* cell, but it required at least three people. I and one other man were found, and there was a young woman—this was already 1990—in her late twenties, also with patriotic views, a Ukrainian. I said, “There are three of us, let’s get together and form a *Rukh* cell.” She said, “You know, I still don’t know which way this will turn, and I have children, a family.” Even in 1990, people were still afraid. So I didn’t officially join the *Rukh*, but I took part in all their events, supported them, and went to all the *Rukh* rallies and pickets. When the first congress was held, I was there with all my friends. I wrote for Ukrainian publications.
A year after the *Rukh* was created, people started talking about creating a party based on it. I wrote a letter to Drach, saying that this was the right thing to do and that I supported it. But then the splits began, different parties and organizations, and then the 1991 elections—they couldn’t even manage to nominate a single candidate.
I basically supported all the initiatives but didn’t formally join anything except the Society of the Repressed. Because my health was very poor. And I didn’t want to be just a name on a list, as they say, just for show.
V.O.: And until what time did you work, and where?
V.P.: In 1990, when I was working as a loader and ruined my health, I quit and underwent a long period of treatment. After that, I worked various jobs. I’ve been on disability since 2005. I’ve mostly been busy writing articles for newspapers and writing poetry.
V.O.: Have you had any autobiographical publications?
V.P.: You know, for some reason I never wrote anything autobiographical. I felt that next to figures like Chornovil, Lukianenko, and many others—well, what was I going to write about myself? Was I that distinguished?
V.O.: I’m interested in a bibliography.
V.P.: Somehow, I didn’t think it was necessary to write about myself. I thought there were many distinguished people who had suffered, who had spent decades in prison, who had died there. By the way, I’ll show you sometime—I was looking for it yesterday and today but couldn’t find it. When the reburial of Stus, Tykhyi, and Lytvyn took place, I participated; I even carried a coffin.
On the approach to Baikove Cemetery—people were taking turns, getting tired—it was announced that it would be desirable for former political prisoners to carry the coffins. I went up—I still looked young then, it was 1989, I was 38 years old. And the people there were no longer young. I approached to help carry Oleksa Tykhyi’s coffin, and they said to me, “What, are you a political prisoner too?” I said, “Well, that was my fate as well.”
After the funeral, I came home, and I was so full of emotion, such inspiration, that I wrote a poem, “The Funeral of Heroes.” I’ll bring it to you sometime, because I don’t remember it all. I gave it to friends and acquaintances to read, made handwritten copies, and in December I sent one copy to *Literaturna Ukrayina*. But it was still 1989, Shcherbytsky was still in power, and they replied that they had read my poem, thanked me, but unfortunately, they couldn’t publish it. In 1990, I sent it somewhere else. And when the August Coup happened, I thought, who knows how things will turn out, so I tried to hide all my manuscripts far away. Because, I thought, who knows, maybe they’ll come to confiscate things again, so I wanted to make sure they weren’t destroyed. And I hid some of them so well that I couldn’t find them for a long time.
And one last thing. When the “Ukraine without Kuchma” campaign began, I also frequently went out to all those protests. And during the 2004 elections, of course, I went out and campaigned for Yushchenko. I went to the Maidan often, almost every day, even though I was often sick and had a cold. I was there through all those days and did what I could. I wrote quite a few poems on this topic and gave them to Kyiv University; they promised to publish a book about the “Orange Revolution.” But I haven’t heard anything about it yet.
Since the summer of 2004, I had been seriously ill. The doctors couldn’t establish a diagnosis. And in 2005, they diagnosed me with stomach cancer. I had to have an operation, and now I have a Group II disability. When I can, I still continue to participate in the work of the Kyiv Society of the Repressed; I write poems and letters to newspapers and government institutions. I just wrote a play for a Ukrainian Radio contest, which is somewhat autobiographical. About myself, about prosecutor Abramenko, about my trial, and about how I accidentally met him last year—such are the collisions of life. That there are people who are turncoats, there are opportunists who adapt to the current government. I don’t know what the future fate of this play will be. I try to do what I can; I engage in creative work.
V.O.: Good. Thank you.
