The program “Antykult” on Hromadske Radio, March 28, 2020. Part two. Interview with Yevhen Zakharov.
Dmytro Belobrov (D. B.): This is the program “Antykult.” At the microphones are Dmytro Belobrov and Hryhoriy Pyrlyk, with Dmytro Smiyan at the sound control desk. Our next guest on the line is Ukrainian human rights activist Yevhen Zakharov. Mr. Zakharov, we welcome you.
Yevhen Zakharov (Y. Z.): Good day.
D. B.: Mr. Zakharov, with our previous guest, Ilya Novikov, we briefly touched on the topic of dissident cases and legendary figures like Dina Kaminskaya and Sofya Kallistratova. You wrote a massive article about them. In your opinion, why was it at this time, in the 1960s and 1970s, that lawyers began to gradually emerge from the shadows? They became personalities, subjects of judicial activity, and, in fact, started to influence civil society. You had a quote that they began to become, I don’t know, leaders of civil society. Why did this process start at that particular time?
Y. Z.: It all began precisely when the authorities tried to reverse the “Thaw” and started “tightening the screws.” And, in fact, all these people who had embraced the “Thaw” as their own, who welcomed it, who wanted a different life for themselves, their families, and the country as a whole, faced a very difficult choice of what to do next. Some decided to emigrate, while others decided to stay and create moral resistance to the government's policy. This is exactly what gave birth to the dissident movement, the human rights movement in the former USSR.
And the human rights lawyers, who were also in this circle, were well-acquainted with human rights activists, who were predominantly not lawyers but mathematicians, physicists, and representatives of other exact sciences, as well as the humanities intelligentsia. They also became part of this circle, became close friends, and defended them. They were human rights lawyers precisely because they always raised the question of their clients' innocence and proved that their persecution was baseless, that there was nothing to it, not even the corpus delicti they were charged with. That's roughly how it all happened. These were times when the intelligentsia rose up against such Soviet policy in various forms, with varying degrees of force, different people. There were different, one might say, types of behavior for people in an unfree country who tried to act like free people. That is one of the definitions of dissidence.
It should be said that personal relationships and friendships were also of great importance. For example, Dina Kaminskaya was friends with David Samoilov from a young age; they had studied together practically since school. Through him, she knew many dissidents with whom he was friends, and this connection was very easy to establish. And then, once you enter that circle, it’s quite difficult to leave, because the people who joined considered it morally unacceptable to abandon it, so to speak. These were people for whom the moral instinct was stronger than the instinct for self-preservation, I would say.
Hryhoriy Pyrlyk (H. P.): We want to ask about a completely different figure. Her activities are being discussed more and more, as she gains weight in Ukrainian society and politics. This is the Soviet lawyer Viktor Medvedchuk. In your article, you call him a puppet. Why so, and how would you characterize him in the days when he was still a lawyer?
Y. Z.: I called him something slightly different. There’s a phrase, “Chinese nodding-head doll.” Medvedchuk simply played the role assigned to him and provided a completely standard defense for a Soviet lawyer in a political trial. That is, he effectively supported the prosecution and only spoke of mitigating the defendant’s sentence because he had young children or because he was ill. So, the defense went no further; it was a standard defense. To go so far as to say there were no grounds for the accusation, that there was no crime—that never happened with him. He was, as is known, the lawyer in the Stus trial in 1980 and played such a role. I actually wrote that article because Medvedchuk launched this mind-virus that “those were the times, that was the law, it was impossible to do otherwise, all lawyers were like that.” So, I tried to prove that this is not true, that not all lawyers were like that, and that there were lawyers who behaved completely differently. I simply provide a list there of the trials in which lawyers managed to achieve a more lenient fate for their defendants, and in some cases, their defendants were even released in the courtroom—even that happened.
D. B.: Mr. Zakharov, I’d like to ask a question. I’m trying to understand how this functioned. There’s a community of lawyers. On one side, there are people like Mr. Medvedchuk, who effectively cooperate with the authorities and work to ensure the authorities get what they want from the defendant, for example, sending them to prison. On the other side, there are Dina Kaminskaya and Sofya Kallistratova. How did they interact within this community? You have honest lawyers, and then, so to speak, dishonest ones. What were the relationships between them in the community? How did they coexist?
Y. Z.: I don’t think they had any relationships. At that time, this community of lawyers who defended human rights activists in political trials was quite small. It was close to the dissidents themselves. It should be said that to participate in a defense for certain articles, you had to have clearance from the KGB. And those who took on defenses and acted as human rights defenders were quite quickly stripped of this clearance. Some were even stripped of their law licenses, the license of that time, so to speak. For example, Boris Andreyevich Zolotukhin was barred from practicing law for many years. He was a member of the CPSU, was expelled from the CPSU, and was deprived of the right to be a lawyer. Things like that happened. So, in reality, the kind of communication you're asking about didn't exist. Soviet lawyers shunned such lawyers and, generally speaking, did not want to maintain relationships with them, and so on.
That was in the provinces. In Moscow, the situation was different; everything was less harsh in the 1970s and 1980s than in the provinces. As they used to say then, for what they’d chop off your fingers in Moscow, in Ukraine, they’d chop off your hand; that's how they compared it. And there were quite a few such lawyers; it was primarily Moscow and Petersburg lawyers who traveled all over the USSR and defended dissidents. They were in the same circle, and they were the best lawyers in Moscow, that should be emphasized. Dina Kaminskaya was a member of the presidium of the Moscow Commission of Lawyers. Semyon Ariya, who defended many dissidents, was considered the number one lawyer in the entire Soviet legal profession for many years. So, they enjoyed great authority from long ago, when they worked as lawyers in the 1950s, and some even in the 1940s. Therefore, the foundation of those relationships was just different, so to speak. But for many, it all ended with them being forced to emigrate.
H. P.: Mr. Zakharov, regarding the instances when Moscow lawyers traveled all over the Soviet Union to defend political prisoners. When Sofya Kallistratova defended Crimean Tatars, particularly in Tashkent. What were the specifics of these cases? Were they different from, say, the more everyday dissident cases?
Y. Z.: You know, these cases concerning Crimean Tatars were different. They were different in that they were very poorly fabricated. Experienced Moscow lawyers would simply dismantle the cases in court, and there was nothing to counter them. Many criminal cases against Crimean Tatars were fabricated, but they were very crudely done. In court, lawyers would just dismantle these cases, showing that the accusations were baseless. And there were judges who agreed with this and even released these defendants in the courtroom. One judge was even expelled from the party for doing so. But he did what his professional honor told him to do. So, these trials of Crimean Tatars were, for the most part, a bit different.
As for other cities—in Kharkiv, I remember Semyon Ariya and Mykola Monakhov coming for political trials. And in Kyiv, Mykola Monakhov defended, for example, Mykola Plakhotnyuk. Ariya and Monakhov defended our four political prisoners in Kharkiv (Henrikh Altunyan, Vladyslav Nedobora, Volodymyr Ponomaryov, and Arkadiy Levin), who received three-year sentences in 1969 just for signing a letter in defense of Petro Grigorenko, who had been placed in a psychiatric hospital in Tashkent. So, these were typical dissident trials. In fact, in these trials, they referred to the constitution, to the fact that it guaranteed freedoms, that the people who did what they did did so sincerely, and therefore there could be no talk of slanderous fabrications. Because slander is when you lie and you know you're lying, but there was no lying here. They said what they absolutely and truly believed, and therefore this article cannot be applied, and so on.
So, strong lawyers in such situations very convincingly proved the innocence of their clients. Although, quite often the verdict was already written in advance, agreed upon, and yet, even with such a defense, they would pass the planned sentence. But nevertheless, this defense was of great importance, because it essentially highlighted the illegitimacy of these court decisions. It was clear to everyone that these people were absolutely innocent, and people sympathized with them. All this reached the West, and thus information about political persecution in the USSR spread, shaping the attitude towards Soviet policy that existed in the West at that time. A major role in this was played by our human rights lawyers.
I want to emphasize that in Ukraine, there was also a lawyer named Nelya Nemyrynska. She was of the same class and level as the Moscow lawyers. We published a book containing ten of Nemyrynska’s defense speeches from political trials, where she defended her clients and similarly raised the question of their innocence. She was also invited to travel to other cities to defend dissidents. She traveled to Kazakhstan, to Almaty, where she defended Dandaron, a well-known Buddhist of that time who was also imprisoned. She also traveled, I believe, even to Lithuania to defend someone, and so on.
We had other such lawyers in Ukraine as well. There was a lawyer named Ivan Yershov, who defended dissidents in several trials in Kyiv. For example, in the case of Ivan Kovalenko, he managed to secure a more lenient sentence than the prosecution wanted.
So, what Medvedchuk says is untrue. He was playing a role, he was building a career. Medvedchuk was a young lawyer, a member of the CPSU; he needed to build a career, and he did. And at that time, many young people built their careers on persecuting dissidents.
D. B.: Thank you. Yevhen Zakharov, a human rights activist, was on the line with us.
First part of the “Antykult” program - interview with Ilya Novikov
Audio recording of the program