Oleh Volodymyrovych Alifanov. Autobiography

OLEH VOLODYMYROVYCH ALIFANOV. AUTOBIOGRAPHY Worker, dissident. Confined to a psychiatric hospital for breaking into the French embassy. I was born on January 24, 1954, in the village of Shevchenko in the Starobesheve Raion of Donetsk Oblast. My great-grandfather, Andriy Rybalka, fled here with his family in 1933 from near Kharkiv to escape the famine. They walked nearly 300 kilometers. They carried the small children, including my two-year-old mother, in their arms. When I imagine this procession now, it brings tears to my eyes. Traveling by train was impossible, as the communists were pulling peasants off the trains. Here in Donbas, there was also a famine, but not on the same scale as in Sloboda Ukraine. My grandfather, Lavrentiy Andriyovych, after the death of his wife—my grandmother—married a local Greek woman, and this second grandmother of mine told me that their family, the Yuryevs, survived in Starobesheve in 1933 only because they traded their house for a few sacks of grain. My life was not particularly noteworthy. I graduated from high school. From 1972 to 1974, I served as a border guard in Azerbaijan on the Soviet-Iranian border. In 1975, I went to Moscow, where I worked as an electric welder at an automobile plant, and then as a construction worker on the Moscow Olympic Village and other construction sites in the Soviet capital. The contradictions between what the communist mass media presented (and as is well known, there was no other) and what I saw with my own eyes began to irritate me from my very first days in Moscow. My provincial belief that there was order, justice, and law in the “capital of our Motherland” was shattered daily. When you work a 20-minute walk from the Kremlin and see how property and building materials are being stolen, how false work orders are being written up for supposedly completed jobs, and many other things, you involuntarily begin to doubt the system itself. Sometimes I had to work the second shift, and in the evening, when visibility was poor, several trucks with cement mortar and concrete would dump their loads into ravines or any available pits, just to report that we had “used it up.” Similarly, the truck drivers would dump diesel fuel into any hole they could find. Once, seeing building materials being hauled away from the construction site of a vegetable storage facility, I told my foreman, to which he replied, “What can I do? It’s for Grishin’s dacha.” At that time, Grishin was a member of the Politburo, the head of Moscow, the third most powerful person in the USSR. Thus, my economic doubts about socialism gradually began to be overlaid with political ones. In 1979, after the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan, I turned out to be the only one in my construction crew who sharply condemned the war. To my surprise, all the other guys were even happy about the war. That was the first time I heard the word “traitor” directed at me. In 1980, I studied for six months in preparatory courses for admission to the philosophy department of Moscow University, where I was guaranteed a spot as a student in the esteemed university's evening program. Before that, a professor had said, “And what makes you think you're going to be philosophers? Almost all of you will be teaching scientific communism.” By then, my anti-Soviet views were already effectively formed. In April 1985, for personal reasons, I left Moscow and returned to my native village. But in the very first week, I realized that after the capital, I just couldn't live in the provinces, especially one like Donbas (which hasn’t changed even after 20 years of independence). I immersed myself in fiction, self-education, and listening to Western radio stations, which I had hardly ever heard before. It was Radio Liberty and Voice of America that opened my eyes to things I had not yet figured out on my own. In the summer of 1985, another triumph of the Land of the Soviets was being prepared in Moscow—the World Festival of Youth and Students. I decided to add a little dose of reality to the celebration. I wrote an open letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU in two copies, expressing everything I thought about the Soviet regime in a rather tolerant tone. Sensing that I would not be forgiven for even this, I decided to give one copy of the letter to a Western embassy and request political asylum. In Moscow, I dropped one copy—the one for the Central Committee of the CPSU—into a mailbox. With the other, I made my way to the American embassy. The number of militsiya around the US embassy dismayed me. I realized that my plan to get into the embassy, or simply to make my letter public, was impossible to carry out. This was confirmed as I walked around other Western embassies. I think two days passed; the letter to the Central Committee must have been received, and the KGB could have guessed where its author would go and what he would do. I was in despair: they were probably already looking for me. Using my last money, I was eating in a café across from the French embassy, observing the security deployment. Suddenly, I noticed two men in gray suits watching me, and KGB agents had worn suits of that color during the Moscow Olympics. Fear gave me wings. I decided to circle the French embassy a second time—which was already risky. And then I got lucky. As I was walking past a policeman, I heard the phone in his booth ring. He ran to the phone, which was about 15 meters away. He was in the booth talking—and I somehow managed to scale the nearly three-meter-high fence. The French couldn't figure out for a long time who I was or where I had come from. The ambassador, they said, was not in and would not be back soon. I took this to mean that they would not grant me political asylum. I was prepared for this, because I knew that the USSR and France had always had friendly relations. In all other respects, the French were French. They treated me politely, even graciously. They fed me, we chatted, I watched some kind of musical circus show on a VCR (which I had never seen before), walked freely around the embassy, and went into a room where teletypes were chattering away with news from all over the world. There was only one door that was off-limits not only to me but, it seemed, to the embassy staff as well. Behind glass, a man sat controlling an entrance turnstile—like in the metro. I left the embassy at about 9 p.m. I asked the French not to forget me (they promised and kept their word), gave them my letter to be published in the press, and asked them not to consider me a common criminal, which is how the militsiya guard outside the fence had promptly portrayed me. In the foyer of the Oktyabrskaya metro station, located near the embassy, I was immediately arrested. They took me to some police station, where I heard things like, “So, should we twist his head off now or later?” and “traitor.” The KGB agents arrived. They spoke amicably, interested not so much in why I did it, but in what I had seen at the French embassy. An hour and a half or two later, people in white coats came in. The KGB man said, “They're taking you for a medical examination, don't worry.” I was taken, as it later turned out, to the Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital. As the gates were closing, someone said, “You'll never get out of here.” This phrase haunted me throughout my entire time in the psychiatric hospitals of Moscow and Tyumen Oblast, significantly eroding my will to resist and to live. On the very first day of “treatment,” I was injected with sulfazin and lay half-asleep for a full day. Other daily injections they started giving me—haloperidol and aminazine—were not as painful. A few weeks later, the doctor asks, “Oleh Volodymyrovych, why do you look so bad?” I say, “I didn't look like this at all when I was admitted.” The injections were reduced, but I had to take 24 pills a day. They even checked inside our mouths. It was an ordinary ward in a psychiatric hospital. There were people who had attempted suicide, army deserters, someone who was “faking” illness to get a larger apartment, there were “writers”—people who wrote numerous complaints to various authorities, and there were comical patients. One man ended up there because he wanted to submit a poetic translation of the “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism” to the USSR Academy of Sciences. Of course, there were also people who were genuinely mentally ill. Some were injected a great deal. Sometimes you would see men following the doctor in tears, begging him to stop the injections—it was impossible to sit on their backsides. Then I was transferred from Moscow to the settlement of Vinzili in Tyumen Oblast, closer to my mother, who lived in Surgut. It was easier there. The injections stopped. What struck me most there was a room where malformed young children lay in fenced-off beds. They were only fed, with no upbringing whatsoever. My mother came to visit, and I could not convince her that I wasn't insane. Suddenly, after three months of psychiatric confinement, I was released. Later, the human rights activist Valery Senderov told me by phone that my release was possibly aided by the French and by the international publicity. I returned to Ukraine, where through Amnesty International I wrote letters and postcards to heads of state, calling for the release of political prisoners. I wrote letters to newspapers about various current affairs in public life. I worked in Donetsk. I now live in a village. I do not participate in social or political life. But I feel that all this is yet to come. Because the outrage at the gangster regime of Yanukovych, which is plundering Ukraine before everyone’s eyes, is reaching a point where action is necessary. My greatest frustration is with my fellow countrymen from Donetsk. “We know they're crooks, but they and he are ours.” These are the words of those who voted for Yanukovych and the Party of Regions. The youth here are the same. Slaves have begotten slaves. There is one benefit from the Party of Regions members: they have tested everyone in Ukraine for spinelessness. Now we will know who is who. If the communists had the excuse “we didn't know,” then the Party of Regions members and their minions have no such excuse. They know what they are doing. Oleh Volodymyrovych Alifanov. February 17, 2013.