Vasyl Semenovych Lisovyi. Memoirs

Vasyl LISOVYI

MEMOIRS

Note. Dear readers, I am presenting a corrected and expanded text of my Memoirs. The corrections and additions were especially significant in connection with the declassification by the Security Service of Ukraine of documents related to the “Block” case. I express my gratitude to Vasyl Ovsiyenko for his careful proofreading of the text. As for its content, full responsibility lies with me. August 8, 2010. – V. Lisovyi.

Contents

Chapter I. The Beginning of the Road.

1. The Land.

2. History.

Chapter II. The Ruin of Daily Life. Fragments of Tradition.

1. The Ruin. The Fate of My Brothers and Sisters.

2. Stories, Myths, Customs, Religiosity.

Chapter III. School.

1. Bezradychi School.

2. Velyka Dmytrivka School.

Chapter IV. The University.

1. The Start of My Studies. Daily Life. The “Buza.”

2. Teaching. Self-determination.

Chapter V. Ternopil Medical Institute.

Chapter VI. Postgraduate Studies. The Institute of Philosophy.

1. Postgraduate Studies.

2. Teaching at KSU. The Institute of Philosophy.

Chapter VII. The Spread of Samvydav. Coming out from the “Underground.”

1. The Reproduction and Dissemination of Samvydav.

2. The Arrests of ’72. Coming out from the “Underground.”

Chapter VIII. The Investigation.

1. The Investigation.

2. Ideology and Ethics. Repressive KGB Technologies.

Chapter IX. Camps and Exile.

1. Mordovian Camps.

2. Perm Camps.

3. Exile.

Chapter X. The Exhaustion of the Leviathan.

1. The Museum of the History of Kyiv.

2. Teaching.

3. The Ideology of “Perestroika.” Helsinki-90.

I dedicate this to the memory of my mother

Psychoanalysis has offered us a regressive movement toward the archaic; the phenomenology of spirit offers us a movement in accordance with which each figure finds its meaning not in what precedes it, but in what follows it: in this way, consciousness breaks free of itself and directs itself forward, toward a future meaning...

Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations.

Chapter I. The Beginning of the Road

1. The Land

The place. South of Kyiv, the Dnipro River immediately recedes from its high, steep banks, forming a wide lowland. Scattered within it are villages, as if they had fallen from the bag of a wandering deacon on his way to Kyiv: Mryhy, Koncha-Zaspa, Kozyn, Pyatykhatky, Tsenky, Ukrainka. When you travel south on the “new” of the two asphalt roads toward Obukhiv, the steep banks of the Dnipro’s right bank disappear from the horizon near Novi Bezradychi: here, the lowlands form a branch—a wide channel for the now very narrow Stuhna River. The high, steep banks of the Dnipro turn sharply west in the village of Novi Bezradychi: this turn, high and steep, is a place from which the expanse of the Dnipro lowlands opens up. I admired this expanse in my youth, and after returning from exile, my wife and I climbed this height—this time, the high-voltage towers of the Trypillia Thermal Power Plant floated like a mirage in the sky. When I was first told that Yushchenko had built a dacha for himself in this place, I initially thought he had managed to perch it on the slope to have a view of the vast space. Seeing it below, at the foot of the slope, I was disappointed. Although how would you even place it on such a steep slope?

Below this high bend, on the side of the Novi Bezradychi road, was the homestead of my mother’s parents—my grandfather, Myron Tkachenko, and my grandmother, Paraska (in the village, they called her “Baba Pelehachka”). She had a loom and, for that time, a lot of land, not only a field but also a meadow near the homestead, beside the swamp. The homesteads of the Tkachenkos (my grandfather Myron’s brothers) were located nearby, right here on the corner at the foot of the hill.

I know that my grandmother Paraska was from the village of Pidirtsi: when I took a job as a teacher in 1987 at the Velyka Dmytrivka secondary school, from which I had once graduated, it turned out that the house my wife and I bought in Pidirtsi was right next to the yard where my grandmother had spent her youth.

Paraska and Myron had a large family: four daughters (Fedoryna, Vasylyna, Priska, and Olena) and two sons—Tymish and Petro. The sons were drafted into the army for the First World War, and both returned wounded. Tymish’s wife, Marusia, was pursued by misfortune (the memory of this was preserved in our family). As soon as the family went to bed, whistles and the cracking of a whip would begin in the house: something was driving Marusia out. They moved, but the whip’s crack followed Marusia to the new house. Such stories about the actions of mysterious forces, particularly *domovyks* (house spirits), were still a living part of rural ethnoculture in the postwar years. For a long time, they spurred the imagination and the idea that behind the visible, external reality, there lies another, invisible one.

Grandmother Paraska’s family was unlucky. Grandfather Myron and both of his sons died early, and the entire household rested solely on the hard work and energy of Baba Pelehachka. After her husband’s death, she not only managed to maintain it but to improve it. My mother, Yefrosyniia on her birth certificate (though she was called Priska), must have inherited from her mother the energy and persistence she showed in the struggle for her children’s survival.

My childhood and youth were spent in Tarasivka—a hamlet of the village of Stari Bezradychi. Not far from Tarasivka, towards the neighboring village of Neshcheriv, a small field rises gently to a summit called Bili Horby (White Hills). Today, both the field and the hills are covered with a pine forest, which we, schoolchildren of the postwar years, were just planting. In my childhood, there were no trees on the White Hills: we took white sand from them to decorate graves. These hills signify an important moment of self-determination in my life. In my last year at the university, it was on these hills that I made a decision that ended my vacillations: with it, I “affirmed” my choice between good and evil. Specifically, this meant for me the defense of Ukrainian cultural identity against its destruction. I needed this ritual of “affirmation” as a sign of certainty, as the finding of an important point of reference for thought and action. I think that with this romantic gesture, I was trying to assure myself that my choice was final. Later, I expressed it this way:

Змиритися з приниженням народу,

забути всі духовні заповіти,

це означає також дати згоду

на смерть твою, Вкраїно-дивоквіте.

Не знехтуй покликом сумління: як зумієш

втішатися і сонцем і землею,

коли байдужістю своєю дати смієш

із того квіту вирвати лілею.

I cannot say with certainty how much I then understood the simplicity of the ordinary opposition of good and evil and the difficulties associated with unmasking evil’s disguises. At least I understood the complexity involved in choosing the means to fight evil. And that among these means, the justification of “friendship” with evil for the sake of overcoming it is a great temptation. The plan to “outsmart” evil often makes a person a part of that evil. A broader view is also possible: how many good undertakings, good ideas, and slogans have been devalued or even turned into evil by those who joined the movement and interpreted the ideas and slogans. A great deal of blood has been shed in the name of God, including the Christian God, with his commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Reflections in this direction led me to the conclusion that special attention must be paid to how individuals and groups of people in specific situations interpret and use inventions, ideas, slogans, and theories. I later called this approach “contextualism.”

* * *

The beginning of the road. The Stuhna is the river of my childhood: in spring and sometimes even late autumn, it would overflow its banks and spread wide; the word “flood” still echoes in my memory with the roar of its spring waters. It was beside this narrow, chronicle-mentioned river that Tarasivka was nestled. It had only two streets. They ran in the narrow space between the Stuhna, with its low, marshy bank, and the oak grove, located on stepped slopes that rose to the south, towards Obukhiv. And the village of Stari Bezradychi (like Novi) huddled against the steep slopes that, having turned west from the Dnipro, stretched along the Stuhna basin. Some houses were scattered below on the banks, others on the slopes and gentle hills. These clayey slopes and hills, overgrown with matrimony vine, with their chasms, attracted us schoolchildren: we imagined they concealed some secrets. This corner of the land on the right bank of the Dnipro near Kyiv does indeed have a long memory: Trypillia, Pidirtsi, Stuhna, and even Stari Bezradychi (with its ancient settlement) are known to every historian of Ukraine. This, of course, is not the only place in Ukraine with a long memory. In the world, many lands have a much longer one. But this land between the Stuhna and the Dnipro spoke to me from childhood: its word was the first.

This is the place that marks the beginning of the Road. The Road on which village girls and youths set out with a “rushnyk.” The rushnyk, celebrated in song by my fellow countryman and poet, not only symbolizes the road but above all the connection to cultural tradition—that most precious gift we can receive from previous generations. Childhood impressions are for us the “ring of youth,” the “white candle” that will burn “in the depth of nights.” They cannot be recreated in their original sense: they beckon us with their play, inviting us to unravel their hidden meanings. They are thrown into our souls as a theme for improvisations.

Ти мій забутий сон, моє видіння,

відкритим світом перше милування,

забутих мрій чарівне колисання,

пречистих луків золоте світіння.

A person’s life resembles a stream that leaves behind traces—impressions: they change the angle of vision and the color of the ray in whose light we see our former experiences. And this means a continuous rethinking in the flow of our experience. And yet, the play of meanings in what was previously experienced retains its charm for us. Moreover, their call inclines us to choose and makes life dynamic. This provides the key to understanding these memoirs: they are not confessional, “regressive” (to use Paul Ricœur’s term). They are not aimed at uncovering hidden desires behind flashes of insight, illuminations, or idealizations. As “true” reality. Rather, on the contrary, in our past impressions and experiences, we cherish hints of meaning that we can catch and articulate in a certain semantic perspective.

It is also worth mentioning the attitude toward the past from the viewpoint of its heterogeneity. Since in these memoirs the imperial and communist ideology and the corresponding political system are predominantly objects of negative assessment and condemnation, I would not want this to lead to an underestimation of those elements or practices that, even in our modern understanding, deserve a positive assessment. After all, this part of the experience can be used in modern cultural and state-building. Provided the corresponding will exists. How these elements coexisted or were connected with the ideology and political practice of that time is another question.

* * *

The lands of the forest-steppe are far from being as fertile as the black-earth steppes that widen ever further south of Obukhiv. The soils of the forest-steppe are diverse—sandy in places and, therefore, poor. In the vast Dnipro basin, these are mainly sandy deposits, often adjacent to marshy lowlands, sometimes covered with a layer of peat. Tarasivka is located on just such a sandy slope, which gradually rises from the banks along the Stuhna to the south, turning into a sandy field near Obukhiv. Thus, the vegetable gardens on the Upper Street were mostly sandy and poor. They required fertilizer and watering. On the lower street of Tarasivka, the lowland part of the gardens, which gradually transitioned into the swamp along the Stuhna, was called the “berehy” (banks). The soils at the end of the gardens, in the berehy, were more fertile. For me, berehy is not just lowland earth, but morning fogs and the sparkling of dew on the meadows, evening frog choruses, the breath of moist wind saturated with the smell of grass, cucumbers, and beet tops.

In spring, you couldn’t get from Tarasivka to the seven-year school in Stari Bezradychi by taking a shortcut across the footbridge: you had to go over the bridge—along that old, “upper” Kyiv road, which was paved only in the mid-90s. In the years of my childhood, this road was paved with gray stone only in small stretches. The image of the “beaten” path leading into the wide world is linked in my memory with this gray stone. A beaten path in my imagination (and in Ukrainian folklore as well) is a path into a world full of dangers.

On the hills and steep slopes where Novi and Stari Bezradychi were nestled, cemeteries had long been located. On our way to school, we passed a hill that held a former cemetery in Stari Bezradychi: part of it had collapsed; on a cliff hanging over the road, a skull gleamed white against the yellow clay. Like a sign that reminded of the generations that walked these paths. I thought I could hear their footsteps and voices: “put your ear to the ground—they are coming.” Further west, along the bed of the Stuhna in this ridge of hills, one stood out, separate from the others, with almost sheer slopes—the Bezradychi ancient settlement. The ancient settlement is a sign of resistance: standing on its “ramparts,” we “saw” Tatar horses rushing from the south, “heard” their neighing and the shouts of the settlement’s defenders.

* * *

Clay. The clayey hills and slopes attracted us, the schoolchildren, and some of us, including the author of these memoirs, instead of sitting in school on warm days at the end of spring, explored the yellow clay gullies and caves. The metaphor of clay, the symbol of clay, and all the fluidity of this symbol’s meanings were later superimposed on these my first impressions. The symbol of clay in the most diverse semantic shades—including in the sense of St. Augustine, who in his “Confessions” speaks of the “clay of my being”—is one of the important ones in the European cultural tradition. It also found its artistic interpretation in Ukrainian poetry (Tychyna, Drach). The feeling of the dampness and amorphousness of clay in myself and in my surroundings became the source of my appreciation for form: Berdyaev’s expression about the formedness of the Western person and the amorphousness of the Russian soul (as a result of the “boundless expanses”) reminded me of the sources of my early, still only subconscious, opposition to this uncertainty and amorphousness. The brokenness of people, their crippled state (physical, and especially spiritual), their lack of will—I began to think through the metaphor of clay.

This is a branching theme of the Mediterranean-European philosophical tradition, marked by pairs of oppositions: matter-form, potentiality-actuality. On the one hand, formless passive matter as nothing, as only a possibility of being, and on the other—active form. God as the source of all meanings-forms and human action as the source of meaning. In the theological version, the infinite and undefined spiritual substance, a particle of which we carry within us as a gift from our Creator, is still only the ability to “hear” the word of God as the source of meaning. The gift of God or the grace of God is twofold—as our capacity for a meaningful life and as the Word—the path to meaning. This Word is called the Law of God, as a prototype of any law created by people. Both components—the gift as an ability (as a possibility of spiritual life) and the gift as the Word or Law (without which the ability remains something undefined)—are equally important. This indicates that in the well-known distinction between grace and law, initiated in the Ukrainian intellectual tradition by Ilarion (despite possible different interpretations of this distinction), the main direction of my philosophical “style” lies in shifting the emphasis to the formation of personal and social life, to institutions, including the Law. Although the spirit (or Sophianism) must animate the law, without law, without embodiment in earthly forms of life, the spirit is inactive.

Culture as a set of institutions that form a person, and meaning-creating action and will as the source of all forms and re-formations—this is an emphasis more on action and creativity as opposed to mere potentiality. For grace is often understood as only an undefined spiritual substance in its infinite attributes. At least this shift of emphasis to action is safe until the threat of thoughtless activism appears. Or another threat: when the material being “formed” is thought of as mute, and reason as the form-creating factor, as the source of all meanings.

The theological version just outlined corresponds to a secular one. Man possesses a natural “gift,” the ability to acquire language (and, therefore, meaning), and more broadly—culture. On the other hand, man, in accordance with his nature (as an inferior “animal”), needs value—that is, a rule, a law. The “gift” of nature in this secular version remains only a capacity, a possibility of becoming human. This possibility is realized through the assimilation of another gift—cultural tradition as something passed down to us. However, any “matter” is not entirely passive: it has its sources of activity and its own “memory.” Therefore, any “forming” is only a “re-forming.” If instead of the word “forming” (as too mechanical) we speak of sense-making and re-interpretation, then the hint of memory points to an attentiveness to the meaning that tradition contains within itself. Without “hearing” what it says, we impoverish the resources of our creativity—including in the emergence of new meanings and values. In short, “clay,” as a symbol of matter, is not entirely mute.

Perhaps my youthful impression of uncertainty and amorphousness can be understood only by taking into account the spiritual situation of Ukrainian life at that time. I have in mind the fact that the fragments of tradition contained in the social environment were not included in a new meaning-creating action. In order to become the basis of those social values that would be able to withstand the onslaught of absurdity and chaos. Later, in B.-I. Antonych, I found a resonance with this impression: “A reverie—not quite a reverie, sadness—not quite sadness. On this land, it is a tragic papilloma.” Antonych here only picked up the theme, initiated by Shevchenko, of the sleep and future awakening of the robbed. Robbed primarily culturally and spiritually: having allowed themselves to be robbed in their enslavement, in their inability to defend themselves with action, the awakened manifest their awakening in anger and rebellion.

* * *

The oak grove. In the years of my childhood, Tarasivka had (and still has) two streets: one was called “Upper,” the other “Lower.” During my time in the camps, one of them was named “in honor of Taras Shevchenko,” the other—“in honor of Alexander Pushkin,” for the sake of strengthening the friendship of peoples. The streets with two rows of houses on either side, covered in the post-war years mostly with straw, mostly built with wattle and daub walls (perhaps only the vestibules here and there were log-built). The yards next to the houses were overgrown with knotgrass, plantain, and grass, enclosed by woven fences, lathes, and occasionally by board fences. In front of the house were flowers—“virhenii” (dahlias), cosmos, peonies, lovage. Around the houses were orchards—cherries, plums, pears, apples. Beyond the yards and orchards were vegetable gardens (after the war, every household that worked on the collective farm was entitled to 0.6 hectares).

The gardens of the Upper Street ended almost at the ditch that separated the oak grove from the gardens. A path from our house, running through the middle of the garden, led through the ditch into the oak grove. The oak grove—a community of oaks, pines, pears, birches, hazel, hawthorn, “baiborys”—was part of my worldview in the days of my youth. In early spring, there would be a day when a barely audible breeze of reviving branches would reach you, and your soul would respond with an awakening of hopes:

Дібровонько, знов чується твій поклик,

передвесняні шепоти-зітхання,

гілок до гілок перший дружній доторк,

забутих мрій таємне оживання.

Meanwhile, the harsh, even gloomy rustle of the trees in autumn brought thoughts and dreams down to earth: like all living things, one wanted to find shelter and warmth in some refuge. The pine forest evoked different moods: the forest between Novi Bezradychi (the hamlet of Pisky) and Kozyn was called a “bir”—it still stretches in a wide band towards Pidirtsi. I was captivated by the image of broken pines in a famous poem by Jānis Rainis (translated by Dmytro Pavlychko), but the motif that the pine forest instilled in me was not proud defiance, but the breath of eternity:

Твій шум, твій сум, стоїчний, споконвічний,

гук пралісу, віків незмірна велич,

в них приспіву звучить мотив трагічний

над гамором щоденним міст і селищ.

From my house, I would walk through the garden onto forest paths, along which, in my student years, I would set out on my solitary journeys of reflection (in winter—on skis). These journeys became one of the sources of the motif of solitude. Solitude is a salvation from the fatigue whose source is the human world. To this day, every Ukrainian intellectual who realized that the nation’s existence depends on his own choice has resisted and continues to resist that looming “not to be.” There is no escape from this: because “we are a handful. A tiny flock.” Now, admittedly, we are no longer just a handful, but a minority among the entire mass of the intelligentsia (which is still “undecided”). An intelligentsia that lacks a position and will. Often, the soul seeks salvation in turning away from this incessant resistance, from this confrontation. To turn away for a while, just to hear the rustle of trees and the breath of eternity. Solitude is a good medicine, but a temporary one.

* * *

For me, a village boy, the forest was also a place of work. For some time, we were allowed to graze cows there. It was not easy to watch over them among the trees, to prevent one from straying from the herd and wandering into someone’s garden. According to accepted custom, the herd was grazed in turns by two shepherds. After the war, there were two such herds in Tarasivka. In Tarasivka, as in other villages in the postwar years, communal lands (the banks along the Stuhna, pastures) where the herd could be grazed were still traditionally preserved for some time. Then (in the 60s), the policy was to take these pieces of land away from the people. This absurdity went so far that people would take their cows on a lead and walk them around on the field boundaries.

The forest was a place for getting firewood. The residents of Tarasivka, most often women, would take rakes and cloths and go to the forest to rake up pine “needles.” Or they would go with baskets and sacks to collect pine cones. Another method: they would take long lathes with metal hooks attached to the top (these lathes were called “kliuchky”), break off dry branches, tie them with rope, and carry them home. From my earliest childhood years until I finished high school, I witnessed a secret war between the forester, who for some reason forbade breaking branches and even raking needles, and the women, who stubbornly refused to sit in a cold house in winter. But the most serious crime, for which one had to pay a large fine, was cutting down trees—even dry ones. Men did this: sometimes they cut them even in daylight, but carried them in the evening or morning twilight, or even at night. The forester could conduct searches and, if he found the stolen wood, could impose fines.

Before the war, a tragic story occurred in Tarasivka during one of these searches at my uncle Anton’s. I don't know the details, as no one talked about it afterwards. In our family, they spoke about it reluctantly: apparently, the uncle, in some conversation with the forester, probably in response to some of his threats, said that if he dared to come to him with a search, he would not leave his yard. But he ignored this warning, and indeed he did not leave—he was carried out dead. Uncle Anton hid somewhere after that, later appeared “with a confession,” and was sentenced to many years in prison. No one in the village or our family justified Uncle Anton's act. But it is very likely that my uncle, who had a pronounced sense of his own dignity, wanted to feel like a master in his own home. Since, as I was told, he had warned the forester, this event has the features of a tragedy in my imagination: in my modern understanding, it has acquired symbolic meaning. It is the last and desperate attempt of a Master to protect the last island of his independence—his home. This later inclined me to sign my “Letter to the Deputies” with the pseudonym “Anton Koval.” But from Uncle Anton’s grandson, I heard a clarification of my story, after this chapter was published. From it, it follows that the forester, whom my uncle did not allow to conduct a search, hit him in the chest and he fell. In response and in anger at his humiliation, my uncle grabbed an ax and struck him. In this case, we have what is legally defined as exceeding the means of defense of oneself and one’s home from illegal entry. And this is indeed true: at that time, no legal grounds were presented for conducting a search in a village house and yard.

Like other children, I carried pine cones and needles from the forest. The last time, I brought enough needles to last the whole winter for my mother, who was left alone. This was after graduating from the university, when I was a philosophy lecturer at the Ternopil Medical Institute. But from the age of about twelve or thirteen, I was forced to get firewood by climbing high into the trees with a “nozhovka” (a small saw) in my belt and cutting off dry branches. Women and children had completely gathered all the dry branches that had fallen to the ground, and had also broken off what they could reach on the trees with long “kliuchky.” I had to climb high. It was risky: dry branches, rotten on the inside, were treacherous, as were pines with their slippery, mica-like bark.

Later, when I was involved in distributing samvydav and risking the loss of the opportunity to do intellectual and teaching work (and subjecting my sick mother to unbearable anxiety), I mentally returned to these high-altitude exercises of mine. This readiness for risk, common to a part of my generation (the “sixtiers”), was consonant with the image of the alpinist in the famous song by Vladimir Vysotsky. The height at which I held on by some miracle, at the cost of a superhuman effort, became a recurring dream for me during my postgraduate years (until my imprisonment). In this dream, I was holding onto the cornice of a high-rise building on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (for some reason located opposite the stairs leading to the October Palace): my legs were up, my head was between my hands with which I was holding onto the cornice, and from a height of a 10-15-story building, I saw the gray cobblestones below.

* * *

To the east of Tarasivka, slightly downstream of the Stuhna, there was a swamp called “Hoshchiv.” It remains in me as a picture of the life-giving fermentation of the earth's juices and herbs—a fermentation that “creates the pre-forms of life.” Mostly, on the eve of Trinity Sunday, children would pull “tatar's herb” from the silty bottom of Hoshchiv, knee-deep in water (that's what they called calamus in the villages near Kyiv—elsewhere, it is called “tsar-herb” in some steppe villages).

In the yard near our house grew two large, spreading wild pear trees. The trees, bushes, and flowers cradled our house in their green palms, like a bird's nest. My years before finishing secondary school were spent in this green luxury.

My “little motherland,” speaking of nature, is not so much the Kyiv region (as its borders are rather formal) as the forest-steppe: its diversity—hills, ravines, gullies, banks, meadows, swamps, sand deposits, fields, oak groves, pine forests. It seems to me (or rather, I would like it to be so) that nature is somehow connected to my way of thinking, which I began to favor in my last years at the university. I mean my sympathy for analytical philosophy: an appreciation for distinctions, clarifications, semantic nuances, contexts—as opposed to the general, the general idea or metaphor.

The main part of my attempts (more attempts than achievements) was aimed at erecting a structure that was well-anchored to the earth. To move upwards, building step by step, rather than with an instant ascent to the summit. In reality, the metaphorical and analytical styles in philosophy rather complement each other. Sometimes through competition and mutual criticism. It is about the relationship between truths that can only be discovered by reason and those accessible only to feeling, to the “heart” (Blaise Pascal). The first ancient philosophers wrote their treatises in a poetic style. It is true that these styles are not easy to combine in one text, because then a “mixing of styles” occurs, in the words of Yevhen Sverstiuk. In the steppes, where my wife Vira is so drawn (she is from Kaharlyk—also the Kyiv region), poets, followers of Platonic idealism, or theologians are meant to be born. There the sky is too close, it absorbs you: one more moment—and you are flying.

The years of my childhood—the childhood of the generation that went into the “wide world” from the village—had their happy advantages: nature, freedom, noisy children's games on the common, swimming in the Stuhna (where I once almost drowned, saved by one of the village boys), the still-living customs of the people with the charm of myths and legends. But through this profusion of green, through the diversity of the forest-steppe and the poetry of customs, time made its way—the history of the Ukrainian people.

2. History

When one moves from describing nature to the intention of pulling back the curtain on the pictures of history, the hand hesitates. The contrast is too stark, known not only from Shevchenko's poems. It has become like a curse—the age-old suffering of a people amidst the luxury of nature, on this fertile land. For everyone who has tried or is trying to understand Ukrainian history, this is a painful theme. It is bitter to realize that for centuries the people have been unable to take advantage of their own advantage—an advantage that would seem to require so little: to become master in their own house. But for that, the people must acquire an understanding of themselves as a subject of history, develop (through their cultural elite) a basis for their unity, and grasp that their lifeworld (cultural identity) is not just a whim of poets, but the basis of their ability to be themselves. And today, the vast majority has still not grasped these simple truths—truths that other European nations assimilated in the 18th–19th centuries.

For the Ukrainian people, history is something that burst into people's lives like a natural disaster, like a strange and alien force. One can, of course, point to periods of history-making, of erecting a structure that signified a cultural space: when people were capable of both building and defending their “house of being.” It is enough to mention Petro Mohyla and his academy or the cultural renaissance of the first quarter of the 20th century. But for the most part, and over the last few centuries, Ukrainian history has been the onslaught of foreign events and forces that have severed all inheritances, all construction. No space could emerge that was defined by values, where the word “value” (*vartist*), contrary to its immediate etymology, should be understood as related to “guard” (*varta*)—with those symbols that signify cultural identity, with the talismans that protect a people from erosion, from disappearance. Without such talismans, a people becomes clay, kneaded by history, which sculpts monsters and phantoms. On the winds that drive people into obscurity, dazed, homeless, and faceless. And only violence and curses are heard.

Still, in this respect, the history of the Ukrainian people is not an exception. The list of tragedies of other ethnic groups would be too long. But complaining about history and blaming an outside force does not signify a new perspective—an escape from the vicious circle. Neither cutting off a history that “cannot be read without bromine” (because forgetting is not a cure), nor constantly returning to the pain as a final stop, is of any help. Only finding a new life perspective in accepting and honoring spiritual values that would become a component of national self-awareness makes the past a source of modern meaning. Though it in no way justifies the horrors of the past.

As long as a people does not feel the power to make historical choices that depend on itself, as long as it has not filled its present existence with meaning, it will return to the past as something self-sufficient in its hopelessness. Because this past lives in the present. Even today, the existence of some small ethnic groups, even those well-united on the basis of a common culture, may be threatened by mortal danger from stronger foreigners (the Chechens are only the first, but not the only example). But Ukrainians are not a small people who could not defend themselves. Moreover, like other nations that have suffered physical genocide and cultural assimilation in the past, they could become an influential force in international relations in the defense of threatened ethnic groups. And this ethical perspective would give some meaning to the tragedies experienced in the past. It could, if the question of preserving cultural identity (and to some extent, even physical survival) were not still facing Ukrainians today. Even today they are still at a crossroads: should they revive and preserve their cultural identity, or, perhaps, is it better to disappear, if history has so ordained it.

* * *

Collectivization. “Collectivization” (the state's seizure of land from the peasants) led to the best field lands being taken away from people. According to accounts, in 1924, the Lisovyi family—my grandfather Petro and his four sons (the youngest of whom was my father, Semen, and his brothers Musiy, Savka, and Anton)—settled in the hamlet of Tarasivka. So, the Lisovyi family had not lived by the forest before (perhaps they once lived in or near a forest, but no memory of it has been preserved). They moved to Tarasivka from Stari Bezradychi. My father and his three brothers, my uncles, had a certain number of hectares of field lands before collectivization. The forest-steppe, as its very name suggests, besides swamps, forests, hills, and ravines (with cliffs or gullies), also consists of fields that are dotted in larger or smaller patches throughout its varied relief. The brothers probably expected that they would continue to own these field lands—in addition to the poor, sandy lands in Tarasivka where they had moved. After all, it was a good place to live: dry, open, with a view of sunrise and sunset, near the forest... Like many other people, I enjoy feeling that solemn moment—meeting the sunrise and bidding it farewell. A sun-worshipper lives in many of us.

After moving to Tarasivka, my father and his brothers built their houses in a row on the lower street, but before the war (in 1932), our house burned down. The fire occurred when my grandfather Petro was left at home with the children, while my father and mother were at work. Mother was working at the “posadky” (weeding young trees “in the forestry”), and from there she saw the fire. Mother—terrified that the children were left in the house (grandfather Petro was supposed to take the cows to pasture)—ran as fast as she could, probably about two kilometers; not quite reaching the burning house by about two hundred meters, she fell unconscious.

The house where I was born, my parents bought from my aunt Vasylyna (my mother’s sister), whose husband, uncle Hryhoriy, worked in Kyiv when they were building it. My uncle got building materials in Kyiv. And so our house, for that time, looked somewhat better in comparison with others: it was roofed with tin, had decorative architraves on the windows and doors, the windows were double-casement and could be opened, and the doors between the rooms were also double-leaf and decorative. The floor in the house, however, was earthen. But my mother was not satisfied with our new house: it was not built as solidly, it was much colder—in part because it was roofed not with straw, but with metal. Later, we children, with our sick mother, had to suffer in this house from the cold and a leaking roof. It even got to the point where there was nowhere to hide from the water dripping from the ceiling. But this was when my father was gone.

* * *

My relatives. In its fullest composition (with everyone who was alive at the end of 1942), our family numbered eight: my mother, registered on her certificate as Yefrosyniia (born 1904), my father, Lisovyi Semen Petrovych (b. 1904), four sons, and two daughters. The brothers: Petro (b. 1923), Pavlo (b. 1926), Fedir (b. 1933); the sisters: Halia (probably b. 1939, died 1944), Liuba (b. 1942). My mother had two sisters—the elder Fedoryna and the younger Vasylyna. Vasylyna—with my uncle Hryhoriy and their children (son Ivan and daughter Olia)—moved to Kyiv in 1932. My aunt Vasylyna lived with her children (uncle Hryhoriy died in 1936) during my student and postgraduate years in Pechersk, on Nemyrovycha-Danchenka Street (formerly Maloshyianivska). Today, the Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design (formerly the Institute of Light Industry) stands on this site. I will mention this apartment later in connection with the spread of samvydav. I do not remember my paternal grandmother—grandfather Petro’s wife. I have listed our whole family here because I will be mentioning my relatives in various episodes that follow.

The life stories of my relatives, taken together, largely illuminate the dramatic history of the Ukrainian peasantry in the 20th century. They provided me with real types that made it easier to see the cultural structure of rural, and at the same time, Ukrainian existence. My mother, Aunt Fedoryna, and my great-aunt Maryna signify for me a Ukraine unreachable by either the former Russian or the new authorities—a Ukraine self-sufficient in its spirituality, harmony, and customs. This self-sufficiency was apolitical, and therefore limited. But potentially, it contained a force capable, under favorable circumstances, of becoming the basis of a political movement—as it turned out in the years 1917–20. Immersion in ethnoculture and folk Christianity—and hence ethical independence and intransigence, reliance on oneself in the struggle for survival—are the most important features of this world. Indeed, this world was disappearing, the people who carried it within themselves were passing away. In the Brezhnev era, a new type of person began to prevail in society. A person who, for the sake of material benefits, was willing to renounce any ethical principles—just to push closer to the authorities, to the “miserable tidbit.” This was despite the fact that the standard of living had risen. We are witnesses that this process not only continued in independent Ukraine but, to some extent, has even deepened. The word “corruption” has become popular.

* * *

Like other peasants—after the distribution of landlords’ lands and the legalization of this land redistribution—my uncles rushed to farming. Being capable, they acquired machinery: even after the war, I would find its remnants near the house. But my memory has also preserved the striking sight of this machinery, brought to the collective farmyard in Tarasivka (in the valley behind the Tarasivka cemetery). On the hill above this valley stood a windmill; we sometimes played near it. Below, our eyes were met with the sight of this machinery, left to rust under the rain: a graveyard of human hopes.

Rereading and editing this text of mine, I note in retrospect that the sandy hill on which the windmill stood has completely disappeared today. It was dismantled by new builders, mostly “dacha owners,” for their “cottages.” It is known that they mostly enclose themselves with high concrete walls and are not inclined to communicate with local peasants. This is especially noticeable in the villages near Kyiv. And the children of the old-timers mostly tried to move to Kyiv or other cities after the war. The intensity of these relocations was growing: the depopulation of villages in Ukraine is a visible phenomenon. The political system did not give peasants the opportunity to become prosperous farmers on their own land.

And yet, probably until the end of the 1940s, uncle Savka’s “drive mechanism”—a device that allowed horses to be harnessed to turn the axle of a winnower or some other machine—remained in private use. I used to watch the horses walk in a circle in front of the barn, while inside, people were pouring in and collecting the winnowed grain. I don’t recall anyone explaining why this mechanism had not been confiscated. Uncle Anton had an oil press: a huge log with a press for crushing grain. It was located right in the house—in the front room, while a stove for roasting the grain stood in the kitchen. For children, the pressing of oil was an interesting event: if the grain was sunflower seeds (and not false flax or rapeseed), custom allowed the children, unnoticed by the adults, to grab roasted seeds from the stove.

Uncle Anton also kept his smithy. It remained with him until the end of his working life. Sometimes I managed to see him at work—how he manually fanned the forge with bellows. In my younger school years, I also engaged in smithing: in our yard under a pear tree, I would forge toy knives, pokers, sickles, and fire-irons for the girls (my little sister and the neighbor girl)... The war left behind metal. The body of the war appeared in my imagination as a giant green monster, resembling a lizard: it destroyed everything in its path, leaving behind metal, its excrement.

One of the mechanisms that uncle Anton owned was a hand-mill. I don't know what the designs of other hand-mills were (I think they were roughly the same), but it was very difficult to turn the crank to grind even two scoops of grain. On it, as a teenager, with my sick mother, I came to know the price of a piece of bread. In the early 50s, windmills still stood on the hills: one in Tarasivka and probably three were visible to the north, on the horizons, when looking from the low-lying bed of the Stuhna. The movement of their sails beckoned one to fly beyond the horizons. Like some of my spiritually close fellow villagers, I sadly perceived the disappearance of the windmills on the horizons: they were dismantled for firewood. With the same sadness, people perceived the horizons from which the domes of the Novi Bezradychi church had suddenly disappeared (in the 30s) (it had been blown up).

People went to the windmills when they needed to grind a sack or at least half a sack; for this, they had to pay the miller a “mirchuk” (a scoop or two of flour). To grind a small amount of grain (and often there was not much grain), the hand-mill was a lifesaver. The hand-mill belongs to the common experiences of my generation. This was best expressed by Symonenko (as well as some other common experiences and feelings of the rural youth of the post-war generation).

As I recall from stories, there was a threat of “dekulakization” for my father and his brothers. Some person came to their rescue by suggesting the idea that these four Lisovyi brothers, by farming together, had started the first village cooperative. It is quite likely that someone might have actually used this half-truth as an example of the working peasantry's gravitation toward socialist methods of farming. Still, as I can judge from my mother's stories, my father (unlike my mother) initially took a favorable view of the idea of collective farms. And when a temporary “retreat” in forced collectivization was announced (this was connected with the publication of Stalin's article “Dizzy with Success” in “Pravda”), it was my mother who dragged the wagon from the collective farm, and then brought the horse.

Only later did I learn (from literature) about the cooperative movement—the thing that scared the Bolsheviks. Such socialism was a real alternative to the Bolshevik one. Lenin felt the threat from the cooperative movement, and the Bolsheviks rushed to destroy the cooperatives that had begun to print Ukrainian books, establish mutual aid funds, etc. But deceiving the people with socialist phraseology became the main ideological weapon. Yet, at first, this demagoguery did not achieve the desired result: the resistance to collectivization is proof of that.

Perhaps my father really was influenced by that post-revolutionary communitarian socialism? Perhaps so, but of our parents' aspirations and struggles, only echoes reached us, the youth of the post-war generation. It became dangerous to talk about the struggle for an independent Ukraine, the struggle against War Communism, and the resistance to collectivization and dekulakization. The times had changed. The recent past was cut off, it became unreal.

* * *

I never had the opportunity to find out how many people were “dekulakized” in the village of Stari Bezradychi. More interesting to me were the peasants' reactions to this event. Most pitied the “dekulakized” for their hard work and good attitude toward people. Those who in the literature of “socialist realism” personified the type of “kulak” were exceptions. I mean the greedy ones who sought to ruthlessly exploit others (“hired hands”). But the image of the dekulakized—these products of “historical necessity” who were to be punished for the course of history—kept appearing in my imagination:

Корчуваті дуби, згорблені понад шляхом.

Земляки – ви куди? Етап за етапом.

Хіба не було чути свободи дзвону,

Щоб знову від Славути аж до Сибіру гноєм?

Many tragic stories are associated with “dekulakization.” One of them was told to me by my niece Halia Lisova, the daughter of my brother Petro. Halia worked as a nurse in the Zhovtneva Hospital her whole life: she and I have much in common in our way of feeling and understanding the world. She now often lives for long periods in Bezradychi, in her parents' house. She helped me to clarify or add some details to these memoirs.

Here is that story. Yovkhym Zhuk, Halia’s grandfather on her mother's side, owned a windmill and a field on Hora, a locality in Stari Bezradychi. When Yovkhym was told that he had been “dekulakized,” he got up in the night and set fire to the windmill. In the morning, his wife Khymka went outside and saw that their windmill was on fire:

— Yovkhyme, our mill is on fire.

— Let it burn, Khymka, let it burn, – she heard in reply.

Perhaps on the same day, or maybe a few days later, Yovkhym, still in the same state of despair, went to water the horse and at the same time bring water to the house (the well was in Chotyrkiv—the name of the locality). The horse returned, neighing, but Yovkhym was not there. They went to the well and saw him drowned. Only the past knows the truth—whether it was a suicide or an accident.

* * *

The War. To bring some order to this narrative, I will turn to the images beyond which my memory does not reach. No matter how I tried to extract any impressions from before the start of the war from the depths of my memory, only some shadows remained, indistinct, like dreams. More than once I tried to figure out for myself whether the picture in which I (as a small boy, it seems) am walking in the dark and see the glow of a fire on the horizon is a memory or just a dream. And why did this sight surface from the depths of my memory (or why did I dream it) again and again? Meanwhile, the pictures of the war, beginning with the entry of German troops into the village, appear clearly and distinctly in my memory.

I see myself in a small line of boys on the side of the street, along which a column of German troops is moving. I remember saying the word “Fritzes” and immediately hearing a warning from one of the wiser ones among us. From the entry of the German troops into the village (and they, for known reasons, entered without a fight), a picture of the solemn arrival of motorcyclists has remained in my memory. It was precisely these advance units of the German army that demonstrated the greatest contempt for the “natives.” This impression later contrasted with my acquaintance with German culture—German philosophy, poetry, and language (which even today attracts me with its rich root base, and in this is similar to Ukrainian). In reality, this contrast only testifies to what a malignant ideology can do to people.

The attitude of my parents, like most peasants, to the “occupiers” was alienated and cold. Only a few of the peasants entered into any kind of relationship with them, to get, say, some “canned food” or sugar from them. And it could not have been otherwise: they were perceived as foreigners, and their arrogance only increased the alienation. In contrast, the soldiers of the “Soviet” army were perceived as “our own”: and they treated the peasants in the liberated territories as their own. This contrasts with the attitude toward the “liberators” which, in the light of the experience of 1939, the population of Western Ukraine displayed. Of course, the attitude of the ruling elite (including a part of the Soviet army command) towards those who had been in the occupied territory was different. On the other hand, the peasants’ attitude towards “our boys” can in no way be identified with their attitude towards the “Soviet” authorities. For this government from the very beginning waged a continuous war against that Ukraine which, for lack of a better word, I call “underground.”

I call it the underground Ukraine, the one that, despite atheist propaganda, kept icons in the houses, embroidered shirts in its chests, and portraits of Shevchenko on the walls of its homes. It was the basis of the national movement in 1917–1920, it resisted collectivization, it was the object of revenge—for stubbornly existing. For not accepting the proposed substitute, the official Ukraine, one of whose purposes was for the Ukrainian Ukraine to disappear. Later I witnessed how this Ukraine dwindled, as village children, tempted by an easier city life, forgot its history, its legends, myths, customs, and language. Of course, they were helped to forget. Very influential forces are helping to do this even today, updating their technologies and ideologies. And today every thinking Ukrainian faces the choice of whether Ukraine should be or not. I will later recall how I made this choice myself.

The relations of the underground Ukraine with the authorities were external and alienated. I think it could not have been otherwise: if only because of the forced collectivization and the famine of ’33. The peasants could not consider such a government their own. Of course, the German occupation authorities were also perceived as alien. The contempt and rudeness of the Germans were an important reason that pushed people to participate in the partisan movement. One form of violence, the fascist regime replaced with another. What I've said explains the attitude towards the Germans on the part of the peasants in a broader context—in the context of the attitude towards any government that is not their own. Whether such institutions as school, the system of education and propaganda, removed this alienation between the people and the authorities, I will discuss later.

And yet, we children, despite all the horrors, found something new, and therefore interesting, in the war. We got toys—cartridge cases, foil, beautifully designed boxes, tin cans. Some of these toys turned into disability and death for children. Once I also started to unscrew a light-blue “lemonka” grenade. My brother Fedir was nearby and ran to me with all his might and managed to take my “toy” away. These “toys” killed and maimed children for many years after the war. A group of teenagers (among whom was my cousin Mykola, Aunt Fedoryna’s son), while grazing cows in the pine forest, began to do something, probably with an aerial bomb: its explosion was heard in the village, the children were killed.

In 1942, our family grew—a baby girl was born. She was named Liuba. When Liuba was only a few months old, the Germans decided to set up some kind of headquarters in our house. They occupied two rooms—the front room and the bedroom, and all of us had to live in the kitchen. The proximity of the headquarters turned into an unexpected disaster for us. One of the German officers, as soon as little Liuba began to cry, would grab the infant, run out of the house with her, and throw her on the ground. My mother, with a cry of despair, would run out into the yard and pick up my sister from the ground. The repetition of this forced my mother to seek some salvation. She was told that some higher-ranking German official lived with our neighbors; she dared to go and complain about the officer. The reaction was unexpected—the public punishment of this officer, which the neighbors could see. A strange punishment: the officer had to crawl back and forth on all fours for some distance on the road. But even stranger was that he did not seek revenge on us for this humiliation. On the contrary, from time to-time he would give the girl some sweets. Perhaps some words from the senior officer awakened something human in a soul brutalized by fascist ideology.

Some youths and girls who were threatened with deportation to Germany tried to hide. My brothers Petro and Pavlo also hid, as I recall, in caves somewhere near the hamlet of Berezove (a hamlet of the village of Stari Bezradychi). My memory has clearly preserved the picture of a policeman coming to our house. He was cracking a whip against the door and rudely, with a quarrel, demanded that my parents hand over one of the two brothers to Germany. The occupation authorities forced families with youths and girls of the appropriate age to choose one, or even two, for deportation to Germany. Hiding did not help—the policemen knew the composition of every family. My eldest brother Petro was fated to this. In addition, two of my cousins—Natalka (uncle Anton’s daughter) and Maria (my aunt Fedoryna’s daughter)—were also taken to Germany. It is known that those who ended up with German farmers had it easier. It was much worse for those who worked in factories, and later on the construction of defense structures, digging trenches, etc. Petro and Natalka were not destined to end up with farmers.

After Petro returned home, I had the opportunity to get acquainted with the postcards that Natalka had sent to Petro in Germany. Touching these postcards and reading them is one of the special impressions of my youth, impressions both painful and inexpressible. The poetic epistles of this Marusia Churai—with their nostalgic lyricism, illuminated by tragedy—are an image or a shadow that will be with me to the end of my days. Natalka died in Germany, and a premonition of this was present in her postcards. One stanza from her poem-songs has sounded in my memory all my life:

Прощай, любов, прощай, розлука,

прощайте, очі голубі,

прощай, те все, що вже минуло,

щоб не боліло на душі.

It is now impossible to collect the letters of those young men and women, to make public this tragic page from the life of youth torn away from Ukraine. I learned an interesting fact, perhaps unknown to our historians, from my cousin Maria, daughter of Aunt Fedoryna. Some of the youths and girls taken to Germany, after the occupation of East Germany, were not allowed to return home for a long time by the Soviet regime, forcing them to serve the occupation authorities (and strictly forbidding them to tell anyone about this fact). Maria and her husband were not allowed to go home for seven years. Only in the 90s did she dare to talk about this fact.

During the retreat of the German troops in 1943, I witnessed the consequences of our childish, thoughtless actions—mine and the neighbor girl Olia’s (the daughter of Aunt Yivha, whose house was next to ours). Olia would steal some trifles from the Germans, pieces of soap, for example. She would give these small things to me, and I would hide them. My memory preserves a picture of a German with a submachine gun pointed at the girl and Aunt Yivha on her knees, sobbing and begging. I also remembered another event. When the headquarters had already left our house and all things had been taken from the house, some German ran in, tore a portrait of Hitler from the wall, and said something like this: “Stalin-Hitler—duts-duts,” tapping himself on the forehead. I wonder if this person, forced to become a cog in the senseless machinery of war, survived.

* * *

I remember quite well the entry of the Soviet troops into the village. They entered with a fight. We (my mother with us children) hid in Uncle Musiy's cellar during the battle. Only Grandfather Petro was not with us. He must have been grazing the cow in the forest so the Germans wouldn't take it during their retreat. Grandfather Petro—a tall, sturdy, strong man—had a strange habit of ignoring warnings. During some shellings or bombings, when we hid at least in the space under the stove, he could lie peacefully on top of the stove. One got the impression that the whizzing of bullets meant no more to him than the buzzing of flies. I don't remember my father being with us in the cellar—I think he might have been at his water mill, which he, along with a few other peasants, had built on the Stuhna before the war. To do this, they dug a canal from the Stuhna towards Tarasivka: this created a small branch on which the water mill stood. Later, in the second half of the 40s, we children used to climb in the tarred compartments of this by-then abandoned and neglected mill.

Uncle Musiy's cellar was relatively large and dry, and many people had gathered in it—our neighbors from the Upper and Lower streets. Uncle Musiy, a lively and restless man of average height (only uncle Anton took after Grandfather Petro—tall and stately), would run out of the cellar from time to time to see “how things were going.” I turned out to be the most restless of everyone in the cellar. The whistle of a shell caused me a painful anticipation of an explosion; the rising sound of this whistle merged with my scream. This was repeated every time. No matter how much they tried to calm me, I could not stop screaming.

During the battle, Germans would jump into the cellar and inspect us. We sat in the cellar for probably about a day. The battle raged at night. Still in the dark, before dawn, the Germans were driven out of the village. Someone announced: “Ours are here.” We left the cellar and entered Uncle Musiy’s house. Soldiers ran into the house and asked for something to eat. Something was found for them, but then several more soldiers, three it seems, asked for the same. There was nothing to give them. My mother suggested they go to our house, where some food was left. So we set off for our house. But just then, from the west, some large flaming balls flew across the sky above us. The soldiers shouted for us to run after them, but we ran in the other direction, towards Uncle Anton’s house. Thus we and the soldiers ran in different directions. And to the west, on the Lower Street, just a few houses away from us, a house was on fire.

From then on, our house became overcrowded with soldiers. At night they lay tightly packed on the sleeping platform and on the earthen floor. When I needed to go out, I could barely squeeze my legs between their bodies. The soldiers lying on the sleeping platform would rock the cradle with Liuba, which hung above them. They joked. I remember an officer pinning a diamond-shaped badge to my shirt, saying: “Istrebitel” (Fighter), and added: “Moloka” (Milk).

Then the wave of Soviet troops rolled on. But during the departure of the last units, an incident occurred with my brother Fedir (who was 10 at the time). A group of “rear echelon troops” trailed at the tail end of “our” army. They discovered that a multi-colored flashlight was missing and suspected that my brother had taken it. Some threats began, the content of which I do not remember. My visual memory has preserved only the very same picture that I had already seen in our neighbor Yivha’s house. This time it was my mother on her knees, pleading. As I recall, those pleas lasted a long time. At least in my memory they remained long and painful. The pleas had no effect: the rear echelon troops decided to take the teenager with them. They dragged him onto a truck, but they allowed my mother to go with him after all. Only somewhere near Kaharlyk were they released.

Men of older and younger ages began to be drafted into the army from the village. The age limits had been expanded. They took my father and my brother Pavlo. We were lucky to meet Pavlo again. He was stationed near anti-aircraft guns in or around Kyiv. He had to stand in cold water and caught a cold in his legs. Consequently, he was allowed to stay home for a few days: he warmed his legs on the stove; this was our last meeting with him until his return from the army.

* * *

Those who were drafted from the villages during the offensive were treated in a special way—after all, they had been in occupied territory (they had not been evacuated or joined the partisans). I am convinced that even if the Soviet troops had not been encircled near Kyiv, and even if people had been helped to evacuate, the majority of peasants would not have agreed to leave their homes. Only a tiny minority, closely connected with the authorities, would have taken advantage of this. Among them, only a few would have done so out of conviction, others—out of fear for their lives. I don't think the reason for this should be seen in the peasant's attachment to his “homestead.” The main reason was the fresh scars of the violence they had endured, especially the recently experienced Holodomor. After an organized famine, only a cynic could call on peasants to be patriots. Even a perpetrator would not have believed the sincerity of someone who said that he did not remember this or had forgiven it.

In any case, those drafted in the newly “liberated” villages faced another act of revenge. They, untrained, often not even dressed in military uniforms, were thrown at machine guns. This is a known fact today. It was said that they were given a drink “for courage” beforehand. Now, it is probably difficult to calculate the number of those deliberately sent to their deaths among those long lists of those “who died a hero’s death,” whose names we read on the columns above the mass graves in the “liberated” villages. However, is it even worth counting, considering the disregard for “our” lives by “our own” in this war.

Indeed, this is a Russian state tradition: ordinary people are just material. If the need arises to sacrifice them for “higher goals,” then such a sacrifice is justified. To think about how necessary the sacrifice is, or to make efforts to reduce the number of victims, means to show a sentimentality unacceptable for a politician, a lack of firmness. Lenin was not the first to introduce this political “ethic”: it was formed along with the formation of the Russian state. One can easily trace the inheritance of such a “political culture” through all periods of the Russian empire. The continuation of this tradition, in an updated form, is the involvement of a significant part of the modern Ukrainian political elite in the plunder of their own people. Without understanding this tradition and renouncing its criminal component (and such a renunciation presupposes the formation of a political elite with a fundamentally different political culture), all of today’s talk about overcoming corruption will remain just talk. Just like the talk about the “fight” against poverty.

So, my father died “a hero’s death,” not far from his native home in the steppes of the Kyiv region—in the village of Kruti Horby. Although my father, as one can judge from the story of a man from a neighboring village (Sloboda), did indeed show courage. When this man was wounded, my father pulled him away from the machine gun (thus saving him) and replaced him at the gun. I remember, I was sitting on the stove when the door opened, and we, the children, heard not sobbing, but the scream of a mortally wounded person—our mother. I also began to cry loudly, probably not yet understanding what had happened. My mother’s words “who did he leave you to” became the accompaniment to our lives. As it did for the lives of many other women and children, regardless of whether it was the Nazis or the Bolsheviks who doomed mothers to struggle single-handedly for the survival of their children.

I returned to thinking about the war again and again. Some new facts or assessments were superimposed on my childhood impressions. It was important to comprehend this war not only in the context of the world war, but primarily in the context of Ukrainian history. It is morally unjustifiable to look at historical events as something completely independent of the people—especially a large nation. If the Ukrainians, like the Poles, had defended their independence in the 1920s, the appearance of another strong, democratic, independent state in Eastern Europe could have changed the course of history. Perhaps the fate of Russia as well. There is a grain of truth in the statement “there can be no democratic Russia without an independent, democratic Ukraine” (to paraphrase Lenin's famous saying). In any case, the attempt to keep non-Russian peoples in one state by force will always be a source of anti-democratic tendencies in Russia. But during the First World War, the West did not understand the importance of establishing an independent, democratic Ukraine: it was then far from a well-thought-out geopolitical strategy for the long term.

Psychologically, the death of my father, whom two totalitarian systems killed with their combined efforts, gave my aversion to totalitarianism a personal motive. Hence the sharp rejection of the rhetoric of praise, which became a traditional ritual associated with the “liberation” and victory (a tradition that is maintained even in independent Ukraine). Not a comprehension of the war and the nature of totalitarianism, but the sound of victorious fanfares. Of course, the people who went through the crucible of war, looking death in the face, deserve respect. But my respect and sympathy for these people were combined with the bitter recognition that, having gone through the war, they were still unable to make sense of their experience (with rare exceptions—Hryhorenko, Rudenko, for example!).

My late cousin, uncle Musiy’s son (also Vasyl), who flew a “kukkurudzianyk” [Po-2 biplane] throughout the war, described my concerns for the fate of Ukraine and its unique culture as “nationalism”—understandably, in the negative sense of the word. And today, unfortunately, a large part of the former participants of the war remain ideological supporters of that “internationalism” which is only a guise hiding the stereotypes of Russian chauvinism. It is difficult to combine in the imagination and mind their experience with this powerlessness in comprehending what they lived through. And I, like other sixtiers, was haunted by a sense of duty to comprehend this experience of standing face to face with death in that war for them. I recall when, in the camp, I was thrown into the “shizo” (punitive isolation cell) once again, Major Fedorov “visited” me for a “talk.” Given his officer rank, I addressed him with a tirade something like this: “How can you, an officer, participate in this torture of political prisoners, obediently carrying out the orders of your superiors? Has it completely faded from your memory how many soldiers and officers recently in the Great Patriotic War stood face to face with death and how many of them died? Where is your officer's honor and courage? I am the son of one of those who died in that war. Do you really think that for the sake of saving my life, or out of fear of a mighty totalitarian state, I should forget my father’s death and flee the battlefield?” Thus I tried to awaken in him a feeling called “honor.” Later, something about this rhetoric of mine bothered me: first, the demagogic use of my status as “son of a hero who died a hero’s death” (and what to say to the sons and daughters of those who died in the ranks of the UPA?), and second, to whom was this tirade of mine addressed (in the camp, the major was considered a “total goner”).

And today, the official commemoration of “victories” has not grown any wiser. The official rhetoric stubbornly clings to cheap populism, sweetened with sentimentality and the pathos of thoughtless romantic heroics. And the desire to fuel the stereotypes of Russian chauvinism with that emphasis on the unity of the “Soviet” peoples as a guarantee of victory. In order to continue to destroy those peoples, their national identity, in the name of unity. Instead of becoming an occasion for reflection on the nature of totalitarianism and Russian chauvinism. And to prevent their return in new modifications—even in softened and hidden forms. Of course, the question arises here, who is interested in people being able to think? Obviously, not someone who would like to have a people that is easier to deceive and rob. And not a Russian chauvinist and imperialist, who considers the disappearance of cultural differences between “fraternal peoples,” the so-called “yedinobrazie” [uniformity], to be the most important guarantee of unity. Ivan Svitlychny's phrase comes to mind here, which can be conveyed almost verbatim: you think that they up there are “thinking,” but they are not thinking. To express my attitude to thoughtless pathos, I resorted to a publicistic style of speech:

Так легко напрошується зваба самовтіхи:

ми довели правоту і силу.

Стій! — відкинемо знову завісу,

щоб залишити правду сину.

Правду, омиту слізьми і кров’ю,

не ховаймось від її сяйва в гроти:

фашизм – це віра в свою ідею

і нищення всіх, хто проти.

…………………………………..

Чом би вам у світлі аналогій

на Отечество не глянуть свіжим зором.

Тож воно крізь галас демагогів

вам кричить насильством і терором.

Нехай істина і совість живить слово,

не патетика бездумна й тупіт ніг,

бо ж тоді той диктатури голос

перемогу вашу переміг.

When people today speak of the romance (or even heroism) of the dissident movement, they do not always take into account the hidden sources from which it grew. For, in addition to purely cultural and intellectual sources, every young man and woman who possessed moral imagination inevitably had to comprehend this standing face-to-face with death of our grandfathers and fathers. It did not matter whether they were martyrs in the torture chambers of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD-MGB, or UPA fighters, or soldiers of the “Great Patriotic” war, or all of these combined. In particular, the resistance movement and the associated philosophy of existentialism are one of the sources of existential motifs in the work of the sixtiers. The generation of people spiritually close to me in the 60s considered it their duty to comprehend the bloody experience and to be honest in their conclusions. Honesty in conclusions meant a strict dependence of one’s own behavior on the meaning that was revealed to us. This is called the existential understanding of truth and value.

Chapter II. The Ruin of Daily Life, Fragments of Tradition

1. The Ruin of Daily Life. The Fate of My Brothers and Sisters

Mother. So, in 1944, three of us children were left with our mother: Liuba, me, and the oldest of us, Fedir, who was 11. Our mother's struggle for our survival began. A few brushstrokes for my mother's portrait. The first is energy, an unwillingness in any situation, even a hopeless one, to retreat, to fall into despair. She stubbornly fought for our lives. But not by any means necessary. She had a natural aversion to making even the slightest gesture of fawning to the village authorities (for example, the brigade leader) in order to get something for us. This was still characteristic of many peasants of the generation to which she belonged. It is surprising how this breed of people could have survived, having endured all the humiliations aimed at eradicating “character”—the sense of independence and dignity of a farmer. I have mentioned here a side of my mother's soul that has remained an unattainable ideal for me. And yet, for me, inclined to take into account the “dialectics of life” (and this expression contains not only positive connotations), this example of her proud independence was important.

Her second profile contrasts with this first one. She had delicate, intelligent facial features, a poetic soul, a distinct aesthetic element in her attitude toward the world. But what charmed me most about her, preserved in spite of everything, was her faith in the good foundation of the world. Not even the circumstances of life, nor her exhausting efforts to ensure our survival, nor twenty years of severe physical suffering (which she affectionately called “my little torment”) killed this faith. Neither life circumstances nor physical suffering managed to break this most important axis of her spirituality. She had, like many rural people of her generation, a faith in the goodness of the first people she met. This is a well-known (and perhaps now forgotten) trait of a rural person, the most vivid manifestation of which was the attempt to strike up conversations with passengers on public transport. To confide in them as if they were good acquaintances. A strange contrast of different worlds. In the structure of traditional rural culture, a person saw in every passerby a conversationalist, an advisor, and a helper. Someone to whom one could complain, find understanding and support. This openness sometimes exposed my mother to bitter disappointments. I would explain to my mother that she had just met a bad person. Of course, one can understand a city dweller who has reasons to be wary of very undesirable acquaintances in a city crowd. But this sentence of mine explains far from everything. Something else, more important, remains beyond it.

Mother, as I can judge from stories, was physically strong, but in 1932 or 1933 she suffered from typhus, which she contracted while caring for her niece Oleksandra (Sasha). I want to note in passing that my mother's younger sister's (Olena's) husband, Rozhovets Ilarion, died of typhus in 1933. He worked at the “Arsenal” factory (Kyiv), and in the autumn of 1933, they were sent to one of the villages in the Kyiv region to gather the harvest; he contracted typhus and died. Famine, typhus, war, the death of her husband, the post-war efforts to save us—all undermined my mother's health. And so in my imagination, I see her thin, sunlit figure, nimble, used to relying on herself, trying, until the last day of her life, to take care of herself, to be neat, so as not to bother others. And a look in which, freed from the captivity of suffering and the shadows of the past, the light of goodness and trust in the world and people radiates.

* * *

After the War. And yet, mother did not manage to save everyone. In the winter of 1944, our Halia fell ill—probably with the flu, which led to complications: from then on, I remembered the word “meningitis.” But it is very likely that Halia’s death was the result of my own action. It happened like this. Mother had placed the children—me and my little sisters—in the bedroom. Between the bedroom and the main room was a large stove that heated the bedroom. The door to the kitchen, where the main cookstove stood, was closed: there was not enough firewood to heat the whole house. One morning, when Halia’s fever had passed and she regained consciousness, I, in my joy, grabbed her and opened the kitchen door to show her to my mother. I stood with her in the open doorway for only a moment: my mother, with a cry of despair, snatched the child from my hands and closed the door. It could be that the deterioration of my sister's condition and her death were the result of my thoughtless act.

The years 1943–1947 were especially hard for my mother, who was left with three small children. The year 1945 brought no change to her situation. Unfortunately, our older brothers, who could have helped, did not return home for several more years. Brother Petro was liberated by the Americans, clothed, fed, and offered a choice: you can return home, or you can stay in the West. Most of the young people chose to return home. Petro did too. But he, like many others, was punished for his stay in Germany. He was sent to the polymetallic mines of Karaganda, where he was forced to work for two years. Pavlo, despite his two years on the front, had to serve, I think, two years in the army.

The main means of salvation was the garden (0.6 hectares of sandy soil) and the cow. Mother made extraordinary efforts to get hay. It was not easy. It had to be bought. She collected milk and made ryazhenka. Once a week, she would go out to the Kyiv road, where so-called “kalymshchyky” (drivers of trucks—mostly “polutorkas” and “ZISs”) made extra money by transporting people to Kyiv. They would seat them on wooden benches in the truck beds, and often on the floor of the bed. The roads then were not paved, let alone asphalted, and no one leveled the potholes. When Fedir enrolled in the FZU (factory-vocational school), I had to carry baskets on a yoke to the road in the predawn darkness (around 3-4 a.m.).

Taxes had to be paid—not only in money, but also in kind (meat, eggs, milk). These taxes in kind were abolished, if I'm not mistaken, in 1952 (for which the peasants gratefully remembered Malenkov). I had to carry milk from the hamlet of Tarasivka to the center of Stari Bezradychi—to the “molochnarnia” (milk collection point). In addition, peasants (and workers too) at that time were plagued by “loans,” formally voluntary, but in fact mandatory. But where could a peasant get money to pay for these loans? Out of desperation, for some time, my mother made moonshine (despite her extreme hatred of drunkenness). She would take it to a reseller, a distant relative in the village of Pidirtsi. At that time, most peasants made moonshine at night: the discovery of moonshining was punishable by a fine, or even imprisonment (though I do not remember cases of imprisonment and do not know how widespread such a practice was). I also had to sit at night by the steaming pot to stoke it with dry, mostly alder, short-cut and finely chopped firewood.

* * *

Fedir. In 1945, Fedir left his work on the collective farm and entered one of the Kyiv FZUs to become a lathe operator. The training at the FZU lasted six months. Sometimes he would bring me colored metal shavings. But suddenly, at the end of his training, he returned to the village and, without explaining anything, stayed at home for, maybe, a month, if not longer. Mother was very worried and reproached him. One day he went to Kyiv (probably saying he was going to the FZU) and suddenly disappeared. Mother was in despair and began to look for the boy in Kyiv without any idea where to look for him. But in the end, she found her son in the Lukianivska Prison. It turned out that, in accordance with some order, their entire FZU was to be moved to Königsberg (later Kaliningrad). Fedir refused to go, and refusal to work was punishable (it seems, with up to six months of imprisonment). He was left to serve his sentence in the Lukianivska Prison. Mother began to bring him parcels. After serving his sentence, he returned home.

For several months, Fedir worked (of course, for free) on the collective farm. Sometimes he would find a mine, take out the detonator, insert it into a TNT block, and stun fish. One day he found a bent detonator and decided to straighten it. He did this in the yard in front of the house. He sent me and my contemporary Olia (the neighbor girl) as far away as possible for safety. Only Liuba stubbornly refused to move away. Suddenly, an explosion rang out. I saw Fedir's bloodied hands and face and my sister's bloodied clothes. Fortunately, my mother appeared very quickly and, wailing, rushed to wash and bandage them. Fedir's fingertips were torn off and his face was peppered with shrapnel. Liuba's side was peppered. From then on, I fed Fedir until his fingers healed. Later, he received a notice from the military enlistment office, and they thought he would be taken into the army after all: our relatives even came to see him off. But he was rejected and he returned.

Fedir was a kind-hearted and unhappy person. Out of desperation, not wanting to work on the collective farm for “sticks”—labor-days (in the book, a day of work was marked with a single stroke)—he decided to sign up for a work contract. Mother took this as a tragedy and she was not mistaken. “Verbovka” (recruitment) (a very popular word in the postwar years) “rescued” the youth who wanted to escape the tight embrace of serfdom. The state left only one door open—recruitment, usually for two years, on terms offered by the recruiter. Most recruitment was for the Donbas. My cousin Fedir (aunt Fedoryna's son) went there. My Fedir, however, along with another young man (the son of our neighbors), signed up for the northern Urals (to work in logging). To the place where later, many years later, I, along with others, was transferred to the camps (from Mordovia). Two years later, Fedir returned, but he didn't live with us for long, then he signed up for another contract—this time to the Caucasus, to work in the polymetallic mines. There, however, he learned that everyone who worked in those mines was doomed (I don't know why—perhaps they were uranium mines). There was only one way to get out (because of the contract!)—to be declared unfit for service. Fedir, as he told us, drank a very strong infusion of tea, causing heart palpitations. He managed to get discharged and transfer to another job. He got married, and some time later (when I was already in high school), he and his wife came to visit us. During his recruitment years, he had become accustomed to vodka, which caused great grief to his wife and mother. They didn't live with us for long and finally settled in Zheleznovodsk. When I returned from exile, he visited me and even gave me a little money. This was not our last meeting with him. A few years later, his wife informed me that Fedir was in serious condition. Liuba and I managed to find him alive; he died in my presence (the women had just left the apartment). His biography is typical of the fates of those village youths who took the path of recruitment. They doomed themselves to wandering far from their native lands in order to avoid the contempt and lawlessness in their own village.

* * *

Petro. Petro likely returned in the autumn of 1947. We were eagerly awaiting his return from Karaganda. Mother placed special hopes on Petro. He was capable: he excelled in school, played the accordion, had a talent for painting (he painted with oil paints). A painting he had made hung in our house: green meadows below, with a scytheman on them, a house above with a path running down. I think that before being sent to Germany, he was a romantic youth. After returning from Karaganda, I never saw him paint. Instead, he loved photography. I keep the photographs and negatives he made—glass plates (mostly 9x12), given to me by Halia (his daughter). There are hundreds of these plates (about a hundred, unfortunately, stuck together, I couldn't separate them and had to throw them away). Among them are many group photos (weddings, funerals, class or school graduations, etc.). It is a photo-chronicle of the village of Bezradychi—Stari and Novi. Only a part of them have been scanned for me, and I have positives in electronic form. In the village, he became a jack-of-all-trades: he fixed earrings and watches. He made reeds for accordions from clock springs. By polishing the plate, he adjusted its thickness to achieve the desired pitch: one could marvel at his patience. However, his nerves did sometimes fail him, perhaps not without the influence of what he had endured in the factories in Germany and the mines of Karaganda. I remember how he threw the body of an accordion with its rows of reeds on the floor with all his might, and a few minutes later, he was meekly picking up the scattered parts. I believed him when he told us that, driven to the brink of his patience by a nitpicking supervisor in a German factory, he had hit him with a hammer and somehow managed to get out of the factory. And since such fugitives were caught and returned to their old workplaces, he, on the advice of others, concocted a story that the train that was transporting them had been hit in a bombing raid. Thus he ended up in some other factory.

Petro had a sharp mind and returned from Germany with a developed assessment of the Soviet political system. During my imprisonment, as I was told, he listened to foreign “voices,” and thanks to this, he also knew about my situation. But due to the lack of men, particularly literate ones, Petro was eventually offered a job as a “finagent” (financial agent), which he accepted and worked in this position for several years. I was ashamed of this decision of his. And it's not surprising, given the tax extortion from peasants at that time. But perhaps it was better for a compassionate person to be in this position, rather than a soulless one. This also applies to the heads of collective farms: if, even at risk, a collective farm chairman did not try to curry favor, but, with the help of various tricks, sought to give the collective farmers at least something per labor-day, such “chairmen” were respected. Still, gaining a reputation for being “good” was dangerous for them. When a directive came from above about insufficient grain deliveries, the collective farm chairmen were summoned to the district party committee, where they were spoken to in the language of threats and obscenities. The system pushed out the compassionate, attracting those capable not only of fulfilling but of over-fulfilling the orders sent down from above. In the end, Petro also did not “fit in” with the village bureaucracy, and later worked as a lathe operator and in other simple jobs. In general, he was unable to realize his abilities, which became a source of his moral dissatisfaction and irritation. After returning from imprisonment, I did not find him alive: he died of a lung disease. Seven young men from Stari Bezradychi alone, who worked in the Karaganda polymetallic mines (as punishment for being taken to Germany), suffered from lung diseases, and therefore, one can assume that this was not a coincidence.

Petro’s trip to Western Ukraine in ’47 (together with Halia, the daughter of Uncle Anton) was a great salvation for us. By the end of winter, most of the peasants had run out of everything—first and foremost potatoes (the staple food) and whatever grain they had. At that time, Eastern Ukraine was, to a great extent, saved by Western Ukraine—a fact that is hushed up in modern Ukraine. I am grateful to the “1+1” channel for mentioning this in connection with the 70th anniversary of the famine of ’32–’33. The fact that Western Ukraine, with its much poorer lands (but private farming), was able to trade thousands of tons of bread for whatever meager belongings people had is a telling one. So Petro, among thousands of others (statistics for this are unlikely to exist), set out on a journey and returned with two sacks of groats. In one of them, as I can judge today, were oat groats, because they would boil down into a jelly-like porridge.

And yet, somewhere around May or June, the supply of these groats ran out, as did the supply of potatoes. We, admittedly, had a lifesaver—a cow, milk. Our mother would allot each of us—Liuba, me, and Petro—a portion of milk each day. The rest went to be sold. Still, I recall that the lack of bread drove my mother to try baking pancakes from ground acorns. But our stomachs refused to digest this “bread.”

* * *

Liuba. Only Liuba, who was five years old in 1947, managed to avoid feeling the famine: she was taken to Kyiv by our aunt Vasylyna. An interesting life prospect even opened up for Liuba: thanks to a chance acquaintance, our aunt was offered the opportunity to enroll Liuba in ballet school. At that time, she was truly a charming little doll. And later, in her youth, I considered my sister beautiful. As my aunt later told me, when Liuba was eating a roll with butter, she would say with sorrow that we, in the village, didn’t even have bread. Aunt Vasylyna and her daughter Olia wanted to leave Liuba in Kyiv (Olia wanted to adopt her). But my mother did not agree to it. And Liuba worried about us and wanted to return home. She returned when the new potatoes appeared. Dressed in city clothes, she seemed to me a charming young lady from another world. I perceived her as an exotic flower among these impoverished people, dressed in clothes that had been turned inside out or patched together from hand-me-downs.

Probably a year or so after Petro’s return, Pavlo finally returned from the army. He lived with us for only a short time, however, and got a job as a truck driver in Kyiv. This was one of the possibilities—to go to Kyiv immediately after the army, because in such cases, the consent of the kolkhoz chairman and the head of the village council was not required. It was serfdom, after all. Peasants were not given passports. True, people managed to move to Kyiv in various ways. The city authorities needed a labor force, especially for construction. A hidden war was being waged between the kolkhoz chairman and the collective farmers. Urban construction organizations would send trucks with wooden benches in the back, covered with tarps (or with no covering at all), to the villages in the morning to pick up those who had agreed to work on construction sites. In the evening, after the workday, the truck would bring them back to the village. The kolkhoz chairmen began to establish “quotas” (one person could work on a construction site, the others—in the kolkhoz). Families that violated the apportionment were threatened with having their garden plots “cut off”—sometimes right up to the walls of the house. People refused to recognize that they had lost the right to the confiscated plot and planted it anyway. Then the kolkhoz chairmen would send someone to plow over the planted garden. The rank-and-file collective farmers would not agree to do this, so they sent the brigadiers, and if they refused, the chairman himself had to do it.

* * *

We found out that we were entitled to a tax reduction as a family of someone who had “died a hero’s death,” a family with no able-bodied members. The “servants of the people” believed that exercising one’s rights was the sole responsibility of the citizens themselves: they cared little about how much time and effort the citizens had to expend on it. And whether the citizens were even capable of exercising their rights. But, already a student at the incomplete secondary (seven-year) Stari Bezradychi school (I started first grade in ’45), I, on someone’s advice, began to walk to the district center (Obukhiv) to get part of our tax lifted. It should be noted that my impression from meeting the head of the Obukhiv district executive committee was positive: he clearly showed sympathy for a child with such adult concerns. This shows that even in that political system, which bred heartless, brutalized people capable of extreme cruelty toward their neighbors, compassionate people still managed to survive by some miracle. Our family’s tax was reduced, I believe, by 50%.

A pension was also paid to the non-able-bodied family members, the amount of which depended on the number of such members. As I recall, for the two of us (my sister Liuba and me), they paid, I think, 56 (that specific number is stuck in my memory). But I remember well that for three (after our mother was registered as disabled) this sum was 72. I want to note that the difference between the pension for a deceased officer’s family and that of a deceased soldier’s family was very significant. Mother sometimes complained about this: my uncle Musii and my aunt received an immeasurably higher pension for their deceased officer son (Petro).

Still, the pension did little to improve the financial situation of families with mothers and young children left behind. The plight of widowed mothers, especially those with small children, was extremely difficult. When I started school, it became a problem to buy me any clothes or shoes. Mother mostly bought black “rubchyk” (a corded cotton fabric) or black or blue calico and sewed pants or a jacket by hand. The Ukraine of my childhood is a Ukraine in mourning: in black corded fabrics and calicos, in rubber galoshes. And only on religious holidays and at weddings did people take their hidden embroidered shirts out of their chests: Ukraine was still returning to its spiritual sources—those that by some miracle broke through the violence and curses of the 20th century. Mother didn’t have the money to buy herself a *telogreika*, a quilted jacket that was a godsend then. For footwear, she sewed felt boots (valianky) from some old quilted things and bought galoshes. Galoshes were a lifesaver; hence the saying, “Thank you, Stalin the Georgian, for shoeing us in rubber.”

I remember an incident involving galoshes: in early spring, on my way home from school, I was crossing a mud patch that was truly hard to get around (I note this because I was not one of those boys who could resist wading into or climbing on something). I came out of the mud missing one galosh. I tried to find it in my already closing tracks, but to no avail. The whole way home, I prayed to God, I think not so much to avert my mother’s anger as for Him to ease her sorrow. It was very difficult for her to clothe and feed us. With gratitude, I want to remember my cousin Oleksandra (whom I mentioned in connection with the typhus outbreak) and her husband, an officer who, upon returning from Germany, brought back various, mostly worn clothes for his children. They gave us some of the little jackets (“frenches”) and shirts. Liuba, I remember, wore one of these frenches, a green one.

* * *

Grain Ears. Children at that time helped their parents by gathering leftover grain ears in the fields. They were forbidden from doing so; the ears were shaken out onto the ground. Since the communist state, from its very beginning, incorporated people with criminal inclinations into its structures, it effectively became a kind of cultivator of people with such a psyche. The sisters of my wife, Vira Hrytsenko (then the underage Natalia and Aniuta from Kaharlyk), in order to somehow survive in 1947, went to a haystack at night with other girls, five of them in total, and each took a sheaf. Each of them was sentenced to five years in prison, despite the terrible wailing and pleading of their mothers. What they endured during their years of imprisonment is worthy of a separate narrative (they now live in Kaharlyk, and Vira is always meaning to record their memories). To describe all the cases of such extreme cruelty, even just in the post-war years, would mean collecting not tens, but hundreds of volumes of testimonies. Since this policy towards the Ukrainian peasantry was directed from the center, and the technology for selecting people without pity or conscience was well-established, we are talking about a system. This type of person was well known to the peasants: was it not this kind of person who operated in the state-organized gangster groups, the most famous of which were the “Red Broom” detachments.

Стоїть дід,

біля нього внучок:

сльози кап-кап.

Хліб –

де сховав, так-перетак?

Чуєш по селах: дзень-дзень, дзень-дзень...

Ну що, наспівалися вкраїнських пісень?

На народ –

армади чорних пацюків:

потрусіть землячків –

в припічку, печі,

небі, землі, воді.

Гордість, сміх, спів –

хліб,

для нас,

для хортів.

The mentality of the “new class” (the class of bureaucrat-dictators) came down to a simple formula: let it be destroyed rather than let the peasants use it for their survival. This mentality is tenacious: its manifestations—and what manifestations!—can be observed today. It is about cruelty as an element of state policy. And this applies not only to the peasants. As for the peasants, there is one possible explanation: the Ukrainian peasantry had to be broken morally, as it preserved within itself the energy of national revival. Robert Conquest, speaking of the Holodomor of 1933, notes that this action was accompanied by “mass pogroms of Ukrainian culture, the intelligentsia, and the church” and that “the perceived stubbornness of Ukrainian peasants who did not hand over grain (which they did not have) was unequivocally regarded as ‘nationalism.’”

In reality, the peasants were “nationalists,” because the very existence of an independent peasant who possessed a sense of his own dignity was considered “nationalism” (in the negative sense of the word). After all, he was the bearer of Ukrainian cultural identity. The peasantry, as a result of a well-thought-out policy, was supposed to arrive in the cities completely demoralized, grateful for a warm apartment and food—having left behind, outside the city limits, its dignity, language, and Ukrainian identity in general. Lipinsky’s calculation that the farmer class would be the foundation of a modern Ukrainian nation was taken into account. But this is not just the past: under renewed ideologies (such as under the banner of “bilingualism”), forces that have mentally inherited an intolerance for Ukrainian culture are striving today to legally consolidate what was achieved through violence. So that, with the help of other, well-thought-out, cunning technologies, they might finally complete the “heroic” work of their predecessors.

In March of ’47, when snow still lay on the ground, a small group of children from Tarasivka went to the field to dig leftover sugar beets from under the snow (it was some kind of food, after all). There was still a light frost. One of the boys fell behind; adults found him later. He had suffered from frostbite (especially his feet) and was left a cripple for life. Ivan “Shliakhovyi” (because their house was by the road) I remember because, already in my student years, he told me that I had to find a way out of the injustice in which people were living. He was the only one of the villagers who expressed this openly and decisively: most just complained about life without any thought or belief that the situation could be changed. Submission and despair. This “enslavement” (a word used by Oksana Zabuzhko) is still a living tradition today. It is alive, in part, because it is being nurtured. There is no shortage of those interested in cultivating loyalty, submission, and fear. I mean those who see in this the most important guarantee of their hold on power. And the selection of people for positions of power continues, people who value collusion above all principles, in order to get their share of the “unhappy treat.”

* * *

2. Stories, Myths, Customs, and Religiosity

Ethnoculture. The post-war rural generation still grew up in an environment that preserved fragments of traditional culture—scraps of myths, customs, and elements of folk Christianity. These fragments fed the conservatism and ethical resistance of a part of the peasantry to the influence of the new ideology. This probably does not apply equally to all villages in Ukraine under Russian rule, but central and steppe Ukraine clung tightly to these fragments. Some of them were taken up and reinterpreted during the short-lived literary and artistic “renaissances” of the 1920s and 1960s.

The need to modernize Ukrainian culture—particularly its artistic and intellectual aspects—was such a monumental task (and it remains relevant today), and the socio-political conditions were so unfavorable, that it was unthinkable that the “inheritance-renewal” problem could be solved by the Sixtiers. This was especially true given the rather narrow space for freedom and the short time of the “thaw.” I say “solve,” fully aware that it has an “eternal” aspect: each generation must solve it anew. Of course, in the poetry of Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Vasyl Holoborodko, Vasyl Stus, and Ihor Kalynets, in the paintings of Panas Zalyvakha, Mariia Pryimachenko, Liza Myronova, and Halyna Sevruk, in the choral activities of Leopold Yashchenko, in “poetic” cinema, etc., one finds attempts to make elements of traditional culture workable in the new industrial world. How to make the elements of traditional culture vibrant, so that its voice could be heard, is an interesting topic for discussion. But it is resolved, first and foremost, through creativity.

In any case, if a young man or woman from the city, through a fortunate turn of events, manages to break through the apparent self-sufficiency of urban life to the “sparkling dreams,” they discover for themselves one of the important spiritual sources. I am convinced that these echoes are alive in the souls of many Russified Ukrainians. Modern technologies of denationalization are aimed at deadening these hidden sources, which are capable of breaking through the silt at any time. But in the post-war years, rural girls and boys who had a sensitivity to the spiritual subtexts of life were still able to feel the aesthetics of tradition: it was not just fairy tales, but myth, that peered at them “with gray eyes” through their windows.

* * *

Stories. First, however, I will mention the “stories.” On winter evenings in the last years of the war and the first post-war years, close neighbors would gather in one of the houses. And, one after another, they would weave a tapestry of narrative, which still preserved an attention to genealogies—to that special kind of preservation of information about life destinies that had previously played an important role in rural life. After the appearance of photography, photographic family trees appeared on the walls of houses. The turbulent events of the ’17–’20s, the division of land, lynchings, collectivization, dekulakization, the famine of 1933—all of this poured into my imagination and memory in images and voices. In the revolutionary years, my mother, then a young girl, set out on foot, along with her fellow villagers, to Crimea for salt. The steppe met them with an energy of movement: her story of the rebellious steppe, of the “steppe on horseback,” had such an effect on my childish imagination that for a long time afterward I could still hear the clatter of those horses. She summed up the experience of the revolutionary years roughly like this: “So we walked around with Shevchenko’s portrait and sang Ukrainian songs, and for that we were punished.” This was said as if referring to the punishment of some fate, some invisible cosmic force. And each time afterward, the sorrow of the defenseless people’s submission to this invisible force evoked a painful compassion in me. So these people (mostly women), in my imagination, sit even today in a row on a bench—with their hands folded on their knees, an icon in the corner, and behind them photographs of parents and sons scattered across the world and killed.

Розповіді,

переказані рядком сусідів,

що всілися на довгій лаві

в зимові вечори

поговорити про се, про те.

Вступають по черзі промовці,

в’яжуть у нескінчену повість –

колективізації, голодівки і знову

розмови про яви страшні —

домовиків, мерців тощо.

Замовклі ж сидять самітні

у цій всесвітній пороші.

Perhaps this humble submission—this disbelief in the possibility of influencing the circumstances of one’s life, the course of history—continues to operate in the psychic inertia of today. Having taken on a hidden, at times unrecognizable form, it has been passed down to the urban population, the majority of whom are separated from the village by only one or two generations.

My storytellers often included tales of strange phenomena in their narratives: apparitions of Christ or the Mother of God, warning signs, souls of the dead, nighttime adventures in cemeteries, the actions of house-spirits. The belief in the existence of otherworldly forces, fragments of pagan beliefs, withstood the onslaught of the new ideology and the new realities of life. Later, when I became imbued with a scientific worldview, I explained the persistence of belief in the *domovyk* (house-spirit) by the great power of auto-suggestion. When I had to spend the night alone in the house and it seemed to me that I heard sighing under the bed, or I imagined moans or whispers, I tried to practice self-observation: what was the state of my consciousness, what could have caused such sensations?

But of greater importance in the worldview, or rather, the world-feeling of my generation were impressions behind which stood the archetypes of ethnoculture and folk Christianity. My reflection on such impressions is a consequence of the fact that they resurfaced in my memory again and again, calling on me to grasp their hidden meaning. Indeed, the main mistake of realism (including in art) was that it focused its attention on external (visible) reality. Meanwhile, the phenomena of cultural life are illuminated from the depths by the spiritual experience embodied within them.

* * *

Religiosity. In the post-war years in the Kyiv region—and, I believe, in most of the Dnipro River region—people in the villages still stubbornly adhered to religious rituals. Most revered were Christmas, Easter (“Paska”), Epiphany (“Yordan”), Pentecost, and the Transfiguration (“Spas”). Almost all children in the villages in the post-war years underwent the rite of baptism (I, like all my brothers and sisters, knew my godfather and godmother). In the first post-war years, there was still a church in Stari Bezradychi: an oblong, single-story wooden building with a dome in the middle. During the war years, as is known, the regime decided to use religious and even, in part, national feelings for mobilization purposes. So, after the war, for some time, churches were functioning; then the old policy was renewed: churches began to be closed and destroyed. Probably at the end of the 1940s, the dome of the Bezradychi church was removed, and the church was converted into a club. And today, approximately on the same spot, stands a club built later. Recently, a new church (of the Moscow Patriarchate) was built and opened in a different location. A church has also been built and opened in Novi Bezradychi (also of the Moscow Patriarchate). At its opening, “my” peasants were addressed in Russian. The Russian Orthodox Church continues to be an instrument of Russification. Berdyaev saw in the nationalization of the Russian church one of the important sources of Russian messianism and imperialism. Undoubtedly, in the past, a certain portion of the priests of the Moscow church resisted the transformation of the church into an instrument of state policy. Most of them were repressed. I do not know to which church the tortured priest of the Novobezradivtsi church, whom my mother remembered with great respect, belonged.

Тебе проковтнула далека дорога,

ніхто повороту твого не чекав.

В яких же Сибірах, в останній знемозі,

ти, брате сердешний, на землю упав?

Які ти пройшов мученицькі дороги,

не знаю, та пам’ять про тебе жива,

й душа твоя нині під захистом Бога,

що чесне і вічне в собі обійма.

* * *

Still, I would like to take this opportunity to note one peculiarity of the peasants’ religious faith, which I observed in my fellow villagers, particularly in my mother. I think it was characteristic of all of central Ukraine. I am referring to a purely ritualistic, aesthetic attitude toward the church, and at the same time an alienated attitude toward priests. This alienation is well known from folklore and from the superstitions associated with “popes” (priests). I think that the main reason for this alienation, whatever anyone might say, is connected not only with the traditional conservatism of the Orthodox Church (which never managed, even in sermons, to use a language understandable to the peasants), but also with a deeper church history. With those pages of it that were supposedly completely forgotten. I mean the destruction of the Kyivan Patriarchate and the transformation of the Russian church into an instrument of the Russian state.

In general, the basis of this alienation was the divergence between that folk Christianity, in the spirit of which at least some folk religious songs were created, and the official church hierarchy, which never became the pastor of the people and could not command respect. How could one revere a church transformed into an obedient tool of Russian state policy, which it largely remains to this day? The renewal of Orthodoxy, and consequently of the church, which Russian intellectuals began to talk about at the beginning of the 20th century, remained only a project. Most of them, in the end, found themselves abroad (a collection of articles from the journal *Put’* was recently published in Kyiv through the efforts of Arjakovsky). This decline in the authority of the church is an important circumstance, without an understanding of which, I think, we cannot understand the spiritual history of Greater Ukraine.

Of the religious holidays, I liked Pentecost and Easter the most. Pentecost because we, the children, participated in decorating our house with greenery. For this, we would gather sweet flag in the swamp near the Stuhna River, with which we covered the clay floor in the house and the path to the house, and placed bunches of it on the windowsills. It was an interesting sight: children and adults from Novi and Stari Bezradychi, on the eve of Pentecost, would set out individually and in groups to the Stuhna to return with bundles of sweet flag. Its fragrance filled the house. From the forest, we brought maple branches, which we stuck into the gate. Easter was interesting for its special solemnity—the glow of dyed Easter eggs on the table in the gleam of the morning sun. The entire space was permeated with this gentle, solemn pinkish glow: it seemed that some higher power had remembered these people, forgotten by the world, and sent them signs of its compassion and mercy.

Theophany took place on the Stuhna, next to the place where the bridge over the Stuhna stands today. This bridge once stood a little to the east: even today, the remains of the old dam that led to that bridge have been preserved. This dam ran up to the Stuhna and formed a high cliff above it: in the days of my childhood, the wooden supports of the old bridge stuck out of the water below. About 30 meters east of those piles, an ice-hole would be cut, and next to it they would place a cross carved from ice, taller than a person. People stood on the right bank of the river (some on the river itself, others on the cliff) and watched the blessing of the water. On a clear morning, the sun illuminated the frozen river and the cross on it. A rosy glow diffused in the air and a pink cross—this was a different rosiness from the glow that permeated our universe at Easter. My childhood memory can be conveyed in the image of a cleansing and inspiring force: not arbitrary, but capable of being a source of order and harmony. It was as if we all acquired the ability to achieve reconciliation and unity in a joyful feeling of our renewed dignity.

On Theophany in Tarasivka, there was a parish feast day; in some years, relatives also gathered at our house. Later, poverty made this impossible. But I felt nothing aesthetic or religious in the parish feasts. Rather, the opposite; only unpleasant scenes of drunkenness remain in my memory. After the war, people began to drink a lot—by the glassful. Women said it hadn’t been like that before. I remember, in the center of Stari Bezradychi on the first Feast of the Dormition, many people would gather, some of them completely drunk, and get into fights. I think that the destruction of cultural tradition and the moral foundation of social life is the most important social factor that reinforces drunkenness and drug addiction. That which can drown out the memory of horrors experienced, the feeling of humiliated dignity and hopelessness. And this, to a large extent (to what extent is a separate question), applies to the current state of public morality. It was only in the 1990s, when Halia Lisova revived the tradition of the parish feast in Stari Bezradychi, that I felt a completely different atmosphere: it’s good for relatives to gather at least once a year, to see each other, to remember, to talk.

Around the church in Stari Bezradychi on Easter and on the Feast of the Transfiguration, people would line up to have their gifts blessed. The impression of the church’s interior remained in my memory as a dim glow of icons, a first touch to the mysterious existence of holy things. Such impressions became a support in my reflections on the importance for existence of values, their rootedness in the transcendent, in religious and cultural tradition. This does not mean devaluing reason in the justification of moral and spiritual values, but rather indicates the mutual complementarity of reason and faith. Unthinking faith is not true faith; such faith is a source of fanaticism. But reason that lacks respect for spiritual values, with their rootedness in the transcendent, becomes, if not fanatical, then pharisaical. This is a very dangerous kind of reason.

Our mother, putting us to bed, would repeat: “The Mother of God at our heads, angels at our sides, guardian angels...” She sang folk religious songs. I was particularly struck by a song about Herod and the newborn Christ. Only one phrase from this song remains in my memory (“For a long, long time throughout the world the angels will trumpet...”). But the general picture and mood remained. This mood only intensified our feeling of defenselessness: subconsciously, we felt like children still being sought by Herod’s messengers.

Коли новий світ лебедів

по жертві дітей невинних,

на землю квіт білий летів,

хилились і в’яли лелії.

Тебе не торкнула рука,

твоя не зів’яла лелія,

і нам у передніч Різдва

невинністю світ лебедіє.

Ми ж маримо: Ірод живе,

гінців по землі розсилає,

надворі сніг білий паде,

їх чорні сліди замітає.

I will speak more later about the fact that at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, it was primarily educated people who initiated the revival of elements of folk Christianity. It was, of course, a surprise to us that many professional religious works were also created in this vein. The “Homin” choir, under the direction of Leopold Yashchenko, a truly dedicated man, was probably the first of the choral collectives to include religious songs in its repertoire. I think that for everyone who values the spiritual component of culture (and, therefore, the spiritual subtexts of their own life), the discovery of Ukrainian liturgical creativity (Bortniansky, Berezovsky, Leontovych, and others) became one of the deepest spiritual experiences. But in its fuller scope, this pertains to the end of the 1970s and the 1980s (here one should first and foremost mention the choir under the direction of Viktor Ikonnyk, and today the “Kyiv” choir under the direction of Mykola Hovdych).

It is probably indisputable that religiosity can only be rooted in the soul of a people through a resonance or synthesis with cultural tradition. After all, Christian symbols and rituals are only able to find a response in the soul if they touch upon the deepest strata of the national ethnopsyche. This is despite the complexity of this problem in its entirety. To denote this resonance, I use the expression “folk Christianity.”

* * *

Customs. The second circle of impressions concerns folk customs. After the war, in our village—and, I think, throughout central Ukraine—they were, at least in fragments, still alive. Later, they were suppressed and modified, lost their aesthetic components, and became saturated with foreign elements, mostly with an orientation toward the material: a table as rich as possible—with comparisons and gossip about who had more of what on their table. A wedding today is a feast with continuous shouts of “bitter!” Of course, it is good that the church wedding has been revived, but many aesthetic elements have been thrown out and replaced with food, drink, and dancing to a tape recorder. It is well known that industrial civilization, while making life easier, at the same time greatly impoverishes the aesthetics of the living environment. Professional art—the art of concert halls and exhibition halls—cannot compensate for this loss. In general, the aesthetics of the living environment in which urban and rural people live—from the organization of daily life (I mean both the aesthetics of housing and the aesthetics of lifestyle) to the architecture of cities—is a topic that requires more attention and wider discussion.

I was particularly impressed by the tonal, imagistic structure and symbolism of the wedding ritual. It was a call to interesting insights into the aesthetic power of the archetypes that form the foundation of folk rituals. When later (in my student years), during visits to the village, I happened to meet a “bride” who honored me with her bow, I subconsciously perceived this bow as a sign of a ritual, restrained farewell. It was a sign of farewell to a world to whose aesthetic and moral insights most modern people have lost sensitivity.

From my interactions with this vanishing world, I consider my impression of the singing of the bridesmaids during their procession to the “groom’s” house to be particularly unique. The icon-like faces of the girls, strung together in a row—and, as a repetition of this string, their weaving of an endless ribbon of wedding songs. The children could run alongside this formation or file: and the ribbon, and the road, and the string of girls, and that carpet which they wove with their voices, with which they paved—or carpeted?—their path—all of this formed some single metaphor, the meaning of which I later tried in vain to grasp and express.

When the river of folk life becomes turbulent or even overflows its banks, then—if there was a deeper meaning in this turbulence, and not just the gurgling of emotions—this meaning becomes a source of poeticizations. When the flow of folk life becomes calm and even frozen, the elements of meaning, singled out from the chaos of experience, give rise to idealizations. These idealizations are capable of nurturing the national soul in times far from any heroism, in times of humiliation or despair.

When later, at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, I became interested in ethnology, the construction of structural models in a purely rational way seemed unattractive to me. Of course, they have their own value (which was mainly seen in their scientific nature, trying to follow the successes of structural linguistics). I, however, found Bakhtin’s approach (with his idea of “polyphony”) on the one hand, and Jung’s on the other, more appealing. I tried to de-psychologize Jung, adapting his concept of the archetype to purely cultural and ethnological needs. Later, after my return from exile, Mircea Eliade appeared in this line. In any case, I began to understand the archetype as a canvas that lives only by its content—it lives as long as we are able to feel or reveal its action in that content. This approach of mine does not claim to be original; I do not think it is fundamentally different from the ethno-symbolic approaches of some philosophers in the West, as well as some philosophers in Ukraine (Ihor Moiseiev, Serhiy Krymsky, and others).

In those hints of structures—in the “signs” that carry a hidden message from the past—that useful ambiguity is preserved which makes various interpretations possible. The structure is rather thrown into the stream of changes that always threatens to wash it away: it only signifies the coherence of the stream, but does not determine the direction of movement. Cultural identity, from this point of view, appears as a task, as a project that we are always called upon to realize. This seems true to me also with regard to the identity of the person, which each of us must find or recreate anew in the continuous flow of ever new impressions and experiences.

And yet the spiritual subtext of collective life—customs, morality, religion—is not easily destroyed. After all the horrors of the civil war, collectivization, dekulakization, especially after the famine of 1933 and the repressions of the 1930s and, finally, the Second World War—still, for some time in the post-war years, this spiritual subtext of collective life showed its vitality and ability to support people. From the stories about the famine of 1933, I did not hear about thefts to which people might have been pushed by the attempt to survive. Isolated cases of cannibalism are not an argument, because such actions should be the subject of psychiatric, not ethical, study. It is possible that all that was experienced could have acted as a time bomb, as a subversive force that was to act with a delay. But perhaps a greater role in that moral decline was played not by the horrors of what was experienced, but by an ideology aimed at its destruction: it corroded the spiritual subtext of life from within, secretly but consistently.

Despite the fact that in the post-war years most women became widows and that it was they (and also adolescents) who became the productive force in the kolkhoz—choral folk singing was still a living tradition. Women, returning from mowing hay in the back of a truck, would sing. The echoes of the song would fade, grow thinner, disappearing into the unknown. In the summer, you could still hear the evening singing of girls:

Вечір із перегуками-співами,

хвилями, що плинуть крізь душу,

граються у своєму плині,

повнячи передчуттями

неземного блаженства і смутку.

Східці у давно забуте,

пригадане, тільки що знайдене,

схоплене у своєму леті.

Солодкий щем од повір’я,

радість життєвих наповнень,

зухвальство ігор кохання.

* * *

The 20th century, especially the 1930s and the war, greatly undermined the structure of rural culture as a source of the spiritual element in the soul. Even relatively gradual modernization, if it categorically rejected tradition (the French variant of the 18th century), had very undesirable consequences—in comparison with the moderate variant of the Northern European countries. The communist variant of “modernization” (if it is at all permissible to use this word here) undermined not only traditional values, but spiritual values as such. Including reason—the greatest value of the modern era. This was the destruction of culture itself, the spiritual foundation of life. However, intolerance toward the cultural identity of the peoples who were part of the Russian Empire is a much deeper tradition of the Russian mentality and Russian policy. It was clearly and plainly recorded by Kostomarov in his “Two Rus’ Nationalities.” I think that among all the condemnations of this tradition, Stus’s is the most devastating:

Державо тьми і тьми, і тьми, і тьми!

Ти крутишся у гадину, відколи

тобою неспокутний трусить гріх

і докори сумління дух потворять.

Of course, culture cannot exist without the transmission (tradition) of what has been created by generations of people. As Burke said, we are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of countless generations that lived before us, and only because of this are we able to see further. The generations have passed on to us their cultural achievements, thanks to which we can create what we create. The conceited superiority of modern man in relation to tradition, this “ape of civilization” (in Heidegger’s words), prevents us from thinking about how to take up and preserve what is worth preserving. And as a result, people become victims of the worst in tradition, not of that which is worthy of support. I, of course, do not mean here the preservation of antiques in museums. On the other hand, one can only be amazed at how the human soul was able to survive at all, having passed through the horrors of the first half of the 20th century.

* * *

Unfortunately, today the destruction of spiritual values as the most important component of mass culture is not just history. The revival of the spiritual subtext of collective life is obviously possible only through a wise combination of tradition and renewal. Only in this way can Ukrainian cultural identity be affirmed, so that the Ukrainian people become a modern nation. The other alternative is the loss of cultural identity, and therefore, the disappearance of the Ukrainian nation. The question—to be or not to be a Ukrainian nation—retains its acuity. Only the means of implementing the old strategy, designed to ensure its non-existence, have changed. Ideologies and technologies are being updated, but the goal has remained unchanged. The forces interested in implementing this strategy are powerful. Today, taking advantage of a situation characterized by a high level of social injustice and corruption, which they themselves created, these forces have begun a process of rehabilitating (or restoring?) elements of the former communist empire.

The awareness of the current situation is sufficiently widespread among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and many well-known, and even more unknown, enthusiasts are making efforts to counteract these forces. However, without a radical change in the current oligarchic, corrupt political system, cultural revival, like the establishment of true democracy, does not have good preconditions. The authority of the state and the authority of important social values are interconnected things. And, as always, in conditions of a spiritual and social crisis, the decisive responsibility lies with the Ukrainian intelligentsia. After all, it is primarily the defender of spiritual values and the enlightener of the people. This is a somewhat old-fashioned view; this is not the place to consider various theories about the role of intellectuals in modern society, especially if it is characterized as “informational,” not to mention “postmodern.” But no matter what complicated theories about the place of intellectuals in modern society (even a “postmodern” one) we discuss, the cultural elite will always have the duty to be the defender of fundamental values. This does not mean neglecting the complexity of the existence of values in a historical-cultural context. That would mean spreading superficial rhetoric that cannot successfully resist modern forms of nihilism. With its accompaniment—the destruction of that logos, communion with which is meant to ensure the balance of renewal (spontaneity) and the preservation of necessary structural elements. Ideals are unattainable, but they signify important guideposts.

We live in a transitional historical period when the minimum necessary prerequisites for such a structure must be created. But in doing so, of course, it should be borne in mind that institutions must not only be reasonably designed, but also filled with appropriate people (a free rendering of Karl Popper’s thesis). Structural reorganizations (like the current latest political reform) will yield nothing if the power structures are filled with the same people. Structural prerequisites are necessary, but the ability of a structure to resist a use of it that deforms the very idea of constitutional reform is limited if the human element is neglected. These are elementary things. To fulfill its task in this situation, a large part of the modern Ukrainian intelligentsia lacks position and will. We have inherited obedience and loyalty. Unfortunately, our society still needs sacrifice and heroism. To what extent is a separate question. With the number of intelligentsia we have (in particular, the educational intelligentsia), the question of choosing a future depends to a large extent on us. If each of us does not allow the current oligarchic system to turn us into corrupt, dependent people.

Chapter III. School (1945–1956)

1. The Bezradychi School

I started the first grade of the Stari Bezradychi seven-year school in September of ’45, when I turned 8 years old. It was possible to start a year earlier, but walking from the Tarasivka khutir (hamlet) to the center of Stari Bezradychi was still a long way (about three kilometers). Besides, there were no clothes or shoes to speak of. The teachers were also poor: in the first grade, our teacher, an elderly woman, asked us to bring a beet or a cabbage, for which she would give us a grade. I don’t remember if we initially wrote on newspaper, but I do remember how the teacher handed out sheets of paper with “slanted lines” for calligraphy. All sorts of bottles left over from the war served as inkwells. They tipped over easily; spill-proof inkwells were at first only available to a few students. And you had to watch that our pen nibs—“spoons” and “frogs” (which made a wider line when pressed)—didn’t pick up too much ink, because then—a “blot.”

Then primers (“Bukvari”) appeared (quite an event!), and our bags, sewn by our mothers from homespun (hemp) linen, became heavier. The remnants of this linen were still in use; some families had preserved their weaving looms. Our neighbors (the Rozhovets family) had one; they would lay out long linen runners on the grass by the road. They also had a device for twisting rope from hemp tow (two vertically placed boards with holes, into which metal handles were inserted—one had three or four for the strands, which were twisted into a rope on the other board, which had one handle). I sometimes helped my neighbor with this work. These domestic circumstances (carrying notebooks and books in a linen or leather portfolio) are not, of course, important. But the things themselves are interesting as part of our lifeworld.

In the first four years of my schooling, I showed no interest in learning. I lived in fantasies; my state, I think, was also influenced by the grief that had taken up residence in our house. It was not an exception: in every other house, and sometimes in every house, a father or son had not returned from the war. However, when I later compared our childhood with the life of children in Galicia, whose parents had suffered torture, extermination, imprisonment, and exile, our situation was incomparably better. If only this comparison does not immediately bring to mind the image of the deportations of the dekulakized: too little time separates similar events in the East and West. The echo of events in Western Ukraine “rolled” as far as Tarasivka. I remember being present at an unusual funeral: they were burying one of those who had been sent to fight the UPA. Still, children managed to create their own independent world: children’s games of “opuky” (a ball game), “hylky,” or “horobets” (sparrow) on the village green, group swimming in the Stuhna. But adult cares, anxieties, and despairs threatened to destroy the transparent partition that ensured the relative independence of this children’s world.

* * *

Revolutionary Spirit. In connection with our hungry existence, I will recall one case of childhood “revolutionary spirit.” When I was, perhaps, in the second or third grade, we children (I, my sister Liuba, a neighbor girl, and my classmate from Tarasivka, Nyzhnyk Ivan, with whom I was friends) decided to put up leaflets. On a sheet of paper, we wrote in large letters, “Arise, you wretched and hungry,” and, bypassing the house of our neighbor Yivha, we attached the leaflet near the next house (of old man Taran and old woman Taran). This action of ours in the situation at that time could have had unpleasant consequences. It depended on who would see the leaflet. And our forester, whose surname was Sokil (Falcon), saw it (no one expressed any suspicion that one of the villagers had given him the leaflet). He conducted a corresponding investigation. In our house, they started talking about the leaflet; the neighbors also talked about it. We, the children, kept silent. The adults managed to convince the forester that children had written the leaflet and that it should not be taken seriously. He had enough sense not to give the event wider publicity. This time, everything turned out all right.

One more “game” of clandestine activity. Three students (school friends from Tarasivka, including myself) created our own Pioneer organization with the acronym “PO.” The organization’s headquarters was a hut we built on the left bank of the Stuhna. The “meetings” of our organization took place (secretly) on the way to school. Sometimes we would spend the entire time we were supposed to be sitting at our desks in the hut. We would return home on time. My sister recently reminded me that we had scratched the letters “PO” on our buttons. Our secret became known at school; some students mockingly asked what “PO” was.

These childhood actions testify that in the post-war villages of the Dnipro region—and, I think, throughout eastern and central Ukraine—the preceding generation did not pass on to the generation that was coming of age after the war any “legend” that would be suitable for self-defense and protest. Undoubtedly, there were individual participants of the previous struggle among the peasants, but they could not pass on a meaningful word to the youth. On the “crimson steed of revolution” (in the words of Bohdan Kravtsiv), everything that showed signs of disobedience was trampled. For our protest, we took slogans heard at school.

Children from poorer families (in particular, those who had lost a father in the war) began to be given soup at school at someone’s initiative. I don’t know if this was a local initiative (say, the kolkhoz chairman’s) or that of some higher authority (district, regional?) and how widespread this practice was. From Vira’s memoirs, in Kaharlyk in ’47, children in schools were given buns by order of the district party committee. I think that the kolkhoz chairman at that time would hardly have dared to show such initiative without permission from the district party committee. There was a fear of punishment for showing kindness to those who were “hiding” a “surplus.” The word is taken from a popular saying among the peasants: “Lenin said to take the surplus—Stalin misheard and took every last crumb”; Lenin was little known because he ruled for a short time, but they probably remembered the NEP.

* * *

The City. I pestered my mother to take me to “Kyiv” (in the surrounding villages they didn’t say “to Kyieva,” the standard form, but “to Kyiva”). Finally, she agreed. This probably happened when I was in the first or second grade. And so I am sitting on the bed of a “polutorka” (a one-and-a-half-ton truck), which, swaying on the “potholes,” is making its way along the “upper” Kyiv road. On the way, the women began to say that everyone who comes to Kyiv for the first time is kissed by a “baba” (old woman) on Bahrynova Hill. I asked which “baba,” but the women just smiled enigmatically. Finally, the truck crawled up Bahrynova Hill, and I smelled the stench and saw plumes of smoke rising above the garbage dump. “So that’s the ‘baba’s’ kiss,” the women said. I only began to think about the fact that the city produces an ever-increasing amount of garbage, along with others, decades later. In my childhood and youth, however, the positive profile of the city became dominant for me.

The multi-story buildings were an interesting sight for someone who had only seen village houses. So I craned my neck, looking at the buildings and streets. Meanwhile, our “polutorka” was driving from Demiivka to the Volodymyrskyi market. On this road, large, perfect spheres lying freely beside a bridge caught my attention. I remember a later trip to Kyiv, without my mother’s escort: at the Volodymyrskyi market, I sold “hnylychky” (wild pears with rotten cores), measuring them out with a “mug”; people bought them.

At some point, the image of the City began to be associated in my imagination with a window above a frieze, with evening light through curtains and the sounds of a piano. Perhaps even with the figure of a girl in the window. But the main thing was the sound of the piano: a sign of “high” culture. The spheres, on the other hand, which were firmly preserved in my memory, were the simplest example of technology’s ability to embody ideal rational constructions. They were materialized rationality, geometry, its first example. Architecture, in this case, can be understood as a combination of music and geometry: the poetry of plastic form, held together by a skeleton of mathematical calculations.

Mass schooling (primary, secondary, higher) is the fundamental institution of professional (“high”) culture, as opposed to customary, rural culture. The growth of cities as the most important center of professional culture became a defining feature of industrial society. The understanding of the city not only as a center of science and professional art, but as the concentration of the very spirit of industrial society, has been presented by many names. A comparison of the village and the city from the point of view of social and cultural anthropology reveals a difference both in the cultures themselves and in the attitude toward them. Ernest Gellner, comparing cultures in agrarian and industrial societies, called the first “wild” and the second “cultivated,” like a garden. Professional culture requires a whole system of institutions and practices without which it cannot exist. It is a pampered, demanding creation. Due to the fact that culture in industrial society acquires political weight (as Gellner emphasizes), the state becomes interested in it. But at the same time, the attitude toward culture also changes in the mass consciousness. In the collective consciousness of agricultural societies, culture is perceived almost as part of the natural environment. The education and upbringing of the vast majority of people here take place in the process of everyday life and work, not with “a break from production.” Meanwhile, in industrial society, mass schooling (as opposed to elite educational institutions in agricultural societies) becomes the basis of their existence. Including the basis for the creation and duration of modern nations. An important feature of modern culture is also its orientation toward novelty, toward invention, its progressiveness. For the youth who sought to reach the heights of science, literature, and art, Kyiv symbolized the possibilities for realizing this dream.

So that image of Kyiv, which, even if on an intuitive level, formed in my school and even student years, clearly does not reach the heights expressed by the words:

І ось він – Київ!

Возсіяв хрестами.

Пригаслий зір красою полонив.

Тут Сам Господь безсмертними перстами

Оці священі гори осінив.

But even in Lina Kostenko’s work, this image turned out to be an unfulfilled expectation. If one sees Kyiv’s spiritual mission in its ability to be the heart of the nation’s spiritual unity, then later reflections on this unity (from the Sixtiers to our time) have revealed the multifaceted nature of this problem. In achieving the civic consolidation of Western nations, the role of religion and the church was far less compared to the role of professional culture, the state, law, and the economy. The belief of religions and churches in their own single truth (and, accordingly, the falsity of all other faiths and churches) was one of the sources of religious intolerance. In the formation of Western nations, the idea of tolerance and religious freedom, formulated and popularized by intellectuals, played a decisive role. Politicians could not have succeeded in establishing a new type of collective identity—belonging to a nation—without the crucial role of intellectuals and teachers. Philologists created a standardized (“national”) language, and the teacher pushed the role of the priest to the periphery of social life. Only where religion and the church managed to combine an emphasis on the transcendent source and universality of moral values with an appreciation for national-cultural identity did they retain their social and cultural importance. The most spatially proximate example may be the social role of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia or the Catholic Church in Poland. But in any case, the recognition of a universal ethics (“macro-ethics”), capable of justifying the right to existence of different cultures, religions, nations, and civilizations, must prompt any religion to renounce the conviction that it alone points the one true path to righteousness, spirituality, and salvation.

Kyiv today is far from being an example of wisdom in combining the universal and the unique. The most important cathedral—the Cathedral of St. Sophia—at best symbolizes a call to attain this wisdom. If we acknowledge (and there are obvious reasons for this) that the Kyiv-Lviv axis forms the backbone of at least the political self-determination of modern “multi-vector” Ukraine, then one cannot speak of the cultural self-determination of modern Kyiv. It has no style, no tradition, and remains Russified, faceless. I mean the culture of its streets, not the culture of that minority whose influence on “mass culture” remains almost unnoticeable. The linguistic inertia of its inhabitants is just one of the manifestations of that chimeric post-Soviet mentality, which is revealed in many other features: in architecture (the most striking example may be the infamous new buildings on Maidan Nezalezhnosti), in the littering of streets and parks, in the manner of communication of its inhabitants, etc. So modern Kyiv cannot serve as a model of how tradition and renewal, the universal and the unique, should be combined.

One can still hope that, over time, sources will break through from the subsoil, where the ancient and wise soul of this City remains alive. One can believe in the energy of the hills, overshadowed by immortal fingers: “And the insatiable one will not plow a field at the bottom of the sea.” Hope indeed catches the slightest signs of “awakenings” (if one uses the romantic allegory of the formation of national consciousness as the awakening of a sleeping beauty). But in many cases, the plow has uprooted the life of peoples to the very roots. And the plows in modern times reach much deeper.

* * *

Teachers. My attitude toward school studies changed gradually. The person who probably did the most for that was my first teacher, for whom I felt a hidden affection. This was Kateryna Stepanivna Bozhko (my mother said she was our relative). It was she who noticed some abilities in me and unobtrusively encouraged me. A meeting in 2001 with her niece, a Ukrainian radio announcer, also named Kateryna Bozhko, was completely unexpected for me: she seemed to me similar to her aunt in both appearance and character. What I admire most is her sense of the spiritual content of cultural tradition, which she embodies in her radio programs. Kateryna Stepanivna’s pedagogical efforts were continued by Nataliia Ivanivna Dobrovilska, a teacher of Russian language (her spoken language was, of course, Ukrainian). She also had to make an effort to guide me toward an appreciation of learning and knowledge.

The German teacher, Serhii Viktorovych, was a “demobilized” officer, shell-shocked during the war; it’s likely that a piece of shrapnel had cut across his face. The shell-shock was probably the cause of his nervousness. But besides that, it was not easy for him with blockheads, among whom I was one, who could in no way remember that “crow” in German is *Rabe*. He would call such students to the blackboard and, with an angry shout (often accompanied by a bang of his pointer on the desk), try to guide us onto the path of knowledge. I think I wasn’t the only one who froze in fear—not only *Rabe* flew out of my head, but also that small flock of words that, in a calm state, I could probably still have recalled. I remember him with sympathy for these efforts of his. Later, at the end of the eighties, during my two years of teaching, I myself had to engage in the search for pedagogical “technologies” to guide boys and girls onto the path of knowledge.

Worthy of mention and memory is Ivan Ivanovych Nesvitskyi, a mathematics teacher—an intelligent man, illuminated by that light of spiritual kindness and goodwill toward children that immediately evoked a response of sympathy. I remember from occasional interactions the history teacher, Sak Panko Serhiiovych, who was initially the director of the Bezradychi school. Under the conditions of that time, not every teacher dared to talk with a student on social topics outside of class. One day I asked him what “chauvinism” was (I don’t remember where I read this word). The only answer to my question was his smile. The older generation had an “experience” that we did not know. Later, in my student years, I would visit my former teacher’s house, because I was on friendly terms with his son Volodymyr (who lived and died in Kyiv). Volodymyr was a capable young man, he graduated from the Obukhiv secondary school, then the Ukrainian department of the philological faculty of Kyiv University. He was passionate about poetry, and tried to write poems himself. He was a good person and an opponent of Russification. But, it seems to me, he lacked the will to realize even a part of his plans.

I have not had the chance to read any medical studies about what the physical and psychological consequences of a famine on the scale of 1933 should be. Do such studies even exist? But the impression of the physical and psychological weakness of the children of the post-war generation could not but prompt reflection on the consequences of this tragedy. My impressions inclined me to the intuitive assumption that what was important was not so much the external physical defects (they were obvious) as the weakening of inner life energy and will. The famine of ’33 greatly undermined faith in one’s own strength and the sense of self-worth, and contributed to the spread of the mindset that “nothing depends on us”: one must adapt in order to survive. It seems to me that a fairly common manifestation of “subjugation,” as a consequence of the Holodomor, became sentimentality and unprincipled kindness. All of this can be characterized as a “brokenness,” a weakening of character and will. And although the strength of life, its ability to reproduce, cannot be underestimated, one probably cannot ignore the consequences of genocide for a generation born to parents who survived.

* * *

Illumination. Memory. One of the topics of pedagogical psychology later became a subject of my interest: how to part the curtain for a child so that the glow of the “upper world,” the world of higher values and idealizations, flashes before them. This can be called “illumination” (*illuminatio* in Augustine). For that is how the axis of the soul appears, thanks to which the ideal is reflected in the treasures that the soul stores in its depths—on the border of the conscious and the subconscious. The nourishing sources of our soul (memories dear and often life-saving for us, which we involuntarily collect on our life paths) are lost in the darkness of oblivion if the light of the “upper world” is extinguished.

I am not referring here to any exceptional states of enlightenment, the descriptions of which we find in the lives of saints. It is about states that every person experiences or is capable of experiencing. Illumination is an ascent to a summit from which the experienced is seen in a different light. The life of our soul is a resonance between states of enlightenment and those impressions from the past that memory preserves. It is said that poetry is born from a longing for that which once flashed before our eyes and which is preserved on the edge of memory: “to be in the light, where memory smolders, in the ancestral land of candles, in the homeland of candle stubs” (Ihor Kalynets). In fact, the poet’s appeal to memory is not a simple reproduction of something from the past: it is merely the catching of a hint in the movement of poetic comprehension. But not only the imagination, but also rational thought requires, for the “discovery” of new ideas, a stock of previous attempts and intuitive insights.

The ray of our memory illuminates in the past primarily those impressions that contain a hint. What they hint at remains unclear if the movement of our imagination or thought does not clarify it—all the way to its embodiment in a metaphor or a rational idea. In our soul, they seem to “grow” or “ripen” to the point of being expressed. The commonality of the image and the idea is indicated not only by etymology (the words “image” and “idea” are cognate in ancient Greek). The importance of a certain impression in memory lies in the fact that it contains the potential for meaning. This possibility of becoming a source of original interpretations is contained in our experience in a semi-hidden form: only the later inclusion of a certain impression (not every one, of course) in the movement of imagination and thought allows retrospection to reveal this hidden meaning. Without our movement in a certain semantic perspective, the impressions remain just hints of who knows what. It is true that memory more easily grasps these hints of meaning with the help of a metaphor. But only when, as a result of the subsequent movement of our imagination and thought, their meaning becomes clearer, illuminated. It is like the Platonic recollection of ideas-images. In fact, we do not discover images-ideas as something ready-made in our soul. Their shadowed nature, their vagueness, indicates that our soul is not yet mature enough for their “vision”—that state when they acquire the desired definition without losing the charm of their ambiguity.

* * *

Uncle Musii. One of the examples of a slightly ajar shutter, through which a “strange” world (I can’t find a better word) flashed into my imagination, was the treasures discovered in the house of Uncle Musii. An almost classic story of a grandfather’s suitcase found in the attic. Uncle Musii was a taciturn man; he did not like to talk about himself. And this story would have been interesting. He was a Knight of the Order of St. George, and at the same time, as I can judge from various signs, in particular from the books he kept, he had been influenced by the Ukrainian national revival of the first quarter of the 20th century. After the war, he lived only with his wife, Aunt Varka. Both of them valued religious rites and folk customs. Uncle never forgot to remind me to “sow” for him at dawn on the “old” New Year, and I did it every year. Among my uncles, he was an intellectual. He managed to provide an education for his children: Petro received a legal education (he died during the war), Vasyl became a pilot, and Ania received a pedagogical education and played the accordion. I became friends with the son of his daughter Yevdokiia (Dusia, as she was called), Volodymyr Kabysh. He was brought (later he came on his own) from Kyiv for the summer holidays to his grandfather’s in Tarasivka. I, almost his age (he was a year younger), and in fact his cousin-uncle, was inseparable from him in the summer. Later, Volodymyr graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Kyiv University; he died young, while I was in prison. I occasionally communicate with his wife, Liudmyla Kabysh, who lives in Kyiv. The son of Liudmyla and Volodymyr, Serhii Kabysh, still keeps his great-grandfather’s Cross of St. George, his Bible, and other books.

Uncle Musii had a well-ordered homestead: a house with a tin roof and a veranda, a gazebo in the garden—a round wooden structure with a mushroom-shaped roof, about five meters in diameter, with a bench around the perimeter. When you entered the house from the porch, through the anteroom that also served as a kitchen, directly opposite were the doors leading to the veranda. There stood a sofa, and shoots of wild grapes peeked through the large windows. From the anteroom-kitchen, doors to the left and right led to separate rooms. The door of the southern room was sometimes half-open. My discovery was illustrations to the Bible: postcards inserted into a glazed frame, perhaps about a meter high and about half a meter wide. The frame was located on the western wall of the room. From the southeast side, the rays of the morning sun could fall on it at an angle.

What I remember most is the postcard of the Dead Sea. When I later tried to express the meaning of my impression of the postcards in metaphorical language, all my attempts proved futile. Much later, I understood that the reason for my failure was not difficulties with expression, but my attitude toward the impression as purely aesthetic. Meanwhile, the postcards were only a reflection of the narrative that stood behind them. Not they themselves, but the extraordinariness of the events they reported, was the source of their “strangeness.” Decades later, after my return from prison, I met these postcards again. Removed from the frame and transported to Kyiv, after the death of my uncle and aunt. I looked them over; I felt sorry for them in their aesthetic helplessness. But in my memory, they signify a window into an unusual world.

The second discovery in the house of my gardener-uncle was books. Of my uncle’s books, I first encountered two—a book without covers, which, as I later determined, was one of the issues of the journal *Osnova* (Foundation). I would read poems from it. The second book was a *Kobzar*, a 1939 edition (I remember Izhakevych’s illustrations on the dust jackets: “Even women with pokers went to join the Haidamaky”). The *Kobzar* could only be read at my uncle’s table: he did not allow children to take the book out of the house. Later, when I was, maybe, in the 6th or 7th grade, my uncle would sometimes let me take the *Kobzar* home. Many volumes of *Vestnik Evropy* (The Herald of Europe) were kept on the veranda.

I associate with the image of Uncle Musii, more than anything else, the suspicion that under the influence of the defeat of the national liberation struggle of the 1917-20s and the repressions he had experienced, he refused to instill dangerous beliefs—religious and national—in his children. Hiding his own beliefs from them, he oriented his children toward adapting to the new reality, toward utilitarian pragmatism. Serhii Kabysh told me that in the 1930s, his son Petro, who had already come under the influence of communist ideology, demanded that his father destroy the Bible. The father was forced to assure him that he had done so, but in fact, he hid it in the attic.

* * *

*Kobzar*. The immediate consequence of reading the *Kobzar* was that I began to compose poems “in the style of Shevchenko.” But beyond that, reading the *Kobzar*—and I also read it aloud for my mother and sister—meant for us what it meant for many: the parting of a curtain. A curtain that separated each of us from that cultural and moral world which turned out to be the world of our own soul. The image of a Ukraine seemingly well-known, native, yet just discovered. Poetry as a path to self-knowledge and self-determination: “Great poets do not simply describe already known experiences; through their description, they make many people capable of perceiving their own inner world” (Vittorio Hösle).

At the time of my early acquaintance with the *Kobzar*, the romantic and, perhaps, socially acute works were more accessible to me, as they were to many other untrained readers. My mother, like most village women, could not listen to “Kateryna,” “The Poplar,” or “The Hired Girl” without tears. After all, only the external circumstances had changed, not the fate of the Ukrainian woman. And the fact that the *Kobzar* instilled sympathy for the oppressed, a protest against injustice, probably sowed the first seeds of my “populism.” The understanding of Shevchenko as the creator of the national ideal, the spokesman for national self-awareness, was not realized by me with the clarity that one might have expected (from the perspective of a later “rereading” of his works).

As for the more complex images, in particular, the religious-philosophical motifs, the road to their understanding turned out to be even longer. In fact, it is endless—given the inexhaustible ambiguity of the work of every great poet at its peak. But if we set aside this endless perspective, then with the help of appropriate interpretation of the works (not only Shevchenko’s), a key to their understanding was selected. Today, new interpretations of Shevchenko’s work are constantly appearing. They explore the space of possible interpretations, the semantic horizons of his work and life. I mean truly possible interpretations within the semantic space of his work and life. Including the orientation of these meanings toward the future, their perspectiveness. Such an approach excludes unfounded, far-fetched interpretations. But at the same time, it leaves the possibility for an individual reading of the “texts,” including the “text” of the poet’s life. Exploring the semantic possibilities of the texts is more important than the reader’s agreement or disagreement with the interpretations offered by, say, Hrabovych or Zabuzhko.

Creative interpretations are valuable precisely because they catch on to meanings that are capable of “working” in our social and spiritual situation. On the other hand, revealing the semantic potential of texts allows us to catch on to meanings aimed at the future. This allows us to avoid that type of impoverishment of interpretations whose source is the tying of works to the time of their writing. But since a quality interpretation is the result of co-creation, of co-thinking, its prerequisite is the requirement that the interpreter’s own horizon of thought not be narrower than that which he is interpreting. I will note that I do not reduce the term “comprehension” to rational thought, but also include in it intuitive insights that can only be expressed in metaphorical language. In the ideal scenario, one can even speak of a resonance of souls that overcomes the distance of time.

* * *

At Uncle Anton’s, the living space consisted of two rooms—a kitchen, where there was a stove, a heating stove, and a range, and a second room, which was obviously meant to serve as a drawing room. In this room, where for some time there had been an oil press, hung a large portrait of Shevchenko. The same one, in the sheepskin hat. However, a large oil painting made a greater impression on my imagination: Cossacks in a boat on a sea with high-crested waves. One Cossack, dressed, as it now seems to me, in a red svyta (outer garment), stood at the bow of the boat. This painting, perhaps under the influence of some later impressions, I named “Hamaliia.” Maybe someone actually did call it that.

* * *

Experience. The individual characteristics of memory are characterized, in particular, by what is better preserved—a word, a thought, visual impressions, or feelings and moods. But most of our visual or auditory impressions enter our memory tinged by our mood, the state of our soul. The imagination does not simply reproduce a picture of yellow dandelions in the sparkle of morning dew, but the experience that accompanied this impression. The word “experience” was introduced into the philosophical lexicon by German intellectuals (German: *Erlebnis*). It is rooted in romantic philosophy, then taken up in hermeneutics (Schleiermacher and Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer). Finally, the importance of experience in memory and the writing of autobiography has been emphasized. Initiated to counter, on the one hand, Enlightenment rationalism, and on the other, positivist empiricism, it is indeed the most important concept that allows one to understand memory not as a detached interpretation of past impressions, but as their re-experiencing. Unlike understanding as sympathetic “entering into” (empathy), experience is a special kind of reproduction. It is participation, an entry into one’s own or another’s life with the whole of one’s soul, and not just with reason or imagination. It is an attempt to enter for a second time the stream of our inner experience—into the unrepeatable:

Зірку ту, що гойдалася в темній воді

Під кривою вербою в глухому саду,

Вогник той, що до ранку в ставку мерехтів,

Я тепер і на небі уже не знайду.

У село, де пройшли мої юні роки,

В стару хату, де перші пісні я складав,

Де я мрії свої і надії плекав,

Я ніколи, ніколи уже не вернусь.

(Bunin, in my translation).

The image of that past, which each of us would like to return to, is preserved by memory. Although the real past cannot be returned, by recreating its image, tinged with the sorrow of loss, we are able to re-live it (with all the ambiguity that the prefix *pere-* gives to the word “to live”). In memory, it is important not only to avoid a dismissive attitude toward initial intuitions (the centrism of the “more mature” person), but also to try to see spiritual life in motion. Illuminations signify some important “turns” that not only mark a new perspective, but also allow one to find a resonance with past impressions and experiences. Protecting us from their devaluation when they are considered only as stepping stones to maturity.

* * *

What we call moral education presupposes the presence of an emotional-moral memory and a “moral imagination” (E. Burke’s phrase). Moral imagination is the ability to reproduce a moral situation on the level of experience: one’s own or another person’s. One of the moral experiences of my early school years. Once at school—I think for the sake of self-affirmation—I told my fellow classmates a made-up story that I had some pocket knives that I could give them. I think this happened in the first or second grade. And when two schoolchildren, my friends from Tarasivka, came to our house for me to give them those knives, I found myself in a very delicate situation. My brother Petro showed his pedagogical talent in this situation: he found words capable of evoking a deep sense of shame. This lesson served as a warning to me in those cases when my fantasy tried to break down the partition between the real and the imaginary. Or when I was tempted to boast about something for self-affirmation.

One of these two schoolchildren was Mykola Voznyi (Tymoshovych). Later, he graduated with honors from the Obukhiv secondary school, then the philological faculty of Kyiv University, mastered Czech and German, and worked for many years at the Kyiv Intourist (as a translator from Czech and German). He was cautious in his statements. Once, when I was in my final year at the university, we were waiting together for a truck on the Kyiv road (to get to Obukhiv, and from there by bus to Kyiv). I wanted to find out from the tight-lipped Mykola how he felt about the Soviet political system, so I started talking about the lack of democracy in the USSR. I was satisfied that he took my statement as something obvious.

The second Mykola Voznyi (Oleksiiovych), whose house, like that of Mykola Tymoshovych, was in “our corner” of Tarasivka, I remember for showing me an interesting “trick” with a sheet of paper in our early school years. The sheet of paper had the inscriptions “СССР” (USSR) and “США” (USA) in certain places. By folding it, the inscription “СССР” ended up in a coffin. From this, Mykola drew a conclusion: “The USA will defeat the USSR.” He did this, of course, at home, not at school, counting on the fact that I wouldn’t tell anyone about it at school. And I really didn’t tell anyone about his trick.

* * *

Fear. Everyone learns to overcome fear—a feeling useful in the biological and psychological structure of living beings and humans. He whose childhood passes in circumstances of war is inevitably doomed to experience not just fear, but terror. In 1947, cases of robbery became more frequent. In winter, we saw suspicious tracks in the snow near our house. One night, we heard our neighbor’s dog barking. And the three of us—my mother, my sister, and I, then ten years old—began to peer out the window. For a moment, the partition that separates the real from the imaginary was broken, and I “saw” those robbers dragging some kind of sleigh behind them in the snow. I felt that moment when I allowed fear to possess me: I turned away, realizing that I needed to come to my senses.

Later, I divided fear into two types: fear of something unknown, which resembles groundless anxiety (I called such fear “metaphysical”), and fear of real dangers. The first type of fear contains “mystical” elements. I will say a few words about the “lessons” in overcoming the second type of fear. When grazing a herd from the age of six or seven with someone (usually an adult), I was forced at the end of the day, in the already darkened forest, to look for a cow that had strayed from the herd. Such a cow, having wandered into someone’s garden, could overeat and even die. And there were those that would try to secretly lag behind and get into the gardens. When a bush in the twilight looked to me like a wolf or some kind of monster, I taught myself not to run, but to walk toward it—to convince myself that it was indeed a bush. If you run, the thing you’re running from will chase you.

Another example of such “training” was our neighbor Yivha’s cow. She had such a temper that she would chase anyone who ran. But she would approach slowly, but menacingly, whoever did not retreat. And if you had a switch in your hand and stubbornly whipped her on the snout, she would eventually give in and retreat. This had to be repeated every time she felt like testing your will: she noticed the slightest sign of hesitation and fear. And even when you had established yourself in your standoff with her, she would not leave you alone; as soon as you got scared and retreated, you would have to re-establish yourself against her. Fear is always treacherous; it conquers the space we free up for it by our retreat. A pandemic of fear in society is inevitable if it is not resisted by those who do not retreat. However, fear imprinted at the level of the personal or collective subconscious is much more insidious.

I must admit that although in urban conditions I always tried to stand in the way of an aggressor, I still began to consider my ability to save the victim (and myself at the same time). I have never found a moral justification for this caution of mine. And each time I felt that I was on the verge of my impulse to protect the victim breaking through the warning of my cautious mind. That mind which has its own arguments in favor of finding means to fight evil: so as not to enter into a fight with it powerless. There is a difference between a conscious action in defiance of fear and recklessness that cannot be justified. And yet the value of spontaneous moral action is indisputable. When is sacrifice justified? Its intrinsic value is obvious; its moral worth does not depend on success in achieving the goal. But reason also has its point. I will speak more later about how I had to stand in the field of tension between my heart and my mind.

On the Construction Site in Kyiv. In 1952, I finished the seven-year school, having a few C’s on my certificate. But I intended to study further. Meanwhile, the nearest school, in Obukhiv, was the only one for a large number of villages. There were many who wanted to continue their studies after completing seven grades, and so the administration selected those who did not have C’s on their certificates. I didn’t know what to do next. I tried to get into a trade school. This was a higher level of training for blue-collar professions compared to the FZU (factory-plant school). In it, the training lasted not six months, but three years; at the same time, the youth received a secondary education. The school to which I applied was located on Shevchenko Boulevard (not far from Victory Square). I chose the profession of a lathe operator. They treated me well and encouraged me; it also mattered that I was the son of a man who had died in the war. I had a glimmer of hope: I would be enrolled. But unexpectedly, at the medical commission, they rejected me due to a childhood ear illness. I had indeed suffered a lot from my ears in childhood, and it lasted for more than a year (inflammation of the middle ear). Someone advised my mother to put olive oil in my ear, which she did, having gotten that life-saving oil from somewhere. I still believe that it was in this way that she cured my ears. So I stopped crying, and my mother stopped suffering, watching my pain.

Unable to find any education in Kyiv on my own, I returned home. To have some work, I went to the kolkhoz office and said that I could do something—for example, carry the mail. However, Paraska Konistrativna, an old “communist” (that’s what they called her in the village), saw this as an attempt to find easier work for myself. Instead of becoming, for example, a driver or something. She lived in Tarasivka alone (it’s unknown what her past was—I never heard anything about it), and was known for her very orthodox judgments and actions. Even some of the village authorities were already making fun of her a little.

Not everyone in the kolkhoz leadership at that time belonged to the merciless types nurtured by the system. During the period of kolkhoz consolidation, our kolkhoz (named after Taras Shevchenko, a separate one in Tarasivka) was merged with the Stari Bezradychi kolkhoz named after Lenin; thus, the Tarasivka kolkhoz became a vegetable-growing brigade. The brigadier of this brigade advised my mother to send my sister Liuba to the riverbank (on the opposite side of the Stuhna) to gather tomatoes and cucumbers, to bring them home in her basket. On our sandy garden plot, everything burned up. There was no question of watering: the well was deep, wooden, made of logs, and what’s more, there was only one for the entire neighborhood. I remember it also because, from some point on, I had to go down into it to clean it. On those few occasions when I was lowered into it, tied to a “chain,” I looked with fear at the wooden planks that had bulged out and were ready to collapse on my head. So, our brigadier, not forgetting his own interests, believed that others should also be allowed to live. He did not stoop to searching the baskets of people returning home from gathering vegetables. And Liuba sometimes went to gather vegetables. One day, our “communist” intercepted her, searched her, and took the five or six cucumbers she was carrying. The brigadier, upon learning of this, said something with annoyance about her stupidity.

In order to still earn some money, I decided to join those who were picked up early every day by trucks for construction work in Kyiv (after the working day, they were brought back to the village). We rode in an open-top truck, sitting on wooden benches in the back. Our “brigade” (a full truck of my fellow villagers who had agreed to work on a construction site in this way) was digging a trench for the foundation of a building on Mechnikova Street (now Klovskyi Descent, 14/24). Later, every time I looked at this long-since-built building, I remembered this first hard work of mine. When I first arrived at the construction site and went down into the trench, it was deep. And it was not easy for me to throw the viscous soil out of its bottom with a heavy shovel.

Among the peasant-builders, there were already some who were “seasoned”; they were spouting curses. I would make comments. These, however, were not “criminals”; they were not aggressive, they took my comments with humor and even goodwill. I will note, by the way, that some of the young men who started working in Kyiv came under the influence of the criminal urban culture. They would get tattoos on their hands, bring back “flick knives” and “brass knuckles,” cast from lead, which they began to use in fights.

* * *

Cursing. Curses were just as much a foreign phenomenon to village culture, penetrating from Kyiv: in the village, they were considered so indecent that a person who cursed was considered abnormal. I absorbed this attitude of village culture toward cursing. The *mat* (Russian profanity) is truly an external imposition: Ukrainian culture and the *mat* are incompatible things. This is stated categorically: one might ask what Ukrainian culture I mean here—the real or the ideal, the mass or the elite. But I will refrain from analysis here and stick to my thesis. Whether the *mat* is compatible with Russian culture is, of course, for Russians to decide.

In any case, I couldn’t help but make a comment. Sometimes I still can’t restrain myself. But their prevalence today, especially among young people (and now even among children), has grown so much that isolated comments are completely powerless. I remember one incident during my student years (which my fellow students would remind me of from time to time, laughing at my naivety). During field training for our “military studies” (training at the military department of the university), I made a remark to Major Vereikin about the inadmissibility of curses for a cultured person. Vereikin must have been very surprised by this. He probably thought: that’s what happens when you admit people to university straight after school and even exempt them from military service (at that time, after the summer training camp, students were sent to the “reserves”).

Later, I tried to find some hypothesis that would explain the reasons for the appearance of such curses. I have not come across any serious research on this topic. There are plenty of historical sources that simply state their prevalence from the early periods of the Muscovite state (Pavlo Shtepa mentions them in his book *Moskovstvo* [Muscovy-ism], citing various sources). But we have, as a rule, a simple statement of prevalence, without an attempt to explain the reasons for their emergence. Generally speaking, this is a subject for cultural studies, sociolinguistics, and ethnopsychology. They, however, can draw their conclusions only on the basis of relevant facts, which will probably never be obtained.

I do not consider the modern resort to various theories to soften the assessment of the spread of curses in the mass speech of Ukrainians to be justified. I mean not only the obscuring of the fact that the spread of this type of invective (obscene expressions) does not correspond to the Ukrainian tradition, but also of the fact that it testifies to a certain state of mass culture and morality. In one of the recent interesting and useful publications on semiotics (Lesia Stavytska. “Language and Gender.” —*Krytyka*. — June, 2003), in which curses are considered as an example from gender semiotics (female and male jargons or discourses), there is, unfortunately, also a clear underestimation of the cultural subtext of this phenomenon. In rural culture, the basic vocabulary of “curses” and imprecations (and not the stylistics and intonation!) did not differ by gender. Words like “plague,” “devil,” “demon,” “damn,” “damned,” “may you...” etc., belonged to the common lexicon of quarrels for both men and women. It is another matter that women used that lexicon more often, and one of our neighbors in Tarasivka displayed, if not genius, then at least outstanding abilities in this genre of “poetics.”

The fact that profanity came to characterize primarily the speech of men (who would refrain from it in the presence of women) cannot be explained merely as a manifestation of male jargon. On the contrary, the main reason men refrain from using profanity in the presence of women is explained by the state of the culture. For biopsychic, historical, and sociological reasons, men are more prone to crime, aggressiveness, and destructiveness. Women, to a greater degree, are inclined to be guardians of life; behind them are the children, and a protective conservatism is characteristic of them. The Oranta is of the female gender. The transformation of profanity into a component of male jargon is a derivative phenomenon: men refrain (it would be more correct now to say “used to refrain”) from using profanity in the presence of women and children because they intuitively felt that in doing so they were violating an important cultural taboo. The fact that such restraint is not observed in northern Russia indicates that its use is an indicator of the state of the culture.

The semiotics of profanity, and especially its semantics, are truly worth considering, but from the perspective of the cultural state and ethno-psychology of the society in which the words “God” and “mother” acquire a certain lexical proximity (the creation of meaning through the contiguity of signs). This is obviously about the presence or decline of certain “taboos,” the observance of which is a mark of culture. Transgressing a certain type of prohibition, even if only in speech, can be a serious sign of moral erosion, and thus of culture in general. Those modern intellectuals who agree that children and adolescents should be protected from erotic and violent films should also demand that books containing obscene expressions be marked with an “adults only” warning. It is sometimes said that avoiding profanity prevents the characterization of the speech of literary personages, and therefore the use of profanity, in the form of an explicit or implicit quotation, is a justified means of realism or naturalism. And that refraining from such use is not a successful means of affirming culture and morality. Obviously, there is ground for discussion here. However, the origin of obscenities is mostly left out of these discussions. Often, their use in the Ukrainian language is no more than five to ten years old, initiated by cheap films.

For myself, I have adopted the “working” hypothesis that the emergence of profanity is a result of an inter-ethnic conflict—a rebellion of some ethnos or ethnoses against the values of Christian ethics (the lexicon of profanity attests to this). This inter-ethnic conflict likely occurred on the periphery of Kyivan Rus’—perhaps within the lands where the Muscovite state was forming. Then profanity became a component not just of “low,” but of criminal “culture” (underworld slang), which, in the process of Russification, began to spread within the empire. I agree with some of my philosopher colleagues that this component of criminal culture played a significant role in the process of Russification: mass culture, aimed at destroying other cultures, must be psychologically and stylistically aggressive.

I will note that my attempts to discuss the phenomenon of profanity in student audiences revealed a weakened critical attitude towards it. The arguments they presented were naive. They say: it is just a speech habit. When you say that these are phrases that have meaning, and this meaning undermines moral values, you hear in response: the use of profanity does not testify to a person’s immorality. Supposedly, the dividing line between moral and immoral people does not coincide with the division between “swearers” and “non-swearers.” But this, it seems, excludes the possibility that a “moral” person is capable (out of thoughtlessness, unconsciously) of doing something that has negative social consequences—for example, undermining public morality. Another common argument is that the impetus for using profanity is the harshness of life: swear words help to express oneself in situations where words fail. But if profanity, no matter what they say, carries meanings aimed at undermining fundamental spiritual values, then it only reinforces the harshness of life. Is one’s own behavior a consequence of unfavorable socio-political circumstances, or one of the important sources of these circumstances? If people consider themselves as having no influence on the state of society, then that state will never depend on them.

Undoubtedly, from the point of view of cultivated speech, profanity is verbal garbage. And it can indeed be viewed from the perspective of polluting the living environment. What is the reason that, once again, mostly young people, fashionably dressed, even with “mobiles,” spit at their feet, throw packaging, cigarette butts, etc., on the sidewalks, even just a few steps from a trash can? Inattention or negligence towards the living environment (including inattentive, irritated, or rude treatment of passers-by) is an indicator of the state of the soul, the state of one’s mentality. That incomprehensible egocentrism manifested in polluting the living environment is a manifestation of the cluttered state or at least the “rawness” of one’s own soul. This is the “rawness” of an amorphous person who, having rejected external, disciplinary formation, has proven helpless in solving the problem of self-determination. Inertia and conformism, the simple aping of some dubious models (something seen on television), the imitation of primitive indicators of prestige are a manifestation of fleeing from making one’s own choice. From the effort required for one’s own self-determination.

It seems to me that the phenomenon of littering is in the same category as vandalism: burning out elevator buttons, scribbling on and scratching up walls, etc. My hypothesis for explaining this phenomenon lies more in the realm of social anthropology—I will turn to this hypothesis later. Here, I will only note that I consider littering and vandalism a consequence of a psychological breakdown or a challenge by the rigidly formed *homo sovieticus*—an unconscious and distorted protest against the disciplinary “culture.” The rejection of this culture took on distorted forms because it was not (and for known reasons could not be) balanced by the emergence of mechanisms of self-control (the presence of which is precisely the first sign of civilization). Of course, as far as profanity is concerned, simple mimicry plays a role here, when one borrows the worst from a foreign culture, not the best.

* * *

But back to the trench. Fortunately, I did not have to dig it for long (perhaps a week). The “foreman” (I think out of pity for me) ordered me to help bend rebar on the surface. In fact, my role was reduced to handing or carrying things. Then he came up with another job for me: he sent me with a broom to clean the courtyard of the Zhovtneva Hospital—it was downhill, just beyond the fence that still separates the large courtyard with the buildings of the Zhovtneva Hospital from the street. At that time, there was various trash there, mostly broken medical glassware. I was supposed to sweep this trash into piles. This effort by the “foreman” to help me in some way was one of the many actions of people who, on my life’s path, sought to help me out in difficult, and sometimes hopeless, situations.

So, while it was warm, I went to the construction site; I remember once receiving a small sum of money for a month’s work after standing in a very long line. The head of the line was in front of some plywood structure with a small window, through which a woman, dazed from the shouting and disputes, was paying out wages. The peasants were willing to work for any pay, since the kolkhoz paid nothing. But with the onset of the autumn cold, my mother firmly told me that I should not go to this job, because I would catch a cold and get sick. And so ended my search for study and work.

* * *

An illusory ideal. I was left without a “social standing,” which provoked a feeling of contempt from our “communist.” I helped my mother with some things, went to the forest for firewood. More importantly, for almost a year (until I began studying at the Velykodmytrivska secondary school in 1953) I read very intensely whatever I could get my hands on. Fortunately, the club library in Stari Bezradychi at that time had quite a few books, which I regularly borrowed. The librarian, Nina (from Tarasivka, who until recently worked in that same library), gave me the opportunity to go between the shelves to choose a book for myself.

Mostly, I read late into the night. The three of us (my mother, Lyuba, and I) escaped the cold on the stove. The stove was heated only in the morning; for the winter, the other two rooms were closed off to better retain the heat. At first, a homemade rushlight served as a lamp. It was made by taking a tube from a broken radiator (remnants of the war) into which a wick was inserted. Later, my mother bought an oil lamp with a glass chimney; the chimney didn’t last long, it would crack, and then we had to use the same lamp, but without the glass.

З-поза свідомости зринає образ хати,

при світлі каганця, неначе сниться,

ворушить вогник тіні волохаті

під шепіт материнської молитви.

The tongue of flame illuminated only the plane of my book and did not disturb my mother and Lyuba. I read lying down, propping my elbows on some rags. We covered ourselves with old homespun blankets and remnants of traditional overcoats and huddled against the warm clay of the stove. It is truly so: there were once blankets, overcoats, and even sheepskin coats, but all this decayed before my eyes. They could not be stored in chests; they had to be worn. In the chests, they kept embroidered shirts, corsets, skirts, and headscarves. The gold earrings that mothers saved to pass on to their daughters as inheritance were confiscated during the famines. My mother also sold hers during the famine of ’33. An involuntary association: now, everything of value that people still have is being bought up, also in a situation where for many people the problem of survival is acute. In Pidhirci, at my “dacha,” everything made of aluminum was stolen, they even took the cover off the well. But this is something completely different, or is it not so different?

Among the books I read that year, a significant place was occupied by “Soviet classics,” in particular, books by writers who were laureates of the Stalin Prize. Here are some of those I read: Azhayev’s *Far from Moscow*, Nikolayeva’s novel *The Harvest*, Ostrovsky’s *How the Steel Was Tempered*, Kopylenko’s *Very Good. Tenth Graders*, Fadeyev’s *The Young Guard*, Makarenko’s *The Pedagogical Poem*, Belyayev’s *A White Sail Gleams*, and others like them. One of the illusions this literature created was that in the Soviet system, not only was some parallel world possible, but it actually existed, with brave heroes capable of defending goodness, honesty, and justice. The question of whether such an illusion was useful or harmful cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” In the absence of any ideals, destroyed by the dominant ideology, faith in the possibility of defending justice is better than complete despair. True, one who believed in the illusion was often not ready for a collision with reality. This sometimes ended in tragedy; I will mention one of them later. However, another evolution of this illusion was possible: a clash with real injustice pushed one to see its source in the political system itself. The communist ideology turned out to be contradictory. This contradiction threatened the ideology itself. The modern bet on eroticism, utilitarianism, cynicism, and cruelty, cultivated by our television channels, is more reliable. No ideals whatsoever.

* * *

2. The Velykodmytrivska School

In the summer of 1953, it became known that a secondary school was opening in the village of Velyki Dmytrovychi. And they were already enrolling students for the eighth grade (at that time, secondary school had three stages). Most likely, at the end of August, I went to the school, where I was received by the school principal, Stepan Ivanovych Shcherban. I recall he asked me to read a German text and checked if I knew the meaning of some German words. I don’t remember what else he asked. His decision was positive; he said I was enrolled. I was very happy; my life was gaining a certain meaning and direction. When we showed up at school on the first of September, it turned out that there were enough of us for three eighth-grade classes: “A,” “B,” and “C.” I was lucky to buy a relatively cheap, complete set of textbooks for secondary school from a girl from Tarasivka who had just finished the tenth grade at the Obukhiv school.

At the time I entered the 8th grade, only two of our family—Lyuba and I—remained with our mother. I had to help my mother in our difficult life. The social circumstances of this life changed during the three years of my studies in secondary school—from the time of Stalin’s death to the 20th Congress of the CPSU. One can speak of some positive changes (I have already mentioned the abolition of taxes in kind). Upon learning of Stalin’s death, I entered the house and said to my mother, “Stalin has died,” adding nothing to these words. There was only an awareness of the event’s importance. My mother’s reaction to this event was sadness. In it was a more intuitive than conscious farewell to history: half a century of her lived experience was being taken away by his shadow.

My help to my mother consisted of the usual village work—weeding and hilling potatoes, providing firewood, herding the cattle. Since there wasn’t enough hay in the winter (the cow’s main food), from time to time I would go with my mother to one of our neighbors who had a straw cutter (two large metal wheels with handles, with knives between them and a trough where the straw was placed) to chop straw or corn stalks into chaff. To that, we added some slop, and with that we fed the cow. A particular incident is “seared” into my memory, when one winter in the early 50s, my mother went to “Obirky” (the name of a locality near the entrance to the village of Pidhirci from the lower highway). To buy and bring back a bundle of hay. The day was already drawing to a close, and she was not there. And our childhood imagination was constantly haunted by an older picture of her winter journey. Sometime at the beginning of the war, she went to Kyiv on foot with jars of soured cream and, on her way home, fell gravely ill (with pneumonia). Strangers in the village of Mryhy nursed her back to health. But from then on, the word “Mryhy” had a frightening effect on our imagination. So the two of us set off to look for our mother. Turning from the Novobezradychi road onto the flat lowland that stretches along the slope of the hills towards Pidhirci, we could no longer distinguish anything in the snowstorm. It was already getting dark. I was afraid that in this white oblivion we would not see our mother and would ourselves get lost and wander until we were exhausted. She, meanwhile, not finding us at home, would rush to look for us. We turned back, got on the road, and did meet our mother, who was already coming to look for us. However, in the winter of ’53, my mother’s health worsened, and she had to be sent to the Obukhiv (district) hospital. In such cases, it fell to me to “manage” our household: feed and milk the cow, heat the stove, and feed Lyuba something.

* * *

In the upper grades, my lifestyle took shape. With the exception of what I had to do to help my mother, my time was divided between work at my desk and solitary wanderings in the forest—not only for firewood but also for solitude and reflection. My solace during these walks was singing: my listeners—the trees and birds—probably caught me on a false note, but they forgave me, sensing my delight. My repertoire consisted of the folk songs I remembered from the singing of my fellow villagers, including songs of literary origin that had become folk songs. I preserved this love of singing into my university years, attending for some time the rehearsals of the university choral capella. I was most attracted to symbolic songs with enigmatic metaphors, whether lyrical or historical. One such song in my repertoire was “Oh, a Fire Burns on the Mountain.” This explains my disdain for superficial psychologism in songwriting and poetry, including most of a modern, meaningless pop singing. This, of course, does not apply to certain talented Ukrainian pop singers and “groups” who have managed unexpected “breakthroughs” into the collective subconscious, into myth.

It’s about 6-7 kilometers from Tarasivka to the Velykodmytrivska school. In winter, I would set out while it was still dark: my lonely and relatively long walk to school, especially in the snowy expanse and the ghostly moonlight, inspired a mood of being cast into boundlessness. A well-known motif: “A small village is just a transition...” (Rilke).

Похмуре сіре небо,

блідий місяць.

освітлює мою дорогу в школу,

сніг під ногами холодно іскриться,

пересувається зі мною світле коло.

Довкола розбіги примарних ліній,

проміння схрещення,

раптові зблиски граней,

попід хатами і горбами тіні,

неначе зяючі в безодню рани.

But it was precisely the Velykodmytrivska school that played a decisive role in my exit from states of uncertainty, in gaining faith in my own abilities. Moreover, it also gave the first impetus to the formation of my intellectual preferences. Besides the influence of individual teachers, the fact that the school library was relatively rich (for a village library) played an important role, and I took advantage of it then as much as I could.

* * *

The beginnings of intellectual preferences. If I were to single out the disciplines that formed the core of my interests during my three years of secondary school, they would be mathematics and logic on the one hand, and psychology and literature on the other. This laid the foundation for my intellectual preferences at the university as well: logic and psychology. But at the same time, these preferences sowed the seeds of a conflict between two approaches: empirical positivism, on the one hand, and mentalism (with its attention to inner experience), on the other. The dialogue between these two approaches is a well-known page in the history of 20th-century philosophy. In the 1960s, its echo in student auditoriums was the dispute between the so-called “physicists” and “lyricists.” I will say more later about the search for my own position in this dispute.

So, two modest textbooks—Logic and Psychology—played an important, if not decisive, role in shaping my intellectual preferences. From the distance of decades, I want to thank both the authors of these two textbooks and those who introduced the teaching of these subjects in secondary schools: may the memory of their deed be blessed.

Encountering a well-written textbook is of decisive importance, especially in the school years. I did not like the history and geography textbooks: they were written—as it still seems to me (and I think I am not mistaken)—without a thought for the student, for the peculiarities of his thinking and perception of the world. Perhaps the history textbook, due to the imposition of well-known schemas, was indeed difficult to make well. However, I am also unpleasantly struck by some of the modern school textbooks, whose flaws are partly due to negligence and thoughtlessness, and often also to unjustified innovation that complicates the perception of the text. The first thing that is unpleasantly striking is the lack of aesthetics in the presentation, of clear structure, of that elegance which is the guarantee of clarity. My impressions were confirmed by the feedback of teachers: their irritation at the contrived, deliberately complicated exercises, when it is important for students to master first of all (and at least) the basics. This topic, however, requires broader discussion, concrete analysis, and reasoned criticism. It seems to me that after the war, the inertia of the old intelligentsia school, which strove for clarity and aesthetics of presentation (rules enclosed in frames, exercises well-grouped, etc.), was still partly preserved. In any case, during the school years, encountering a well-written textbook—written with love for the child, taking into account the peculiarities of his or her perception of the world—is of exceptional importance. It is good that in the 90s, some carefully made textbooks appeared. But for now, these are probably more the exceptions than the rule. (As an example, one can name the primers for younger school grades by Dmytro Cherednychenko and Halyna Kyrpa).

And yet the influence of individual teachers on the formation of my preferences was substantial. I want to mention first and foremost Stepan Ivanovych with his knowledge of two languages—English and German. He had an exceptional pedagogical gift. He possessed the relatively rare gift of commanding respect from students. I do not recall him ever being angry or shouting. When later, many, many years after, I spoke about these characteristics of his with some of his teacher colleagues, they assessed my characterization as an idealization. Perhaps it really does look that way from the point of view of people who had to deal with the principal in the everyday routine, in the “kitchen” of school administration.

Another influence was of a completely different character. This concerns the mathematics and physics teacher, Samuїl Zinov’yevych Hurevych, our homeroom teacher in the eighth grade. If Stepan Ivanovych had gone through the war, this teacher was a younger man, thin, sickly, and limped (he had a prosthesis), completely unable to maintain discipline in the classroom. But he knew mathematics and physics, as far as I can judge from my impressions at the time, very well. But to know and to teach are, of course, different things. Together with some other student from the class, I had to help Samuїl Zinov’yevych produce a wall newspaper; at that time, he would take us to his home—to the house where he rented a room—and feed us soup. I think he could have worked with us in the classroom, but, as I now think, observing our poverty and hunger, he felt sorry for us (although he never hinted at his sympathy with a single word). His attitude towards me was friendly, but without familiarity or condescension; he treated me with respect, devoid of any ostentation; his respect was natural. However, by this, he (consciously or unconsciously, I do not know) was able to sow the seeds of faith in my own abilities. Once he gave me a handwritten text about the action of an electric field in a solution—a text more complex than those in the physics textbook. After looking over this text, I thought that he was overestimating my abilities, but his gesture was obliging.

* * *

Boorishness. I was elected the class Komsomol organizer, and I saw my role as guiding students towards knowledge and discipline. A few students (there were, it’s true, only two or three) would sometimes shout the word “zhid” (as an insult, of course) in the general noise. At that time, I knew almost nothing about anti-Semitism, but I was convinced that it was unjust to insult a person. Later, in the narrative about the 90s, I will recall my reflection on Ukrainian-Jewish relations (in particular, in connection with my participation in discussions that took place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and about “the anti-Semitism of Ukrainians” and “the Ukrainophobia of Jews” (I put these in quotes because the use of these labels requires commentary). In this case, I sympathized with my homeroom teacher, especially given his defenselessness. This forced me, in the absence of Samuїl Zinov’yevych, at our class’s Komsomol meeting (which we held without the presence of teachers) to condemn the lack of discipline and disrespect for the teacher. I spoke caustically and touched a nerve with one of the boisterous boys. This student was not aggressively disposed towards me. But he could not stand my remarks and decided to teach me a lesson, not with words, of course. I was protected from his “lesson” by students of the Velykodmytrivska Secondary School, Petro Solovei (from Stari Bezradychi) and Petro Barandych (from Tarasivka): they somehow convinced my “charge” not to touch me.

I was not one of the quarrelsome types, but as a teenager and in my school years, I did not think I should run from an attacker rather than defend myself. Up to about the seventh grade, not on my own initiative, I was forced to periodically but regularly engage in fistfights with a boy from the next street in Tarasivka (we were of roughly equal strength and skill). In the primary grades, I responded to a boy’s incomprehensible anger with an agreement to measure our strength after classes. I was not strong among my peers, but I managed to knock the boy down and pin him to the ground. When I let him go, as he was getting up, he hit me with all his might with his head in the nose, which bled all the way home.

In the Velykodmytrivska school, this young man crossed my path again with his hatred. This time, one of the teachers warned him, and it was a good thing that he heeded that warning. And yet, during my school years—I think not only in rural but also in urban schools—there was not yet the phenomenon that became widespread in the Brezhnev era (when in some schools, leadership in the class was seized by students with criminal tendencies, who repressed those who tried to study well and behave decently). The *dedovshchina* (hazing) that spread in the army was, of course, not just a product of the army, but of the entire society, a consequence of the spread of the cult of force and the criminalization of “culture.”

This finds its continuation in the 90s in an even more dangerous form, fused with corruption. When for an attempt to discipline an unruly student from a family of the “important,” a teacher is intimidated or even beaten. There are quite concrete facts that confirm this. In conditions where criminalization has permeated all social and political structures to the very top, not only the position of a principled teacher becomes threatened, but everyone who strives to defend moral values, legality, and justice.

What is usually called “boorishness” is often in a complex combination with a not always conscious envious malice towards the superior (*ressentiment*). I know a family in which a highly skilled worker, throughout a long married life together, never reconciled himself to the higher education of his wife, a teacher, deriving pleasure from his mockery of her belonging to the intelligentsia. Later, reading Dostoevsky, I superimposed what I read onto my early youthful experience: it suggested to me that embittered hatred for the noble and the good has hidden sources in human nature. When later, we, the generation of the Sixtiers, listened to Shiryaev’s monologue about slavery in the film “The Dream,” behind it was the artistic embodiment of what I mean here. In another form, from my neighbor, a Tarasivka beekeeper, a sort of village philosopher, I heard in my youth the very same arguments about the futility of my aspirations for justice and the ideal. It is all vanity, pride; it is important to find a cozy burrow, a niche—and there you can philosophize to your heart’s content. Under normal social conditions, such a position may be close to the truth, but not under conditions where adapting to socio-political circumstances inevitably leads to professional and moral self-renunciation. At least in the humanities, in literary and artistic creation.

* * *

The Ukrainian Language. My interest in the Ukrainian language in my school years had a rather theoretical bent—grammar. In my oral speech, I had to rid myself of Russisms for a long time to come. School usually had a positive influence on improving speech. But teachers then (as now) paid no attention to the everyday, especially extracurricular, speech of students. Some teachers did not (and still do not today) monitor their own oral speech. And modern language textbooks are not oriented towards the practical use of the language, towards developing habits of communication in various situations—that is, towards the language in its action, in its everyday practice. In them, you will not find exercises designed to improve oral speech, including the elimination of *surzhyk*. Now there are even attempts to bring *surzhyk* within the bounds of the “norm”: supposedly, language is not what should be, but what actually exists in linguistic practice (in speech). But, by following this path, one can completely erode the concept of culture in the normative sense of the word—lowering the norms to reality, instead of raising reality to the norms. Although the affirmation of values and norms should indeed be carried out taking reality into account, it should not be in a way that removes the tension between what should be and what actually exists. For such “realism” is a path to the entropy of the cultural environment and, ultimately, to the lowering of the quality of human life.

It is understandable that in my school years, teachers did not speak of valuing the Ukrainian language. And even less did they instruct us to value Ukrainian identity. The question of Ukrainian national-cultural identity could not even be raised: it would immediately be labeled. It was only permitted to speak of the greatness of the Russian language and culture. The school could not

conduct the business of fostering national self-awareness: its task consisted of cultivating national nihilism. This was an important direction of the educational ideology of the time: to prepare rural children for the renunciation of their language in the conditions of Russified cities.

I was influenced by this ideology: having become a student at Kyiv University, I spoke Russian with Russian-speaking interlocutors. Only in my last year at Kyiv University did I begin to speak Ukrainian on principle. And yet some girls and young men, and more often it was girls, upon finding themselves in a Russian-speaking environment, displayed a calm and stubborn “linguistic resilience” (to use the expression of Orest Tkachenko and Larysa Masenko). It is understandable that linguistic resilience—as a psychic ability to freely use the language in a Russian-speaking environment (which understands Ukrainian)—must be the result of a conscious choice. Although valuing it is not enough to overcome a certain psychic discomfort, a barrier in this type of communication, it is an important and even necessary prerequisite. For it testifies to a conscious choice, which must find support in the mastering of corresponding communicative practices and habits. It is another matter that obtrusive moralizing or categorism are more likely to harm than to foster the cultivation of value orientations. But that is already a question of pedagogical psychology.

* * *

Literature. Even before entering secondary school, I used to buy small, cheap booklets at the Bezradychi village store; in particular, I bought collections of poems by Nekrasov and Lermontov there. But in the upper grades of secondary school, I was already reading multi-volume works—in particular, Turgenev (besides the novels, I admired his poetry in prose, which I learned by heart), Tolstoy, Goncharov (*The Precipice*), I read articles by Dobrolyubov and Pisarev, read Belinsky, and liked Nekrasov’s civic lyricism (especially the poems dedicated to Dobrolyubov and Shevchenko). Of Lermontov’s poems, I most liked the narrative poem “Mtsyri” (which I learned by heart) and the poem “The Fugitive.”

Of Ukrainian literature, in my later school years, only individual works came my way; only later did I learn how much of value was hidden from the reader (especially the schoolchild)—more precisely, completely removed from cultural life. Now, when the heritage previously removed from cultural life is being returned, my joy is combined with a sense of loss—a lack of time for reading. The situation with reading Ukrainian literature was truly worse: firstly, it was much more poorly represented in the libraries, both the village and the school ones. And, secondly, in what I did get my hands on, the romantic-idealistic, religious-philosophical, and psychological-anthropological subtexts were weaker. And it was precisely this, albeit not yet fully consciously, that was the subject of my interests. And yet, it is a good thing that I did have some idea of classical Ukrainian literature: what was included in the anthologies provided at least some elementary knowledge about the main motifs of the work of Ukrainian poets and prose writers. But all this, of course, was without any broader or deeper reflections. The role of ideological interpretations was to make inaccessible precisely the most interesting and most important aspects of the works’ content. But I think the success of this “neutralization” was only partial.

I was impressed by the civic motifs in Franko’s work. Later acquaintances with the work and personality of Franko became an important source in my creation of a self-image, which influences what we, if not become, then would like to become. I have in mind Franko as a citizen and a worker. Even the situation in which Franko found himself, with untouched areas of work that require heads and hands, reminds me of my own (and not just my own) haste. Lagging behind everywhere, much needs to be started from scratch.

Overall, one can say that under the influence of reading Russian and Ukrainian literature, I became imbued with the spirit of civic sentiment. I read the words “You were stern, in your young years you knew how to subordinate passions to reason...” as my life’s creed. In a word, I became a “Narodnik.” I met my Ukrainian language and literature teacher, Halyna Yosypivna, many, many years after finishing school—after our family returned from exile. By that time, she was the wife of Hryhoriy Semenovych Mostovenko. Hryhoriy Semenovych taught geography at the Velykodmytrivska school. Later, during my imprisonment, he was for some time the director of one of the boarding schools in Kyiv. During Gorbachev’s perestroika, as a result of his non-acceptance of communist ideology, he left the CPSU, left his teaching work, and, to earn a living, took up beekeeping. When in 1987-89 I began to teach at the Velykodmytrivska school, he tried to persuade me to take up this craft. I procrastinated, and then one day he brought two hives with bee colonies to our yard in the village of Pidhirci. Consequently, I was forced to look after them and became a beekeeper. During our meetings and discussions in the 90s (sometimes very heated), Hryhoriy Semenovych assessed my understanding of the national problem as too moderate. Why, I will say later.

* * *

The Natural Sciences. It was to the credit of the drafting teacher, Myron Romanovych, that with his strict demands for precision and neatness, he awakened in me a love for drafting, which was unexpected for me. A simple student’s “drafting set,” which contained a ruling pen and a compass, drew various kinds of projections of figures, observing line widths and calligraphic lettering. Everything had to be impeccable and neat. Related to these graphic interests of mine were my studies in shorthand. By chance, I found out about the existence of the Central Correspondence Courses of Shorthand (in Moscow), wrote an application, and paid for the tuition (from our same pension fund). I began to diligently perform all the lessons in accordance with the program: I invariably received “good” and “excellent” for the exercises I completed. I stopped these studies when I received the second-level textbook from the Courses: by this time I was already a student at Kyiv University and, it seems to me, I had lost interest in these studies.

As for my readings in the natural sciences, it is difficult for me to separate in my memory the last grade of school and the first year of university. In the first years of university, I continued my studies in mathematics, I studied the first volume of Fikhtengolts’s textbook on mathematical analysis (I was especially interested in Dedekind’s theorem on the continuity of the number line). I read the book *Charles Darwin and His Teaching* by Timiryazev, which is distinguished by the clarity of its exposition (I also had his *Life of Plants*).

I began to pay special attention to the study of physics under the influence of a new, very young teacher (after finishing university), Lyuba Semenivna, for whom I felt a fondness. As I can judge from my impressions, this fondness was mutual. I particularly remember an episode during the final exam in physics. On the exam ticket, I got an experimental problem in electrodynamics: it seems I had to determine the magnitude of the resistance in the internal and external circuits. Meanwhile, an inspector from the district department of education happened to visit the exam. I knew the theoretical questions on my ticket well. But when I rushed to solve the problem, I forgot something (perhaps the main formula by which the calculation was to be made). I saw the hidden agitation of my teacher, who noticed my bewilderment. And suddenly I remembered that formula, my enlightened expression reassured her—a weight was lifted from her soul. I passed all the other exams with excellent marks and, therefore, was “headed for” a gold medal.

I don’t think that this fondness of mine for Lyuba Semenivna can be called Platonic love. I was in love with a girl from class “A,” to whom I once tried to declare my feelings. This girl replaced another one, with whom I was in love in the sixth and seventh grades (she was my classmate). I think that in my youth, I was greatly influenced by an idealized image of a girl in general (adherents of psychoanalysis would say it was my *anima*). The girl in secondary school was similar to the first one. And then a student of the history faculty was in some of her features (probably important to me) similar to the first ones. This idealized image of a woman had a tendency to extend to many women: later it seemed to me that I was in love with several girls at once. When I later read Dante’s *Vita Nova* (in Ukrainian translation), this idealized image of woman as the embodiment of femininity in general would emerge from behind the text of the work.

The aesthetic side of communication with a girl had a separate and self-sufficient meaning for me. Sexual experience, the carnal side of relations between the sexes, did not compare with the poetry and even mysticism whose source was the spiritual side of love. Today, under the influence of television, the carnal side of relations between the sexes has found itself in the center of attention as a kind of commodity or service, as a manifestation of commodity fetishism. This forms a not very disguised background for beauty pageants and other semiotics that, wittingly or unwittingly, flow into the general stream of advertising women as a commodity. Consciously or unconsciously, they serve the sex business in various countries of the world—in particular, the market in which Ukrainian women have become an important export commodity. This also applies to some writings on the semiotics or even mysticism of the female body. Of course, soul and body are inseparable: the “mysticism” of the female soul, like the male one, has its roots in the body. The rehabilitation of the carnal, suppressed by sanctimony and a peculiar communist asceticism, could only be welcomed. This is reminiscent of the rehabilitation of the carnal in the Renaissance era. Still, there are not only coincidences but also significant differences between these two “renaissances” of the carnal (although there was a vulgar accompaniment in the Renaissance period as well). When I speak here of the flirtation of the semiotics of the carnal with the sex business, I have in mind the lack of clear oppositions. It seems that the aesthetics of women’s clothing is also shifting in the same direction, which is most evident in the “aesthetics” of summer season clothing: victims of fashion are women whose bodies are clearly not designed for a style of tight-fitting or baring. Fashion dominates taste and even common sense. And from the point of view of the philosophy of fashion, it is important to clarify the ideologies and technologies that support it. In our case, a simple reference to the consumerist ideology that has become the dominant form of ideology in Western societies does not explain everything. Apparently, this ideology undergoes specific modifications in our conditions.

* * *

Philosophy. If we don’t count the textbooks on logic and psychology, then in the upper grades of secondary school, I did not come across books on philosophy whose reading would have been timely. I liked the part of Chernyshevsky’s work *The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality*, where Hegel’s aesthetic ideas were expounded. I didn’t just like them: the idealism of these pages belongs to my best intellectual impressions of my school years. When I later tried to reread these passages, as if to renew my former experiences, nothing came of it: the text turned out to be unable to lift me, as it had the first time, to the heights of idealism. I had the *Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)* and I read the chapter on historical and dialectical materialism (of course, without any critical attitude towards it). I had a book, *Problems of Leninism*. I read some of Lenin’s articles.

So, in the upper grades, I became more and more imbued with a scientific worldview, I strove to explain everything by natural causes: I even inclined my mother to this way of thinking, especially when it came to superstitions and belief in supernatural, mystical phenomena. At the same time, this “positivism” of mine, including during my student years, coexisted peacefully with an occasional turning to God.

I was, of course, far from critically assessing dialectical and historical materialism—in the form in which it was presented in the *Short Course*—on the basis of the germs of my scientism and positivism. So, from a distance of time, my “philosophical thinking” of that time can be characterized as a coexistence of completely unrelated, and even incompatible, moods. Two tendencies, not very gracious or friendly to one another—scientific rationalism, on the one hand, and romanticism (and the idealism combined with it), on the other—at that time coexisted quite peacefully in my soul.

In contrast to the “philosophical,” in my political moods, some basic orientations were more clearly defined. In the upper grades of secondary school, I already understood that a conflict with ideology and the state was dangerous. Therefore, one needed to think about ways of acting if one wanted to improve the situation of the people. I imagined myself as a future defender of the rightless, the defenseless, the despised. Especially the peasants, because at that time I imagined that people in the city lived well. This was a clear exaggeration, although it all depends on what one considers a “good” life. Still, the position of workers was much better than that of peasants. It is certain that one of the sources of this attitude of mine was the poetry of Shevchenko, the civic lyricism of Nekrasov, and the civic motifs in Franko’s poems. A belief was born in me that the political system could be transformed and that this was the path to follow. Spring of 1956. I passed the state exams with excellent marks: a path to a wider world was opening up for me.

Chapter IV. The University (1956-1962)

1. The Beginning of Studies. Daily Life. The “Rumpus.”

Summer of 1956. Thinking about entering Kyiv University, I hesitated: should I apply to the physics or mathematics faculty, or to the philosophy faculty. The choice in favor of the philosophy department of the history and philosophy faculty turned out, from my present point of view, to be correct, but I appreciated this only later. At first, it seemed to me that I had betrayed my “positivist” dream. My choice unpleasantly surprised my teachers in the “exact” sciences. And not only the teachers: a doctor from the Velykodmytrivska hospital did not accept it. During my student years, she helped me greatly by keeping my mother in the hospital for a long time so that I would not have to interrupt my studies. I recall a conversation with her during a chance meeting in Kyiv: expressing contempt for the “philosophy” of that time, she considered my choice a mistake. And that was understandable.

Like all “gold medalists,” I only had to pass an interview. In the admissions office of the history and philosophy faculty, it was conducted by the deputy dean of the faculty, Volodymyr Karlovych Tancher. Referring to the autobiography I had written, he asked in what, precisely, my interest in philosophy was manifested, what I had read in philosophy. I remember well that I named some article by Lenin (I think it was “Party Organization and Party Literature”) and briefly told him what it was about. To the question of why I named Lenin specifically, and not something else, I cannot answer with certainty. Most likely, I thought that for an entrance interview, this was the most convincing. Having recently read the aforementioned autobiography in the archives, I could not help but be amazed at the comical frankness with which I wrote about having stopped my verse-writing, being disappointed in my poetic abilities. Volodymyr Karlovych probably also read these confessions with a smile. I do not remember what else he asked me and what I answered. But I remember that he said something in such a way that I perceived his words as almost decisive.

I returned to the village in a joyous mood. Meanwhile, my sister, having finished the seven-year school, also with excellent marks, decided that she would enter a vocational school for shoemakers in Kyiv, in the Podil district. My cousin Olya, Aunt Vasylyna’s daughter, helped her find this school. The advantage of the vocational school was that students received free meals and free clothing, as well as a certain sum of money for renting a “corner” (the school did not have its own dormitory). She later rented a “corner” in a building on Kontraktova Square from a cultured elderly woman. While studying at the school, one could finish evening secondary school. In this way, my sister obtained a full secondary education. I really did not want her to go to the vocational school. My mother would be left alone in the village, and besides, with her abilities, she could have finished secondary school well and obtained a higher education. Of course, it would have been very difficult for her in terms of daily life. Still, her decision was most influenced by her dislike of the kolkhoz village and the memory of her stay in Kyiv in 1947, at the age of five. (I read her this paragraph, and she agreed with this explanation of my motives.)

Undoubtedly, a state-provided education, with the payment of scholarships (albeit small)—was a positive element of the communist political system, worthy of being inherited. Some young Western nations that care about education and culture maintain a budget-funded education system alongside a fee-paying one. In modern Ukraine—with the low salaries and the level of unemployment we have—a fee-paying education system deprives talented children of poor parents of the opportunity to get a higher education (according to statistics, the majority in modern Ukraine belong to the category of “poor” parents). And with the level of corruption that has enveloped higher educational institutions, even the small opportunities to get an education at the expense of the state budget have been practically nullified: to get on the list of those who will study for free, one must either give a bribe or have the protection of influential people. But this is one of many painful topics concerning the state of culture and education in modern Ukraine.

* * *

So, in September, Lyuba and I began our studies in Kyiv. But it turned out that for the first-year students of the history and philosophy faculty, there were not enough places in the dormitory. I don’t know what I would have done if my brother Pavlo and his wife Kateryna hadn’t helped me out: they agreed that I would live in their cramped room. It was one of the rooms that had appeared as a result of additions to a one-story, very primitive building, located at the end of a lane that then, I think, was called Pecherskyi Tupyk (not far from Chigorin Street, above the ravine). This elongated barrack-like building served as a dormitory for some ten men—migrants from the villages. When the men began to get married, they started making additions to this barrack, each for himself: a room and a kitchen, even if only made of planks. They lived in the hope of getting apartments in at least fifteen to twenty years; later they did indeed receive “Khrushchyovkas” in this way. I do not use the word “Khrushchyovkas” ironically: after all, Khrushchev’s announcement of the housing construction program, and especially its intensive implementation, allowed people to be moved out of basements and semi-basements. This was one of the most successful and important programs of social content. Undoubtedly, if we are not talking about the size of the dwellings (since an increase in floor area automatically reduced the number of apartments), the flaws in the planning of the apartments, the mistakes in engineering and architectural solutions are obvious today (my wife and I now live in such a “Khrushchyovka”). But the solution of these issues was already a matter for architects and engineers.

A year of living among migrants from villages who were just merging into the urban working class, along with other similar observations, gave me material for reflection on what happens to traditional village culture in the person of its bearers who moved to the cities. True, these “bearers” of it had already gone through school, and the young men—through the army: they had already rejected some elements of village culture. For example, in the urban dwellings of migrants from the villages, there were almost no icons—an indispensable element of a village dwelling even in the post-war period. The vast majority of them did not bring embroidered shirts and towels to the city. And yet, for the most part, they tried to marry people like themselves—recent migrants from the villages—and were Ukrainian-speaking at home (not without *surzhyk*, of course). But their children became, as a rule, Russian-speaking. The parents were indifferent to this or even benevolent: they did not want their children to go through the humiliations they had experienced because of their Ukrainian-speaking. Still, the main reason for this break in tradition was the lack of national self-awareness (as a result of imperial ideology and policy).

* * *

The inconvenience associated with the lack of a place in the dormitory could not overshadow the uplift with which I began my studies at the university. The University! And Kyiv University at that. If we are to speak of the main tonality of my spiritual life during my university years, then, despite mood swings (and states that can be called crises), I still maintained faith in my own abilities and in a positive personal and social perspective. One of the sources of this optimistic mood, not just my personal one, was undoubtedly the socio-political changes initiated by Khrushchev’s report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. The “Thaw” was hit by a cold wind after 1962 (after Khrushchev’s meeting with the creative intelligentsia in Moscow and the ideological meeting of 1963 in Kyiv). Ivan Drach was expelled from the university in 1963.

Many facts from student life of that time testify that former Komsomol members, and even Komsomol activists, displayed the idealism which I have already characterized as potentially dangerous for the political system in its actual operation. And although these were only isolated stirrings, the “curators” were aware: let go, and you won’t be able to hold on. Our teachers, associate professors and professors, thus had the trouble of protecting us from actions that would result in expulsion from the university. After all, they carried in their souls the shadow of the purges they had experienced. Hryhoriy Kostyuk in his book *Stalinism in Ukraine*, speaking of the post-war personnel purge, notes: “Of the promising possibilities for a new cultural and public upsurge in Ukraine, which had been created under the conditions of relative freedoms of the war period, not a trace remained. Ukrainian historical science, linguistics, criticism, literature, theater, having lost during this rout everything that had been created during the war years, could not create anything significant and of equal value by the end of 1953.” Various events—the resolution “On Overcoming the Cult of Personality...” (June 1956), the October Uprising in Hungary—cast doubt on the clarity of the demarcation between “bourgeois” and “socialist” in the official ideology. The ruling elite had to admit the erroneous application of the labels “bourgeois,” “enemy of the people,” etc. And so the conservative part of the party nomenclature, frightened by the events in Hungary, was inclined to replace discussion with the argument of force.

However, I think it was not only fear that made our teachers “cautious wardens.” Personnel purges contradicted the very nature of the pedagogical process: it required at least relative stability. Conscientious teachers calculated that even within the narrow limits in which the party bureaucracy sought to contain “de-Stalinization,” they could provide some elements of positive knowledge. For how else could one work for the long term?

* * *

The “Rumpus.” An example of manifestations of free thought among the student youth can be the “case” that became known under the name “Buza” (The Rumpus): it concerned students of the philosophy department of the history and philosophy faculty in the 1955/56 academic year. To avoid inaccuracies, I asked Petro Yolon, with whom I have been in friendly relations since the first year of my work at the Institute of Philosophy (until recently he was the deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy), to tell me about this “case.” Yolon was directly involved in it.

At the philosophy department of the faculty, a satirical supplement to the wall newspaper “For Philosophical Cadres” began to be published under the title “Satyricon.” The critical arrows of this supplement—partly openly, partly in the form of hints—were directed at “Soviet reality” and faculty life. It became popular among the students: it was created by Yuriy Sikorsky, Petro Yolon, and Oleksandr Lukyanov. “Satyricon” was hung on the third floor of the “Red” building; the faculty party bureau removed some of them (after the event described here, the publication of “Satyricon” was banned). Meanwhile, something like a handwritten humorous journal was started in the dormitory under the title “Buza,” where students would occasionally write down various kinds of statements and aphorisms on philosophical-humorous, as well as erotic, themes. However, the statements on erotic themes, according to Yolon’s assessment, did not contain cynicism. It was rather a free-thinking humor: “A clear, like the sun, exposition of the principles of the theory of amours, in order to encourage the youth to seductive activity.” The manifestations of free thought at that time also included a challenge to those elements of sanctimonious asceticism that the communist ideology contained.

Three issues of the journal were “published.” One of them ended up in the faculty party bureau: who stole it and handed it over remained unknown. The other two issues disappeared somewhere when the “noise” started. Both journals did not contain a national component; the accusation of “nationalism” did not figure in the “case” (the entries in “Buza” were in both Russian and Ukrainian). An investigation of the case began at Komsomol meetings, but the meetings refused to impose a “penalty” on Sikorsky, Lukyanov, and Yolon. Then the Komsomol committee of the university expelled all three from the Komsomol, and after that, by order of the rector, they were expelled from the university (Sikorsky went to work in the mines of Donbas). Expulsion from the Komsomol then mostly meant that expulsion from the university was to follow. And here the “party organizer” of the course, Shypenko, who tried to defend the students, himself became the object of accusations. He could not stand the persecution and committed suicide (he hanged himself). The case was transferred to the city prosecutor’s office. On the day of Shypenko’s funeral, Kalenyuk, Yolon, and Lukyanov were arrested in their dormitory room, and interrogations began with the imposition of the version that there was an organization that aimed to incite the students. However, after holding them in custody for a day, they were released in the evening. But after Shypenko’s suicide and after his father, a completely orthodox communist and editor of a district newspaper, appealed to the relevant authorities, it was decided somewhere “at the top” that they had “gone too far.” The case was transferred to the republican prosecutor’s office. A hushing up of the scandal began; the expelled were reinstated at the university and in the Komsomol, with the expulsions replaced by reprimands. Including for Sikorsky, who was recalled from Donbas.

The person of Shypenko is an example of naive idealism as a component of the communist upbringing of that time—the declared principles, on the one hand, and the actual operation of the political system, on the other. According to stories, the young man was brought up in a communist spirit (his father was a party member, and at that time only proven people were appointed to the position of editor of a district newspaper). Having spoken up in defense of the students and been accused of unprincipeleness, he could not withstand the collision with reality. For him, this collision ended tragically.

As a student, I heard about this event in a different version. At the center of this narrative was Shypenko’s mother. I was told that she walked around the university, saying: “What have you done with my son?” This image of the mother and her word “you,” addressed to everyone—teachers, students, everyone here at the university responsible for the death of her son—has been seared into my memory.

This story is just one of a whole series of similar “cases” related to manifestations of student free-thinking. Incidentally, I will note that the practice of stealing “ideologically erroneous” writings from student dormitory rooms was used later in the case of the poem about Lenin written by Halyna Palamarchuk. And this time (the end of the 60s), the Komsomol meeting did not adopt a decision to expel her from the Komsomol (because that would have meant expulsion from the university). And to the Komsomol meeting, Halyna wore a yellow-and-blue outfit: this was a bold challenge, a sign of defiance. After the meeting, Halyna’s “case” was transferred to the party committee. According to her, the then secretary of the university party committee, A. O. Dzhedzhula, played a decisive role in her not being expelled from the university at that time (the party committee settled for a reprimand).

* * *

Daily Life. Our studies began and lasted for a short time, about two weeks. It was decided to send the students to help with the harvest (a common practice then). We were taken by train to Simferopol, and then to the Pervomaiskyi district of Crimea, where in one of the kolkhozes for about a month we broke off corn cobs. The head of our course in this work was Vasiliy Terentyevich Pavlov, a logic teacher.

The philosophy students at that time formed one group in each year. This was the philosophy department of the history and philosophy faculty. Our group (27 male students and five female students) consisted of “older” students and the youth who entered the university after graduating from school. The majority of the “older” students were demobilized officers—as a result of Khrushchev’s initiative to reduce the army. This was the second wave of students to be supplemented by officers discharged into the “reserve” (they had advantages when enrolling in universities). According to Anatoliy Kolodny, head of the Department of Religious Studies at the Institute of Philosophy (who entered the philosophy department a year before me), almost half of their group consisted of discharged officers. As was to be expected, they were mostly “party members” and, in his estimation, played a leading and positive role in the educational process: they were disciplined, hardworking, and by this alone they encouraged the “younger” ones. But he admits that in our year the situation was different, with a greater, or even leading, role for the “younger” ones—those who entered right after school or with a one-year break. But in any case, the relations between the “older” and “younger” students in our year were generally peaceful, though not without some distance—especially with some of the “older” ones. This distance consisted not only in a psychological difference, but especially in the readiness to communicate freely and to go beyond official ideological stereotypes in arguments. Sometimes sharp disputes flared up. The older students were, of course, more experienced, “realists”; the “realism” of some was combined with cynicism. This realism was manifested in a disinclination for “risky” conversations, which were obviously assessed as naive. Some of the students of my age were indeed characterized by features of romanticism and ethical idealism.

I, of course, did not like the cynicism of the “older” ones (in particular, the use of profanity in their speech), but in some cases, their “realism” allowed them to successfully solve some issues of student life. Valentyn Lebid helped me out a great deal when, as a result of my reorientation to studying English, I did not pass the extracurricular reading in German in one of the spring sessions. He managed to arrange with the dean’s office for me to be given a deadline for passing the “extracurricular” and not be deprived of my scholarship. He really helped me out of a difficult situation with that.

I was later on friendly terms with many of my classmates (as a result of my year-long academic leave before the final year of study, the circle of my classmates expanded): Yevhen Proniuk, Serhiy Vasyliev, Oleksandr Pohorilyi, Fedir Kanak, Borys Popruha, Petro Bozhko, Anatoliy Artiukh. Many of my classmates became active and well-known in various fields of philosophy (I occasionally communicated and still communicate with some of them): Larysa Levchuk (aesthetics), Mykhailo Toftul (logic), Petro Hnatenko (psychology), Andriy Pochapsky (history of Ukrainian philosophy), and others.

During the first year, we studied in the Red Building—the left wing, on the second floor. For about a year, a group of Chinese students studied in the first year of the history and philosophy faculty. We developed good relations with them, but suddenly, with the deterioration of relations with China, they disappeared. Then we were moved to the Yellow Building on Shevchenko Boulevard: I liked it more—more spacious, brighter.

After the end of the first year, those who had no housing were offered to work in the summer on the construction of a new student dormitory (on Chigorin Street). For the duration of our work, they housed us in the university dormitory on Volodymyr Hill (in the building where the Institute of Philosophy is now located, at Tryokhsvyatytelska, 4). Thus, instead of going to the village to my lonely mother, I was forced to work on a construction site. In fact, the shell of the building was already erected; our task was to clean up and help the builders with the interior work. The windows in the building were either unglazed or broken, and a draft blew through the corridors. After working for several weeks, I fell seriously ill (probably the flu with a complication) and ended up in an infectious disease hospital located somewhere near the Lavra. The attentive care and intensive treatment they gave me there saved me. I was, however, surprised when, before the first of September, I was told that my name was not on the list of those who had been given a place in the dormitory. I had to get indignant and stand up for my right; the matter was resolved in my favor.

We, the second-year students, were housed in the same building on Volodymyr Hill. The room was large: about ten students lived in it. I was elected the room monitor and had to keep order. There were two students in the room who were prone to drinking and making noise after midnight. They became the object of my upbringing: my friends later teased me, reminding me of my educational efforts. In my university years, I was a proponent of routine and order. I did not drink alcohol, I did not smoke, and I was particularly averse to smoking in rooms (I succumbed to the vice of smoking in my last year of university). In the mornings, I would run down from Volodymyr Hill to swim in the Dnieper. Swimming, morning exercises, running (in the morning)—these complemented my routine throughout my student years. Later, rowing a kayak was added. However, this was only the external ordering of my life: as will become clear from the further narrative, behind this “outer man” was hidden an inner one, far from ordered, let alone harmonious.

We lived in the student dormitory on Volodymyr Hill for only one year (57/58), then we were moved to Lomonosov Street, where we lived until we graduated from the university. In the new dormitory, there were four students in each room: this was a great relief. I was “promoted in status”: I was elected the floor monitor—I had to oversee the cleaning of the corridor. So, from the point of view of public duties, the level of my responsibility increased. And again, my “powers” concerned order and hygiene. It so happened that in analytical philosophy, of which I became a proponent at the end of my student years, the work of a philosopher can be characterized as “hygienic” (clearing the “blockages” on the path of scientific knowledge).

Still, the attempt to adhere to a reasonable regimen could not correct the other dismal side of daily life. I mean poor nutrition due to a lack of funds. The 220 rubles of the scholarship, even when spent very economically, were not enough. There was nowhere to earn extra money. I remember how we looked for odd jobs. Sometimes there were lucky breaks: someone managed to arrange to unload wagons of fruit on the weekends. Probably in my third year, I suffered from food poisoning, after which chronic colitis complicated my life.

But I could not resist buying books: during my student years, I acquired a considerable library, mostly of philosophical literature. To this, in my later years, I added my passion for classical music: I bought a record player and started buying records (by the end of my studies I had collected a whole suitcase of them). But as a result, I would find myself in a situation where I had no money at all for food. In a situation of complete hopelessness, I would go to the village. My mother always kept a five-ruble note for me from her pension. Sometimes I would turn to my aunt Vasylyna or my brother Pavlo, and sometimes Lyuba would help out. In a word, it was thanks to my relatives, who helped me out in difficult moments, that I was able to study. I remember a case when I borrowed a small sum of money from my classmate (one of the two blind students in our group, for whom I read texts, for which they paid me). I was very worried until I got the money to pay back my debt. Only in my last year was I lucky, on the recommendation of the university’s Komsomol committee, to get a job as a counselor in a workers’ dormitory with a salary of 50 rubles a month (but my educational activity ended in a conflict with the management, about which more later).

Still, if we compare our life then with the situation of students in modern Ukraine whose parents cannot pay for their education (and who are forced to look for odd jobs), then we, the children of poor parents of that time, were in a better situation. Even if half-starved, we had time to study. Our daily life was, of course, far from desirable, but it was possible to get by and study somehow. But there is an obvious contrast between the daily life of students then and now. We dressed as best we could, wore padded jackets, military tunics. We knew a student who walked around all winter in a suit (he walked to the University from Lomonosov Street). One winter I wore some kind of canvas raincoat. The “stilyagi” (style-hunters) were exceptions among us, we did not try to imitate them, we looked at them with scorn. Sometimes they sold us cheaper shoes at the university. The girls were, of course, more sensitive about clothes: in response to a young man’s suggestion to go to the theater, it was awkward for a girl to say that she did not have a more or less decent dress.

2. Teaching. Self-Determination.

Students of the philosophy department were taught not only philosophical disciplines, but also historical ones (world history and history of the USSR). This was so that the diploma would also indicate the profession of a history teacher: this gave the right, in the absence of work in philosophy, to teach history in secondary school. Still, we were primarily prepared as future teachers of philosophy. Fortunately for us, by the time we graduated from the university, the teaching of philosophy had been introduced in all educational institutions, which opened up the possibility for almost every one of us to get a position as a teacher of “Marxist-Leninist philosophy.” So, for the first three years (six semesters), we were lectured on history—world history and the history of the USSR. A course of lectures on the history of Ukraine was also given (M. V. Demchenko). The compulsory subjects of teaching at that time also included political economy (of capitalism and socialism), as well as the history of the CPSU. Moreover, both political economy and the history of the CPSU took up many lecture hours.

The political economy of capitalism was taught in an orthodox version—in accordance with Marx’s *Capital*. Socialist political economy was mainly an apology for the planned management of the economy, which, by definition, was supposed to eliminate all the flaws of both free competition and the monopolization of capital. It is understandable that (in accordance with the “theory”) centralized planning in the economy should ensure a higher level of labor productivity and well-being than a capitalist economy. I must admit that it was not easy to carry out a critical analysis of Marx’s theory of capitalism on my own, relying only on primary sources and what was said in the lecture (the texts of the “revisionists” were not available to us at that time).

And yet, not only political economy but even the history of the CPSU could be taught with interesting critical “insertions”: it depended on the courage of the teacher, and, therefore, his willingness to be removed from teaching (examples of such removal are known from the history of Kyiv University). The students of the history and philosophy faculty of the 60s were very sensitive to deviations from ideological stereotypes and to deviations from the current definition of the “party line.” They knew which teachers had the courage to do this. For example, the teacher of historical materialism, Tkachenko (known as a “national deviationist”), not only “dared” to constantly wear an embroidered shirt and to speak and teach in Ukrainian, but also had his own views, and not only on the national question. Thanks to the same courage, the teacher of the history of the CPSU, Ivan Ivanovych Shevchenko, gained popularity among the students.

Despite the “Thaw,” the criticism of “Stalinism,” and the orientation towards restoring the “true,” “humanistic” essence of Marxism-Leninism, most teachers were afraid to develop critical thinking in students. I am not talking about ideologically brainwashed orthodox Marxists, but about those who were to some extent capable of doing so. They were afraid that with their hints and hidden subtexts they would push students to go beyond the limits within which the party nomenclature tried to squeeze the process of “de-Stalinization.” This was despite the ever new admissions by the party bureaucracy of its mistakes in determining what should be considered “bourgeois” or “anti-party.” In my final year (which I started after a year’s “academic leave”), Yuriy Kostyantynovych Savelyev taught us a course on the history of Marxist-Leninist philosophy (the “Leninist period”). At one of the seminars during the discussion of Lenin’s work *Materialism and Empirio-criticism*, I made a remark, the essence of which was that Lenin distorts Avenarius (as far as I recall, I said that Lenin incorrectly interprets the concept of “introjection” in Avenarius). The reaction from Savelyev to this remark was overly emotional; he gave me a “proper” rebuff. He could be understood: Lenin remained in the communist hagiography, and besides, the criticism of the “cult of personality” was carried out with constant reference to the authority of Lenin. However, any student capable of at least a little thought could easily be convinced that the work *Materialism and Empirio-criticism* was one of the important sources of primitivism and intolerance in relation to a whole range of new directions in 20th-century scientific and philosophical thought (genetics, cybernetics, mathematical logic, semantics, etc.). They were assessed as “bourgeois”—with corresponding “organizational conclusions.”

* * *

As for the teaching of purely philosophical disciplines, the order of their study at the faculty generally corresponded to my school preferences. In the first year, logic was taught (V. T. Pavlov) and the foundations of modern mathematics. Attributing logic to the preparatory period of philosophical and humanitarian education is, in my opinion, completely justified: it is consistent with a long educational tradition. The course of lectures titled “Foundations of Modern Mathematics” (the lectures were given by M. M. Kabalsky, a mathematics teacher at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute) was one of a series of training courses designed to acquaint future philosophers with the philosophical problems of the natural sciences. But to implement this plan, there was clearly a lack of qualified specialists (those who would be interested in the philosophical problems of natural science and had the corresponding knowledge of philosophy). Kabalsky taught us the elements of mathematical analysis with good lecturing skill, clearly and lucidly. I felt a fondness for him, in particular for his manner of teaching. But it was unclear what relation these elements had to the philosophical questions of mathematics. Since the philosophical questions of any science mainly concern its “foundations,” it would probably have been better to teach some elements of higher algebra, in particular set theory (I started studying Kurosh’s textbook on higher algebra on my own). An analysis of the axiomatic method in mathematics and Gödel’s theorem could have been interesting, at least in some popular exposition. And so on.

Likewise, the course on inorganic chemistry we were taught was only an extension of school knowledge of chemistry. But a special case occurred during the teaching of the course on the philosophical questions of biology. The teacher in his lectures insisted on the correctness of Darwin’s theory regarding the interrelation of environment, variability, and heredity (Michurin and Lysenko were considered orthodox followers of Darwin). Some of us students argued with him: at that time, “formal genetics,” or, in other words, “Weismannism-Morganism,” was no longer considered a bourgeois doctrine. Later, I read in *samizdat* a striking text by Roy Medvedev about the scale of the repressions directed against geneticists. But one day the teacher came to the auditorium and said that he was stopping his course because he needed to “rethink” everything. Perhaps this happened after the publication of some article in *Pravda* or *Izvestia* (which mainly expressed the official position). This act is worthy of respect: after all, it was permitted and even customary to “waver” in accordance with the wavering of the “party line.” In the end, he could have not met with us to announce his refusal to teach the course.

Prof. Kharchenko taught us a course on the physiology of higher nervous activity: he belonged to the natural scientists who did not avoid discussing the philosophical questions of their science. During one of the conversations, I touched on the well-known philosophical problem of the soul and body. My interlocutor, as I then understood him, leaned towards biological reductionism—that is, to the view that the study of the structures and functions of the brain allows for the explanation of mental processes. My objection to the possibility of reducing psychology to biology was based on the well-known thesis that consciousness (as self-consciousness!) cannot be explained by studying biological structures and their functions. This position of mine was almost universally accepted among the philosophers of that time: it was not assessed as “anti-Marxist”: they referred, in particular, to Lenin’s criticism of the so-called “vulgar materialism” of Moleschott.

The discussion of the mind-body problem in the 60s was stimulated by discussions in student circles, known as the dispute between the “physicists” and the “lyricists.” The physicists emphasized the possibility of creating an intelligent machine that would replace man in all his intellectual and even creative capabilities. This was a belief in the boundless possibilities of a new field of knowledge that was only taking its first steps—cybernetics. This belief later did indeed find much confirmation, but at the same time came the realization of the real limits of this science. While not accepting the absolutization of scientific rationality (scientism), I was at the same time not inclined to support the superiority of the “poets” over the “callous” physicists and mathematicians. The poetic way of perceiving the world, as a feature of the Ukrainian mentality, seemed to me not balanced by a well-developed critical rationalism. And therefore, I ironically perceived conversations about the Ukrainian “poetic soul.” But this orientation of mine towards strengthening the intellectual component of Ukrainian culture related rather to some perspective. Because in the 60s, it was precisely poetry that confirmed its ability to be the “cavalry” in attacking dogmas and stereotypes: it is enough here to mention the emphasis on the value of the individual (common in both Russian and Ukrainian poetry) and of national dignity and identity in Ukrainian poetry. So it is not surprising that students, sensitive to actions that overcame the inertia of fear, then read poetry with enthusiasm. The too-cautious philosophical “revisions” could not compare with it.

* * *

Illusions. We, the students of the late fifties, had no idea about the state of philosophy in its institutional dimension, an important component of which is the personalities of researchers and teachers, that is, the philosophical “cadres.” At least, we did not imagine the scale of the repressions that all the social sciences (and not only the social sciences) had suffered. In part, this also applies to the modern situation, because even today a young man or woman, choosing one of the humanities as their future profession, is also not very interested in the level of teaching that a particular university is capable of providing: given the inherited backwardness of the social sciences, there is still a palpable lack of well-prepared specialists and an unsettled indicator of the prestige of universities. Meanwhile, the previous pogroms and personnel purges were a decisive circumstance in understanding the consequences (it would be better to say, the “remnants”) from the point of view of the personal composition of the staff of institutes and university teachers. Only gradually did we realize that it was precisely we (and subsequent generations) who would have to clear the intellectual space of various kinds of chimerical constructions that had arisen as the fruit of the fear of those who had managed to survive. To clear it, in order to sketch at least the first contours of free, positive thinking. This work of laying the elements of the most necessary foundation continues in modern Ukraine. More precisely, it is precisely now that the political prerequisites for the implementation of this plan exist. The absence of ideological control. The educational situation of the post-war decade was determined primarily by political circumstances. It is certain that from a certain time, fear continued to act as an inertia, embodied in the practice of over-caution. And this narrowed the possibilities of using the “Thaw” as a favorable opportunity for revival.

The fact that we, the students of that time, naively assessed the educational situation of that time is evidenced by our initiative regarding the removal of Prof. F. F. Yenevych from teaching dialectical materialism. This happened in the third year. It is known that dialectical materialism, together with historical materialism, then formed the core of “Marxist-Leninist philosophy.” Prof. Yenevych’s lectures were a gabfest on themes from the corresponding section of the *Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)*. I will note that he did not give the impression of an aggressive orthodox. In private conversations, he was probably a good man, he was disabled (missing one arm), it was said that he had graduated from the Institute of Red Professors—an institution designed to quickly prepare “specialists” to replace those who had been repressed and destroyed. The absence of any fresh thought, not to mention any elements of criticality, pushed the “younger” ones to the decision to refuse to attend these lectures. The “older” ones decided to direct the initiative of the “younger” ones into a constructive channel: to hold a joint course meeting with the presence of Yenevych himself and someone else from the faculty administration. I, as the Komsomol organizer of the department (I was in this “position” not for long), and one of the initiators of the removal, was asked to speak first. This time, for reasons unknown to us, our action ended successfully. Yenevych was removed from teaching at the philosophy department: as was to be expected by the logic of the nomenklatura system, he was transferred to teach at the Courses for the Advancement of the Qualifications of Teachers of Social Sciences. Instead of Yenevych, E. G. Fedorenko began to give us lectures on “diamat,” and this was approximately the same level of teaching. Whether this subject could be taught “well” at all, and who in the Ukraine of that time could do it, we did not think about. (In the second half of the 60s, V. O. Bosenko and M. L. Zlotina tried to develop some variants of critical dialectics). This is not an isolated case of student protest against dogmatism in teaching: another case (according to P. F. Yolon) was the protest of their group against the lectures of M. E. Ovander.

* * *

P. V. Kopnin. Unfortunately, I must admit that Prof. Yenevych decided to punish me for my speech at that time. He tried to do it during the final (“state”) exam (he was a member of the examination committee). I assessed the questions he asked as too “dialectical”: any answer to them could be considered unsatisfactory. But the state examination committee was headed by Pavlo Vasylovych Kopnin, who helped me out in this situation. With his characteristic decisiveness, he seized the initiative and, ignoring the questions that had been asked, as if he hadn’t heard them at all, asked me others, to which, according to his calculation, any normal student would be able to answer. I still remember one of them today: what is the most important difference between the atomistic materialism of Democritus and Epicurus? He was satisfied with my answer. In a word, he left no opportunity not just to “fail” me (I think that wouldn’t have happened, they would probably have given me a “satisfactory”), but even noted my answer as one of the best.

A few strokes to the portrait of Pavlo Vasylovych, undoubtedly a very characteristic figure. In my student years, I did not have the opportunity to listen to his lectures, but I did attend several of his lectures at the Courses for the Advancement of the Qualifications of Teachers of Social Sciences in Kyiv in 1965. Kopnin belonged to those whom it is better to listen to than to read: his attempt in his publications to turn dialectics into the logic of scientific cognition can hardly be considered original or promising. But in his lectures, he masterfully wielded the language of hints, knew how to speak aphoristically: he skillfully plucked out individual theses of philosophers to give them a socio-critical resonance. I remember precisely such a use by him of the expression “when common sense sits on the throne, then reason sits in prison.” The trouble, however, was that even common sense did not sit on the “throne” in the political system of that time, let alone reason.

Having become the director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1962-1968), Kopnin opened a department of logic and methodology of science; he also supported the study of manuscript sources of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He was not timid before the “organs” (KGB, Central Committee). When in 1965 the KGB established Yevhen Proniuk’s involvement in the dissemination of *samizdat*, he did not fire him from the Institute, but transferred him to work in the Institute’s library. He then made an attempt to open the way for him to defend his candidate’s dissertation (which had been recommended in 1965, but in the same year the defense was blocked). Unfortunately, Yevhen was not able to defend it, but not through Kopnin’s fault. Pavlo Vasylovych used to joke that it was difficult to suspect him, a Russian, of sympathies for Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism.” When in 1968 he was appointed director of the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, he encountered opposition and persecution in Moscow from Marxist orthodoxes. I remember, when I was already an employee of the Institute of Philosophy, during his visit to us, a caricature was hung in the corridor of the Institute (drawn, most likely, by Myroslav Popovych): Pavlo Vasylovych, sitting on a stump with a whip in his hand, fighting off the predatory beasts that surrounded him. He died in 1971 in the prime of his creative powers (at the age of 49), it was said that in that hospital (was it not in the same ward?) a fatal illness brought him together with Tvardovsky.

* * *

History of Philosophy. The fundamental discipline in the training of philosophers is, of course, the history of philosophy. It was taught to us—and I think this was correct—throughout our entire university studies. But here, too, there was a lack of qualified teachers and of a well-thought-out approach to how to separate the training of those who would specialize in the history of philosophy from the rest of the students (who were not oriented towards choosing the history of philosophy as their future specialization). It is in this that I see the reason for the serious lag that remains unresolved even today. I have in mind the absence of well-prepared specialists capable of qualitatively researching individual philosophical traditions (in particular, the great philosophical traditions—Indian, Chinese, Western), using sources in the original language. Obviously, a professor who teaches the corresponding course should encourage two or three students who will specialize within his course. In that case, the training of these students should then be carried out separately—in order to provide them with the additional knowledge necessary for future research work. Including the ability to read and understand texts in the original language. The same applies to specialization in the history of Ukrainian philosophy: depending on which period a student chooses as his specialization, he needs certain additional knowledge. Including knowledge of certain languages rather than others.

But in retrospect, the main reason for my dissatisfaction with the way the history of philosophy was taught back then can be explained by the lecturers’ inattention to the cultural and ethical-political context of ideas. Simply put, it was about evaluating the cultural, ethical, and sociopolitical consequences of the ideas that philosophers proposed. As for the attempt to view philosophical ideas and systems as a component of ideologies related to the “class struggle,” this primitive “sociology” of ideas was increasingly becoming an object of ridicule, even among the students of that time.

Volodymyr Illarionovych Shynkaruk delivered his course on the history of German classical philosophy at a high level—“high” in the sense that he interpreted the philosophers’ ideas by relying on primary sources (in Russian translation). He devoted the most attention in his lecture course to Hegel’s philosophy which, I now believe, was entirely correct. This was precisely what attracted some of my classmates to his lectures: it was, after all, a philosophy that developed the capacity for speculative philosophical thought as an important component of philosophical culture. However, with my positivist mindset, I was not particularly drawn to speculative philosophy. So the grade of “satisfactory,” with which Volodymyr Illarionovych assessed my knowledge of German classical philosophy, was fair. He graded my knowledge of the philosophy of Marx and Engels (he also taught us a course on the history of Marxist philosophy of the “pre-Leninist period”) as “excellent.” The issue, of course, is not the grades (I was not striving to get only “excellent” marks), but the fact that Marx’s philosophy, particularly that of the early Marx, to whom Shynkaruk drew our attention, seemed more concrete and practical to me. I am referring to the problem of alienation, commodity fetishism, ideology as an illusory form of consciousness (so-called “false consciousness”), and so on—that is, precisely those elements in Marx’s philosophy that were taken up by Western neo-Marxism and “revisionism.”

In addition to the general (Western) history of philosophy, we also had a short special course on the “history of philosophy of the peoples of the USSR,” primarily Russian (taught by M. I. Tretiak) and Ukrainian (A. O. Pashkova and V. S. Dmytrychenko). What has stayed in my memory is not so much any interesting interpretations of Ukraine’s intellectual history (perhaps their lectures contained some interesting points, but I do not recall them) as the very friendly relationship and free communication Anastasiia Oleksandrivna and Volodymyr Saveliiovych had with the students. I should note that Anastasiia Oleksandrivna’s assistance played a decisive role in Yevhen Proniuk’s admission as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences after his graduation.

The teaching of the history of philosophy concluded with a lecture course on the “history of contemporary bourgeois philosophy,” taught by Mykola Stepanovych Shliepakov. The students spoke of Mykola Stepanovych with good-natured humor. By that time, he was already an elderly man (born in 1898), somewhat eccentric in his behavior. Students joked that the sheaves of paper from which Mykola Stepanovych read his lectures were greasy from long use. It seemed that he only understood and heard what was written on those pages. His lectures were ideological rhetoric, from which it was difficult to fish out any positive content from those “bourgeois” philosophies. One could only marvel at how naive and helpless those Western philosophers were in their argumentation. By the time I took the exam on the critique of 20th-century bourgeois philosophy (the grade for this exam was the last in our grade book), I had read everything I could get my hands on that had been published: original works in Russian translation were unavailable at the time (with the exception of a few Western Marxist critics of “bourgeois” philosophy). It is a known fact that merely showing interest in the primary sources of “bourgeois philosophy” aroused suspicion: access to these sources was permitted only to those who specialized in its “critique.” The “critiques” contained summaries and quotations: the task of a diligent student was to somehow reconstruct the positive content of the concepts. In fact, at least some of the “critics” of that time were also hoping to become acquainted with the ideas and concepts of 20th-century Western philosophy in this way.

* * *

In Search of Self-Determination. Before the seventh semester of our studies, we had to choose a narrower area of specialization—that is, one of the philosophical sciences. Influenced by my positivist mindset, I chose psychology, one of the “positive” sciences. The Department of Psychology was headed by Prof. Oleksandr Mykolaiovych Raievskyi (who lectured on experimental psychology); lectures were also given by Liudmyla Yosypivna Marisova (psychology of personality) and Maiia Vasylivna Vovchyk-Blakytna (child psychology). But after listening to the special courses, I never found my path in psychology. At first, I thought I would specialize in experimental psychology, but I became disillusioned with it, most likely under the influence of the way this field of psychology was taught. I think I might have been interested in the psychology of personality with an emphasis on introspective psychology and from the perspective of the formation of personal identity. The combination of depth psychology (psychoanalysis) with “summit” psychology is an interesting line of research in which objective approaches could meet mentalist ones. But I did not show any initiative in searching for the relevant literature to move independently in this direction.

Still, it is possible that one of the reasons for my disappointment was also the peculiarities of my way of thinking—my rather theoretical than empirical preferences. Especially considering that I was drawn to the clarification of ultimate meanings—“first causes” or “ultimate foundations.” And this is not just a theoretical, but a metaphysical orientation of thought. The sciences that should appeal to people with a theoretical turn of mind are logic, mathematics, and metaphysics, if we define metaphysics as thought concerned with first principles. The names at the origins of the Western intellectual tradition that signify the theoretical and metaphysical way of thinking are well-known—Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas…

So, while attending psychology lectures, I also attended a logic study group led by V. T. Pavlov. And when the time came to start my diploma thesis, I decided to choose a topic in logic. But this decision of mine provoked a jealous reaction from Professor Raievskyi: he threatened that he himself would attend the defense of my diploma thesis in logic. In such a conflict, V. T. Pavlov did not agree to supervise my thesis. I had to resign myself and, like a prodigal son, appear before my mentor to appease his anger. He forgave my betrayal, but I had lost time in these hesitations—I had neither a concept nor any groundwork to write a thesis in psychology. Extremely dissatisfied with myself, I decided to use my high school work, writing some text on Chernyshevsky’s psychological views. I was ashamed of such a choice—what a psychologist to have found! Moreover, I left the folder with the written text on a bus. I was forced to hastily write another version of the text: I think I had already submitted it when I was told that a woman had found my folder and I could retrieve it. I must admit that this event became a harbinger of a series of other unfortunate situations into which I put myself, guided by my own inclinations and neglecting external circumstances and demands.

* * *

Logical Positivism. In my fourth year, my fragmentary acquaintance with logical positivism pushed me to adopt the position of analytical philosophy. It is known that logical positivism saw the purpose of philosophy in assisting scientific cognition through the analysis of the language of science. The concept of meaning was at the center of philosophy’s attention—the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy. The concept of meaning in logical positivism was very narrow, adapted only for the analysis of the language of science. There is no need to delve into this concept of meaning in detail here. By the time I graduated from university, I had adopted only the main leitmotif of this philosophical current: we must pay attention to how we speak in order to be aware of whether what we say has a definite meaning—as opposed to ambiguity or absurdity.

This appealed to me because I saw in this attention to the meaning of statements an effective means of critiquing the rhetoric of “dialectical materialism.” Moreover, some of the philosophers of this movement allowed for the possibility of speaking not only of cognitive but also of “emotive” meanings: the meaning that statements have which are adapted to influence the recipient’s mental state and behavior (Stevenson’s concept of “emotivism”). And this opened the way to the analysis of ideologies as well. The logical positivists’ rejection of metaphysics did not become particularly important for me, partly because the critique of metaphysics by official dialectical materialism tended to bring metaphysics and logic closer together, as they both value definiteness and a rationally weighed foundation for philosophical thought.

But this influence of logical positivism also caused a state that could be called, if not an intellectual crisis, then a state of intellectual restlessness. It strengthened my positivist mindset: the conclusion suggested itself that it was better to approach philosophical problems from the direction of mathematics or one of the natural sciences (preferably physics). I even envied my classmate, Volodymyr Kostyrko, who, after his first year in the philosophy department, dared to transfer to the mathematics department of the university (although he had to study for a year without a scholarship). So, the satisfaction that philosophy was not just idle chatter, but critically considered, disciplined speech, was combined with the intuition that this direction in philosophy narrowed the possibilities of philosophy too much. Philosophy was becoming merely a servant to the natural sciences and mathematics above all. It did not contain the prerequisites for the development of a philosophy of man, a philosophy of culture, for the grounding of ethics, and so on. This could not be satisfying: in this sense, phenomenology and existentialism seemed more attractive.

* * *

Self-Education. In my first years at the university, I drew up a grandiose plan for self-education. It included the study of foreign languages: ancient ones—Ancient Greek and Latin; the main European languages; and Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Bulgarian). Besides languages, an important part of this program was reading literature (with a priority on world classics), as well as art history (I read Alpatov’s essays, which I liked more than the multi-volume “General History of Art”). In classical music, I was attracted to both the “metaphysicians” (Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) and the “subjectivists,” of whom Chopin was for me the most expressive representative. Tchaikovsky combined both tendencies. The visual arts, and especially poetry and music, prompted me to philosophical reflections. When it came to the intimate sphere of subjectivity, it was primarily in Chopin’s short forms that I discovered the closest, most intimate echoes of the world of my soul: hints of a memory that beckons us with the charm of loss, the impossibility of bringing back what is dear in the flow of time, a fleeting glimmer of hope, the fluidity of moods, the drama of states.

The diversity of my interests—from the natural sciences to art—threatened me with what I disliked: dilettantism. It was comforting that superficial but broad knowledge is a necessary part of any philosopher’s education. Still, each of us must set achievable goals so as not to turn into a dreamer who achieves none of them. So, I was forced to give up one item after another on my program. As for languages, I stopped at the basics of each (phonetics, orthography, elements of grammar), but continued, albeit intermittently, to read English texts. If not guided by the criterion of being “educated,” then, from a practical point of view, you need to know why you need the knowledge of a particular language—for communication, for reading, or for translation. It turned out that one can read in several languages, but for high-quality translation of philosophical texts, sufficient knowledge of one or at least two languages unrelated to one’s native tongue is enough. Because the main effort will go not so much into learning the language as such, but into becoming familiar with the ideational contexts, the knowledge of which ensures the quality of the translation.

And yet, as it later turned out, the efforts I spent on learning languages were not in vain. And today I recognize the usefulness of the “philosophy of ordinary language” for its emphasis on the rootedness of philosophical terminology in ordinary language, and thus on the importance of etymology and comparative linguistics. This allows one to identify certain stereotypes of thinking and shades of meaning associated with certain terms in national languages. And today, comparing translations of texts in different languages remains interesting to me from the perspective of the hermeneutics of language—as a journey into different semantic worlds, in which each language offers a slightly different interpretation of the same work (thereby revealing the hidden codes that cognitive meanings contain in its semantic structure).

As I later learned, most of the Sixtiers walked similar paths: they attended the same lecture-concerts, collected postcard reproductions of paintings, bought record players and records, and every new book by repressed poets. Later, when I married Vira, it turned out that we had all these interests (except for philosophy) in common.

The diversity of interests described here was characteristic of many Sixtiers. Behind it was the neophytes’ thirst for knowledge—of a young man or woman who seemed to have discovered a world previously hidden from them. It is understood that here I use the word “Sixtier” to denote a special type of young man or woman of that time. But it is interesting that the paths of this generation of young people, with their idealism, brought the most consistent and resolute of them together in a single cultural and civic opposition movement—a movement that had cultural, intellectual, and political aspects.

* * *

Civic and National Consciousness. The Sixtiers came to an awareness of their national-cultural identity through an awareness of their personal identity: we rejected, not always easily, the stereotypes of thinking and the widespread manner of adaptive, conformist behavior. Our awakening consisted in rejecting inertia, in refusing mimicry. In short, we wanted to be, not to pretend that we are. This impulse, this rebellion against inertia and depersonalization, was probably the most essential mood and feeling.

In my final year at university, I became “nationally conscious.” And not only in the awareness of the importance of affirming the national-cultural identity of Ukrainians, but also of the political aspect of the Ukrainian nation’s existence. An important role in the formation of my national consciousness was played not only by manifestations of the “national awakening,” particularly the poetry of Vasyl Symonenko, but also by conversations with Yevhen Proniuk, whom I met and became close to in my final year of study. We considered the cultural movement to be important, but insufficient. We called an emphasis on the ethnocultural factor “ethnographic patriotism.” We believed that the achievement of the long-term goal—state independence—must be preceded by enlightenment aimed at forming national self-awareness and achieving, at first, at least real political autonomy.

For every Ukrainian intellectual for whom the question of the nation’s existence becomes important, under the communist regime (and the current oligarchic one), the acute question of what is to be done arises. Of course, the answer to this question depends largely on an awareness of one’s individual capabilities. The contribution each of us makes to the transformation of social existence is linked to finding paths to self-realization. Under a totalitarian regime, an unbearable state of being split is a great threat. Freud’s ego has the trouble of reconciling external demands (“superego”) with internal drives (“id”). However, the ego has to deal not so much with the hidden actions of the “libido” or other instincts (each of us deals with this and somehow manages), but also with the “inner person’s” aspiration for active self-determination—not only professional, but also ethical and civic. The “inner person” does not agree to hide in the shadow of the “outer” person, who wisely convinces the inner one of the need to adapt to circumstances. The inner person’s attempt to realize themselves only in the private sphere immediately encounters the awareness of the impoverishment of such a mode of self-realization. Besides, private life is difficult to separate from public life. Although this difference between the outer and inner person exists to some extent in any society, in a totalitarian one it takes on the character of a split personality. One of the characteristic features of Homo Sovieticus was that the divergence between private and public life reached an unacceptable degree: to say one thing from the rostrum and think another. It became a mass and commonplace phenomenon. In other cases, so-called “sincerity” required psychoanalysis and a clarification of the influence of “false consciousness” (ideology) on the individual.

But for one who felt dissatisfaction with this split, the question immediately arose: what is to be done, how to act? To simply express disagreement with an ideology or a political system, one does not need to pore over books—it is enough to go to a demonstration with a defiant slogan. But is this course of action effective? Finding a successful course of action, calculated for at least some long-term perspective, became a rather painful problem for me as well. My personal decision was to somehow secure the conditions for my philosophical quests, but, to the extent possible, to combine my intellectual pursuits with my civic duty—to carry out enlightenment, especially the formation of national self-awareness.

I tried to realize this second objective in practice when, in my final year of study, I had the opportunity to become a “tutor” in a workers’ dormitory for construction workers (located on Lomonosova Street, next to the student dormitories). My idea was to create preparatory courses for admission to higher educational institutions. It was clear that, regardless of the goals of enlightenment, this could indeed open up a more interesting life perspective for some of the workers. Since the workers’ dormitory was next to the one where philology students lived, I had high hopes for the influence of students from the Ukrainian department on the workers through communication. But our “courses” did not last long—about three weeks, I think. Suddenly, the head of the ZhEK [housing maintenance office] summoned me and gave me an ultimatum: either I “shut down” my courses, or I would be fired. The reason: students were “entering” the dormitory, and he did not explain what threat this posed to the workers. I wrote a letter of resignation.

Chapter V. Ternopil Medical Institute (1962-1966)

Yevhen Proniuk somehow learned that the Department of Marxism-Leninism at the Ternopil Medical Institute needed a philosophy lecturer. The practice at the time was that a graduate had the right to choose from vacant positions, information about which was collected by the Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education. So I decided to go to Ternopil, and after a conversation with the head of the department, F. F. Cherniavskyi, I agreed to accept the offer. I was encouraged by the prospect of receiving an apartment so I could bring my mother from the village (I did eventually receive it).

So, in August, I left the village and headed for Ternopil. With what thoughts and mood did I begin this new period of my life? In my suitcase, as far as I remember, the only samvydav works I brought were the uncensored poems of Vasyl Symonenko. I was aware that I was going to a region where a national liberation war had only recently ended, and my audience would be very sensitive to every word—especially one that touched on national issues. At the same time, such words would be under the close watch of the relevant services.

Upon arriving in Ternopil, I was housed in a student dormitory. At first, I lived alone in a small room on the second floor with a high ceiling and one window. A bed, a table, a chair—that was all the furniture in the room. In contrast to life in the university dormitory, the solitude seemed a great advantage, giving me the opportunity to focus my thoughts and feelings.

Memorable for me is that special romantic feeling with which I, still a young man (in 1962 I was twenty-five), lived through my Ternopil years. It was as if I had been thrown into a youthful bloom: the ideal, still-romantic aspirations of my soul found a secret response in the young student environment. And the large flowerbed of beautiful girls, whom I had the opportunity to admire daily and with whom I could communicate, was an additional source of vitality. I found the ideal image of a woman in many girls: more than one of them was perceived by me as the embodiment of my female ideal. I must admit, even from a distance of decades, that the years spent in Ternopil were happy ones for me. From the perspective of my state of mind, my romantic mood, perhaps the happiest.

Later, I was moved to another room. One day, a young, slender man came and said that he needed to live here for a while, until the issue of his permanent residence was resolved. This was Anatoliy Palamarchuk (then an assistant at the Department of Surgery). It is clear that, going to Ternopil, I had instructed myself to be cautious in my relationships with people, not to open up to just anyone. For the most part, I adhered to this principle. Although I could communicate, and even for quite a long time, with a person I did not trust, having predetermined the distance of my rapprochement. And even with someone who suspiciously imposed themselves on me for communication. I was not hypocritical with such people and told them what I thought, but only a measured portion of what I thought. I got the impression that this satisfied such “friends” of mine (perhaps they were truly friends, not enemies): perhaps they appreciated this restraint of mine.

Our relationship with Anatoliy quickly became friendly and trusting. I should note that our friendship has stood the test of time and has been preserved to this day. I still have great affection for Anatoliy, his wife, and their children. I was always impressed by Anatoliy’s knowledge of public, political, and cultural life—the breadth of his interests, in particular, his ability to analyze social processes and draw independent conclusions.

It was Anatoliy who introduced me to a circle of postgraduate students from various medical specialties. Some of them, particularly Vasyl Faifura, then a postgraduate student at the Department of Pathophysiology (today the head of this department), struck me as an ethically oriented person. I soon became convinced of another of his character traits—courage. Later, I would pass him samvydav materials, which he would give to other postgraduate students to read. The book “Portraits of Twenty Criminals,” which I once gave him, was kept for decades and is now displayed in the museum of the Ternopil Medical Institute. It was fortunate enough to meet its author, Viacheslav Chornovil, who left his autograph on it.

* * *

Teaching Philosophy. At first, I lectured and conducted seminars on dialectical materialism, and then I began to teach a course on ethics. Although by that time I already had a critical attitude toward dialectical materialism, in my lectures I saw my task as formulating the basic principles of this philosophical doctrine as clearly as possible. At the same time, this provided an opportunity to clarify general philosophical concepts and to provide some elements from the history of philosophy. In seminars, I tried to ask “provocative” questions (with a hidden subtext) to encourage creative thinking. But for the most part, my attempts were not successful, as they required better philosophical preparation. Meanwhile, the students, predisposed to a positivist mindset by their studies in the natural sciences, were more inclined to consider speculative thinking as sophistry, detached from concrete cognitive and practical problems. Since I myself had a positivist mindset at the time, their skepticism was understandable to me. And I secretly sympathized with the contemptuous use of the word “diamut” for “diamat.” So I tried to bring the teaching of philosophy closer to the problems of scientific cognition. The most unpleasant thing for me was conducting seminars on V. I. Lenin’s book “Materialism and Empirio-criticism,” to which a considerable number of hours were devoted.

The ethics course was an elective—that is, not mandatory to attend (although students had to receive credit for it). But discipline at the medical institute was at a proper level, and students did not skip elective lecture courses either. I remember that I inherited a thick folder of typed lectures from the previous ethics lecturer, in accordance with the official program. I do not know if he read his lectures from those texts, but these lectures were, as was typical for that time, pathetic rhetoric, the core of which was the “code of the builder of communism.” So, I was faced with the difficult task of how to use the official ethics program to extract something human from each of the topics. Of course, I delivered my first lectures “raw,” and the very first one with which I began my teaching career, I finished probably twenty minutes before the end of the class period. As a rule, any course of lectures I taught, not only at the medical institute but also later, more or less came together only after it had been taught at least twice. Although, like most lecturers, I never stopped working on improving my lecture course, constantly changing and perfecting my presentation.

So, at first, the most trouble was caused by this difficult course on ethics. But it was precisely this course that gave me the opportunity to carry out my program of enlightenment. I singled out several main themes. The first was the value of the human person, of the inner world of man. During the “thaw,” among the creative intelligentsia, emphasizing the unique world of the human personality and calling for respect for this world was, obviously, the most characteristic feature of liberal tendencies. So I resorted to quoting the poetry of Vasyl Symonenko, Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, and also some Russian poets (Yevtushenko). And Symonenko’s famous poem, “You know that you are a human being,” echoed Yevtushenko’s related poem, “There are no uninteresting people in the world.”

The second leading theme of my lectures, which grew out of the first, was to emphasize the value of Ukrainian cultural identity (in the context of appreciating the cultural diversity of humanity). In general, I would not say that it was very difficult to reformulate the so-called “Soviet internationalism” into genuine internationalism—in the sense of the equality of nations and the appreciation of the cultural identity of any nation. The party program of the time contained an ambiguous interpretation of nationalism: the condemnation of so-called “bourgeois” nationalism was combined with the recognition of the positive orientation of the nationalism of oppressed nations. It was important to emphasize this latter thesis, choosing the appropriate context for it. I was elected “secretary” or “Komsorg” of the Komsomol organization of junior lecturers (assistants) and I gave two lectures on this topic for them. This went “beyond” what was accepted, but it passed, it seemed to me, unnoticed.

I also included a critique of antisemitism in my lecture on internationalism: the students perceived it positively. I think the reason for this perception was that I managed to make this critique honest and sincere (not declarative)—with a recognition of both the flaws and the advantages of the Jewish nation. I compared Ukrainians and Jews, characterizing the peculiarities of each of these peoples, and pointed to a perspective that would allow for overcoming mutual prejudices. At the same time, the critique of the traditional flaws of Ukrainians was also quite sharp: I felt that the students did not perceive this as an insult, but as a call for change.

I cannot fail to mention a situation that was incomprehensible to me, when some of the lecturers of medical disciplines, natives of the Ternopil region, refused to give their lectures in the Ukrainian language. And this was despite the insistence of the institute’s director at the time, Petro Ohii. At the Academic Council of the institute, he even shamed his countrymen who stubbornly refused to do so. For myself, I explained their behavior by their greater vulnerability (perhaps someone in their family had been repressed). Perhaps this motive really did play a role in the behavior of certain individuals. Meanwhile, Professor Emanuil Naumovych Berger, a Jew, taught pathophysiology in good Ukrainian. I developed a friendly relationship with him: he was interested in the philosophical questions of medicine. This is not surprising, as pathophysiology really did provide material for philosophical reflections (structure and function, norm and pathology, etc.). But in order to think about such questions, one needed to have a high level of intellectual culture. In addition, we were united by a passion for classical music: he, like me, collected records of classical music, and this was another topic for our conversations (I had brought my record player and my suitcase of records to Ternopil).

In connection with Director Ohii’s insistence on teaching in Ukrainian, I recall his announcement about the removal of Ye. K. Lazarenko from the post of rector of Lviv University for “misuse of funds” (to use a popular phrase from the speech of modern Ukrainian politicians). In this case, as in many modern cases where a person is removed as undesirable (for political or selfish motives), one thing is said, but another is meant. The main instance of “misuse” of funds in Lazarenko’s case was the spending of funds on equipping the Franko and Shevchenko study rooms. What they meant was the same label of “nationalist,” the greatest manifestation of which was the insistence on teaching in Ukrainian at the university.

I had to admit that the totalitarian system with its “internationalism” (in the sense of Russification) was capable of extending its influence to the territory of Western Ukraine. Some of the young people, it seems, were too quick to forget their parents’ struggle. I recall that one of the postgraduate students of local origin even assessed my position in our disputes as nationalism (in the negative sense of the word). True, when she met me in Kyiv in the 90s, she apologized to me for those past characterizations. And I think this was done quite sincerely; if not, she could easily have avoided this conversation with me, by not “recognizing” me during our meeting on Maidan Nezalezhnosti [Independence Square].

And yet I felt that the majority of the student youth was in solidarity with me in my appreciation of our native culture and language. Undoubtedly, an important circumstance was that most of the students were from Western Ukraine. But I was glad that my position was understood and accepted not only by the youth of Western Ukraine. And not only by Ukrainians, but also by those who belonged to national minorities. At that time, I thought that the problem of national minorities could be solved at the level of cultural-personal autonomy. In short, my internationalism was fundamentally different from the official one. Still, perhaps in the East or in the South, I would have had serious conflicts. There, I would have had to exert much more effort for people to recognize that at the basis of their attitude towards Ukrainian cultural identity and language lie stereotypes of intolerance, cultivated by Russian chauvinism. And perhaps I would have encountered insurmountable obstacles in my teaching and educational activities there.

The attentiveness with which the students listened to my lectures on ethics is forever etched in my memory. Never again did I have such a watchful student audience. It seemed to me that the students sensed my risky courage: they must have felt that I felt like I was in a trench at the rostrum—my hints were too transparent. The silence in the auditorium was filled with tension.

* * *

Sometimes I encountered an unexpected, unpredictable reaction from the student audience. For some time, I taught some topics from historical materialism (I had the opportunity to select the topics I wanted to teach). In one of the lectures, dedicated to the critique of revisionist social concepts, I used extensive quotations from the texts of the “revisionists”: about the bureaucracy as a class, about the absence of democracy, and, therefore, of true socialism in the USSR, etc. But after each quotation, at first a few voices, and then a chorus of students began to repeat the word “correct.” Continuing to read, I thought about how to conclude my quotation, protecting the students and myself from the inevitable “investigations.” So I formulated my conclusion something like this: “I understand your sharp reaction as a manifestation of your rejection of such flaws in our social life as bureaucratism, excessive centralism, and so on.” Perhaps, as was customary in the situation at that time, I spoke about the need for the democratization of public life, since true socialism is unthinkable without democracy, etc. In short, the idea of socialism with a human face. In my heart, I was, of course, happy for my students, I truly loved them and was grateful to them for their understanding of the subtexts of my lectures.

The good thing was that teaching at the Ternopil Medical Institute was free from petty supervision: for this, I am greatly indebted primarily to the then-head of the department, F. F. Cherniavskyi. He usually demonstrated great principle, and his loud voice, when he was “instructing” someone, could be heard throughout the corridor. Since he had the habit of reprimanding lecturers in certain situations with this same “loud” voice, some of the lecturers of our Department of Marxism-Leninism would get into sharp arguments with him. Perhaps twice in my entire time of teaching, he tried to start such conversations with me. But I deliberately chose the position of listening to him calmly, so that when he finally finished shouting, I could just as calmly explain my position on some issue. Sensing that he had failed to “get a rise out of me,” he would switch to a normal conversation. As I later became convinced, these reprimands served a protective, demonstrative role. For me, it was important to preserve at least a relative opportunity to include educational inserts in my lectures, in which I actually sought to undermine, as far as possible, certain stereotypes of official ideology. And the fact that Cherniavskyi did not burden me with control over the content of my lectures was the most important thing for me. Still, he could not tolerate my procrastination in joining the party. He “convinced” me with an impeccable argument: “all lecturers in the departments of Marxism-Leninism are ideological workers.” If so, then so be it. He and Leonid Kanishechenko, the secretary of the Institute’s party organization, signed my recommendation for joining the party. The most important role, however, was played by the almost unanimous laudatory feedback from students on my lectures. This allowed me to structure my course quite freely, effectively ignoring the content of officially approved programs.

I also started teaching a course on aesthetics, but did not have time to develop it. I decided to start an aesthetics study group. The students showed interest: I tried to organize listening sessions of classical music in the group, but the lack of quality audio equipment was an obstacle.

* * *

Relationships with Students. The Wall Newspaper. I really did establish very friendly relationships with the students. An important and even dear sign of this reciprocity for me was a memorable evening when a large group of students from one of the courses I lectured to invited themselves over to my place. And so, one of the two rooms in our apartment (I had already brought my mother to Ternopil by then) was filled with young people. We talked and sang songs. Unfortunately, we had to do it without the full force of our young voices, because my sick mother was in the next room. But for me, this visit and this evening have remained in my memory as one of my cherished memories.

The head of the department described my relationship with the students as “overly familiar.” As far as I remember, he used this word in a situation that could have led to my dismissal (if someone else had been in his place). It happened like this. It was most likely the Ternopil regional committee of the Komsomol that insisted on its own candidate from among the students for the post of secretary of the institute’s Komsomol organization: this, however, was a young man whom the student body did not like. I was present at the meeting where the election was to take place, and I already knew the students’ mood. The institute’s rector, the secretary of the party organization (who was then the head of our department), and a woman representing the Ternopil regional Komsomol committee were present at the meeting—so, very influential people. And yet, if I’m not mistaken, some of the students (despite the very persistent recommendations of the “superiors”!) still spoke out against the proposed candidate. But the “superiors” insisted. I felt that the students were being forced: the students had entered into a conflict with the principle of “democratic centralism.” And in this situation, acting rather spontaneously, I raised my hand and was given the opportunity to speak from the rostrum. I spoke sharply, deliberately addressing the head of the department, although, as far as I remember, it was mostly the rector who insisted on this candidacy. After my speech, it became clear that the students would “fail” the candidate, which is what happened. But, to Cherniavskyi’s credit, he did not assess this attack of mine against him as a reason to change his attitude toward me and take revenge on me.

It is worth mentioning Leonid Kanishechenko here with a kind word, an associate professor of the department, a lecturer of political economy; for some time, he was the secretary of the institute’s party organization. On his initiative, I headed the editorial board of the student wall newspaper. By that time, I already knew some talented students with corresponding ideological orientations. So a small circle of like-minded people gathered: Heorhii Petruk-Popyk (already a poet at that time, and later a public and political figure), Stepan Babii (a novice poet at the time, later he published his poetry, now the head of the Vinnytsia regional organization of the Writers’ Union), Yaroslav Bodnar (an artist, now head of the Department of Pathological Anatomy), and others.

Before us, the newspaper was made very simply: narrow strips of paper were inserted into a wooden frame, a ready-made template with the name of the newspaper. We removed this wooden structure and arranged our material on a large piece of Whatman paper with good artistic design. We devoted a large part of our newspaper to a literary page, where we mostly featured the poetry of Vasyl Symonenko, Lina Kostenko, Ivan Drach, and others. We tried to choose poems with patriotic content. However, after some time, this activity of ours became an object of attention from the KGB. One day, Leonid called me in for a “talk.” When I entered the room, I saw an unfamiliar middle-aged man there. I don’t remember how he introduced himself to me or how he started his conversation. I only remember that he spread out several issues of our wall newspapers in front of me and began to ask where we got the literary material published in the newspaper. It was not difficult to foresee such a check: in response, I said that all these poems were taken from books published by state publishing houses. The man expressed his demand in the form of a request, that I should give him (through Leonid) the books from which we took the poems for the wall newspapers—for verification. Which I did.

I liked Leonid for his intelligent pragmatism, behind which I sensed a respect for certain moral values and humanity. In the role of secretary of the institute’s party organization, he avoided any demagoguery, conducted meetings striving, as far as possible, to shorten them in time and to consider only issues that concerned the improvement of the educational process. Later, Leonid became the rector of the Ternopil Institute of National Economy. And in the early 90s—the Deputy Minister of Higher and Secondary Special Education; I visited him several times then to talk.

In this story about my teaching and relationships with students, I leave aside individual blunders, failures, and curious situations I got into due to lack of experience. In general, I managed to avoid serious conflicts with both the students and the Institute’s administration. But I will mention two events, one conflicting, the other unpleasant.

* * *

Reason and Religious Faith. This conflict was caused by a story related to a student (I have now forgotten her last name) who was suspected of belonging to a sect (as far as I remember, Baptists). It was said that her mother belonged to this sect. I knew this student, I liked her, and the talk of her “sectarianism” increased my interest in her. So I would occasionally talk to her, when I happened to meet her on the street. Not doubting her ethics (and assuming that she really did have religious beliefs), I tried to persuade her to appreciate Ukrainian national-cultural identity. She, in response, said that for her the most important thing was the moral and spiritual foundation of a person. To this I replied that one does not contradict the other. And that the moral and cultural-national aspects of personality are interconnected.

I conceived of the universalism of Christianity not only as an appreciation of the dignity of the individual and the equality of all people in their dignity, but also as a recognition of the value of the cultural identity of every nation. Love for one’s neighbor does not mean the demand that the other be like you. This, in my view, are elementary truths of Christianity. But to this day, not only in the practice of the Russian Orthodox Church, but also in Russian Orthodox theology and philosophy, the consequences of what Berdyaev in “The Origin and Meaning of Russian Communism” called the nationalization of Christianity in Russian Orthodoxy, in the Russian Orthodox consciousness, have not been overcome. This is evidenced by the intolerance towards Ukrainian cultural identity and, in particular, the language, with which most supporters of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate are infected. Behind this lies not the affirmation of Christian values, but an orientation towards ethnophyletism (the absorption of a weaker nation by a stronger one). And in a broader perspective, we are dealing not with Christianity, but with an activity aimed at building a New Babylon. It is surprising that in modern Ukraine, various Christian sects also distribute religious literature predominantly in the Russian language.

So, one day Cherniavskyi called me to his office and said that I had to give an exam to the aforementioned student. And since she has religious beliefs, I was to give her a failing grade. It was obvious that someone’s initiative to expel the student from the institute was behind this. Perhaps this initiative did not even come from the medical institute’s administration. To expel her from the institute, she needed to be given several (I think, at least three) failing grades, regardless of the subjects. But, apparently, the lecturers of medical sciences did not give in to persuasion: the student studied with “excellent” and “good” grades. The exam in atheism was the most suitable for achieving the goal. From the fact that Cherniavskyi turned to me, I concluded that the atheism lecturer, Vasyl Ivanovych Shanaida, had refused to give the student a failing grade. In a conversation with me, he said that the student knew the course on atheism (history of religion, major world religions, etc.) no worse, and even better, than others, including being familiar with the arguments of atheists. I told Cherniavskyi that I refused to administer the exam in atheism. A few days later, the deputy director of the institute summoned me to his office and formulated his demand in a categorical form: either I give her a failing grade, or I would be fired from my job at the Institute. I replied that even under such conditions I refused to administer the exam. The threat of dismissal was not carried out. But they did manage to give the student the required number of failing grades: the administration had too many means of pressure at its disposal—dismissal from a post, obtaining an apartment, defending a dissertation, etc. Later, the fact of her expulsion from the Institute was reported in one of the religious magazines. And, probably, the regional authorities received some kind of warning from above: especially since there was no indisputable evidence of the student’s membership in a religious community. Suddenly, a woman from the regional party committee came and wanted to have a conversation with me, to find out from me whether anyone had forced me to give the student a failing grade. I assessed this conversation as a move in a game unknown to me. And therefore, I refused to talk about this topic. In the end, the student was reinstated at the Institute, with her simultaneous transfer, at her own request, to another medical institute.

* * *

I don’t remember the specific circumstances related to my inclusion in a group that was to carry out a trip for the purpose of “atheistic education.” These were regular trips by groups of several people, which involved lecturers of medical and social sciences. In my situation, there were two possible courses of action: the first, morally the best, was to refuse to participate in such an action. This would have aroused suspicion, and, accordingly, would have prompted investigations, in various ways, into my attitude towards religion. This would have complicated my teaching. The second, worse one: to think carefully about what and how to speak. The lecturers of medical sciences, to avoid conflict with believers, chose a completely innocent and proven method—explaining the natural causes of diseases, as opposed to various kinds of superstitions. But when we arrived in the village (I have now forgotten its name), and it was my turn to speak at the village club, I said something very inept about the relationship between reason and faith. In response to my “speech,” indignant voices were heard saying that “we don’t need this.” So, sympathizing in my soul with these predominantly elderly people who had been gathered for a “meeting with doctors,” I left the rostrum, ashamed.

* * *

I spent another summer in my village with my mother. Each time, I met with Yevhen Proniuk to discuss the political situation and to get some samvydav materials from him. I was given the promised apartment, I moved my mother to Ternopil, and we sold our house in the village. I understood that it would not be easy for her in her new environment: and indeed, in the courtyard, with the exception of one woman, she had almost no one to talk to. I was not able to help this, nor to properly care for her daily needs. Our apartment was located in a building not far from the Institute, on what was then Lenin Street: the door from the building opened into a courtyard, opposite which was the police station.

I recalled this police station in connection with an incident. Every time I had to face some injustice face-to-face, I felt that it was difficult for me to refrain from interfering. One evening, as I was walking down Lenin Street, I saw two stocky, well-fed men in front of me, dragging a boy: they were rudely cursing him (in Russian), and he was protesting (in Ukrainian). And although I did not know the exact reason for the actions of these two men, I could not help but rush to the defense of that young boy: here, undoubtedly, national feeling played a role—a far too typical picture. Of course, I could have been mistaken: who knows what this boy might have done. And yet he did not look like a hooligan. Be that as it in may, after my intervention, instead of explaining anything to me, the two turned on me—they grabbed my arm, declaring: “Let’s go to the police station.” I agreed, so we arrived at the police station opposite our entrance. They asked for my address and my position: I said that I lived opposite and asked them not to detain me for long, as my mother was seriously ill. One of the policemen decided to check the truthfulness of my testimony, went to the apartment. He returned from there with my mother, who had rushed to the police station to rescue me. With her heart condition, these worries were the last thing she needed. But the attitude towards me changed sharply after I said that I was a lecturer at the Department of Marxism-Leninism (an ideological cadre of the regional party committee!). So we left the police station.

* * *

An opportunity arose to go to a six-month professional development course at Kyiv University, and I set off for Kyiv with my mother. I was allocated a place in a dormitory on Chyhoryna Street, and my mother, fortunately, was taken in by our relatives (my cousin Halia, daughter of my aunt Fedora). I was glad that they treated my mother very well and she had the opportunity to communicate with her relatives. It was already 1965, arrests had taken place, which became known primarily thanks to V. Chornovil’s book “Portraits of Twenty Criminals.” My studies on the courses consisted of attending lectures and preparing for the candidate exams. During my studies, I passed the candidate exams in philosophy and a foreign language.

I returned to Ternopil when Ihor Gereta had already been released from the investigative detention center. I had almost no contact with him (as, by the way, with other “exposed” persons in Kyiv). This would only have hindered doing something useful—I was primarily thinking of my student audience and the distribution of samvydav. Ihor did not need this “division of labor” explained to him. On the contrary, he had independently thought through the usefulness of such a division. I understood this from one of his phrases, said to me during a chance meeting: he was walking in a small group through the central square of Ternopil and, perhaps, in this company there was someone I knew, because I joined them for a few minutes. I remember his phrase that I had a good opportunity to influence the consciousness of the students and that this was very important. We understood each other without unnecessary explanations.

After Ihor Gereta’s release from the investigative detention center, I had a chance to speak with him briefly. This was a chance meeting in the lobby of the Ternopil theater. I remember, as soon as I started talking to him, Ihor immediately took precautionary measures, moving me to a safer corner of the lobby. Ihor and I met again only during our trip (mine with Vira) to Ternopil (1999), and we were both very happy about our meeting after a break of several decades.

* * *

It was a surprise for me to receive a message from Kyiv University from V. T. Pavlov. He informed me that there was an opportunity to enter the full-time postgraduate program for the next academic year (from September 1966) in the Department of Ethics, Aesthetics, and Logic, with a specialization in logic. Of course, I considered such a prospect attractive. I had almost no opportunity to engage in scholarly work: the heavy teaching load consumed almost all my time. But I could not imagine how I would solve the housing problem in Kyiv. After all, I had to take my mother to Kyiv as well. My advantage was that the size of the postgraduate scholarship, according to the rules at that time, was quite high—higher for those who entered the postgraduate program after working. But still, it was not enough to rent an apartment and for food.

Nevertheless, I sent the documents, and then received a summons for one entrance exam—in my specialty (logic). I had passed two exams with “excellent” grades at the professional development courses. Still, by the beginning of the academic year, I had not received notification of my admission and had already started teaching. But in mid-September, Cherniavskyi suddenly gave me the notification of my admission to the postgraduate program. But he set a condition: I would be released only if I surrendered the apartment. Of course, I was not sure that I would return to work at the Ternopil Medical Institute again. But I could have kept the apartment for myself, renting it out to some tenant. However, I think this would have been difficult and would have led to complications: it would have required a lot of red tape and it was unknown how it would end. In short, I chose the easier path. True, I had some hopes for my relatives in Kyiv—for Aunt Vasylyna and for my brother Pavlo. My sister Liuba did not have the opportunity to house my mother in her one-room apartment.

Meanwhile, I was sorry to part with Ternopil, a city I had come to like very much—the people, the architecture, the lake, the absence of large factories. I was sorry to leave my students as well. There was another, purely personal and intimate circumstance, though the prospects of my marriage were very unclear. I made my later decision to end our relationship in an emotionally charged situation: in connection with the distribution of samvydav, I always felt the presence of a threat. The question arose again and again: what woman, becoming my wife, could go through life’s complications (including my possible arrest), how could she withstand the trials. Not every woman is capable of this. And although such a prospect was only probable, there were growing tendencies in the social atmosphere that suggested to me that it was unavoidable.

Chapter VI. Postgraduate Studies (1966-1969). Institute of Philosophy

(1970-1972)

If one can judge the spiritual development of a person by how they comprehend their life, then, obviously, one can judge a people by how they remember and understand their past.

Yevhen Sverstiuk. A Cathedral in Scaffolding.

1. Postgraduate Studies (1966-1969)

Daily Life. So, having arrived in Kyiv a month late, from October 1st I was enrolled in the postgraduate program at the Department of Ethics, Aesthetics, and Logic of Kyiv University, specializing in logic. The material side of my life during my postgraduate studies turned out to be difficult. At first, Aunt Vasylyna agreed for my mother to live in their apartment. I myself settled in a dormitory on Lomonosova Street. But I soon had to look for an apartment for the two of us. Even now, I regret not daring to rent a more expensive apartment, because I was afraid that there would be too little money left for our food. I could not count on any help: my sister Liuba did not have the opportunity to support us significantly at that time.

So I agreed to Yevhen Proniuk’s suggestion—to rent a small room in the attic of a private house on Baumana Street, not far from the Proniuks’ house. The advantage was the ease of communication with Yevhen: the Proniuks’ apartment had previously been a place for our meetings. I want to express my gratitude to Halynka Didkivska, Yevhen’s wife, and to the now-deceased Halyna Polikarpivna for their kindness, for the friendly atmosphere, for the dishes with which the women tried to treat me. The room I rented, unfortunately, turned out to be cold. And my mother, whose body was swelling, suffered additional hardship. Leaving her for the day to work in the reading room, I reproached myself for this abandonment of hers.

Sometime in the first months of 1968, my mother’s health deteriorated significantly. She needed hospital treatment. The situation was complicated by the fact that my mother did not have Kyiv residency registration. But the landlord of the house where we rented a room managed to arrange for my mother to be sent to a hospital in Pushcha-Vodytsia. In the summer, the doctors said that they could not do anything to help and could no longer keep my mother in the hospital. And the landlord had warned me even before that he would not be able to rent the room to us any longer. My brother Pavlo, in this situation, agreed to take my mother in. In fact, there was no other way out.

My brother’s “Khrushchovka” had two rooms (one very small), a toilet combined with a bathroom, and tiny hallway and kitchen. My brother’s family—my brother, his wife, and his high-school-aged son Vitya—had to somehow arrange themselves to provide shelter for my mother. So my brother and his wife slept in the small room, while my mother was placed in the larger one, which also contained the bed of my nephew Vitya.

Vitya, a high school student at the time, spoke Russian with his parents, who at home spoke only Ukrainian. I later began to talk to him about national issues, gave him some samvydav materials, and in one situation he kept them for me. But he could never overcome his language habit and switch to using Ukrainian outside of school lessons. After my arrest, some criminal elements got hold of him, and he was convicted. After my return from imprisonment, I found him in a situation where, according to his mother, his old “friends” or new ones, acquired in prison, were trying to “involve” him in something. Kateryna, his mother (I did not see my brother Pavlo alive again), tried to lock him in the apartment to protect him from these “friends.” One day he was found dead at the bottom of the building: I do not think his fall from the balcony was the result of his attempt to get out of the apartment. I am more inclined to think it was suicide. Was the KGB involved in this life story? The impossibility of having reliable “grounds” for an answer to this question inevitably expanded the scope of suspicion. One way or another, we are dealing with a tragedy.

My mother’s legs were swelling, the skin was cracking, and it was necessary to re-bandage them every two or three hours, and to hang the gauze bandages on the balcony to dry. My brother or sister-in-law could not do this tedious work; they were at work. So I was forced to move into the room next to my mother, sleeping on a cot. There was a large (vacuum tube) radio in the room: I tried to listen at least in snippets to the reports of “enemy” voices about the events in Czechoslovakia—“in snippets,” because it disturbed my mother. On September 6, 1968, my mother died: she stretched out her hand to me in farewell. Of my friends, Oleksandr Pohorilyi and Vadym Skurativskyi came to the funeral. Time, which heals each of us in such situations, eventually dulled the sharpness of the experiences. And the sharp stings of memories that target the feeling of guilt became blunted. All that was left was to be thankful for birth and survival, for the gift of spiritual elements, which is called a gift of God, often forgetting that this divine seed is passed on to us by an earthly woman.

The department staff showed their consideration, collecting money to help me. I am grateful to them for this kindness. For some time after my mother’s death, I lived in the dormitory on Lomonosova Street. Then Vadym Skurativskyi suggested that I move into an apartment he had found on Kotsiubynskoho Street, 15. The landlady, Liudmyla Vasylieva, occupied two rooms, one of which she agreed to rent to us. It was a small room with two beds and one window. A time of relative stability in my postgraduate studies began. I lived in this room until my marriage.

* * *

Marriage. I met Vira Hrytsenko at the end of my university studies. From the time of that first meeting until 1970, we saw each other by chance once or twice. I developed a feeling of affection then: I remembered her for her idealistic mindset, she seemed to me absorbed in the world of her thoughts and dreams. In 1970-71, we met often. I was impressed not only by her civic and national self-awareness, but also by her stubborn resistance to external pressure. At the same time, her communication with people was always full of kindness and benevolence—a readiness to help others. She, like me, saw the fulfillment of her civic duty in enlightenment: this, to the best of her ability and opportunity, she did in her pedagogical activity. Here she showed wisdom, avoiding conflicts with the school authorities if it provided an opportunity to influence the consciousness of the students.

On our wedding day, June 6, 1971, we went to the Shevchenko monument to lay flowers. The sixth day of the month turned out to be prophetic, because a year and one month later, on July 6, we parted for a long time. Having married Vira, I moved into her room—one of many, located in a long corridor with a shared kitchen. This “kommunalka” was inhabited mainly by teachers from Kyiv schools. But right opposite our room lived the Rohovych family, Myroslav and Nadiika, originally from the Lviv region. Myroslav, an expert in Latin, was a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, working on the history of philosophy in Ukraine (during my imprisonment, the Rohovych couple moved to Lviv). The only window of our room looked out into the forest, and from it one could see the sunset (the building was next to the forest, then the last one on Darnytskyi Boulevard).

* * *

An Attempt at Detachment. An attempt at “detachment” is an effort to look at how and what is said in these memoirs about the life path of the main character of this story as if the author were talking about another person, not himself. The plan of these memoirs, if the author was guided by some plan, is probably to show, on the example of one life, how a person, “thrown” into real space and time, strives for personal self-determination. This self-determination also includes the achievement of socially important goals. Impressions of the external world, as well as internal experiences and states, are presented in these memoirs through the prism of subjective reflections. The world that appears in this way—that is, through the internal experience of the person—is conventionally called “phenomenal” in philosophy. Attempts to understand the peculiarities of one’s own subjectivity and attempts to explain these peculiarities by some objective circumstances, although present, the author’s main attention is focused on internal experience.

A memoir is not a diary or other record made “in the heat of the moment.” The usefulness of such records lies in the fact that they allow one to restore the primary interpretation of external and internal events. Consciousness, as its etymology indicates (in particular, its Greek and Latin prototypes, conscientia—co-knowledge), is an accompanying knowledge: a person not only perceives something, but at the same time is aware of the very fact of perception. This accompanying knowledge includes a “tinge” of subjectivity. We have a “tinge” of thought and feeling especially in the case of events that are important to the person—those that for some reason attract their attention. This “tinge” of subjectivity is what is called here “primary interpretation.” To it also belongs that accompanying knowledge or “tidings,” which we call the word “conscience.”

A memoir, unlike records made “in the heat of the moment,” is a secondary interpretation. In it, what has already once been in the field of our consciousness is reconsidered. The sparkle of morning dew in early childhood, the smile of a person dear to us, the benevolent act of a friend in any memoir appear to our consciousness accompanied by those meanings that our subjectivity once imposed on them. The advantage of a memoir, as a secondary interpretation, lies in its ability to grasp meanings in their nascent state: after all, they can be noticed if we know what “grew” from them. In addition, a memoir is attractive for the unpredictability of the later movement of our initial insights—the meanings with which these insights are filled or which they “thread” onto themselves, like strings of beads.

* * *

In his postgraduate years, the main character of these memoirs had just reached one-third of his life. But the beginning of his life path (“bad”—war, the ruin of daily life and traditions) seemed to predetermine the central problem of his philosophical interests: to try to find a theory capable of directing people’s efforts against the destructive onslaught of chaos and absurdity in their life environment. And, consequently, in their soul. This is not about those elements of the chaotic or elemental that are one of the sources of the renewal of life forms. Like the “wind” that in B.-I. Antonych “blows from the centuries, winged, free and unceasing.” In these memoirs, it is mostly about chaos as a source of absurdity. The theme of absurdity, of the loss of the meaning of life, in the 20th century becomes the subject of attention of psychological research (e.g., in the so-called “summit psychology” of Frankl), in Western philosophy, literature, and art. But the peculiarities of Ukrainian history in the 20th century gave this problem a national poignancy.

Undoubtedly, the line between the meaningful and the absurd cannot be clear and unchanging. Moreover, the absence of a ready, predetermined line is precisely what forces a person to constantly rethink already created ideas. Cultural and intellectual tradition and the Word of God as a source of meaning, on the one hand, and the comprehension and creation of new meanings by the person, on the other, form two poles that feed each other. The separation of one of these poles from the other threatens with absurdity.

So it is quite obvious that the awareness of the problem of indefiniteness (as formlessness, absurdity, etc.), as opposed to definiteness, is not a personal discovery of the author of these memoirs. One can even note that Western civilization and its philosophical tradition, in contrast to the Eastern one (especially Indian), highly values definiteness. But even within the Mediterranean-European intellectual tradition, the answers to the problem of definiteness-indefiniteness differed in different historical periods and in different directions of philosophical thought. After all, alongside rationalism, with its orientation towards definiteness, accompanying currents or tendencies (more often, however, peripheral) were intuitionism and mysticism. And this was in all periods, including the 20th century.

A purely individual feature of the author of these memoirs can be considered perhaps only a sharp awareness of the problem of definiteness-indefiniteness in the context of the Ukrainian social and spiritual situation. Definiteness, represented by rationalism, universalism, and objectivism, in the Western philosophical tradition underwent absolutization in the “modern” era in disciplinary ideologies, with their contempt for the intuitive and subjective. So, if a certain balance is to be found between definiteness (rationalism) and indefiniteness (intuitionism, mysticism), then this should encourage a critical assessment of the mystical components in Eastern patristics, the combination of the incompatible in the “Baroque man,” intuitionism and spiritualism in Skovoroda’s “philosophy of the heart,” etc.

* * *

The heightened weight of subjectivity in the Ukrainian cultural tradition is represented, perhaps, most vividly in the predominance of imagination, feeling (“cordiality”), contemplation (“everything goes, everything passes”), and aestheticism in general. It is known that Ukrainians are most easily united by a song, and not by the ability to unite for the sake of successful collective action. This significantly distinguishes the Ukrainian cultural tradition from the cultures and mentalities of those European peoples who have been influenced by Western patristics and scholasticism. How to preserve some positive elements of this “aestheticism” and “cordiality” while ensuring the acquisition of important features of a modern nation—this is the main problem. To formulate it crudely, without going into finer distinctions. The Kyivan-Mohyla Academy was an attempt to make up for the weakened rational element, but this “union” project was not completed. After the Pereiaslav Council, its implementation became impossible—due to political circumstances.

The acuteness of this problem for the Ukrainian situation of the last two centuries is conditioned by the process of modernization. Modernization, and the formation of nations associated with it, radically changed the pre-modern context of the 17th century, in which the presence of Christian values still gave hope for a harmonious combination of the heterogeneous in the “Ukrainian Baroque man.” In the 20th century—as traditional rural culture was destroyed—the cultural formlessness of the Ukrainian person, in whatever terms it may be characterized (“between West and East,” etc.), degenerates into a chimerical mentality.

Poetry reacts most sensitively to the Ukrainian socio-spiritual situation. These reactions in the poetry of the 60s are not only sharp, but even dramatic: Mykola Kholodnyi (the poem “Today”), Ivan Sokulskyi (“A dead people approaches with an absent face”), Hryhorii Chubai (“The Vertep”), and others. Paradigmatic from this point of view is Ihor Rymaruk’s poem “On That Land” (with a dedication to Bohdan Boychuk), in which the theme receives a calm, detached conclusion. This calmness has as its source the hope of achieving the minimally necessary harmonization of the heterogeneous in the affirmation of national-cultural identity. This is followed by a grotesque-caricatural rethinking of this theme in the verbal, visual, and audiovisual art of the 90s.

And today, at the beginning of the third millennium, the word “self-determination”—personal, national-cultural, political—painfully hits the sore spot of the Ukrainian mentality. An important component of the personal self-determination of a modern person is national self-determination, on which the political depends. And the Ukrainian person, like Ukrainian society, retains in itself a mixture of the pre-modern and the modern. And from the pre-modern, not the best survives, but the worst: the feudal appreciation of loyal servitude, the preference in politics for clan-family, kinship, and regional ties, the tendency to act “by understandings” and not by law, etc. Whatever terms are used to characterize such a mentality—“Provincialism,” “Little Russian-ness,” “Kaidashism,” “Creolism,” etc.—the same signs of formlessness are at the center of attention: an escape from personal and national self-determination as a choice of a positive life perspective. “…Little Russian-ness means such an internal-value orientation of a person, such socio-cultural attitudes, which are associated with a constant readiness to flee from one’s own Self… Little Russian-ness is an internal factor of Ukrainian existence, which causes its numerous breakdowns, the instability and incompleteness of norms, the blurredness of values and attitudes, internal unstructuredness….” In one of his television interviews, Yurii Andrukhovych remarked that he is, of course, a postmodernist, since we are all postmodernists today, because we live in a postmodern society. If we set aside the touch of a joke and take the phrase seriously, then in response one could remark: to be “post-,” you need to have something after which you can put the word “post-.”

* * *

From the Theory of Speech Acts to Practical Philosophy. The above explains the socio-practical motivations that influenced my choice of intellectual preferences. I mean an inclination towards analytical philosophy as a 20th-century movement in whose lexicon the word “meaning” is central. This is not about some new fad. It is more appropriate to consider this in the context of the broader cultural and intellectual movement which in the 60s continued previous efforts to overcome the provincialism of Ukrainian culture, caused by political circumstances. The point was and still is to find one’s natural place in the broad stream of the European cultural tradition, in which currents of nationally distinct cultures interact and resonate. Isolation from this stream causes a lack of self-knowledge—to the point of not understanding the meanings of one’s own language, at least in its intellectual part. It is clear that in such a case, the movement “towards Europe” means finding oneself. Perhaps “finding” is better than “returning to oneself,” although there are obvious losses of what was once achieved. Including in the search for ways of national self-determination. This means asserting one’s national-cultural identity against hostile forces interested in preventing the Ukrainian nation from coming into being. But with a clear awareness that, besides external forces, the internal enemy is important (if not the most important)—a lack of value orientations, inertia, indifference, and mimicry.

In the 60s, a high appreciation for definiteness of thought and speech led to my sharp rejection of dialectics. This sharpness was largely provoked by the official version of dialectical materialism. In it, I saw a continuation of sophistical dialectics with its relativism, which the “new class” used as a means of justifying a cynical political practice. And, finally, I saw in it a means of corrupting reason itself. Including the destruction of fundamental values—an important component of “wisdom.”

But the transition in my postgraduate years to a later branch of analytical philosophy—the so-called Ordinary Language Philosophy—exposed me to new problems associated with the way of thinking known today as philosophical postmodernism. After all, the criteria of meaning in different “language games” (behind which stand different types of activity and even “forms of life”—Lebensformen) can be different. And therefore, to speak of meaning as something unified is unjustified: at most, one can speak of a “family resemblance” of different “language games.” In fact, this called into question the traditional aim of philosophy to offer a holistic worldview through the a priori synthesis of the conclusions of different sciences and types of practical activity. And this threatened the destruction of traditional semantic wholes—the meaning of the world, history, human life, and so on. But this problem of the “disintegration of meaning” rather “hangs” over my head (entering into the modernism-postmodernism dialogue becomes a subject of reflection only in the 90s).

One of the prospects for going beyond the narrow limits of linguistic philosophy was the transition to the logic of practical reasoning. And then, more broadly, to practical philosophy, the core of which is the philosophy of values and ethics. My interest in the logic of practical reasoning already relates to the time of my work at the Institute of Philosophy. A lucky find for me was David Gauthier’s book “Practical Reasoning” (David P. Gauthier, Practical Reasoning, Oxford, 1963), which was (and still is) in the library of the Institute of Philosophy. It is clear that a book that we find or that accidentally falls into our hands becomes an important impetus for our thinking mainly when it answers our already-matured questions. Any practical action—both individual and collective—requires taking into account the situational context. This transition from the analysis of speech acts to the clarification of the logic of practical reasoning also corresponded to my civic aspirations: Socrates’ answer to Socrates’ question.

Existentialism had a certain influence on my understanding of philosophy from the point of view of practical philosophy. But the flaw of existentialism was the so-called subjective understanding of truth and value. This to some extent applies even to religious existentialism. It is impossible to go into a more detailed assessment of existentialism from the point of view of the subjectivity-intersubjectivity problem here. What is important is something else: this aspect of existentialism at the end of the 60s, as will be clear from the further narrative, was recognized, at least in a narrow circle of Ukrainian intellectuals. So, if we talk about influences, my transition to the problems of practical philosophy was influenced not so much by existentialism as by the need to expand and supplement the approach proposed by the logic of practical reasoning.

Although the emphasis on self-knowledge and self-improvement is a well-known motive of philosophical and religious thought, internal perfection, not realized in actions, has an obvious flaw. We see an exaggeration of the role of internal self-improvement in Stoicism. In the religions of Brahmanism and Buddhism, there is a clear tendency to consider union with God, achieved through meditation, as the last resort. Meanwhile, in Christianity, God sends the person who comes to him back to Earth: after all, true love for God presupposes love for one’s neighbor. And this is an active love. Francis of Assisi, after converting to Christianity, gives away his possessions and goes to the leprosariums to help the suffering. It is well known from experience that a person who spends a lot of time in prayer is not necessarily inclined to good deeds. This is not about mindless activism, as we see with the word “struggle” in Bolshevism. Let’s recall Tvardovsky of the 60s: “Struggle—they deified it from morning till night, and pitted each other against each other, just so it would go on.” But charity in many cases requires activity—intellectual, educational, or missionary. And in critical cases, also the use of physical force for self-defense.

The image of the archangel slaying the dragon symbolizes this activity as a struggle against evil. In Christian thought, there is the theme of tyrannicide: some Christian theologians believed that the people have the right to overthrow by force tyrants who act contrary to Christian commandments. Although power has a divine origin, rulers are obliged to adhere to the principles of Christian ethics. And although “the deeds of the good will be renewed, the deeds of the wicked will perish,” to consider Christianity as devoid of an orientation towards active charity is probably (if not obviously) a misunderstanding of the spirit of Christian teaching. But the presence of good intentions must be complemented by thinking through the prerequisites that ensure the practical effectiveness of a good action. Thus, it is necessary to weigh the consequences of an action, because otherwise the probability of wasted, “lost forces” increases.

Thought ultimately becomes defined in a corresponding course of action, which requires taking the context into account. It is true that philosophers mostly limit themselves to inventing ideas in the silence of their studies. As a rule, other people use their ideas in practical activity. However, in special situations, the philosopher cannot avoid practical action. He cannot, due to the nature of his philosophy, which includes attention to the choice of value orientations and the idea of his own responsibility for the state of society and the course of history. So, in my intellectual evolution, I see three main transitions: from the theory of speech acts to the logic of practical reasoning, and then to practical philosophy, the core of which is the philosophy of values as a basis for grounding ethics. But the transition to practical philosophy, which, in addition to the philosophy of values, also includes the theory of communicative action and the philosophy of understanding (hermeneutics)—this is already the period of the 90s. True, even the edited-distorted article “A Critique of Scientistic Conceptions of Scientific and Technical Progress” points to this transition to the philosophy of values. But during my postgraduate studies and for a year and a half in the 70s, I was already forced to use the logic of practical reasoning in my practical actions, to speak with a touch of irony.

* * *

Communication. The head of the Department of Ethics, Aesthetics, and Logic was Viacheslav Kudin. He treated me “normally”: I did not feel any ill will from him. But since I was studying logic, not aesthetics, I was on the periphery of his attention. As a student, I listened to Kudin’s lectures on aesthetics. Most students found them interesting, although after a lecture it was hard to say what it had given you. Kudin had a masterly lecturing style, he knew how to pick interesting episodes from the lives of artists, but aesthetics and the philosophy of art—in the sense of certain concepts and ideas—was almost absent from his presentations.

But at that time, there was probably no person in Ukraine who could teach a course in aesthetics and the philosophy of art at a relatively high level. I mean a lecturer who could, on the one hand, provide an appropriate level of theoreticality, and on the other, bring theory closer to the practice of artistic creation. The absence of such people was a consequence of the pogrom. Its scale was much larger than in Russia, although even there Bakhtin was “remembered” only in the 60s, and his works began to be published only from the mid-60s. So, to introduce elements of theory and ensure the practical orientation of aesthetic studies became the task that the younger generation of scholars had to perform. At the department then, Anatolii Kanarskyi (born 1936) and Larysa Levchuk (born 1940), my classmate, were beginning their aesthetic studies.

Like the vast majority of postgraduate students, I worked in the reading room for scholars on the second floor of the yellow university building on Volodymyrska Street. With the help of my close friends, I gradually outlined a circle of postgraduate students and scholars whom I could trust and who trusted each other—in conversations that went beyond purely professional interests. These were not only postgraduate students, but also scholars who worked in the academic library constantly or episodically. I will try first to give short characterizations of the people whose relationships at that time defined the space of my intellectual communication, including the assessment of the ideology and politics of that time. In intellectual communication that went beyond my professional interests (semantics), first place belongs to Vadym Skurativskyi and Oleksandr Pohorilyi.

* * *

Vadym Skurativskyi. A known feature of Vadym Skurativskyi is the wide range of his intellectual and cultural interests: from concrete art history to philosophy. In addition, a characteristic feature of his is an exceptional memory. He encouraged me to have cultural experiences, occasionally inviting me to see an interesting film (he never missed such an opportunity; it’s a pity, but I rarely took advantage of his advice). In the reading room, while looking for something for himself, he would “toss” me something that, in his view, should also interest me. I remember he drew my attention to some issues of the “Literary and Scientific Herald,” in particular to the issue with Dontsov’s article on Lenin. In addition, using his tips, I read, in addition to Berdyaev’s works, some other works from Russian philosophy of the late 19th - early 20th centuries (Rozanov, Sergei Bulgakov, Shestov, Merezhkovsky). He also advised me to read Foucault’s “The Order of Things.”

Reading Russian philosophy during my postgraduate years deepened my earlier interests in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I appreciated the religious and philosophical quests in Russian literary and philosophical thought—a suffering, sometimes even morbid conscience, initiated by Gogol. A part of my soul was and remains close to this. And yet, Russian philosophy did not satisfy me with its style: its free, and often careless, attitude to the meaning of words, its vagueness, its symbolism, its tendency to eschatological visions.

Vadym’s intellectual influence on me, from my current point of view, primarily consists in strengthening my attention to the cultural and socio-historical context of ideas. I perceived Vadym as a person with a dramatic way of thinking, which resonated with the peculiarities of his personality, his existence—with mood swings, with a tendency to skeptically assess the present and with pessimistic visions of the future. With the help of intellectual reflection, he sought to overcome any kind of poor-quality tendentiousness—a narrowness of views or assessments, the source of which is mainly personal life circumstances, limited experience, and information.

Despite his broad erudition, Vadym was not prone to intellectual snobbery. He highly valued the moral component of Ukrainian traditional (rural) culture—in contrast to some modern erudite scholars. Vadym did not like totalities, total characterizations. A sensitivity to heterogeneity, to complexity, allowed him to find something positive in people, in texts and phenomena that do not lend themselves to an unambiguous assessment. A disgust for widespread simplified stereotypes prompted him to emphasize something that did not fit into a stereotype. Despite his good knowledge of Russian literature, he was always critical of the imperial tendencies in Russian culture and mentality. This critical attitude was also evident in the 90s—in particular, in his critique of updated versions of Eurasianism. His efforts to counteract primitive stereotypes in the interpretation of Ukrainian cultural phenomena are well known: a telling example of this was his article “Shevchenko in the Context of World Literature,” which he wrote when he was on the editorial board of the magazine “Vsesvit” (he was dismissed from the editorial board after the publication of this article). While respecting the identity of any culture, he, at least in the 60s and early 70s (and probably later), held a position that I conventionally designated as “liberalism,” even with some inclinations towards anarchism. This, in particular, explains his bilingualism at that time; only later did he switch to principled support of the Ukrainian language through his own language behavior.

Vadym did not like constructions built a priori; he was more attracted to the diversity of life, to its contradictory and complex dynamics. These dynamics also included unrealized possibilities and lost prospects, which found their continuation in the 1990s in his book “History and Culture” and in his original television narratives. The interpretation of history becomes impoverished, and therefore, in a certain sense, erroneous, if one’s thinking and imagination fail to keep in view the possible but lost variants of historical development. In comprehending historical events, we must strive to consider them in the context of the richest possible set of perspectives. If a historian interprets history from the viewpoint of its only possible “course,” then such an interpretation impoverishes not only the past but also the present: it condemns us to passivity, relieving us of the responsibility for choosing the future. This does not mean complete arbitrariness in historical interpretations: a given historical situation imposes limits on the choice of realistically possible variants of development. But a lost possibility narrows the space of future real possibilities.

Vadym’s thinking was more historical, narrative, and dramatic. When I spoke of a certain principle or some theory, he would prefer some fact that did not fit into my theory. He would counter my principle or construction with, if not a fact, then humor or irony. But he differed from some of our contemporary “postmodernists” in that his criticism was never the criticism of a certain pure Self, which elevated itself above the world. On the contrary, he always felt himself immersed in this world, and what happened in it became a source of his personal experiences. He was not attracted to intellectual rhetoric behind which he could not feel sincerity, the work of conscience, the drama of life. During our interactions in the 1960s, he had the courage not only to read Ukrainian and Russian samvydav but also to pass it on to others. Today, I interact with Vadym only episodically, but I think that at least some of what has been said here has remained unchanged in his character and way of thinking.

* * *

Oleksandr Pohorily. The core of the intellectual interests of Oleksandr Pohorily—my classmate (after my one-year break from my studies)—was initially the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and later the “interpretive” sociology of Max Weber (in the 1990s, selected works of Weber were published in his Ukrainian translation). In my postgraduate and institute years, I often met with Oleksandr, visited him at his home, and had a feeling of deep affection for Vasylyna, Oleksandr’s wife. She had a degree in philology (she graduated from the Ukrainian department of the Faculty of Philology at Kyiv University) and was engaged in mathematical linguistics.

It was through Oleksandr’s commentary that I first became acquainted with Heidegger’s ideas (Oleksandr had a microfilm copy of Heidegger’s book “Sein und Zeit,” made in Moscow). I think our conversations about the importance of cultural context in explaining social institutions and social dynamics, characteristic of Weber’s sociology, were also important. Oleksandr became interested in Weber under the influence of the intellectual biography of Weber written by Jaspers. Taking cultural context into account placed limitations on achieving universal generalizations that would be based on the existence of certain basic needs or economic structures. It is known that Max Weber’s idea of “ideal types” is connected with this.

Oleksandr communicated with people in Moscow who had similar intellectual tastes. He told me about the trends and moods in the circles of Moscow sociologists, philosophers, and culturologists—intellectuals such as Yuri Davydov, Piama Gaidenko, and others. He followed the cultural life in Ukraine closely, admiring the poetry of Symonenko, Drach, Lina Kostenko, and Vinhranovsky. It was not just admiration. He subtly analyzed the aesthetic features of each poet, noted the renewal of poetic style, and so on. He highly valued the civic feat of the people who published their works in samvydav—Dziuba, Chornovil, Svers­tiuk, Moroz. In our conversations, we assessed the work “Internationalism or Russification?” as being written in the genre of heresy, with a masterful use of citation methods and the identification of contradictions in the approach to the national question in “Marxism-Leninism.” We did not even discuss the question of whether Ivan Dziuba was “really” a Marxist-Leninist. It seemed inappropriate to us given the author’s intellectual level. It was impossible to assume that the author was unaware of different assessments of Marxism or, even more so, of Leninism. The assessment of the social consequences of implementing Marx’s ideas in Franko’s article “What is Progress?” (fragments deleted from this article in the official edition were distributed in samvydav) was valuable precisely because it was made before the Bolshevik application of these ideas. And thus, Djilas in his book “The New Class” (published in Russian in New York in 1957) seems to develop and specify Franko’s predictions.

At a time when I was already an employee of the Institute of Philosophy, Oleksandr was working in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and, after the trial of Valentyn Moroz, gave me a copy of his letter, addressed to official bodies, written on the eve of the trial (I, in turn, then gave this text to Yevhen Svers­tiuk). After my arrest, I had trouble finding work. Oleksandr not only read samvydav works himself but also passed them on to others. But during our conversations in the 1990s, he was very critical of his behavior at the time, condemning himself for his inconsistency and lack of civic courage.

In reality, the trouble with Ukrainian society was not that it lacked people capable of self-sacrifice, but that a large stratum of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, held captive by fear and inertia, was incapable of taking positive steps even within the limits of the possible. While a relatively small group of intellectuals was ready to risk their social standing, the main mass of the intelligentsia did not take the smallest steps in the civic and national enlightenment of the people. From my wife’s observations, who taught Ukrainian literature in Kyiv schools, if even one teacher (and more often a female teacher) in the entire teaching staff conducted civic and national education using the available opportunities—that is, acting within the limits of the almost-permitted—that was already a good thing. Approximately the same situation existed among university lecturers.

* * *

Serhiy Vasyliev. I had been on friendly terms with Serhiy Vasyliev since our student years; he was my classmate. When I took an academic leave of absence, someone knocked on the window late one autumn evening. Half-asleep, I thought it was my mother returning from Kyiv (when she would go to Kyiv with jars of ryazhanka, she would return late in the evening). In fact, my mother was in the hospital in Obukhiv for inpatient treatment, and I was in a depressed state. And suddenly—it was Serhiy. When I was imprisoned, it was he, from among the staff of the Institute of Philosophy, who visited my wife and children. In my postgraduate and institute years, I gave him samvydav materials; we were also united by common professional interests—semantics. A feature of his character is his benevolence and openness—an unaccommodating directness of judgments and assessments. He also used his sense of humor to poke fun at some of my character flaws and at manifestations of my romantic idealism.

After my return from prison, our conversations often concerned semiotics, meaning and sense, and the philosophy of language. But we also discussed social and political problems. Serhiy headed the institute’s organization of the People’s Movement (Rukh): it was joked that “Vasyliev destroyed the institute’s party organization.” He left Rukh when it was transformed into a party. After returning from prison, I learned that Serhiy had taken up photography: he specialized in psychological photo portraits, and especially loved photographing children. During my time in prison, he took very beautiful photographs of my daughter Myroslava and son Oksen. In the 1990s, he also took pictures of my “parsuna,” which I like precisely for their “psychologism.” Today he is retired and is engaged in raising his grandchildren, testing his abilities in the field of family pedagogy.

* * *

Andriy Katrenko. I met Andriy back in my student years. He was studying in the history department of the Faculty of History and Philosophy. His biography is typical for the young men and women born in a rural family (village of Baibuzy, Cherkasy Oblast) who are characterized by diverse interests and diligence. He graduated with honors from the Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi Pedagogical College, having mastered the violin and several other musical instruments (in the university’s folk instrument orchestra, he played the domra). After graduating from the university (with honors), he was assigned to a job at the State Archival Administration under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR—in a nook of St. Sophia’s Square (now the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art is located there). Our first conversations in our student years were about music. It was by following Andriy’s example that I began to collect gramophone records of classical music. In addition, he was interested in Ukrainian and world literature. Thus, he had a Renaissance-like breadth of interests and in this way fit into the circle of people seized by a thirst for knowledge and spiritual awakening.

During my postgraduate years, our conversations concerned national problems. I cannot recall their specific content (only people with exceptional verbal memory are able to reproduce the content of conversations decades later). I met with Andriy mainly near the Archival Administration building, and later in the Kyiv University building on Shevchenko Boulevard (from the end of 1969, Andriy went to work at Kyiv University). I gave him some samvydav materials, which he would return to me during our next meeting. Eventually, I began to persuade him to take a more active position in the national-democratic movement, which was taking its first steps. At least to more actively disseminate samvydav materials in his circle. However, given his individual characteristics, he did not consider himself capable of making such a choice. I was understanding of his explanation. Everyone decides individually. Later, Andriy did a lot in the field of research on the history of Ukraine. From 1996, he headed the Department of History of Ukraine at Kyiv University and took an active part in public life. He is now retired.

* * *

Alla Klimash. I had known Alla since my studies at the Faculty of History and Philosophy. I also communicated with her during my time at the professional development courses. Even then we had reached an understanding about the need to participate in the national-democratic movement, at least through enlightenment, particularly the dissemination of samvydav. Our time in postgraduate studies partially overlapped (her postgraduate term was from 1964–1967). She was working on her dissertation on the history of the CPSU. But she knew this history from another side. In particular, perhaps, because she was lucky with her academic advisor: he was the previously mentioned Ivan Ivanovych Shevchenko, a Doctor of Historical Sciences, a professor, and a nationally conscious person. This “bearded man,” as the students called him, in addition to his Hrushevsky-style beard and his ever-present vyshyvanka, was known for being able to lecture on the history of the CPSU in such a way that the students did not doze off in his lectures. For this, he was well-known and respected among them. Eventually, he was removed from his position as head of the department (he was replaced in this post by a “saldofon”—then only a candidate of sciences, but a “proper,” “correct” person—O. A. Borodin).

After completing her postgraduate studies, Alla was assigned to a job at the Kyiv Civil Engineering Institute, or “KISI” (now the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture), to teach “Scientific Communism.” She worked there for 30 years. In this institute, as she put it, she was a “white crow”—the only one in the entire teaching staff who lectured in Ukrainian. I want to draw attention to this behavior of both the mentor and his student as examples that even under the conditions of that time, it was still possible to expand the existing space of freedom, and not to narrow it. Justifying a lack of elementary courage with the phrase that, you see, “that’s the system.” When we complain today that the Ukrainian nation is still “incompletely formed,” the reason for this lies to a large extent in the fact that a wide stratum of the Ukrainian intelligentsia showed excessive cowardice and inertia.

Alla had the courage not only to read or pass on samvydav materials to others but, if necessary, to hide the duplicating technology of the time—a typewriter. In a recent conversation, she mentioned our talks about teaching Scientific Communism. I think it was about “saturating” this very ungrateful “discipline” from this point of view with positive content. The method of saturation at that time consisted in emphasizing the role of a scientific approach to solving socio-political problems. But this emphasis on scientificity carried the threat of extreme forms of scientism and technocracy. One example of technocracy was Hlushkov’s well-known idea at the time about the possibility of managing the economy from a single “brain” center. I will mention this threat again in connection with the publication of my article “Critique of Scientistic Conceptions of Scientific and Technical Progress.”

Alla’s circle of friends—from the personalities I met thanks to her back then—included Raisa Ivanchenko, Zoryana Romovska, and Olena Ovsienko. I don’t need to introduce Raisa Ivanchenko to my reader: she is a well-known historian, novelist, poet, and publicist. She was already a well-known personality back then. During my postgraduate years, thanks to Alla, I only got acquainted with her. Our constant communication dates back to the 90s—to the time I was teaching philosophy at the Kyiv International Institute of Linguistics and Law (now Kyiv International University).

* * *

Zoryana Romovska. Zoryana Romovska, then a postgraduate student at the Department of Civil Law (the department was headed by V. L. Muntian), was working on her PhD dissertation under the supervision of the renowned legal scholar Hennadii Kostiantynovych Matveev. Matveev highly valued her abilities, calling her his “daughter.” As a detail for the portrait of this nice, then already elderly, man, it is worth mentioning his act that caused a scandal at the university. He dared to invite a priest to conduct the funeral service for his mother-in-law: this became the reason for “organizational conclusions” along party lines. It is also worth mentioning the story of the removal of the dean of the Faculty of Law, P. P. Zavorotko. Communicating with Zoryana somewhat softened my prejudice against jurists, whom I considered the most opportunistic among the humanities scholars. Unfortunately, the recent expert opinions sent to the Constitutional Court, carried out by jurists from Kyiv University and the Institute of State and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (concerning Leonid Kuchma’s right to run for president), caused in me a feeling of deep shame for their actions and revived my former prejudices. Revived also because I have not read a single statement from any of the jurists belonging to the institutions named here about their disagreement with such an expert conclusion (I am convinced that such people exist).

I communicated with Zoryana often: for some time we lived in the same dormitory on Lomonosova Street. Again, I can no longer convey the specific content of our conversations, but I think they were important for me. In particular, in connection with working through the literature concerning the evolution of Soviet constitutional law and the problems of federalism. It is known that, having become a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Zoryana, thanks to her extraordinary capacity for work, made an important contribution to the legislation of Ukraine. Let me recall the most important of her work: she is the co-author of the Civil Code and the author of the draft Family Code. Today she expends a lot of effort to defend this project of hers.

* * *

Olena Ovsienko. Olena Ovsienko, then a postgraduate student at the Department of History of Ukraine, had a special fate. Her father—Hryhorii Parfenovych Ovsienko, commander of the Shchors partisan detachment (the detachment operated in the forests of the Pereiaslav and Boryspil districts)—was wounded as a result of the detachment’s participation in the crossing of the Dnipro River. He was sent by plane to one of the hospitals in Moscow, where he died of his wounds. Her mother and uncle (her father’s brother) were shot by the Germans during one of the actions directed against the partisans. Olena was raised in an orphanage and lived in a one-room apartment in Pechersk with her young son. She was one of those with whom one could freely discuss not only topics from the history of Ukraine but also the manifestations of the civic and national movement of that time. For some time, she hid a typewriter in her apartment. Recently, recalling this act of hers, she said that she had decided on this action, being aware of the possible consequences—a young son! But she added that moral motives prompted her to overcome her anxiety and fear. I think the courage and sacrifice of her father and mother served as a moral example for Olena. I have already said that the sacrificial struggle against German fascism served as a model for those who did not succumb to the deceitful rhetoric about the difference between the two totalitarianisms. For Olena, who knew the history of Bolshevik crimes in Ukraine well, the deceitfulness of this rhetoric was obvious.

* * *

Volodymyr Kostyrko. I have already mentioned Volodymyr in passing. He was my classmate in the first year of the philosophy department, then transferred to the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Kyiv University. He graduated from the mathematics department of the faculty, specializing in mathematical logic and programming, completed postgraduate studies at the Institute of Cybernetics (1962-1965), became an employee of the same institute, and worked in Hlushkov’s department. From 1987, he worked at the Institute of Philosophy, then at the Institute of Sociology, in the department headed by Yuriy Kanyhin, known to a wider circle of intellectuals for his book “The Way of the Aryans” (criticized for imitating the ideas of Roerich).

Volodymyr achieved serious success in mathematical logic. It is enough to mention the fact that his report “A Mistake in Zhegalkin’s Algebra” (which is referenced in the “Encyclopedia of Cybernetics”—in the article “Zhegalkin’s Algebra”) was immediately reprinted in the *Journal of Symbolic Logic*, which did not correspond to the usual practice of publishing articles in that journal. When I was already an employee of the Institute of Philosophy, he initiated my meeting with the employees of Hlushkov’s department, at which I tried to explain the fundamental ideas of linguistic pragmatics, based on my PhD dissertation.

Volodymyr’s first wife (Lesia), who specialized in geometry, was also a postgraduate student during my postgraduate years. Volodymyr would come to the university reading room to see her, and this provided an opportunity for our episodic conversations. Our conversations concerned not so much mathematical logic (which I already considered a purely specialized field, adapted primarily for the needs of mathematics) as the national problem. In a recent conversation, Volodymyr recalled the great impression made on him by reading Chornovil’s book “Portraits of Twenty Criminals.” He not only read samvydav works himself but also gave them to other people to read. A curious incident occurred with one woman to whom he was passing samvydav materials. A man began to show interest in her, who at first was interested not in her herself, but in information about samvydav. In the meantime, he really fell in love, she made efforts to enlighten him nationally, and eventually they got married. Even if we assume that in this case the suspicions of collaboration were unfounded and that we are dealing only with a “legend,” it is a charming one. We have too few stories about how relationships developed between “unofficial collaborators” and their “recruiters” (“Letters to the Investigator” by Borys Kovhar is, it seems, the only exception to the general silence on this topic). Volodymyr took an active part in the socio-political life of the late 80s and early 90s, and in the early 90s, he was a deputy of the district council.

To these brief portrait sketches should be added mentions of many other people with whom I communicated in my postgraduate years. I will later mention Mykhailo Hryhorovych and other individuals who participated in the production (duplication) and dissemination of samvydav. I will also mention later my communication with Veniamin Sikora, which was important for me from the point of view of understanding the relationship between economics and politics, and so on.

* * *

Linguistic Philosophy. The terms “semantics,” “meaning,” and “sense” or “sence” (“denotation”-“connotation”) gradually entered the language of philosophy. Some Russian-language translations began to appear (mostly under the designation “for academic libraries only”). R. Carnap’s book “Meaning and Necessity” was published in Russian translation. Among Ukrainian philosophers, Myroslav Popovych was one of the first, if not the first, to discuss the problems of semantics (in the context of analyzing the language of science) in his lectures and publications at that time.

From the mid-1960s, the first Russian-language publications on linguistic philosophy also began to appear. But the initial impetus and decisive role in my transition to linguistic philosophy were played by publications in foreign languages. The anthology of Polish translations titled “Logic and Language,” compiled by Jerzy Pelc, proved to be particularly useful for me. Serhiy Vasyliev gave me this book. My initial study of Polish in my student years was sufficient to read these texts. In addition, the scientific library of Kyiv University also had a book in English—a collection of articles compiled by G. Ryle titled “Ordinary Language.” This intellectual evolution of mine corresponded, albeit with some delay, to the crisis of logical positivism in the West in the 1940s and 50s. In the 1960s, logical positivism was criticized in two of its components: as an absolutization of scientific approaches (scientism) and as an empirical fundamentalism—a continuation of British empiricism and positivism. From the point of view of criticizing the variant of empirical fundamentalism advocated by logical positivism, Quine’s article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” made a great impression on me.

So, eventually, I abandoned the concept of meaning developed in the channel of logical positivism and accepted the concept of meaning based on the ideas of the “late” Wittgenstein—that is, I became a supporter of linguistic philosophy. In accordance with the concept of meaning developed in linguistic philosophy, meaning came to be understood as the way an expression is used, and not on the basis of the relation of naming (reference)—through the relation to some object, physical or mental. Secondly, as already mentioned above, it was accepted that the criterion of meaning or sense is not universal but is different in different “language games”—in different ways of speaking. Since these ways of speaking themselves were seen as manifestations of different types of activity and even ways of life, this ultimately opened the way to considering those meanings whose source is a given concrete culture with its system of values.

This meant the liberation of philosophy from the strict limitations associated with an orientation toward so-called “scientific philosophy” (where the concept of scientificity meant an orientation toward mathematics and the natural sciences). The first and most immediate consequence of this liberation was the justification of different styles of philosophical writing, including an intuitive and metaphorical style of speech. The focus of scientific cognition on finding technologies mainly requires terminological (unambiguous) language. In contrast, the language of poetry (and art in general) is addressed to the subjective world of a person: such language must provide space for subjective interpretations.

This was a much more radical approach than the distinction between so-called extensional and intensional contexts in logical positivism. Logical positivism was still oriented toward finding the “ideal language” of science. Everyday language from this point of view was considered imperfect. In linguistic philosophy, the thesis of the imperfection of ordinary language was canceled: the question was reduced to taking into account its peculiarities and explaining its different ways of use. The metaphorical way of speaking, from this point of view, also had its advantages. The use of a word, say, in a poetic context is just as precise as the use of a scientific term, but this precision is different. The precision of terminological language is based on the independence of the term’s meaning from the context, on the use of the term’s meaning in accordance with the accepted definition. Meanwhile, the precision of using a word in a poetic context depends on what shades of meaning the word acquires in the context (and the phonetics of the word or even its graphics often participate in the generation of the corresponding shades of meaning).

Since the use of an utterance is a certain kind of practical action (as opposed to an intellectual action), taking the context into account—linguistic and extralinguistic (situational)—is an important prerequisite for the success of such an action. In my PhD dissertation, I actually set myself the goal of developing a terminology and classification of what I called linguistic pragmatics. In fact, it was a study of different types of utterance application. This was later called speech act theory (Austin and Searle). Proponent, addressee, utterance (text) used by the proponent, type of use, context in which this use is carried out—these are the basic concepts of linguistic pragmatics.

As was to be expected, I almost abandoned my studies of mathematical logic, which V. Pavlov was then enthusiastically engaged in. With sympathy, I later recalled his disappointment with my answers at the PhD qualifying exam in mathematical logic. But I am grateful to V. Pavlov that, having clarified my interests, he declined to supervise my dissertation research and sent me to Myroslav Popovych. This was a happy “accident,” as Myroslav’s participation both in my hiring as an employee of the Institute of Philosophy and in the successful defense of my dissertation was decisive.

Nevertheless, the study of symbolic logic had an influence—and, I think, for the worse—on my research in linguistic pragmatics, as I tried to artificially adapt symbolic means to describe different ways of using utterances (statement, command, question, etc.). The influence of the formal-logical approach is also evident in my article, published in the journal “Movoznavstvo,” dedicated to clarifying the concept of context. Later I considered that the very way of looking at the concept of context in this article is unproductive, if not erroneous altogether.

* * *

Political Thinking. The need to write some document that would not so much criticize the political system as propose a concrete program of action was obvious. In conversations with Yevhen Proniuk, we touched upon this topic every time, as well as the topic of the ideology of the national-democratic movement of that time. We were talking specifically about ideology—that is, a certain system of ideas and principles capable of working successfully—of expanding the number of supporters and participants in the national-democratic movement. From this point of view, it should not be radical, which, given the state of mass consciousness and psyche, would inevitably repel people (later, in the story about the dissemination of samvydav, I will talk about the level of fear that hindered the dissemination of even quite moderate texts from samvydav). On the other hand, a simple declaration demanding secession from the USSR could not get support due to the low level of mass national and civic consciousness. This problem had arisen even earlier for the Lukianenko-Kandyba group. I will mention this again later in connection with Yevhen Proniuk’s writing of a more radical program called “The State and Tasks of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement.”

So, alongside my purely philosophical searching and quite significant efforts related to the duplication and dissemination of samvydav, I began to work through the relevant literature, particularly on Soviet constitutional law, to write such a programmatic piece. Eventually, the article was written in the form of an “Open Letter to the Deputies of the Soviets of the UkrSSR” (signed with the pseudonym Antin Koval). As it later turned out, it was edited by Yurii Badzio (Proniuk had given him this article for editing), who proposed deleting one or two points from my program, with which I agreed. The article was later published in the journal “Suchasnist” (No. 10, 1969). Although the text itself is not long, it required significant preparatory work. I had not read Djilas’s book “The New Class” (it seems it was not distributed in samvydav). Instead, Avtorkhanov’s book “Tekhnologiya vlasti” (The Technology of Power) was distributed in samvydav. But for me, the officially published literature on the evolution of Soviet constitutional legislation in the context of narrowing the autonomy of the republics was also important (at least some of the preparatory notes have been preserved in my archive). This document is published in Anatolii Rusnachenko’s book “The National Liberation Movement in Ukraine” (Kyiv, 1998), without errors (in contrast to my “Open Letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU,” included in the same book, which contains various stylistic and grammatical errors absent in the original). The accessibility of the text for the modern reader eliminates the need to comment on its content here.

2. Teaching at Kyiv University. The Institute of Philosophy.

Teaching Logic. Before the beginning of the 1967–1968 academic year, V. Pavlov suggested that I, as a form of practice, lecture on logic to the Ukrainian department of the Faculty of Philology and to the Faculty of Journalism. I agreed. I did not have a pre-developed course of lectures on logic. I decided that for philologists and journalists, before presenting the elements of classical logic, it would be useful to start with semantics—to show language in its action, in its use. That is, to use my own developments in linguistic pragmatics: to acquaint students with my classification of speech acts—the use of utterances and texts to construct assertions, to convey messages, to incite actions, to evoke images in the imagination, to induce moods (suggestion), etc. This would complement and in some moments correct the traditional structural-grammatical description of language. I thought of drawing the students’ attention to the use of various kinds of labels and expressions designed to manipulate consciousness.

I later evaluated my success in implementing this plan skeptically. Failure in teaching is mostly a consequence of the teaching method. But perhaps some role was played by the orientation of my audience not so much toward the theory of language as toward verbal art. The students, philologists and journalists, would probably have listened with greater interest to lectures on the semiotics of verbal and visual art. Nevertheless, the students’ benevolent attitude toward my efforts was an incentive that sustained my teaching enthusiasm. Some of the students guessed that I was an “oppositionist,” showing trust during conversations during breaks. One student was interested if I had access to samvydav. I denied it.

Meanwhile, I was observing the students to find one or two capable, in terms of their moral and psychological qualities, of disseminating samvydav. One seemed to me to be so. I probably wasn’t mistaken in his morality, but he was frightened by my proposal: after our conversation, he would avoid me during chance meetings on the street. This was not the only case of this kind. One of the postgraduate students, who in our circle of friendly communication seemed to share the goal of the opposition movement, looked at me with a gaze full of horror in response to my request to hold some texts for me. She probably didn’t expect to be put in a situation of choice. And therefore she had no ready decision to calmly refuse.

But I was lucky with one. It was Vasyl Ovsienko. By the time of our rapprochement, he had already gone through the path of self-determination—he was obtaining and disseminating samvydav. According to Ovsienko, there were other students who had the courage to do so. From then on, I passed samvydav texts only to him. He knew the student environment better and could decide whom to trust more.

* * *

Vasyl Ovsienko. Ovsienko possesses some typical features of the “Sixtiers,” if this word is used to denote people with a certain type of mentality: a sense of personal responsibility for the state of society, an rejection of the rupture between thought and action, and a sacrificial fulfillment of civic duty. It was enough to talk a few times, and a sense of moral and spiritual kinship would appear. Perhaps our similar social origin contributed to this: Ovsienko’s parents were peasants (from the village of Stavky in Zhytomyr Oblast). But more important was the type of person who is capable of perceiving words about responsibility for the world in which each of us lives as a challenge requiring an active response. I liked in him the combination of ethical idealism, rooted, it seemed to me, in a romantic frame of mind, with practical wisdom. Our constant communication with Vasyl put him in danger—with consequences well known to him (from the examples of others). But he had made his choice even before meeting me; his educational enthusiasm could not but arouse admiration. He was organized and meticulous. This allowed him to avoid failures: the scale of his activity and its duration (our cooperation in disseminating samvydav lasted from 1968 to the spring of 1972) is the best confirmation of these characteristics. I will mention him again in various situations later on.

I also became closer to some other students, communicated with them, at least on occasion, not only during lectures: Olha Kobets, Halyna Palamarchuk, Mykhailo Soroka (in the 1990s—editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Uryadovyi Kurier” [Government Courier]), Ivan Haiduk. I recall talking about something with Bohdan Zholdak. During chance meeting-conversations with my former students in the 90s, I was surprised at what phrases or episodes they remembered from our conversations back then. Slavko Chernilevsky, during one of our meetings, recalled that I had praised his abilities but advised him to work more. If so, then my advice in this case was lucky: it was addressed to a young man who would be characterized by creative restlessness and diligence (poetry, cinema).

For disseminating samvydav among students, mostly philologists and journalists, the following were expelled from the university in the second half of the 60s and early 70s: Nadiia Kyrian, Mykola Vorobiov, Mykola Kholodnyi, Mykola Rachuk, Stanislav Chernilevsky, Ivan Haiduk, Mykhailo Yakubivsky, to limit myself to those I know about. Of those named, Mykhailo Yakubivsky suffered the most humiliation and abuse, because he became a victim of punitive psychiatry (he was expelled from the university for reading “Internationalism or Russification?”). Outside the circle of students I taught, I recall individual occasional conversations with Mykola Vorobiov, Mykola Kholodnyi, Viktor Kordun. I remember Mykola Vorobiov’s phrase: “The ancient Greeks said everything that can be said in philosophy.” Mykola’s style of behavior reminded me of Skovoroda. Once, I don’t remember on what occasion, I entered one of the dormitory rooms; there was only one girl there: I was somewhat surprised when, as a result of our acquaintance, I learned that this girl was Valentyna Chornovil, Vyacheslav’s sister.

* * *

Employment. My postgraduate studies ended at the end of January 1969. I had finished a working version of my dissertation, planning to finalize it later. This was important in view of the fact that Myroslav Popovych had offered to arrange an appointment for me at the Institute of Philosophy—in the Department of Logic and Methodology of Science, which he headed. Such an appointment after completing postgraduate studies could only be obtained after the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences made a corresponding submission to the Ministry of Education, in which it would confirm its consent to enroll someone in one of the academic institutes. For this purpose, a postgraduate student, if they had not managed to defend their dissertation, had to submit to the Presidium at least the department’s official conclusion that the dissertation was complete. I presented the text of my dissertation to the department with a positive review from my academic advisor and received the corresponding paper. It was passed to the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, which forwarded the relevant request to the Ministry of Education. But the appointment to the Institute of Philosophy was delayed for some reason, although all the relevant papers were already at the Institute of Philosophy.

Month after month passed. They were probably deciding “upstairs.” One can assume that the KGB was able to block a decision in my favor. But with respect to me, it could only do so on the basis of “operational data”: my opposition was not public, I had no materials published in samvydav under my own name, and I was a member of the CPSU. I had no doubt that the KGB “knew something.” In my private communications, I said a lot openly; most importantly, in cases of provocative conversations, I did not deny the suspicions. I remained silent, which was “eloquent” in such situations. Something else is more important: although reading samvydav had become a widespread phenomenon in a narrow circle of the intelligentsia, there could be no doubt that identifying the activists involved in the dissemination of samvydav was a priority task in the work of the KGB.

A confirmation of these assumptions of mine was the warning expressed to me tête-à-tête by Pavlov. Sometime at the end of my postgraduate term, in a conversation that took place in the corridor in front of the reading room for scholars, he said something like this: “Vasylii Semionovich, look, just engage in your scientific research.” It seemed to me that he was saying this with a sense of anxiety for me and with the intention of warning me. I had heard such warnings back in my student years. Ivan Ziaziun, who had signed a very good Komsomol reference for me upon my graduation from university (that was the practice then), during one of our conversations in the dormitory corridor (on Lomonosova Street) friendlily warned me against “unnecessary” talk. In general, I followed his advice, but selectively.

At that time I belonged to the “cautious” ones, which is why I finished my postgraduate studies. While others acted openly, wrote texts for samvydav, signing their own names, were subjected to persecution, and were expelled from universities or postgraduate programs (Stus and others), I preferred the underground. Caution, of course, has many degrees—all the way to complete conformism. My caution was risky. Moreover, it had the features of a conscious choice. Organizing the duplication and dissemination of samvydav was a socially important activity. The activity of those who acted openly needed its necessary supplement—the existence of an environment in which samvydav texts would circulate and which would take on the difficult task of duplicating materials, passing them on to the West, etc. The awareness of the division of labor was present among those who acted openly. The main efforts of some participants of the national-democratic movement of that time (Liolia and Nadiika Svitlychna, Zinovii Antoniuk, Yevhen Proniuk, and others) went into providing the corresponding “infrastructure.” It also required courage to maintain communication with prisoners, to take risks in order to receive and transmit a word from behind bars to the West. As well as to support their families morally and, if possible, materially here, in the “big zone.”

Second. Philosophy is perhaps the most demanding in terms of the prerequisites for activity. It suffered the most as a result of isolation from the West and because it was turned into a handmaiden of ideology. But even in the presence of good social prerequisites, philosophical thinking requires more time to think through one’s own conception. It was important not just to deny the ideology and practice of totalitarianism, but to provide this denial with an appropriate justification, outlining a positive perspective. In addition to the “Voter’s Letter” (which was distributed under a pseudonym), I had drafts of some other articles of this kind, intended for publication in samvydav. It is likely that if the situation had not changed radically, I would have submitted them under pseudonyms. A work published under one’s own name must be worth the “inconveniences” that will result from such an action.

And yet most of the activists in the dissemination of samvydav (who for one reason or another did not act openly) agreed with the position expressed by Yevhen Sverstiuk (“Cathedral in Scaffolding”) as follows: “We are passing through a non-heroic stretch in history, where the feat is already accomplished by the one who has broken out of the state of passive conformism and follows the voice of conscience. The cautious are the most irresponsible. They know only one science—not to stick their fingers in the wheels.” This refers to the need for mass “heroism”—mass civic behavior. Indeed, under totalitarianism, civic behavior inevitably became heroic. With the emergence of mass civic behavior, the need for the heroism of individuals should have ended, if one ignores that such a need will always exist (even in well-ordered democratic societies). In the situation at that time, examples of open protest were of particular importance. When, amidst general passivity, the “wheels” are merrily rushing towards a spiritual, and thus ultimately a physical, Chornobyl, the only saving action (calculated at least for the long term) is the figure of the lone hero who sticks his hand into the mad wheel.

* * *

Volodymyr Shynkaruk. More than half a year had passed since the end of my postgraduate studies (from February to September 1969) when, finally, the director of the Institute of Philosophy, Volodymyr Shynkaruk, issued the order for my appointment to the position of acting “em-en-es” (junior research fellow) in “Popovych’s department.” It is not out of the question that my conversation with Shynkaruk, which took place during a chance meeting in the elevator (at that time the Institute of Philosophy was in the building on Kirova Street, now Hrushevskoho Street), played some role. It was a short conversation: I reproached Shynkaruk for the delay in making a decision. If the resolution of my issue was indeed hanging between “yes” and “no,” and Shynkaruk’s word proved to be decisive, then may my gratitude to him be placed on the scale of his good deeds.

Although most of my direct interactions with Volodymyr Shynkaruk took place in the 90s, it would be appropriate to express a few brief characteristics of him as a person and a philosopher right here. His appointment as director of the Institute of Philosophy in 1968, from the point of view of the possible contenders and “viable” candidates at the time, was evaluated positively by the Institute’s staff. He was capable, possessed a good, for that time, philosophical culture and did not belong to the “Marxist orthodox.” I have in mind the specific meaning of the word “orthodox,” which, frankly, did not quite correspond to the Western concept of “orthodox Marxism”: in the USSR in the 60s and 70s, “orthodox” referred to party ideologues in philosophy (Konstantinov, etc.).

The fact that Shynkaruk drew students’ attention to the “young” Marx, I was inclined to assess as a hidden “revisionist” tendency in his thinking. He also showed a fondness for Ukrainian culture and language, but in a very moderate form. This moderation was evident in the discussion on the status of the Ukrainian language that took place at Kyiv University in 1965 (the yellow building). I was present at that discussion. After the first day, it was banned; Shynkaruk’s position provoked a negative reaction from the audience. But he held to the position that teaching at Kyiv University should be conducted in Ukrainian. In one of our conversations in the 90s, he mentioned that this had not been easy for him personally. It was about developing Ukrainian historico-philosophical terminology. Taking part in the work of the commission created to develop a law on the status of the Ukrainian language in the early 90s, he advocated for the statehood of the Ukrainian language.

And yet, if we have in mind Shynkaruk as an official person, there are no grounds to speak of his opposition to the totalitarian political system and official ideology. He belonged to the nomenklatura and consciously accepted this. Such a conclusion seems obvious given V. Shynkaruk’s actual relations with the authorities: he was a delegate to the 26th Congress of the CPSU, a member of the Revision Committee of the Central Committee of the CPU, and was awarded many high honors, including the Order of Lenin. Perhaps purely personal life circumstances played a role—his social origin (his father was a secretary of the raikom party committee). None of his colleagues from the Institute of Philosophy denies the opportunistic style of his behavior, nor do they recall instances of his opposition to the party or academic bureaucracy (the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences).

I have already mentioned that Shynkaruk did not possess even the same reserve of resistance to pressure from the bureaucracy that was characteristic of P. Kopnin. Kopnin’s courage, it is true, was also measured. It is enough to look at his article “V. I. Lenin and the Problem of Practice,” written a year before his death, to understand the limit beyond which he did not dare to go in the “creative development of Marxism.” But Kopnin was psychologically a person capable of resisting or at least ignoring “directives.” Shynkaruk did not possess such an ability. Some of my colleagues believe that he did not have the character for it. Others note that Kopnin had a “rear” in the center: he felt much freer in Ukraine, and, accordingly, the attitude towards him from the Ukrainian party bureaucrats was different. His person was outside the scope of their authority.

On the basis of my own impressions, with a high degree of probability, I can assume that the main motive of Shynkaruk’s behavior was a consciously chosen position: to do something positive only within the limits of the possible. That is, without taking risks, so that he would not be removed and replaced by someone worse. The prospect of such a replacement was real. In any case, one could not expect any manifestation of disobedience from Shynkaruk regarding decisions made “upstairs.” But it would probably also be wrong to assert that such obedience in any case meant agreement—agreement at the level of one’s own conscience. I am convinced that Shynkaruk could not approve of the arrests among the intelligentsia—in particular, the arrests of ’72. He acted under pressure from above and out of considerations of self-preservation. This was confirmed by my conversations with him in the 90s. He did not hide that he had chosen precisely such a strategy of behavior. In his explanations, there was no excessive pretense—no attempt to embellish this behavior. He justified it by saying that his removal from the post would mean a bad prospect for the Institute of Philosophy. (I will speak about the assessment of some of Shynkaruk’s personnel decisions, particularly those related to the arrests of ’72, in my memoirs of the 90s).

But, despite what has been said, V. Shynkaruk’s directorship contributed to preserving an atmosphere of free communication in the Institute, at least among a certain part of the staff. Kopnin contributed most to the establishment of this atmosphere. It is not worth exaggerating the degree of this “freethinking”: there was no shortage of people “in a shell” and those who were “listening in”—one had to change the topic of conversation in their presence.

But when we seek to evaluate Shynkaruk as a philosopher, the characteristics of him as an official person should not play a decisive role. Such an approach can lead to errors; examples are well-known (Heidegger and others). It is also worth, obviously, taking into account his explanation of his own intellectual evolution in publications from the 90s. I would not want to enter here into a discussion of the interpretations of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel that we find in his publications. This is a topic for a separate conversation. It is worth considering that these interpretations were carried out without using the full array of publications in foreign languages. But in all cases, when we evaluate thought produced under duress, it is worth proceeding from a preliminary benevolent attitude—from the suspicion that beneath the superficial, ideologically protective layer of the texts, a deeper layer may exist, one that contains the author’s own ideas. At least in the form of certain tendencies or hints.

Thus, there is a basis for expecting that at that deeper level in Shynkaruk’s philosophy we will be able to detect a tendency to shift Marxism towards “Young-Marxism”—towards the relationship between man and the world, conceived from the point of view of man as an active, creative being. A being that simultaneously both creates its world and is a product of the world it has created (culture). This can be expected from any philosopher who has been influenced by Hegel’s philosophy. And this can explain the attention to Marx’s early works (“Young-Marxism”) and the attempt to interpret Marxism taking into account Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” etc. Shynkaruk points to the importance of this work of Hegel in his intellectual evolution. I will not here preempt the work of the historian of philosophy who, as a result of a concrete textual study, will give a balanced assessment of Shynkaruk’s texts and pedagogical activity in different periods.

But even if these expectations of ours regarding subtexts in Shynkaruk’s work were confirmed, this does not give grounds to call Shynkaruk a “Sixtier,” if we want this word to have any meaning. After all, this word is used to denote people of a certain type—people whose creativity and behavior had signs of defiance, and who themselves suffered various kinds of oppression and persecution (including imprisonment).

* * *

Kyivan Philosophical School? The expression “Kyivan philosophical school,” according to P. Yolon, was first used by P. Kopnin at the end of the 60s (when he was already in Moscow). But not in an academic sense—when a “school” is characterized by the presence of a special methodology or set of problems, and often even a founder of the school. Kopnin used this expression to indicate that a center of philosophical thought had appeared in Kyiv, characterized by manifestations of creativity. These were cautious, very cautious manifestations of “revisionism.”

The fact that during the 60s and 70s of the last century we do not observe the appearance of any “scandalous” philosophical work in academic philosophy—a work that would signify a challenge, a rebellion—testifies to this excessive degree of caution. Here we have no analogies with literary creativity. Among historians, M. Braichevsky wrote a defiant work (“Reunification or Annexation?”). His public lectures, which gathered packed auditoriums, were also bold. The text of I. Dziuba, “Internationalism or Russification?” belongs among the defiant works. Yet its author was known primarily as a literary critic, not a professional philosopher. There are formal grounds to include Yevhen Svers­tiuk (an employee of the Institute of Psychology) among persons from the academic environment. It is obvious that his works are written on the border between literary studies and philosophy. And this was a very noticeable and distinct opposition to official academic philosophy.

There are no grounds to use the expression “Kyivan philosophical school” in a more serious, academic sense. Because there was no circle of people united by a commonality of approaches (methodologies) or even problems. No distinct revisionist concepts were formed in the USSR—distinct enough to speak of the existence of a special revisionist current or “school.” As for the tendencies that signify the introduction of elements of creative philosophical thought into the channel of official Marxism-Leninism, they did not differ significantly in Ukraine compared to, say, Russia.

What has been said largely applies to the label “Kyivan worldview-anthropological school,” the founder of which some authors have come to consider Shynkaruk. This question would not be worth discussing at all if it were not connected with the assessment of the past, which affects the awareness of the current state of philosophy in Ukraine (in particular, the same philosophical anthropology). It is likely this that explains why it became the subject of discussion on the pages of the journal “Krytyka.”

I will note that the problem of distinguishing something positive in the texts of philosophers of the 60s–80s—even certain emphases, hints, and tendencies—is solved textologically. There is no particular specificity here in the case of philosophy compared to other humanities. Any humanities scholar can easily name publications from the 60s–80s that he considers a positive achievement and that belong to the necessary sources in his current professional activity. The list of these positive achievements would be too long. And with that, we practically get the answer to the question of in which area or in what respect the 60s–80s were a “lost” or “not-lost” time.

It is true—one often has to separate important informative material or some interesting ideas contained in a text from the protective ideological, and sometimes quite sincere, “diamat” rhetoric. So, the question of in which topics or areas (and to what extent!) the 60s–80s are “lost” or “not-lost” is decided not by general considerations, but by turning to real achievements—texts, works of art, etc. In assessing the past, both a contemptuous severing of this past and a lack of critical assessment are equally unacceptable. Because such attitudes towards the past threaten a superficial understanding of the present and of ourselves in this present. As for philosophy, it would be a clear simplification to imagine that the use of new rhetoric (even postmodernist) already indicates a real renewal of thinking. It is known that a superficial critique of the homo sovieticus mentality coexists wonderfully with the survival of certain stereotypes of that same mentality in the thinking of the critic himself.

It is indeed true that individual philosophers sought to find some “niches” in order to do something positive. Mostly logic, semiotics, the philosophy of science, even aesthetics and art history (although this is already more difficult) served as such “niches.” One of the directions of positive work was the publication of sources and their description (not interpretation!)—including the publication of sources on the history of Ukrainian philosophy. References to the “classics,” to dialectics, etc., often served in those times as a cover for publishing the substantive part of texts in various humanities. In poetry collections, a “locomotive” poem performed this role. However, it is clear that in the concrete humanities, these “protective” insertions in the text could be more easily separated from its substantive part: their foreignness contributed to this. In the case of philosophical texts—especially those in which both the protective phraseology and the deeper layer were stylistically related (because they belonged to the same direction of thought—dialectics, Marxism)—such an operation is more difficult to perform, if possible at all.

No one will deny that the Institute of Philosophy and the Faculty of Philosophy of Kyiv University were centers of philosophical education, despite the ideologization of this education, and certain centers of communication. If these centers of education and communication are to be called a “school,” then this is another meaning of the word. In any case, the fewer requirements are associated with the meaning of the word “school,” the less weight the assertion about the existence of a “school” has. And the less grounds there are for disputes about its existence. This, again, is a general situation with the use of terms. If by the word “school” we mean some center of education and communication, then the basis for discussion disappears.

* * *

Myroslav Popovych. The staff members of the Department of Logic and Methodology of Science, headed by Myroslav Popovych, were Serhiy Krymsky, Petro Yolon, Serhiy Vasyliev, Anatolii Artiukh, Yevhenii Liednikov, and Viktor Kosolapov. Of them, Vasyliev, Artiukh, and Liednikov were my university classmates. Myroslav was characterized by a high degree of openness. He was not afraid of discussions, and not only on philosophical topics—he also discussed political events with those he trusted. In his later publications, he consistently avoided the use of ideological phraseology and criticism of “bourgeois” philosophy. A rejection of “diamat” was characteristic of most of his “protégés”—the young scholars who wrote and defended dissertations under his supervision. A mood of analytical approach prevailed in Popovych’s department, and, accordingly, a critical attitude towards sophistical dialectics, with its abuse of the vagueness of concepts, predominated. It is understandable that the very problem of the relationship between definiteness and indefiniteness inevitably became a subject of discussion. Popovych is characterized by a wide range of intellectual interests—from logic, semantics, philosophy of natural sciences—to culturology, ethnology, and political philosophy. His publications testify to his interest in culturology. An important indicator of his humanistic orientation is his knowledge of languages: he reads and speaks many European languages (fluently Polish, Czech, French, English, German).

Sometimes Myroslav would invite a few of us—Yolon, Vasyliev, Krymsky, and me—to his home. Using his culinary art, he would, in our presence, prepare dishes, and we, meanwhile, would begin our discussions on intellectual and political topics. We did this even without reservations that we were being overheard. I recall Myroslav speaking into a corner—that is, to the “microphones”—some phrase that was meant to attest that we thought exactly so.

I think his dissident moods were known to the “organs.” He had a “suspicious” circle of acquaintances—he was on friendly terms with Mykhailo Braichevsky, with Aleksandr Zinoviev (from the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow, known in a narrower circle as an “anti-Marxist”) and other “suspicious” persons. His ideological orientation at the time could be called “general democratic”—a term that was then in use among Ukrainian “dissidents.” Yet, unlike many Russian democrats, he had a negative attitude towards the stereotypes of Russian chauvinism. In the 60s, he solidarized with the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” But he consciously chose for himself the position of “quiet” opposition. He did not think he should allow the senseless totalitarian machine to repress him. I did not think it would be right to directly pass samvydav materials to Myroslav. That would be a violation of “operational security.” Later I learned from Myroslav that he had read some of the texts I was distributing (they reached him through other people). After my return from prison, Myroslav invited me and Serhiy Vasyliev to his home. This was done in a situation when even some of the former “like-minded people” tried to avoid communication (not noticing me when we met).

I will point out some moments which, in my opinion, clarify Popovych’s way of thinking, which has not undergone radical changes in his intellectual evolution. Popovych, at the time of my collaboration in the department, was not a supporter of positivism. I mean logical positivism. He was rather then and is today a supporter of critical rationalism. Or, more precisely, of rational reflection, when the means of reasoning and scientific cognition themselves become the object of analysis and evaluation—evaluation of their justification (groundedness) and effectiveness.

Still, the core of his interests is semantics and culturology. The theoretical basis of his culturology is structuralism, with one important correction: he attaches great importance to the transformation of structures—that is, to action, to process, and this is the aspect of diachrony (temporality). The leading methodological role of structuralism is not accidental, if one takes into account that this direction opened up the prospect of making linguistics, culturology, and along with them ethnology and anthropology, theoretical. In this way, the methodological unity of the natural and human sciences was restored, since structures could be described rationally.

In my opinion, the best key to understanding Popovych’s way of thinking can be served by his book “Rationality and the Dimensions of Human Existence” (Kyiv, 1997). In my view, it can perform the role of that text-“topos” that allows for a better understanding of the tendencies present in previous periods of his intellectual evolution. In the context of my narrative, it is important to point to the central place in this book of such problems as sense and absurdity, definiteness and indefiniteness, order and chaos. The supporting concepts in the consideration of sense and absurdity, order and chaos are the opposition of structure-antistructure. The Author reduces all speech acts to three basic ones—constatives (assertions and systems of assertions), expressives (expressions), and suggestives (suggestion of certain states and images). The last speech act for the Author includes not only the suggestion of certain images and emotional states but also incitement to action—that is, it also includes motivating (promotive) acts. This typology of the use of signs (not only linguistic, but also visual and audiovisual) corresponds to the singling out of the fundamental human abilities—reason, feeling, and will. This triad, despite the author’s own reservations about the inevitable simplifications, has the advantage of simplicity.

The named types of acts are used as the most important dimensions of communication, or, in other words, discourses. At the same time, the concepts of truth and freedom are defined depending on which of these dimensions or discourses we are dealing with. Truth in the cognitive dimension is an evaluation of assertions or systems of assertions from the point of view of their correspondence with reality. “Freedom in the cognitive dimension is the making of decisions on the basis of a better knowledge of the matter, that is, ‘conscious necessity’.” Truth in the suggestive discourse is either a question of the attainability of a certain goal in a given real situation, or the correspondence of the mode of action (and means of action) to the final goal, or else the correspondence of the goal to accepted values and norms. Freedom in the suggestive dimension is the possibility of realizing defined goals—this is “freedom for.” The expressive dimension of communication consists in the expression of the subject’s attitude towards “something” (towards the “topic”). Truth in the expressive dimension is an evaluation from the point of view of the correspondence between the intention and the expression (what is said)—that is, from the point of view of sincerity and falsity.

In cultural anthropology and ethnology, the Author uses certain typologies that define the type of a given culture, and, consequently, the type of person it creates. However, the most valuable part, in my opinion, concerns the concept of the space of culture and its transformation. It is about changing the paradigms of a given culture—that structure that defines the ways of understanding and the fundamental values. In these transformations, a decisive role is played by function, action. In society—by the action of a person, their choice. The transformation of cultural spaces can lead to the decline (disintegration) of a given culture—the disappearance of an ethnos or a civilization. The cultural diversity of the world is an unconditional value for the Author, since the homogenization of the living environment means an increase in entropy.

In my opinion, Popovych’s best findings lie in finding the connection or commonality in what is usually considered opposite, alien, isolated. Such combinations are unexpected, and therein lies their value. It is precisely the unexpected that carries information (because it reduces uncertainty, the degree of entropy). Such thinking can be conditionally called “associative.” This “associativity,” bordering on paradoxicality, I remembered from my interactions of the late 60s and early 70s. And it is precisely this associativity of thinking that is subject to reproaches of a lack of “systematicity,” of eclecticism, and so on.

Our discussions with Myroslav in the 90s revealed differences in understanding the defining features of Ukrainian national-cultural identity and the role of the Ukrainian language in this identity. I was inclined to assess Myroslav’s position as too liberal. And I tried to shift Myroslav’s position to the right—towards a rejection of an overly liberal version of multiculturalism. Too liberal, at least in view of the current situation of the Ukrainian nation—both ethnic and political. This problem became acute in the 90s, and therefore I will not go into its discussion here.

But our discussions or differences in approaches to some philosophical or ideological problems, including those expressed publicly, did not affect our relations, which have always remained friendly. Myroslav has an understanding of discussion as a means of clarifying a problem. Often, unfortunately, criticism is taken as a personal offense. It is common knowledge how pleasant and benevolent he is in communication. Today, when Myroslav has become the director of the Institute of Philosophy, his tolerant attitude towards different philosophical orientations and ideological positions of a democratic leaning contributes to an atmosphere of free communication in the institute’s philosophical “community.”

* * *

Since Popovych’s way of thinking appeals to me, because it lies in the channel of the analytical tradition, I would like to point out some differences or nuances, important from the point of view of some emphases in my own classification of speech acts in the 60s. This especially concerns the distinction between the suggestive (persuasive) and promotive (inciting) use of signs. Only some types of suggestion (which evoke certain images in the imagination, moods, feelings, and attitudes) are an incitement to actions and modes of behavior. Such are, for example, the suggestion of certain attitudes and the value orientations associated with them. The same can be said about the expressive (expressive) use of signs. In verbal art, the expression of certain sympathies or antipathies can not only suggest certain states, but also incite certain modes of behavior. This requires the use of a wider repertoire of analytical tools when analyzing texts. I think that what I have said only reinforces the weight of the reservation expressed by Popovych in the aforementioned book.

My second remark is that sensuousness (as a fundamental characteristic of all living things) is represented in human consciousness by its two branches—sensory activity (perceptions) and feelings (emotions). As introspection, which plays an important role in any memories, shows, various kinds of impressions (perceptions) enter our consciousness tinged with emotionality.

Connected with this remark of mine is also the use of the terms “sence” and “sens-ing” in these memoirs. If the term “sence” is used in its most general meaning (contrasting sence with the absurd), then “sens-ing” cannot be reduced to thinking, but must also include “sence”—the meaning that appears at the sensory level. And therefore, in clarifying the concept of sence, in my view, we must rely on the concept of consciousness (self-consciousness). Sences that appear even at the sensory level mostly contain in themselves emotional, rational, and value components. This makes it possible to pick up one of these components: to embody the sence in an artistic image, in a mental idea, or in some attitude (in emphasizing a value).

However, I think that these emphases are only an attempt to correct possible misunderstandings in connection with the aforementioned triadic scheme. I hope that they, in turn, do not contain signs of misunderstanding.

* * *

The Dispute between Logicians and Dialecticians. In my circle of closer communication, the opposition between dialecticians and supporters of analytical philosophy was personified in the disputes between me and Serhiy Vasyliev on the one hand, and Mykhailo Bulatov on the other. Since all three of us were on friendly terms (and these relations have been preserved to this day), every time chance brought us together, a discussion would begin. Mykhailo considered dialectical materialism in its official version only a primitivization of dialectics. However, he held the view that the creative development of the dialectical approach is quite fruitful and promising. He holds this view to this day. But in any case, it is important what the term “dialectics” denotes.

It is known that in a general philosophical sense, this term denotes the interconnectedness of concepts and phenomena—of part and whole, external-internal, subjective-objective, etc. As well as changeability (“development”), distrust of anything that pretends to be absolute, and emphasis on the limitations of any rational constructions. In this sense of the word, “dialectics” not only enters the lexicon of many intellectuals (regardless of their adherence to a certain direction), but has also entered the vocabulary of everyday speech.

In the history of philosophy, the word “dialectics” has undergone radical changes in its meaning. If we leave aside the positive achievements in the activity of the sophists, it was they who to the greatest extent compromised logic-dialectics—turning it into a means of persuasion, bringing it closer to rhetoric. They taught how to win in disputes (in particular, in courts), guided by the rule: whoever wins the argument is right. They composed speeches for politicians, subordinated to the same goal—achieving success in the political struggle. And in this sense, they resemble modern political technologists. Some of the politicians who went through their school came to be despised for their political cynicism: Critias is considered the personification of such a politician-cynic. In connection with the assertion about the relativity of truth, goodness, and justice, Protagoras and Cratylus—one of the followers of Heraclitus—are usually mentioned.

If we leave Kant aside, then the main influence on the modern understanding of dialectics as a special way of thinking was exerted by Hegel’s philosophy. To save metaphysics (after its criticism by Kant), Hegel created a dialectical metaphysics. If we leave aside the question of how Hegel’s philosophy was interpreted by the Left Hegelians and Marx, it is obvious that dialectical materialism (in its Marxist-Leninist version) used Hegel’s dialectics in the same way that the sophists used the “antithetics” of Heraclitus. Such a dialectic was quite rightly called “diamuck” by students. The idea that “the way up and the way down are one and the same” received its practical embodiment in the fact that the kingdom of freedom and justice (the way up), as it turns out, can be reached by going down—through dictatorship and violence. This was bound to lead to the destruction of fundamental values—human life, freedom, justice, and so on. The tricks that consist in using intellectual rhetoric that parasitizes on the interconnectedness of concepts and phenomena, on fluidity and indefiniteness, are dangerous because they are able to tempt with the depth of their obscurity. Such a dialectic only intensified its ominousness: the “cunning of reason” took on features of the cynical. It became a means of justifying any political practice, including genocide.

Today, with Mykhailo Bulatov (whom I often meet, since we work together—at the Institute of Philosophy), I no longer have grounds for sharp disputes. After all, I do not consider the use of the word “dialectics” to denote the just-named and some unnamed here emphases in philosophical thinking to be one that necessarily carries a threat of relativism. And yet I am wary of the presence in the modern way of thinking and speech of some Ukrainian intellectuals of hidden (unreflected) inheritances formed by sophistical dialectics. We find manifestations of this “dialectic” in the propensity for uncritical use of various kinds of rhetoric. Unfortunately, in modern humanitarian and even philosophical education, we have only the initial steps in mastering the positive lessons of analytical philosophy, although it is necessary to take into account the criticism of analytical philosophy, to be aware of its possibilities.

* * *

Dissertation Defense. To defend my dissertation, I needed to publish no fewer than three articles on the dissertation topic in academic journals and collections. I managed to do this, having published the three necessary articles. I will not evaluate the quality of these publications here, but I will recall an incident related to the publication of the only article that went beyond the scope of the dissertation and concerned humanitarian problems. I should note that in my philosophical texts intended for publication, I wanted to keep the text free from the inappropriate use of Marxist phraseology. And if I was forced to make a “protective” insertion, I tried to make it clearly localized so that it could be easily “removed.”

But my attempt to go beyond my logical-analytical “niche” and move on to discussing humanitarian problems yielded a very negative experience. This concerns the publication of the article “Critique of Scientistic Conceptions of Scientific and Technical Progress.” One of the immediate motivations for writing the article was Hlushkov’s idea of creating a cybernetic center capable of managing the entire economy of the USSR on a scientific basis. But more broadly, it was about the transformation of communist totalitarianism into a technocratic one, so that the formation of a new type of person would be carried out using scientifically grounded technologies. It was an attempt to write something in the genre of philosophical publicistics.

But Fedir Kanak, my classmate with whom I was on friendly terms (he was the deputy editor-in-chief of Shynkaruk’s journal “Filosofska Dumka” [Philosophical Thought]), said that in my version, it “would not pass.” I added some reference to the “classics,” he consulted again, probably with Shynkaruk, and again the conclusion was the same. I said I refused to publish it. Fedir replied that even in its current form it was “scary.” In the end, I agreed; something was probably “softened” further during its editing. The simplest way of softening was to insert the adjective “bourgeois” to emphasize the author’s correct, class-based position. I was very dissatisfied with my compliance. Such articles should be sent to samvydav: self-censorship, even at the level of editorial “polishing,” distorts the text. F. Kanak was partly right: the prophecies about the inevitable catastrophe of a closed society were an expression of my anxious premonition of future real catastrophes. It was precisely these places from the article that were later noted by Nadiia Svitlychna in her article “From the Tenacious Tribe of Don Quixotes.” Bohdan Vytvytsky also drew attention to this article in his Review of Philosophical Thought for 1979–1979 (under the title: “Philosophy, Politics, and Politics in Philosophy.”

Before the defense, I had three more short reports on the results of my dissertation. I have already mentioned the meeting with cyberneticists in Hlushkov’s department. The cool attitude of the cyberneticists to my concept was understandable. The proposed concept of meaning was contextual: it did not open up prospects for its formalization and mathematization. One could expect a more favorable attitude from linguists. And so I agreed to meet with linguists from the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences. But I was disappointed: no discussion emerged. There was still a long way to go to understanding and recognizing a semantics based on the description of speech acts (articles by Austin, Strawson, and Searle were published in “Novoe v zarubezhnoi lingvistike” only in 1986). Only a young scholar entered the discussion, characterizing my concept in ideological terms (“semantic idealism” or something of that sort). In response, I said that in this case, it was not about any ideology, but only about the meaning of expressions in natural language. I did not convince him, because even after my explanation, he insisted that I was indeed a spokesman for “bourgeois semantic philosophy.”

But I found a benevolent reception of my concept from a group of philosophers from Odesa University, gathered to meet with me by Avenir Uyomov. Myroslav Popovych had arranged for the Department of Philosophy of Odesa University to provide an external review of my dissertation. Someone from the scholars met me at the station. To my speaking Ukrainian, he remarked that at their university, only one person used the Ukrainian language publicly. But then he made it clear that this person was very primitive. I thought that probably that was precisely why he was allowed to represent Ukrainian speakers at the university. And I also thought that my report might be somehow tinged by that prototype. And indeed, at the beginning of my report, it seemed to me, there was a moment of reaction to the language. But a few minutes later I already felt the attention and interest of my audience. Then the atmosphere of benevolence was maintained throughout our entire meeting. It was the only collective discussion whose participants understood the essence of my concept. From this distance in time, I express my gratitude to Avenir Ivanovych and his colleagues for their support back then.

I still had to go to Moscow to give my dissertation and abstract to Aleksandr Zinoviev, who had agreed to be an opponent at the dissertation defense. For me, it was a responsible trip; I was anxious. Zinoviev was engaged in many-valued logic. I was afraid that my semantics would seem unconstructive to him. I was also worried that my dissertation was written in Ukrainian. However, the dissertation abstract was done in Russian, and for a text on logic, the number of pages in the abstract was sufficient if you had something to say.

I went to Moscow to give Zinoviev the text of the dissertation and the abstract. He turned out to be a person who was easy to communicate with. At least I didn't feel a hint of any superiority. But his frankness was prickly. When I handed him the dissertation text and the abstract, he asked sharply: “Do you have a lot of Marxism in here?” To this I replied: “What kind of Marxism can there be in logic?” I spent the night at the train station and met with him the next day. Later, in his speech at the dissertation defense, Zinoviev evaluated my work quite highly—higher than I myself evaluated it. He probably wanted to support me in my endeavors. The second opponent was Avenir Ivanovych, who positively evaluated the dissertation, although he expressed a few critical remarks; I did not agree with one of them.

Later, when I had already received my Candidate of Sciences degree, the publication of a book based on the dissertation was included in the publishing house’s plan. But I considered the text of my dissertation “raw” for publication as a monograph and was going to seriously rework it. But the arrests of ’72 made my plan unfulfilled.

* * *

Some time after receiving my Candidate of Sciences degree, Valeriia Nichyk suggested that I move to the Department of the History of Ukrainian Philosophy. It was an unexpected proposal, given my penchant for analytical philosophy. But I agreed. It seemed to me that I already possessed a certain methodology that could be used in some applied area of philosophical thought. And the history of Ukrainian philosophy best suited this plan. Back when I was teaching at the Ternopil Medical Institute, at the request of the department head to “decide” on the topics of my dissertation research, I chose the topic “The Ethics of Prometheanism in the works of Shevchenko, Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka.” A declarative title. Still, at that time (at least at the level of the medical institute), it was officially approved. It turned out, however, that Valeriia Nichyk valued precisely my analytical way of thinking (I will say more about this in my memoirs of the 90s). Now I chose for myself a topic from the philosophy of Ukrainian history. It was probably about interpreting Ukrainian history primarily from the sources of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Obviously, it was impossible to officially carry out the planned topic without resorting to falsifications in publications. By choosing such a topic (because I could have taken something from the history of logic), I thereby consciously left my logico-semantic “niche.” With all the future consequences.

* * *

Analytical Philosophy and Existentialism. Linguistic philosophy, as a branch of analytical philosophy, was relatively easily combined with the logic of practical reasoning and, ultimately, with practical philosophy in general. A speech act is a type of practical action, the explanation of which requires taking context into account. Expanding the approach, one can move on to considering any practical action. Its explanation likewise requires taking context into account, but no longer a linguistic one, but a situational one—the situation in which the agent (a person or a collective of people) is. But since it is the person who acts in a concrete situation (even if they strive to combine their action in a collective action), the analytical justification of the action will be incomplete without a philosophy of the person and a philosophy of values. In other words, it was about understanding the complementarity of two ancient trends of thought—rationalism and the “philosophy of the heart” (Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, etc.)

As for existentialism, its influence on Ukrainian intellectuals of the 60s is well known. But this influence came mainly through artistic and literary texts. The philosophical texts of Sartre (“Being and Nothingness”), Camus (“The Myth of Sisyphus”), and Jaspers, with some exceptions, were known only through commentaries and quotations (I have already mentioned that of my friends, Pohorily was engaged with Jaspers). Ihor Bychko’s book from the late 60s, published in Moscow (“Poznanie i svoboda” [Knowledge and Freedom] M., 1969), was useful from an informational point of view. In it, in particular, some important quotes from the works of Sartre, Camus, and others were given in translation. The subject of discussion were some articles by Russian philosophers—Erik Solovyov, Yuri Karyakin, Piama Gaidenko, and others. I recall discussing with Oleksandr Pohorily Yuri Davydov’s book (Moscow) “Etika liubvi i metafizika svoevoliia” [The Ethics of Love and the Metaphysics of Self-Will] (now reprinted). If one leaves aside the Slavophile tendencies of this text, it also contained quite justified moments. I mean the critique of individualistic subjectivism—in the form of the cult of my desires, or in the form of the existentialist orientation toward one’s own choice.

The question of whether existentialism, at least in Sartre’s version, is still in the channel of the traditional philosophy of consciousness (the so-called “egology”) and contains a threat of subjectivism became a subject of discussion in Western philosophy. In particular, it was important to clarify how existentialism responds to the dispute between supporters of the subjective and objective understanding of values. That is, to answer the question of whether existentialism does not offer an exclusively subjective understanding of values. In my archive, there are preserved excerpts from the late 60s from an article by Wiesław Gromczyński, published in the journal Studia filozoficzna, where the author, responding to critics, explains Sartre’s position on the person-value problem as follows: “Sartre’s goal is not to deny all kinds of values and norms, but to clarify the subject-ontological conditions of their existence. Widespread values are external to the individual, but that externality requires their continuous reproduction in my consciousness through an act of free choice. Sartre opposes the division of values into generally accepted—‘supra-individual’—and ‘subjective-individual’ values. Never can any value appear ‘for me’ and exist ‘for me’ outside the constitutive activity of my consciousness.”

Heidegger could consider existentialism superficial precisely because of its subjectivism. He extended the critique of “subjectivism” to a critique of intellectual traditions and collective worldviews guilty of the “forgetting of Being.” However, the “late” Heidegger, proceeding from the thesis of the fundamental uncertainty and temporality of being, gives us only an orientation toward an openness of consciousness that would allow being to appear “in its truth.” This is an important warning against mental constructs aimed at reliably representing being—with the goal of expanding power over known objects! But such a stance, ultimately, means relying on intuition. In fact, his philosophy does not offer any “stance” at all. There is a similarity to Taoism. This renews the image of the Faustian man: a traveler on black paths, without any landmarks on the horizons to indicate the direction of movement. One of the conclusions from such a philosophy was the deconstruction of all certainties, which became one of the sources of Derrida’s radical hermeneutics.

In the European socio-political context, the critique of Enlightenment “egology” (e.g., in Adorno’s “negative dialectics”), which became the source of rational discourses for disciplinary bureaucratic practices, stimulated the student movements of the late 1960s, with clear anarchist inclusions. European nations are well-consolidated, culturally and politically defined, and therefore the philosophy of “non-identity” (Adorno), of otherness and diversity, could at best soften disciplinary ideologies without radically threatening to undermine the “rational” order. The Ukrainian socio-political and ideological situation of the 1960s (and the present one as well) is fundamentally different. Unquestionably, communist totalitarianism can be seen as an extreme form of the same “egology,” but one deprived even of those elements of rationality that merely needed softening.

The analytical philosophy of action is focused on the analysis of practical reasoning—the study of motives for action, the means of successfully achieving a goal, and the consequences of an action. In analytical philosophy, the choice of an action or way of life is evaluated primarily from the perspective of its consequences. But in evaluating these consequences, it is necessary to consider not only the biological survival of the human race but also the provision of an appropriate quality of life. Meanwhile, the meaning of the term “quality of life” is value-laden: the assessment of a good life depends on life ideals. Are such ideals entirely equal (ethical relativism), or should there be universal fundamental values? To answer this question, one must rely on a certain philosophy of values—as the foundation of ethics and the core of any practical philosophy.

Thus, the logic of personal and collective action, the importance of which I mentioned concerning the choice of a practical course of action, had to be based on a philosophy of values and a philosophy of the person, whose spirituality must be considered in a cultural context. The situational context in which personal action (and, therefore, collective action) must be considered requires clarifying what type of person a given social environment cultivates. Taking the historical and social context into account allows us to find an answer to the question of why a real person, “doomed to freedom,” makes a choice in favor of an escape from freedom.

* * *

Yevhen Sverstiuk: the person and absolute values. My sporadic interactions with Yevhen Sverstiuk date back to the early 1970s. At that time, he was working as the executive secretary of the *Ukrainian Botanical Journal*. This was at least some sort of refuge, granted to him thanks to Academician Dmytro Zerov after his dismissal from the position of research fellow at the Institute of Psychology in 1965. The overlap in our philosophical preferences is obvious. If one evaluates them from the perspective of the choice of philosophical disciplines—logic and psychology (Yevhen graduated from the logic and psychology department of Lviv University in 1952)—it is clear. But from psychology, Sverstiuk moved on to literary studies and literary criticism, making this criticism philosophical.

Sverstiuk’s philosophical essays clearly belong to the school of thought known as the “philosophy of the heart.” Among his early works, Sverstiuk expressed this distinctly in “The Last Tear.” Answering the question of what kind of “literary criticism” is capable of ensuring an understanding of Shevchenko’s poetry, he denied the fruitfulness of “dry rationalism” and empirical realism (“the truth of facts”) in achieving this goal. From the viewpoint of the semantics of texts, Sverstiuk’s philosophical essays clearly lie in the vein of “mentalism,” which in the 20th century received support from Husserl’s phenomenology.

In his texts, the carriers of “eide” or even “gestalts” are predominantly metaphors. They allow him to avoid an impoverished constructive semantics—in favor of a “deep” one, rooted in the “genealogy” of the phenomenon, whether historical or psychological. Still, in evaluating Sverstiuk’s style, it is important to also consider the pragmatic aspect. The author’s goal was to speak in a timely manner, in a language understandable to the widest possible circle of readers, and in a way that would influence motivations—to spur people to an active response, at the level of a deed. His texts were written in a situation where the opportunity to say a saving word had appeared. It was important to clearly define the most crucial reference points.

The exceptional importance of Yevhen Sverstiuk’s philosophical essays lies precisely in outlining such reference points. From my perspective, the core of Sverstiuk’s philosophical thought is the philosophy of values (Sverstiuk prefers the term “worth”). With an emphasis on the problem of man—value. His essays provide us with a certain concept of moral philosophy (to a lesser extent, a “philosophy of morality”). And since he recognizes the Bible as the most important source of fundamental moral values, we are dealing with a moral-religious philosophy.

Sverstiuk’s philosophy of man, though only briefly outlined, corresponds to a vertical hierarchy of values. In it, the being of values is considered within the space of the soul. Here we find attempts to point to the sources of human spirituality in the form of an innate disposition to listen to the “message” that accompanies our deed and is called “conscience.” This innate disposition can be understood theosophically—as a gift from the Creator to hear and understand such a “message.” Or rationalistically, as the orientation of man—as an “eccentric” being, “doomed to freedom” (Sartre)—toward the word (Chomsky), and, more broadly, toward culture (Gellner). The need for value, according to Sartre, is conditioned by being “doomed to freedom.” “Cathedral in Scaffolding” begins with a discussion of a person who “clings to a patch of warm earth and high sky to feel a point of support.”

But the emphasis on freedom (as the possibility of choice), and even on responsibility for the choice, does not in itself answer the question of how to make the better choice. The refusal of freedom and responsibility is also a possible choice. All paths are open to man—both to good and to evil, including self-destruction, spiritual and physical. Biologically and psychically, man also contains the prerequisites for his spiritual degradation. From this point of view, it is understandable why the author of “The Cathedral” questions the significance of this person: “does it mean at least enough to stop before the abyss through the effort of its own reason and will?”.

Man’s innate disposition toward the “message,” the word, and culture is only a prerequisite for making a good choice. And in this context, Sverstiuk’s emphasis on culture as a carrier of meanings (understandings) and values is understandable. On culture with all its components—ethnoculture, religion, professional and intellectual culture. The transmission of cultural achievements from generation to generation (tradition) is the basis for preserving the quality of life. In this emphasis on tradition, Sverstiuk goes beyond the bounds of existentialism and individualistic liberalism. It is important to keep this in mind, for it prompts Sverstiuk to consider the being of culture in a real social environment. And this is the direction of social and cultural anthropology.

The hermeneutic aspect of the individual’s relationship to tradition, without explicit reference to hermeneutics, is important in Sverstiuk’s thinking. A person is capable of relying on tradition by interpreting cultural achievements. But the subjective act of understanding and accepting the transmitted meanings and values lies in a person’s openness to their “call.” Spiritual values, in their very content, contain the basis for their recognition. They are objective or “internal” because the subjectivity sensitive to their “call” accepts at the same time their objectivity, and even their absoluteness. After a quote from Exupéry, who speaks of the “rebuilding” of MAN, the question posed by the Author, of where to begin, is followed by the answer: “One must begin with the truth.” “The spirit of truth” is an important prerequisite for comprehending any understandings and values—as opposed to their false substitutes.

A real social environment can cultivate a person whose subjectivity becomes captive to instincts, personal and group interests, and various kinds of stereotypes—that is, sclerotic formations that make a person closed, “deaf” to meanings and values. The explanation of the nature of ideologies and psychoanalysis in the 20th century highlighted the power of such formations over people. Sverstiuk most strongly emphasized the closure to meanings carried by the word using the example of understanding Shevchenko’s poetry. It is not surprising, therefore, that he focuses on what type of person a given social environment creates. He emphasizes this with a reference to Saint-Exupéry: “the most important thing is to know what type of person is created by that system.”

In any society—and especially in a society where the state cultivates a person insensitive to true meanings and values—the main burden of the duty to preserve this “sensitivity” falls on the cultural elite, on the “writer.” This is precisely why a state that lives in evil strives to destroy the free word as the most important prerequisite for the existence of truth in society. In the situation of the 1960s–80s, the role of the individual (“a Don Quixote”), who holds Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” on the tip of his sword, becomes important. This sword is the word and the deed. It is impossible to maintain a person’s openness to understandings and values without dismantling the false substitutes produced by the given social environment. In Sverstiuk’s “The Cathedral,” one of the creators of such substitutes is Loboda—a man-as-function who “stops at nothing: for what is there to stop at when everything can be reduced to nothing by a deceitful word?” Incidentally, Sverstiuk points to the loss of the wisdom that contained the experience of recognizing “inauthentic” people in traditional rural culture.

The particular importance of his essays from the 1960s lies in the fact that at that time he proposed a forward-looking philosophy for combining the particular (personal and national-cultural identity) with the universal. Avoiding concretizations and clarifications, this view can be expressed as follows: the absolutization of the universal, when contrasted with the particular (personal, national), is, as a rule, a hidden form of particularism; and the absolutization of the particular, when contrasted with the universal, weakens the particular.

What caused the spiritual situation that prompts one to call the Ukrainian person “lost” or “confused”—first and foremost within themselves, and only then in worlds not only geographically defined? What is the hidden and most important source of that straying that incites millions of Ukrainians to renounce their cultural identity? What force stands behind this ease of self-renunciation, behind this spinelessness that provokes a strong neighbor to hold Ukrainians in a “brotherly” embrace? Sverstiuk does not neglect geopolitical factors in explaining this subjugation. But the role of these factors is not decisive: any nation has asserted itself not by the will of its neighbors, but by its own will and action. His thinking is focused on the search for internal root causes of this lack of freedom. Finding the primary sources of a spiritual illness is the most difficult thing: “It is difficult to create a picture of spirituality in modern Ukraine not only because of the lack of its bright expressions but also because of the lack of information. The very image of spiritual life is dim and indistinct: almost nowhere does it appear in its fullness and developed forms—not even in the first cradle of spirituality.” Under such preconditions, the topography of Ukrainian spirituality must include the singling out of significant phenomena from the stream that overshadows their meaning.

Sverstiuk sees the source of Ukrainian cultural-national identity in the combination of three most important components—folk culture, Christianity, and professional culture. In professional culture, he attaches special importance in this regard to Skovoroda and Shevchenko. Sverstiuk only rejects superficial borrowings from foreign cultures—“a great power of great words.” Meanwhile, his philosophy only confirms that Ukrainian cultural identity belongs to the family of cultures united in the broad stream of Western civilization. The emphasis on the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian cultural tradition and on Christianity as an important component of this distinctiveness does not acquire features of religious or national fundamentalism in Sverstiuk’s work, as long as the word “fundamentalism” is not used as an ideological tool aimed at undermining cultural identity. For the individual and the nation in Yevhen Sverstiuk’s work are not monads closed in on themselves, but ones that have countless windows, through which they call to one another and are therefore capable, in this calling, of creating at once a national and a universal conciliarity.

This concise and inevitably simplified sketch can be concluded with the observation that of the three supporting terms in Sverstiuk’s philosophy—value-person-social environment—the field of tension is centered around the person. For the consciousness of the person (subjectivity) and his or her action are the guarantee of the existence of fundamental values in a given society. The metaphor that is the key to understanding Sverstiuk’s philosophy and personality is a figure who with one hand points to “heaven” and in the other holds a sword—a sword aimed at those scarecrows that claim to replace true understandings and values. Sverstiuk always keeps his two-edged sword—the word and the deed—at the ready.

But beyond that, the prospect of continuing this line of thought lies in focusing attention precisely on the areas of tension: person-value-God; person and community (society). One of the auxiliary approaches to understanding the work of Yevhen Sverstiuk is to compare his philosophical intentions with Western philosophical neoconservatism. This is not a matter of borrowing, but of echoes: the Western socio-political and cultural context is significantly different from the Ukrainian one. In fact, Sverstiuk developed a version of Ukrainian liberal conservatism, in which the value of the individual (personal self-determination) is in a dramatic interaction with a social environment that has largely lost the spiritual foundation of its life. A comparison of his emphasis on values and traditions with Frank Meyer’s article “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism,” published in the late 1960s, may be useful in this regard.

* * *

Philosophy and poetry. It was probably only after abandoning the idea of a single possible scientific style of philosophical discourse that the idea of writing a series of essays about the horizons of worldview and world-understanding in 20th-century Ukrainian poetry could occur to me. I did not plan to write them using an analytical approach, but wanted to offer a subjective, personal “reading” of the poems. I started with Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, although I had also jotted down some preliminary notes about the poetry of the Sixtiers. When, as it seemed to me, I had finished the article, I asked Ivan Svitlychny to read it and give me his impression. His feedback was very important to me.

I only interacted with Svitlychny occasionally. I gave him my article, probably at the end of 1971. I recall that he expressed his comments orally, in his usual, very tolerant manner. This was his style of working with young writers—to nurture, support, and show patience so as not to undermine the author’s faith in their abilities. It turned out that he had scattered my text with remarks (written above the lines), but I saw them more than a decade later. When the arrests took place in January of '72, there was no time for poetry. Lialia Svitlychna gave me this text after my return from prison.

I revised it (it was published in the *Geneza* almanac in '94). I think the article shares some of the worldview orientations outlined by Sverstiuk (“Cathedral in Scaffolding”)—particularly in understanding such problems as the person and value, universal and national conciliarity, and so on.

Chapter VII. The Spread of Samizdat. Coming Out of the ‘Underground’

1. The Reproduction and Distribution of Samizdat

To what I have occasionally mentioned so far about the spread of samizdat, I add this significant supplement. I will not provide a general list of the samizdat works that were distributed in the 1960s (see, for example, Heorhii Kasianov's book *Dissenters...* and other studies). The Verdict from the “Criminal Case of Proniuk, Lisovyi, and Ovsiienko” lists most of the texts that we distributed. As for me, a significant part of my activities related to the reproduction of samizdat remained unnoticed by the KGB. This concerns the retyping of texts on a typewriter during my time at the Advanced Training Courses at KSU in 1965, as well as the retyping of various messages and statements from the camps that Nadiia Svitlychna gave me, the reproduction of texts by Mykola Khomenko in the form of photocopies, etc. Among samizdat readers, the most in-demand at the time were Ivan Dziuba’s *Internationalism or Russification?*, Mykhailo Braichevskyi’s *Reunification or Annexation?*, Viacheslav Chornovil’s *The Chornovil Papers*, Yevhen Sverstiuk’s works “Cathedral in Scaffolding” and “Ivan Kotliarevsky Is Laughing,” Mykhailo Osadchyi’s *Cataract*, and Valentyn Moroz’s articles. A special place belongs to the five issues of *The Ukrainian Herald* and various smaller texts— “Regarding the Trial of Pohruzhal's'kyi,” etc. Of the diaspora publications, Ivan Koshelivets's *Contemporary Ukrainian Literature* and Bohdan Kravtsiv's book *On the Crimson Horse of Revolution* were circulated in the original (without copying, as far as I know). At least I read these two books (the second of these gave me my first systematic understanding of the destruction of entire movements in Ukrainian cultural and literary life). From Russian samizdat—Sakharov’s “Reflections on Progress,” Avtorkhanov’s *The Technology of Power*, Solzhenitsyn's novel *Cancer Ward* (later—*The First Circle*), and individual articles, for example, “Raskolnikov's Letter to Stalin,” etc.

I had significant advantages for organizing the reproduction and distribution of samizdat in Kyiv, primarily because I had graduated from Kyiv University, which, one way or another, attracted my student friends and acquaintances. This was an important source of contacts during my graduate school years and during the several years of my work at the Institute of Philosophy. In addition, and this is no less important: I had relatives and acquaintances as a result of people from nearby villages moving to Kyiv. After marrying Vira Hryshchenko, her support and that of her friends from her home region were very important. I will not describe all the episodes here in which relatives and friends from home helped (I will mention some later).

I will note the following, by the way. When I was a high school student, my cousin Halyna, the daughter of my uncle Anton, married a UPA fighter who, after imprisonment, was not allowed to return to Western Ukraine. Valerii, during my student years, did not speak to me about national issues. But when I was already a fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, I easily found common ground with his older son, who was working in Kyiv at the time: in one situation, he kept some samizdat materials for me. Valerii died in the 1980s, after I returned from imprisonment. Shortly before his death, I visited him. And I remember with what anguish he said: “Yes, we fought for the same thing you did.” I assured him that this was undoubtedly true. I think this sign of solidarity was important to him—given the mockery from those of my fellow villagers for whom the word “Banderite” no longer reminded them of the label “Petliurite” applied to their grandfathers and fathers.

* * *

Unfortunately, there were no good technical means for copying materials—just the long-suffering typewriter and the making of photocopies. We dreamed of more powerful technical means. Yevhen Proniuk and I discussed the idea of creating a small printing press. We began to think and look for what was needed. Yevhen once informed me that there was an opportunity to get some type: Andrii Koroban was supposed to give it to me. Here I must make a clarification: in the document, an excerpt of which I provide below, it is stated that the type was given to me not by Koroban, with whom I had a meeting on this matter, but by Vasyl Semeniuk on Koroban's instructions. However, when I later examined my lead cargo, I was disappointed: it was some kind of waste from a printing press. But I needed to hide it temporarily. Oleksandr Pohorilyi, who was then teaching philosophy at the Institute of Civil Aviation (“GAK”), agreed. As I was entering the building (on Harmatna Street), his colleague, the head of the philosophy department of that Institute, Y. Zharikov, happened to see me; at the same time, he noticed a person who was following me. According to Pohorilyi, Zharikov informed him of this, so I needed to immediately take my “cargo.” I don't remember where I eventually got rid of it, as I was convinced that nothing could be made of it. In V. Fedorchuk's information report to V. Shcherbytsky dated June 19, 1972, which states that “otdelnye sotrudniki Instituta filosofi AN USSR dopuskaiut vrazhdebnye i ideologicheski vrednye deistviia” [certain employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the UkrSSR Academy of Sciences are committing hostile and ideologically harmful acts], this episode is described as follows: “LISOVOI v pole zreniia organov KGB popal v marte 1969 goda, kogda on s sobliudeniem konspiratsii vstretilsia s SEMENIUKOM Vasiliem Iakovlevichem, 1936 goda rozhdeniia, urozhentsem Zhitomirskoi oblasti, ukraintsem, bespartiinym, st. inzhenerom zavoda ‘Radiopribor,’ vzial u nego predmet, po vneshnemu vidu pokhozhii na pishushchuiu mashinku, i otnes ego na kvartiru POGORELOGO A.I., rabotaiushchego v nastoiashchee vremia v apparate TsK KP Ukrainy. V khode proverki PRONUKA i LISOVOGO polucheny operativnye dannye o tom, chto oni periodicheski vstrechaiutsia s POGORELYM. Kharakter etikh vstrech neizvesten.

O SEMENIUKE izvestno, chto on v 1965 godu po mestu raboty do-puskal natsionalisticheskie vyskazyvaniia, razmnozhal i rasprostranial dokumenty ‘samizdata,’ v sviazi s chem v 1966 godu byl profilaktirovan. Ostavaias’ na prezhnikh pozitsiiakh, SEMENIUK v 1967 godu ustanovil sviaz’ s KOROBANEM i okazyval emu sodeistvie v oborudovanii kustarnoi, tipografii dlia razmnozheniia antisovetskikh i ideino vrednykh dokumentov”.

There were other attempts. Yevhen Proniuk once said he knew some Galicians who (after graduating from the Lviv Polygraphic Institute) were working in Kyiv at one of the enterprises. I met with two young men to find out how they saw the practical side of this matter. They rejected the option of making a press with type (it was impractical) and talked about fundamentally new means of reproduction. They were probably talking about a device like a Xerox machine. The plan was never realized—the arrests of 1972 stood in the way.

But beyond that, moving typewriters and changing the font, which we assumed could be identified by the KGB (since the texts produced could have already fallen into their hands), was a lot of trouble. Once I tried to change the font myself, assuming the operation was simple. I got nowhere: the new font wouldn't insert properly. Moving the typewriters was a responsible and laborious task. Certain interesting episodes of our “underground” life are connected with this. Often, by arrangement with Yevhen, I had to meet with strangers, agreeing on some password. I remember one such meeting during my graduate school years in the garden of the Polytechnic Institute with Serhiy Kudria (I didn't know him then; he is now a fellow at the Institute of Philosophy).

* * *

Nadiia Svitlychna. During my last meeting with Nadiika in Kyiv (as we all called her in our inner circle), we clarified the time of our collaboration in retyping materials that we managed to get from the camps (we agreed it was 1967). I remember it was in the summer. Although I knew Nadiia, I deliberately avoided communicating with her, saving it for special occasions. Proniuk approached me with a request to help her retype such texts—appeals, statements, letters, etc. (from Lukianenko, Kandyba, the Horyn brothers, and others). I had previously spoken with my relatives (my Aunt Vasylyna’s son, Ivan, and his wife, Tamara) about working in their apartment (on the already mentioned Nemirovych-Danchenko Street). A typewriter was provided to me for this purpose.

I would meet with Nadiika in a way that would exclude the possibility of a “tail.” I would take from her sheets of the most varied format, written in the camps: I still remember and cherish those sheets, written hastily, with pencils, sometimes in small and illegible script, on scraps of paper of different formats. It was not easy for them to overcome the obstacles to end up here, in a Kyiv apartment. When retyping the materials, I followed security precautions: I wore rubber gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints (carbon paper!). Among the various statements and reports about conditions in the camps, I remember complaints about the probable use of psychotropic drugs. They described particular physical and mental states, which in some of the letters were explained as occurring after eating food. I will return to this with my own experience of being in prison and in connection with discussing this issue with some former political prisoners.

* * *

Mykola Khomenko. A man worthy of special attention, who, through his sacrificial work, produced dozens of photocopies of the books *Internationalism or Russification?*, *Reunification or Annexation?*, “Portraits of Twenty Criminals,” and other smaller materials. This was Mykola Khomenko, from the village of Zelenky in the Kyiv region (Kaharlyk district). His family’s history is typical. Seven of Mykola’s father’s sisters and brothers died during the famine of '33 (one of the brothers died after eating fresh bread from the new harvest). Mykola’s father died a “hero’s death” in the war. Mykola graduated from the Bila Tserkva medical school. After graduating, he worked for some time at the Starobezradychi medical post. That’s when I met him, because I turned to him about my mother’s illness. During my time in graduate school, he worked as a radiologist in Kaharlyk. It was then that he agreed to make photocopies. He worked mostly late in the evening and at night, in the hospital premises, when everyone had gone home. He had friends among the doctors whom he could trust. Vasyl Ovsiienko recalls meeting one of his doctor friends in Kaharlyk.

In my memory, collaborating with Mykola most reminds me of underground activity. Working in the university library for academics, I kept samizdat materials in a briefcase under my desk. I tried never to leave the briefcase with the materials when I left the reading room. My books and notebooks remained on the desk. When I needed to pass materials to someone, I would take the briefcase or a bundle and pass the texts in the corridors of the building or go out onto the street.

Meetings with Mykola always followed the same scenario. In accordance with an agreement made during the previous meeting, I had to calculate the time so that, leaving my papers on the table in the reading room, I could take a trolleybus to Volodymyrska-Lybidska (to the old Volodymyrskyi market) and, turning right from Chervonoarmiiska (down Lybidska), I would get on a bus heading towards Obukhiv. I would usually get off at the first stop in Kozyn; few people got off there. Mykola would either be waiting for me by the path in the forest, or, conversely, I would wait for him. Then each of us would return on the next bus back. After some time, I would reappear in the reading room and sit down at my desk. This continued, I believe, somewhere between 1968 and 1971. I only had to buy photo paper for Mykola.

He later married Nina, a wonderfully kind person who became his faithful friend (he met her in our one-room apartment at the time on Darnytskyi Boulevard). They had two daughters—Myroslava and Roksolana. Mykola suffered from heart disease and died young, after my return from exile to Kyiv.

* * *

Many episodes, sometimes comical, are associated with the distribution of samizdat. A peculiarity of my behavior—common in general to people focused on ideas and images—was and is “drifting off” from my surroundings as a result of deep thought. Until there is a need to focus attention on the environment I am in. Riding on public transport, I switch to my thoughts, and consequently, even now, I often miss my stop. If I had a “tail” in some cases, this could have given the impression of deliberately “shaking a tail.” But since I didn't always switch my attention back in time, this could have led to undesirable consequences.

Once, I arranged with Alla Klimash that at one of the bus stops she would give me a bag with samizdat materials (which had been stored for some time with her acquaintances). Before the meeting, I only had my capacious (“professorial”) yellow leather briefcase. My workhorse. When I took the bag from Alla and we said goodbye, I stopped a random bus with the inscription “Aeroflot.” But “muscle memory,” probably along with a subconscious shift of attention to the more dangerous cargo, worked in such a way that I left my briefcase on the bus. There was no samizdat in the briefcase, but it contained one or two notes that then replaced oral speech to avoid being overheard. I don't remember why I didn't destroy them immediately. Still, a week or two later, I managed to find that bus and get my briefcase back. The notes were in place. After rereading them, I calmed down—it was difficult to understand anything from them.

Another incident occurred at the intercity telephone exchange office on what was then Lenin Street, near the Opera House. I went in with one of my friends with a briefcase full of samizdat materials. Entering the booth, I placed it on the bench so I could see it. Before that, I noticed a man, tall, thin, in his thirties, who was “noticing nothing,” looking at the upper corners of the room. This was too much; his “absent-mindedness” was suspicious. So I didn't take my eyes off my briefcase. When that man grabbed it, I said “now.” I managed to grab the handle of the briefcase when the man was already in the first set of doors by the entrance. This was the riskiest episode in my street adventures with samizdat.

* * *

Ivan Drach. One of the problems associated with the distribution of samizdat was our poverty: a lack of funds for the most basic necessities—even for photo paper. The salaries of young researchers were low. Thinking about who could help, I decided to turn to Ivan Drach. In the meantime, it was interesting for me to talk with him, as I was then reflecting on his poetry in connection with writing my essays. I called him, and we arranged a meeting. I remember my conversation with him in Mariinsky Park, sharing my plans for distributing samizdat. He was sympathetic to my enthusiasm. And in the meantime, he expressed regret that I had not brought any samizdat texts with me. This was a surprise to me: I thought that in the literary community there must be activists distributing it. I must have been exaggerating the scale of the distribution. Drach agreed to help without hesitation and gave me 100 rubles—almost my entire salary. But this case is an exception: it was hopeless to turn to those who had large salaries. I recall having two more visits to Drach's apartment (in the building opposite Ploshcha Slavy), probably on some other occasion.

* * *

Nestor Buchak, Borys Popruha, Mykhailo Hryhorovych. The people named here were regular “consumers” of samizdat. And they took it not just to read and return, but for distribution. Nestor Buchak was a student at the Ternopil Medical Institute when I taught there. I remembered him for his refined intelligence and tact. Our conversations at that time began our friendly relations. After graduating from the institute, he entered graduate school at the Kyiv Medical Institute and lived in a dormitory on Volodymyrska Hill. I met with him regularly, often near the arch (which led to the courtyard where the dormitory was located). He took and distributed samizdat literature from me for, I think, about two years.

Borys Popruha, a native of the Poltava region, graduated from the philosophy faculty of Kyiv University (my classmate), did his postgraduate studies at Kyiv University (1964–1967), and worked as a philosophy lecturer at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute (1967–1988). He was the mayor of the city of Kobeliaky (1994–1998). One of those who, in the 60s, was prone to heated arguments in city crowds: he couldn't restrain himself from jumping into an argument on the streets with random passers-by or on public transport. Since he didn't observe any precautions in conversation (he said what he thought), he shocked his random listeners with his unusual assessments, in particular, his high praise for the UPA's struggle and his statements that Bandera is a hero of Ukraine. I told him that such sporadic and scandalous arguments could easily result in him being unable to do anything at all, and advised him to direct his energy toward a specific circle of people, distributing samizdat literature among them. Maybe my words really had an effect on him. In any case, he became one of the constant “consumers” of samizdat. He would come to the reading room for academics, I would take my briefcase from under the table, and we would sit on one of the benches in the park on Shevchenko Boulevard; during the conversation, choosing a moment, I would transfer the materials to his briefcase.

Mykhailo Hryhorovych, a geographer by education, worked at the Council for the Study of the Productive Forces of Ukraine, dealing with economic geography—the location of economic facilities in Ukraine. Painful problems, if one takes into account the role of political factors in this placement. Now they are well known (from economic history). Mykhailo regularly took and distributed samizdat materials.

I will note that in each case, I did not ask and did not know (with few exceptions) to whom exactly the materials were being passed. Most of them were not returned to me.

2. The Arrests of '72: Coming Out of the ‘Underground’

Vira. After defending my Ph.D. dissertation and getting married, my personal life, it seemed, could finally enter a calmer and more settled course. As could Vira's life. Her student years were harder than mine. She, like me, belonged to the rural youth who came to the cities in search of a temple of education and culture. But, having finished school in 1954, she was unable to enroll in full-time studies, only in the correspondence department of the philology faculty of Kyiv University (the Ukrainian language and literature department). And so she was forced to work, live in “corners,” sometimes in basements, and eat and dress as modestly as possible. But she attended lecture-concerts at the philharmonic, museums, and theaters, and bought books. She first worked (1954–57) at the Kyiv Motorcycle Plant (for over two years as a lathe operator, then as a timekeeper), then for a year as a Pioneer leader (at school No. 24), and finally as an accountant (at a construction and assembly directorate, 1958-62). Combining work and study, especially for diligent students, is not easy, but she graduated from Kyiv University in 1961.

In 1962, she had the opportunity to get a job as a laboratory assistant at the USRIP (Ukrainian Scientific Research Institute of Pedagogy). This was perhaps the best start—for her, who considered teaching her calling. Besides, it was possible to combine work at the Institute with teaching. In that same year, 1962, she began teaching Ukrainian literature at an evening School for Working Youth (No. 40, on Budivelnykiv Street): at that time, such schools only had grades 8–10. And from 1965 to 1969, she taught Ukrainian literature in a daytime Russian-language school (No. 168, located on Tampere Street). But, according to her, it was at the USRIP that she was able to make up for her university education to achieve the proper level in her teaching work, primarily thanks to the literature that became available to her, including some texts that were kept only in the “spetskhrany” [special collections] (this is how she read the then-inaccessible works of Kulish and others). In addition, communication was very important, particularly with Tamara Ivanivna Tsvelykh—one of the most educated humanities scholars of that time.

The USRIP then had a rich library which, unfortunately, in independent Ukraine, was dispersed as a result of the Institute's liquidation. This is an almost standard situation: when I hear talk today about reforming the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, particularly the Academy's humanities institutes, I think with fear that “reformers” from the cohort of “politician”-businessmen might take advantage of this talk not only to seize the premises of the NAS of Ukraine institutes but also to destroy the main element of the inherited infrastructure—archives and libraries, and thus continue in a renewed way the work symbolized, from this point of view, by the main event of the time I am narrating—the burning of the Academy of Sciences library.

Above the USRIP, on the floor above, were the premises of the Institute of Psychology, where Yevhen Sverstiuk was a fellow at the time. Writers and intellectuals of the time—Ivan Drach, Ivan Dziuba, Roman Korohodskyi, and others—would visit him. Yevhen would sometimes come down to the USRIP to borrow some literature, and that’s how Vira met him. Thanks to Yevhen, her circle of communication expanded, and thus she was able to read some of the works that were then circulating in samizdat. The second hub for her communication and obtaining samizdat works was the amateur choir “Zhaivoronok” [“Skylark”]: it was first led by Moldavan (who was Jewish), and then by Vadym Smohytel. Here, at choir gatherings, she met the painter Vasyl Parakhin, whom she later married, but the marriage proved unsuccessful and ended in divorce.

Of the samizdat texts Vira was lucky enough to read, the unpublished part of Franko’s article “What Is Progress” made a particularly strong impression on her, which, as she recalls today, “turned her worldview upside down.” After all, Franko’s prediction had been confirmed! It still towers over the flirtations of postwar European intellectuals with Marxism and even communism, which continued into the 60s (although the publication of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” acted as a cold shower for some). In addition, for understanding the state of Ukrainian culture and literature at the time, Bohdan Kravtsiv’s book *On the Crimson Horse of Revolution* and Ivan Koshelivets's *Contemporary Ukrainian Literature*, which also circulated in samizdat, were important for her.

Once, late in the evening, when she was reading Vynnychenko’s *Rebirth of a Nation* (Sverstiuk had given her the book), the management came into the department office—the director, the deputy director, and O. Dzeverin, the head of the history of pedagogy department, where she was then working. Deputy Director Chepeliev approached Vira and, placing his hand on the open book, jokingly asked: “And what is Vira reading?” But, fortunately, Vira did not lose her head and, pulling the book from under his hand, said just as jokingly: “A secret.” Thus, she avoided danger. But it was the deputy director who showed concern, asking her on occasion where she lived. Hearing the answer “nowhere,” he said that she taught at a school, and there were dormitories for teachers, and that he would write a letter of recommendation for her to be given a room in a dormitory. And so he did; she moved into a dormitory shortly before it closed. They no longer registered her residence there, but as a result of the resettlement, she received a room in a “kommunalka” on Darnytskyi Boulevard, where she and I lived after our marriage. Even before our marriage, Shynkaruk had suggested that I write an application to receive a room for researchers. But since the matter of my marriage had already been decided, I refused—instead of taking the opportunity to improve our housing conditions (one room for the two of us with a small child).

According to Vira, the attitude toward her at the institute was benevolent: they didn't overburden her with technical work, as they saw her surrounded by books and therefore hoped that she would grow into a future scholar. And she really did try to live up to such expectations, having already passed two of the three required candidate exams—foreign language and philosophy. The topic of her future doctoral dissertation—“The Pedagogical Views of B. Hrinchenko”—had been agreed upon, though not yet approved. So she was compiling a bibliographic card file and reading literature.

But her prospect of a future as a scholar was dashed. Like that of many other creatively inclined and spiritually oriented young men and women, caught up in the wave of national and civic awakening. Her first “mistake,” from the point of view of the “system,” was her view of a teacher not only as a transmitter of accumulated knowledge, but as a spiritual mentor, obliged, therefore, to also awaken the personal and national dignity destroyed by the regime. I would not want to preempt here, as is customary to do today, by saying that the cultivation of national consciousness in this case did not mean the cultivation of hostility towards other nations or national minorities. For it was precisely those who were then called “bourgeois nationalists” who were the defenders of the rights of national minorities and their cultural identity.

This is a well-known fact that might not even be worth mentioning if the modern proponents of the former “internationalism” (in its new rhetorical guise) did not “prefer” to remain silent about it, just as they remain silent about the fact that it was their ideological predecessors—“internationalists”—who destroyed the cultural identity of the Ukrainian people and national minorities. They continue to try to act in the same direction today, and moreover are well-financed by someone: one of many facts is the recently launched free distribution in Kyiv (by putting them in mailboxes) of the Ukrainophobic newspaper *Kievskiy Vestnik*. But the current political changes under the cover of political reform may pour old wine into new wineskins, finding reliable support at the level of the political elite: the Ukrainophobic statements of the well-known Dmytro Tabachnyk, which have already provoked justified protests, signal this unequivocally.

Nevertheless, even under the conditions of that time, as I have already mentioned, it was possible to do something if you didn't belong to the completely terrified and didn't agree to hide like a mouse in a hole. So, in the evening school, Vira not only sought to awaken a sense of human dignity and national consciousness in her adult students during literature lessons but also organized literary evenings. They were held in the school hall, where all classes gathered, as was customary then. As she recalls today, Petro Boiko, a well-known announcer and lecturer on language and speech culture, after his performance at one of these evenings, was surrounded by students who would not let him go for a long time, showering him with questions. She conducted evenings dedicated to Shevchenko's work according to a script written by Sverstiuk. In the same hall, Yevhen Sverstiuk gave a lecture on the work of Pavlo Hrabovskyi.

Vira maintained this teaching style in the daytime Russian-language school as well. In addition, she encouraged students to attend literary and artistic evenings organized by the Sixtiers, as well as various lectures and excursions: M. Braichevskyi led one excursion through Kyiv for a group of her students. It is known that he was an enthusiast of educational activities in the 60s: his public lectures and excursions were the main method of such activity. Teaching students to write essays, Vira rejected the usual stencils imposed by the educational bureaucracy; instead, she introduced a free style of expression. This allowed the schoolchildren to give free rein to their creative thought and express their own understanding. Sometimes they went “out of bounds,” and it was necessary to protect them and herself from accusations of ideological deviations.

So Vira lived an intense life: work at the USRIP, teaching at school, attending the “Zhaivoronok” choir twice a week, but beyond that, the most interesting thing for her was her participation in the cultural and artistic events organized by the Sixtiers. She attended some of the meetings of the Club of Creative Youth (although she was not a member). She remembered an evening of young Ukrainian poetry which, due to the refusal to provide the pre-arranged venue, was held in a park in Nyvky. Many people came to the evening. Vira came with two of her students. Vasyl Stus hosted the evening; the “KGBists” tried to persuade him to stop giving the floor to speakers, but he did not give in. A shout about the “Bandera language” was heard, but Dziuba called on people not to succumb to provocations. Also memorable was a literary evening dedicated to Lesia Ukrainka, held in what was then the First of May Park (opposite the Verkhovna Rada building). In her mind, the image still arises of people with torches, the passionate reading of poems by Mykola Vinhranovskyi and Tetiana Tsymbal. Also memorable was an evening dedicated to the anniversary of the death of Vasyl Symonenko. Vira also attended one of the discussion-gatherings of Ukrainian intellectuals at Alla Horska’s place (on Tereshchenkivska Street), as well as a gathering at Alla’s workshop.

However, the immediate reason for her dismissal from the USRIP, by order of Director Academician Rusko in July of '64, was Vira’s presence, as part of the “Zhaivoronok” choir, near the Shevchenko monument on May 22. When Rusko summoned Vira for a “conversation” and she said there were no complaints about her work, he informed her that the reason for the dismissal was her lack of a Kyiv residence permit (she was registered in Brovary). The dismissal caused surprise and even outrage among the staff of the history of pedagogy department. They went to the director to ask him to explain the situation. They returned downcast because the director had not changed his decision. Meanwhile, Dzeverin approached Vira and said he wanted to walk out of the Institute with her, and, as he walked her out, explained that the issue was not the residence permit: all heads of institutions had been called “on the carpet,” given a list of those present near the Shevchenko monument, and told to find their own people and fire them. When Vira said that she would at least remain working at the school, Dzeverin remarked in response that, in connection with this situation, this too might be closed to her. Rusko said that he did not want to “lay down his party card” because of Vira.

Nevertheless, she was not dismissed from her teaching position at the evening school, nor at the aforementioned Russian-language school, where she worked until the end of the summer of 1969. But in this school, the previous story repeated itself in a different version. In the summer, during her vacation, she was summoned for a conversation with the “triangle” (the school's party organizer and union organizer, and the second secretary of the Darnytskyi District Party Committee). The second secretary of the Darnytskyi District Party Committee was Kalinicheva, Liudmyla Ivanivna, who, as Vira later became convinced, was an intelligent and benevolent person. But in the conversation, she was accused of allowing “nationalist deviations” in her lessons. And in August, on the eve of the usual district teachers' conference, there was an expectation (it was said in the corridors) that the second secretary of the district committee would touch upon the issue of ideological “deviations” at school No. 168 in her speech: they meant “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and Zionism.

It was clear that the object of criticism would be Vira and a Jewish woman, Bela Binder, who taught Russian literature excellently. Since they were friends, this could serve as a visual confirmation of the union of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism with Zionism. Bela was a nationally conscious Jewish woman, well-educated, involved in psychology, and wanted to finish graduate school, but the doors to graduate school were securely closed to her forever. So at the conference, in anticipation of the accusations, Vira and Bela consulted on how to defend themselves. Bela insisted that she would speak in defense of Vira, because “you can't say about yourself what I can say.” But Kalinicheva, in her speech, bypassed the ideological issues. Nevertheless, the general atmosphere in the school changed: it was clear that various inspections would follow. Besides, Vira felt emotionally drained. So she wrote a letter of resignation. This resignation was taken hard by the nationally conscious students, including the Jewish ones. Such students would later not forget their teacher, and would support her, at least occasionally, on her difficult path in life.

For about a year, she worked as a proofreader at the “Mystetstvo” publishing house, and then got a job as a junior editor at the “Naukova Dumka” publishing house. But here she again encountered conflict, first as a result of writing a critical review of the book “Kozak Mamaryha” (the review was published in *Literaturna Gazeta*, the name of *Literaturna Ukraina* at the time) and after sending the review to the Committee on Press Affairs (this book has now been republished with some editorial corrections). But then, to this episode was added Vira's writing of a negative editorial conclusion on a collection of anniversary speeches dedicated to Lesia Ukrainka. So, in October of '71, she was asked to write a letter of resignation: not the right way of thinking. For example, she denied that Lesia Ukrainka was “echoing” Gorky’s “Song of the Stormy Petrel” with her “Dosvitni Vohni” [“Fires Before Dawn”]. And so on.

But this time, fate smiled on her again, giving her the opportunity to realize her former dream: she found herself within the walls of the USRIP for a second time, and was even promised a promotion to the position of junior research fellow as soon as the opportunity arose. For the time being, she was hired as a laboratory assistant. She could again communicate with Tamara Ivanivna Tsvelykh. Everything could be made up for. But my protest against the arrests cut short this new opportunity. And this time, for good.

Before you is a typical biography, if you disregard the details, of a participant in the resistance movement of that time, who did not belong to the group of leading figures of that movement, but without whom there would have been no movement at all. Moreover, Vira’s activity in defending me after my imprisonment, her important role in the activities of the Solzhenitsyn Fund in Ukraine, and, finally, her decision to move with the children to my place of exile to serve it out to the “end of the term,” are important additions to what has been said here.

* * *

Still, if we look more broadly at the period of the mid-1960s, then, as I have already noted, the party bureaucracy, in the process of carrying out the so-called “de-Stalinization,” encountered an alternative. This alternative had starkly confronted the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries: the choice between democracy, on the one hand, and the preservation of a large and powerful Russian state, on the other. Either democracy—and in that case, the inevitable collapse of the “socialist camp,” and after it, the USSR—or an orientation toward a great state (this concept included a large territory), which meant a bet on force, on repression—that is, a return to the traditional means of Russian politics.

Russian intellectuals, capable of thinking in terms of cultural-political identities, at least at the end of the 19th century, faced a historical choice in view of the formation of national and at the same time democratic states in Europe. There were three historical paths for Russia into the future: (a) the path of self-limitation—the rejection of creating a territorially large state and the creation of a national state based on the Russian ethno-national core; (b) the Slavophile project—to expand the borders of the Russian ethno-national core through the Russification of Belarusians and Ukrainians; (c) the Eurasian project or the “melting pot” project—to create a political identity whose borders would ultimately be determined by which of the ethnoi of the former Russian Empire (and its successor, the USSR) could be successfully assimilated. In options (b) and (c), ethnic Russians were doomed to eventually dissolve, to disappear as an ethnic nation. But in the second option, there was hope to eventually “convince” Belarusians and Ukrainians that all three peoples, including Russians, were only sub-ethnoi (more precisely, sub-national formations, not separate ethnic nations). At the same time, the unification of these sub-ethnoi was conceived as taking place on a Russian basis—the Russian language and “true” Russian Orthodoxy. In the USSR, as Berdyaev showed in his book *The Origin of Russian Communism*, this missionary role of the Russian people, religiously interpreted in Slavophilism, became one of the hidden sources of “internationalism.” Moreover, communism, as a quasi-religion, had a significant advantage, because Russia’s mission acquired global significance—as the vanguard in the liberation of all peoples from the evil of capitalism.

During the “Brezhnevism” period, the party leadership openly took a course toward the “melting pot”—the creation of a “single Soviet people.” The successful operation of this “pot” was to be ensured by a belt of “friendly” states, the obedient governments of the “socialist camp.” If we evaluate the projects mentioned here in a modern context, then the rejection of the melting pot idea is complicated by the choice of borders: ethnic Russians (or those who consider themselves Russians) are scattered in patches across the vast expanses of the former empire. Today there is hope for a different prospect—for the modern process of integration and globalization, with the hope that cultural-national identities will lose their importance. As someone said at this year’s Forum in Davos, “culture follows the economy”—an updated version of “economic determinism.”

Thus, from the point of view of the party leadership, it was somehow possible to tolerate a controlled space of free thought in Russia (at least in Moscow and Leningrad), but the direction of thought toward the affirmation of national self-awareness in the republics, especially in Ukraine, had to be nipped in the bud. And decisively. In the bud, before the movement became massive. This resulted in the repressions of the second half of the 60s and early 70s, with two waves of larger-scale arrests—in '65 and '72. External actions included the suppression of the Prague Spring of '68. So Ukraine was moving toward planned arrests. And the fates of individuals in the implementation of this strategy meant nothing.

* * *

The “Underground” at the Institute of Philosophy. I did not distribute samizdat texts (for reading!) at the Institute of Philosophy (perhaps with a few exceptions that I don’t recall). I personally gave out texts for reading (that is, with their return) only among graduate students, researchers, and lecturers at Kyiv University. Sometimes these were isolated actions. For instance, while still in graduate school, my former classmate Larysa Levchuk (daughter of the then-director of the film studio, Tymofii Levchuk) approached me with a request, if I had the opportunity, to get her the text of *Internationalism or Russification?*. From her words, I understood that her father wanted to read it. Since I had no doubt about Larysa's ethics, I brought her the text without hesitation, which she later returned. But from my conversation with Larysa, it was clear to me that she had no intention of regularly receiving samizdat texts, so our communication was limited to this episode.

I saw my main task as passing texts to intermediaries whom I already trusted and who would then distribute the texts in their own circles (Vasyl Ovsiienko, Mykhailo Hryhorovych, Borys Popruha, Nestor Buchak, and others). I tried to be cautious, caring primarily about ensuring that the distribution network operated. The most difficult of my tasks was arranging for the reproduction of texts. But, as I have already mentioned, the possibilities were extremely limited. If not for the sacrificial work of Mykola Khomenko in making photocopies, it would have been impossible to “meet the demand” at all. But, critically evaluating myself, I think that a person with outstanding organizational skills could, perhaps, have organized this better in my place. In my case, what also mattered was that I viewed the reproduction and distribution of samizdat as a secondary and subordinate occupation, compared to my intellectual interests.

At the Institute of Philosophy, Yevhen Proniuk gave texts for reading to a certain circle of people. I have already mentioned that communication with Yevhen played a leading role in my activities related to the reproduction and distribution of samizdat. Yevhen's activity at the Institute of Philosophy spanned ten years (1962–1972). He wrote his doctoral dissertation (“The Ideological Struggle in Galicia in the 1870s. Ostap Terletskyi”), which was recommended for defense by the Academic Council of the Institute of Philosophy in 1965. But since Yevhen came to the attention of the KGB in the mid-60s (he was summoned for questioning in the 1965 trials), the defense of his dissertation was blocked by order of the KGB. In 1966, he was transferred from a researcher position to a bibliographer position, where he worked until his arrest in 1972.

Yevhen, for my “underground” activity, was the link that connected me with the “exposed.” In this way, I myself could remain in a “gray” zone. He was my main supplier of samizdat materials, as well as a source of information that circulated in the inner circle of activists of the movement at that time. Besides the history of Ukrainian philosophy, Yevhen was interested in the philosophy of Gandhism: he believed that the experience of this movement could be useful for the Ukrainian national liberation movement. In 1964, he wrote a programmatic article in the form of theses titled “The State and Tasks of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement.” It was a radical document for its time: it aimed at replacing the totalitarian state with a democratic one, at establishing a sovereign Ukrainian state. The text, unsigned, was printed in linotype thanks to the efforts of Ivan Svitlychny and distributed within a narrow circle of people. Proniuk, reprinting the document 35 years later, notes in a footnote that the theses were also circulated under two other titles. In order not to frighten a wider circle of readers, one of the versions included phrases in the spirit of “humanistic communism” and was given the title “Thoughts of a Communist on the Present and Future of the Ukrainian People.” The ideology of the document is typically national-democratic: the individual and their rights, and the nation, politically defined in the form of an independent state. When distributing texts within the Institute of Philosophy, he sometimes acted riskily. We even laughed about it, because he once said: “Maybe he is KGB, but let him read.” In contrast to me, Yevhen, by his character, had the makings of a leader: he was proactive, showed organizational skills and perseverance, was sociable and attentive to others.

In the premises of the Institute of Philosophy, I maintained contact with Yevhen through Viktoriia Tsymbal. I have already mentioned her mother, Tetiana Tsymbal, who was well-known in the circle of the then-intelligentsia and a participant in the protest actions of the 60s. We now have a recently published, thorough and well-produced book by Bohdan Horyn, with a preface by Valerii Shevchuk, about Viktoriia’s uncle, her mother's brother, Viktor Tsymbal, a painter and public figure. At the time of my employment at the Institute, Viktoriia worked in the Institute's library as a junior research fellow, engaged in translation work. From a distance of almost half a century, my imagination retains the image of a woman who was pleasant in communication, with a sense of humor and optimism—despite everything! Even today, despite difficult life trials, she has preserved this tone of life-giving energy and activity. In our communications at that time, related to the distribution of samizdat, her brevity and precision, her meticulousness in words and movements, were important; she did not get flustered, speaking only in phrases that would not arouse suspicion—in case of eavesdropping. We would look for some opportunity to meet without witnesses, and exchanged papers and notes that contained only what needed to be communicated.

* * *

Corrections and Clarifications. To this text, the last one published in the journal *Suchasnist* (No. 7, 2007), I am retrospectively making some insertions, as well as certain clarifications and corrections as a result of familiarizing myself with archival documents concerning the “Blok” [“Bloc”] case, declassified by the Security Service of Ukraine. During January-February 2010, I worked in the Archive of the Security Service, reviewing the declassified documents, as well as the “Criminal Case No. 58 of Proniuk, Lisovyi, and Ovsiienko.” Regarding the declassified documents related to the “Blok” case, they concern a wide circle of people who “produced,” reproduced, and distributed samizdat. This prompted the KGB to resort to the mass arrests of early 1972. These documents, which should be and partially are preserved in the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, can be divided into three groups: (a) operational-investigative files; (b) “criminal” cases (pre-trial and judicial investigation); (c) various kinds of reports and information produced by KGB employees: most of them were addressed to the Central Committee of the CPU and the Central Committee of the CPSU. I will note that most of the operational-investigative files, including those related to the “Blok” case, were destroyed in 1990 or early 1991. V. Viatrovych reported this during a meeting with former political prisoners who were “objects” of the “Blok” case, which took place on February 17, 2010. Were they taken to Moscow?

Of the operational-investigative files related to the “Blok” case, only a few have accidentally survived. Mine has survived in three volumes, as has Vira's in nine volumes. The difference in the number of volumes can be explained by the fact that after my arrest I found myself in a zone of complete control, and therefore the weight of surveillance, etc., decreased. The “criminal cases of dissidents” (in fact, political cases—“there are no political prisoners in the USSR”) were not destroyed: they are kept in the archive of the Security Service and can be viewed by anyone. The criminal case of Proniuk, Lisovyi, and Ovsiienko consists of 27 volumes. I proceed from the assumption that the “criminal cases” of dissidents were deliberately inflated to make them difficult to review. When during the investigation I pointed out that some facts or testimony were irrelevant to the accusation, I was told in response: we strive to investigate comprehensively, collecting not only negative but also positive characteristics of the accused. From the point of view of a historian’s interests, this indeed provides him today with richer factual material. But I do not think that, by inflating the cases, the KGB men were thinking about this prospect of future historical research.

Unlike criminal cases, operational-investigative files provide much more specific information. The documents from the operational-investigative files and the aforementioned KGB reports to the Central Committee I present below in the original language—Russian, preserving the spelling, structure, and some graphic features. At the end of the text, the official reference accepted by the archival department of the Security Service of Ukraine is given. To understand the documents of the operational-investigative files, the reader should know the meaning of the abbreviations used by the KGB. I provide here a list of the main abbreviations: DOP – delo operativnoi proverki (preliminary stage, concerning those who came to the attention of the KGB); DON – delo operativnogo nabliudeniia (next step – surveillance of those under suspicion); DOR – delo operativnoi razrabotki (active investigation, including summons for explanations, investigation, and imprisonment); a variation of it is DGOR – delo operativnoi gruppovoi razrabotki. The “Blok” case belongs to this category. A number was added to the abbreviation for each person. These are the most common abbreviations from a much longer list, which relate to certain types of investigative actions – surveillance, eavesdropping and recording of conversations, secret search of a dwelling, inspection of postal correspondence, etc.: “Nn” (naruzhnoe nabliudenie) [external surveillance], “t” – eavesdropping and recording of conversations, “PK” [postal control] – a description of everything that goes through the mail, etc. In the documents of the operational-investigative files, KGB agents are mostly mentioned not by their own names, but by a pseudonym. For example, the pseudonym of Raisa Politsyna was “Valia.” The “objects” of the “Blok” case were also given pseudonyms: in contrast to the agents, their pseudonyms often have a pejorative or ironic semantic tinge. Oksana Meshko – “Lysa” [The Fox], Leonida Svitlychna – “Kobra,” Mykola Rudenko – “Radikal,” Mykhailna Kotsiubynska – “Faryseika” [The Pharisee], Vira Cherednychenko – “Krysa” [The Rat], Yevhen Cherednychenko – “Yarema,” Svitlana Kyrychenko – “Fanatychka” [The Fanatic], Mykola Matusevych – “Podstrekatel’” [The Instigator], Myroslav Marynovych – “Beglets” [The Fugitive], Liudmyla Stohnota – “Khudozhnyk” [The Artist], Kateryna Vysotska – “Khorystka” [The Chorister], Halyna Didkivska – “Dora.” My pseudonym was “Sluha” [The Servant] (probably because I was first noted for providing “services” related to the reproduction and distribution of samizdat), Vira’s pseudonym was “Tykhaia” [The Quiet One]. The researcher of archival materials must know these pseudonyms, because the names of the “objects” of surveillance, eavesdropping, etc., are usually not placed next to the pseudonyms in the documents. In the documents cited below, my own notes in the text are in square brackets – [], omissions are marked with the symbol , as throughout the text of my Memoirs,

In the first volume of my operational-investigative file (pages 6-11), there is a Report on me as one of the “objects” of the “Blok” case:

СПРАВКА

на объекта дела групповой оперативной разработки

ЛИС0В0Г0 Василия Семеновича, 1937 г. рождения, уроженца села Старые Безрадичи Обуховского района Киевской области, украинца, беспартийного /исключен из КПСС в 1972 г. в связи с арестом/, кандидата философских наук, до ареста работавшего младшим научным сотрудником Института философии АН УССР, проживавшего в г. Киеве, по Дарницкому бульвару, 1, кв. 52.

ЛИСОВОЙ проиcходит из семьи колхозников. Его отец – участник Великой Отечественной войны, погиб на фронте. Мать умерла в 1968 году. Окончив в 1962 году историко-философский факультет Киевского госуниверситета, ЛИСОВОЙ работал преподавателем философии Тернопольского мединститута, где в 1965 г. был принят в члены КПСС. В 1966 году поступил в аспирантуру при кафедре этики, эстетики и логики КГУ. За время учебы в аспирантуре защитил кандидатскую диссертацию. После окончания аспирантуры в 1969 году поступил работать младшим научным сотрудником в Институт философии АН УССР, арестован в июле 1972 г.

Ближайшие родственные связи ЛИСОВОГ0:

- жена – ЛИСОВАЯ /ГРИЦЕНКО/ Вера Павловна, 1936 г. рождения, уроженка г. Кагарлыка Киевской области, временно не работает /имеет 2-х малолетних детей/, проживает в г. Киеве. Националистически настроена;

- брат – ЛИСОВОЙ Петр Семенович, 1924 г. рождения, колхозник, проживает в с. Старые Безрадичи Обуховского района Киевской области;

- брат – ЛИСОВОЙ Павел Семенович, 1926 г. рождения, водитель такси, проживает в г. Киеве;

- сестра – СТЕПАНОВА /ЛИСОВАЯ/ ЛЮБОВЬ Семеновна, 1942 года рождения, служащая, проживает в г. Киеве.

В поле зрения органов КГБ Лисовой попал как связь объектов дела групповой оперативной разработки "Печатники", которое велось Управлением КГБ при СМ УССР по Киевской области в 1968-1970 гг. Объекты этого дела занимались изготовлением и распространением антисоветской националистической литературы. 12 марта 1969 г. осуществлявшимся "Нн" [наружное наблюдение] за объектом дела "Печатники" Семенюком В. была зафиксирована его встреча с ЛИСОВЫМ, которому разрабатываемый передал какой-то тяжелый предмет, завернутый в плотную бумагу, по внешнему виду напоминавший пишущую машинку. Характер поведения ЛИСОВОГО и СЕМЕНЮКА во время этой встречи свидетельствовал о том, что они стремились провести ее конспиративно: оба делали вид, что не знакомы друг с другом, после встречи тщательно проверялись, пытаясь обнаружить за собой слежку. Полученный от Семенюка предмет ЛИСОВОЙ отвез на квартиру одной из своих связей.

Других компрометирующих данных на ЛИСОВОГО в то время не имелось. В апреле 1970 года, после реализации дела "Печатники" с Лисовым в УКГБ Киевской области была проведена беседа профилактического характера, во время которой он вел себя неискренне, своей связи с СЕМЕНЮКОМ не признал. После профилактики ЛИСОВОЙ некоторое время находился под агентурным наблюдением, однако данных о проведении им враждебной деятельности получено не было.

В 1970-71 гг. от агента 2 отдела 5 Управления КГБ при СМ УССР "Вали" были получены данные, что к ЛИСОВОМУ проявляет повышенный интерес объект дела "Блок" СВЕРСТЮК, который через агента пытался выяснить политические настроения ЛИСОВОГ0, уровень его развития, увлечения, круг знакомых. Видно было, что СВЕРСТЮК намерен вовлечь ЛИСОВОГ0 в националистическую деятельность. О ЛИСОВОМ, как националистически настроенной личности, СВЕРСТЮКУ, очевидно, стало известно от его единомышленника ПРОНЮКА /СВЕРСТЮК с ЛИСОВЫМ в этот период времени знакомы не были/, с которым ЛИСОВОЙ вместе учился в КГУ, а затем работал в Институте философии и находился в дружеских отношениях.

ПРОНЮК Евгений Васильевич, 1935 г. рождения, в составе семьи участника банды ОУН выселялся на спецпоселение в Карагандинскую область. Скрыв свое прошлое, вступил в комсомол, поступил на учебу в Киевский госуниверситет, стал членом КПСС. Органам КГБ стал известен с 1965 г. как связь арестованных в то время УКГБ Львовской и Киевской областей украинских националистов ОСАДЧЕГО, ГОРЫНЯ М., ГЕВРИЧА и других, которые на допросах показали, что он среди своего окружения распространял националистическую литературу. В 1969 г. допрашивался по делу арестованного КОРОБАНЯ как соучастник его антисоветской националистической деятельности. Оба раза (в 1965 и 1969) профилактировался в органах КГБ и через общественность Института философии, однако антисоветской деятельности не прекратил. С февраля 1970 г. разрабатывался по ДОР.

В процессе разработки СВЕРСТЮКА и ПРОНЮКА было установлено, что ЛИСОВОЙ разделяет их взгляды. Он поддерживал тесные контакты с ПРОНЮКОМ, а также националистически настроенными сотрудниками Института философии АН УССР БЫШОВЦОМ, ЦЫМБАЛ В. и другими, в кругу близких связей допускал националистические суждения. На основании изложенного в марте 1972 года на ЛИС0В0Г0 было заведено дело оперативной разработки.

Полученные в результате разработки ПРОНЮКА и ЛИСОВОГ0 материалы свидетельствовали, что они знакомятся с документами т.н. «самиздата», антисоветского и клеветнического содержания, размножают и распространяют их.

Реализуя свои преступные замыслы, ПРОНЮК и ЛИСОВОЙ в марте 1972 года организовали изготовление т.н. "экстренного" выпуска "Украинского вестника". Для его размножения на пишущей машинке и последующего распространения они привлекли выпускника Киевского госуниверситета ОВСИЕНКО Василия, студентов ГАЙДУКА Ивана, СИДОРЕНКО Раису и других.

После частичной реализации дела «Блок» и ареста ряда объектов этого дела ПРОНЮК и ЛИСОВОЙ предприняли попытки активизировать антисоветскую деятельность. Агенту «Валя» ими были переданы для размножения на пишущей машинке несколько документов клеветнического содержания, которые они впоследствии намеревались распространить путём помещения в нелегальном антисоветском журнале «Украинский вестник».

В июне 1972 года ЛИСОВОЙ изготовил документ антисоветского клеветнического содержания под названием "Открытое письмо членам ЦК КПСС и ЦК КП Украины", в котором утверждал, что в СССР якобы имеют место нарушения социалистической законности и основ Советской конституции, попираются права человека, проводится политика геноцида по отношению к передовой украинской интеллигенции и т.п., брал под защиту арестованных объектов дела "Блок", заявлял, что полностью разделяет их убеждения и просил его также арестовать и судить.

По одному экземпляру указанного документа ЛИСОВОЙ направил в ЦК КПСС и ЦК КП Украины, один вручил секретарю парторганизации Института философии АН УССР и один передал ПРОНЮКУ. Они намеревались изготовить сто экземпляров "письма" и распространить его путем засылки в различные партийные и советские инстанции, в писательские организации, в адреса отдельных общественных деятелей. Указанными действиями они преследовали цель – вызвать отрицательный резонанс в широких кругах общественности по поводу арестов органами КГБ лиц, проводивших националистическую деятельность.

За совершенные преступления ПРОНЮК и ЛИСОВОЙ 8 июля 1972 г. были подвергнуты аресту.

В ходе следствия было установлено, что кроме участия в изготовлении "экстренного" выпуска "Украинского вестника" и написания "Открытого письма" ЛИСОВОЙ на протяжении 1971-1972 гг. систематически хранил у себя на квартире и у своих связей нелегальную литературу антисоветского и клеветнического характера, которую получал у ПРОНЮКА, размножал и распространял ее. Это подтверждено вещественными доказательствами, показаниями свидетелей СТОГНОТЫ Людмилы, ВЫСОЦКОЙ Екатерины, арестованного в марте 1973 г. ОВСИЕНКО и других.

В период судебного разбирательства по его делу ЛИСОВОЙ в предъявленных обвинениях виновным себя не признал. Признавая фактическую сторону совершенных им действий, категорически отрицал наличие в них антисоветского умысла, пытался доказать, что СВЕТЛИЧНЫЙ, ЧЕРНОВОЛ, СВЕРСТЮК и другие объекты дела "Блок" осуждены несправедливо, а приведенные в его "Открытом письме" факты "геноцида", "русификации" и т. п. соответствуют действительности. Внутрикамерному агенту заявил, что от своих убеждений не откажется и после отбытия наказания будет продолжать заниматься националистической деятельностью.

Изложенное свидетельствует о том, что ЛИСОВОЙ является убежденным украинским националистом, после осуждения идейно не разоружился и намерен продолжать враждебную деятельность. С учетом этого дальнейшую его разработку следует вести в плане выявления и пресечения возможных с его стороны попыток проводить враждебную деятельность в местах лишения свободы в форме группирования вокруг себя единомышленников, идейной обработки окружения с националистических позиций, изготовления и переправки на волю различных клеветнических документов.

При этом следует учитывать личные качества ЛИСОВОГО: достаточно высокий уровень образования, умение логически и последовательно излагать свои мысли, конспиративность в проведении враждебной деятельности (о чем свидетельствуют материалы его разработки на воле). По складу характера ЛИСОВОЙ несколько замкнут, малообщителен, очень разборчив в выборе связей. В своих решениях настойчив до упрямства. Любит внешний эффект, в связи с чем способен на открытое враждебное проявление.

В ходе разработки ЛИСОВОГО и его сообщников, а также следствия по их делу осталось невыясненным у кого они брали пишущую машинку для размножения "экстренного" выпуска "Украинского вестника", вручался ли этот выпуск "Вестника" кому-либо для передачи за границу, кто из сослуживцев ЛИСОВОГО и ПРОНЮКА был осведомлен об изготовлении ими указанного журнала. Это также следует учитывать при разработке ЛИСОВОГО в местах заключения.

Из числа оставшихся на свободе связей ЛИСОВОГО заслуживают оперативного внимания:

- Бадзьо Георгий Васильевич, 1936 г. рождения, литератор, проживает г. Киеве, объект дела "Блок";

- Бышовец Василий Елисеевич, 1936 г.рождения, служащий, проживает в г. Киеве, объект ДОР;

- Мешко Оксана Яковлевна, 1905 г. рождения, пенсионерка, проживает в г. Киеве, объект дела "Блок", поддерживает тесную связь с женой ЛИСОВОГО;

- Роженко Николай Маркович, 1936 г. рождения, преподаватель вуза, проживает в г. Хмельницком, объект ДОР УКГБ Хмельницкой области;

- Стогнота Людмила Климовна, 1939 г. рождения, инженер, про-живает в г. Киеве, объект ДОР 2 Управления КГБ УССР.

Не исключено, что указанные лица будут поддерживать с ЛИСОВЫМ письменную связь, в связи с чем о полученных в отношении них материалах просим информировать заинтересованные органы.

Оперуполномоченный

2 отдела 5 Управления КГБ при СМ УССР

ст. л-нт /Канивец/

«Согласен» Начальник 2 отдела 5 Управления КГБ при СМ УССР – подполковник /Высоцкий /

24 января 1974 года

So, this Report says that the “prophylactic talk” with me was held in April 1970 (not in 1971, as I had thought, relying on my memory). It is also clear from this Report that it was only thanks to my caution that I managed to finish graduate school and defend my dissertation. I should note that the KGB man oversimplifies our practice of reproducing and distributing samizdat when he assumes that transfers of typewriters or texts took place only between acquaintances: at the time of my meeting with Semeniuk, I really did not know him. It would have been superfluous to report who you were going to meet with for a one-time meeting if it was arranged through an intermediary. I remember that the conversation with the KGB man took place on the premises of the Regional Department of the KGB, located on Rosa Luxemburg Street. When I was going to the “meeting,” I told myself that I would not get into arguments. The man, still relatively young, about 40, was performing, as I understood it, the duties of “curator” of the Institute of Philosophy and, possibly, also other humanities institutes of the Academy of Sciences. He was interested in my reaction to the “anti-Soviet” activity at the Institute of Philosophy, naming Yevhen Proniuk “and others.” I denied that I knew anything about such activity. Of all that he said, I remember a phrase, uttered approximately like this: “And why do these anti-Soviet elements penetrate specifically the institutes of the Academy of Sciences?”.

The conflict between critical thinking and total control over thinking did not seem incompatible to him. The hopes of a small layer of intellectuals, born of the “Thaw,” he probably considered a consequence of temporary leniency, if not the whim of the party “apparatus.” At the end of the “conversation,” he asked me not to tell anyone about our “meeting.” A warning-test: if he doesn’t tell, he is afraid. That was the purpose of the “prophylaxis.” The ideology and politics of Brezhnevism was an attempt by the bureaucracy to stabilize a system that had already cracked. To stabilize it with the help of preventive and limited repressions. Because later would be too late.

I told Yevhen Proniuk and Viktoriia Tsymbal about our “conversation.”

* * *

Repressions at the Institute of Philosophy. Looking ahead, I will note that after the arrest of Yevhen Proniuk and myself, the following people were “dismissed” from the Institute, deprived of a modest salary and the opportunity to engage in intellectual work: Viktoriia Tsymbal (she was dismissed after returning from maternity leave), Mykola Rozhenko, Serhiy Kudria, Vasyl Byshevets, Fedir Kanak, and Volodymyr Zhmur. Those thrown out of the Institute, as was to be expected, began to have problems finding work: this was what the “punishment” came down to. The system used tried-and-true methods of “re-education”: imprisonment, psychiatric hospitals, intimidation, deprivation of a crust of bread, bribery—the main “arguments.” Some of those dismissed had to go through a difficult path. Serhiy Kudria worked as a loader, a driver, etc. And this went on for almost two decades.

Of the Institute's staff, only Mykola Rozhenko, then a candidate of philosophical sciences, a senior research fellow, and a member of the CPSU, dared, albeit in a moderate form, to express disagreement with my arrest and Proniuk's. He was engaged in the philosophy of science, was nationally conscious, communicated with Yevhen, and read samizdat. He expressed his disagreement with the arrests in the form of a letter sent to Shcherbytsky.

The Bureau of the Presidium of the UkrSSR Academy of Sciences adopted Resolution No. 294 “On the Further Improvement of the Thematic Orientation of Research Work, the Structure, and Personnel of the Institutions of the Section of Social Sciences of the UkrSSR Academy of Sciences” dated July 31, 1972. As was later stated in the resolution of the Bureau of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine dated December 21, 1994 (No. 281-B), in connection with this resolution, “the budget fund for salaries of the institutions of the Section of Social Sciences of the UkrSSR Academy of Sciences was reduced by 4 percent. This, in turn, became the formal basis for dismissing a number of employees from the section's institutions ‘due to staff reduction,’ who were accused of being close to persons arrested in 1972 on political charges.”

Of the persons named here, Volodymyr Zhmur and Fedir Kanak seemed to me the most “innocent.” Some of my colleagues from the Institute even laughed in the 90s that Volodymyr was fired because he spoke Ukrainian on principle, had a Cossack mustache, and smoked a pipe. And all this demonstratively! Or even defiantly—to taunt with the specter of nationalism. But in a recent conversation with me, Volodymyr dispelled this beautiful “myth,” because he communicated with Yurko Khorunzhyi, who in turn communicated with Ivan Dziuba. And therefore he had a “channel” for receiving samizdat that was independent of us. In addition, together with Yurko Smyrnyi, he organized the work of the cultural-intellectual Club named after Petro Zaporozhets. I worked closely with Volodymyr in the 90s; he was the deputy editor-in-chief of *Filosofska Dumka* and *Politologichni Chytannia*: he belonged to the “deputies” who actually make the journal. In addition, he published a number of philosophical and literary works, among the philosophical ones—the book *Povernennia do sebe* [*Return to Oneself*].

As for Fedir Kanak, my classmate with whom I shared a dorm room on Lomonosova Street, now deceased (it is difficult to come to terms with this, as with the deaths of Oleksandr Pohorilyi and Serhiy Vasyliev), according to Volodymyr, one of the accusations was his assistance in the publication of my articles in *Filosofska Dumka* (as I have already mentioned, he was the deputy editor-in-chief of this journal—V. Shynkaruk). In fact, he was fired for his friendly attitude toward Yevhen Proniuk and myself.

In addition to the Institute of Philosophy, other institutes of the Academy of Sciences were “purged” of the disobedient.

* * *

Creative Plans. Nevertheless, at the time, I had hopes for the possibility of research work. After moving to the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy, I had the idea of combining research in Ukrainian and Western philosophy. How I then conceived my intellectual perspective, I can judge today by looking at my collection of microfilm copies of books from that time. In retrospect, the choice of texts that I then considered important for myself is telling. This includes about twenty books on analytical philosophy in German and English (Frege, Carnap, Ayer, Moore, Ryle, Strawson, Feigl, Sellars, Quine, Wright), almost all of Husserl in the original language (only *Ideas of Pure Phenomenology* in Polish translation), Jaspers’ *Philosophical Faith* in German, and Freud’s shorter works in Russian translations. A number of books in English and German on social philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of culture. Among them, Williams’ *Culture*, Marcuse’s *Culture and Society* and *The Philosophy of Happiness*, Le Bon’s *The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind*, Kron’s *Normative and Value Ethics*, Dewey’s *Theory of the Moral Life*, Osborne’s *Humanism and Moral Theory*, Ortega y Gasset’s *Man and People*, Parsons’ *Social Structure and Personality*. Parsons’ sociology interested me for its emphasis on the system of values as a basis for explaining human actions and social structures. From Russian philosophy—the works of Berdyaev, Shestov, Rozanov.

The creation of these film copies was an expression of anxiety that circumstances could change and the texts I considered important for myself would become difficult to access. Humanists in Ukraine have always been anxious that the most elementary conditions for work (less so domestic ones, as they were accustomed to living in poverty, than political ones) were something very precarious. However, from a modern perspective, the narrowness of intellectual contacts with the West at that time is obvious. One often had to be content with what became available by chance.

And yet, in those days, foreign currency was allocated for scientific libraries, at least the central ones, to purchase books in foreign languages. The Institute of Philosophy library stopped receiving the German multi-volume historical-philosophical dictionary in independent Ukraine at the letter “O.” And this “O!” sounds ironic, if not mocking, as if to say, “So we’ve finally gotten our independent state.” The one that would at last make promoting the development of Ukrainian culture, particularly intellectual culture, one of its priorities.

In the second half of the 1960s, upon exiting the metro onto Khreshchatyk, one could immediately buy European newspapers at the newsstand—at least from the countries of the “socialist camp” and the newspapers of the communist parties of “capitalist” countries. We could then read Polish, Czech, and Slovak newspapers (now you have to search for them in “nooks and crannies”). Today’s newsstands and book displays (at metro stations and the like) testify neither to the fact that “Kyiv is a European capital” nor that Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine, but rather that it is a city in some Russian province. For a foreigner who has just arrived in Ukraine and begins their acquaintance with it on Khreshchatyk, these press displays at every metro station and even the newsstands (where a Ukrainian-language newspaper peeks out shyly from under the Russian-language press) can create no other impression. In the 60s, I still managed to find some interesting books from Polish or German publishing houses in the “Druzhba” (Friendship) bookstore. When, a year or two ago, I asked the salesclerks in this store why there were no books from European publishers, they said something to the effect that such a business does not exist in Ukraine, that it is unprofitable. But what about the European face of Kyiv? And what is there to say, watching bookstores and other cultural institutions disappear under the pressure of greedy, profitable business. The bureaucracy is also not averse to participating in this campaign against culture, seizing attractive premises, as we see in the case of the relocation of the Museum of the History of Kyiv.

In the 60s, literary works of the 20th century penetrated the “Iron Curtain” more easily. Russian translations predominated, but I think that in terms of publications in the national language, Ukraine ranked second among the “republics,” after Russia. The magazine Vsesvit (The Universe), although it could not compare to Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature), still played an important role, particularly in organizing translation work. But the plan for reading philosophical literature that I had set for myself, even with a completely peaceful life, left little time for fiction. I managed to read some 20th-century prose works (Hemingway, Saint-Exupéry, Kafka, etc.). I read more poetry, both Ukrainian and translated.

Translations of 20th-century philosophy, even in Russian, were published very selectively, in contrast to the “classics”—and mostly with the inscription “for scientific libraries.” Philosophical works were almost never translated into Ukrainian, with rare exceptions (for example, a series of books on the history of aesthetic doctrines). The delay of Ukrainian philosophers in “entering” the Western space of intellectual communication at that time is obvious today. Works on hermeneutics published in Germany in the 60s (Gadamer, Habermas) were, as far as I recall, outside the scope of discussion even in my closest circle of communication. Ricoeur’s publications of the 60s were also unknown to me. Meanwhile, an acquaintance with his book *The Conflict of Interpretations*, published in 1969, would have been timely.

In our conversations back then, we more often mentioned Adorno and Marcuse, especially in connection with the student “rebellion” of 1968. Although the protest against the cultivation of the “one-dimensional man” appealed to us, the ideology of the “New Left” itself—as a mixture of Freudianism and Maoism, with elements of anarchism—did not inspire enthusiasm in me personally (or in my immediate circle). In contrast, the “Prague Spring” was perceived with enthusiasm, and we experienced its suppression as a personal drama.

* * *

But the situation with access to 20th-century Ukrainian philosophical works was even worse. Meanwhile, I was primarily interested in the period from the end of the 19th to the 20th century—texts that dealt with the problems of the philosophy of Ukrainian history from the perspective of the national outlook. The works of Lypynsky, Dontsov, Starosolsky, Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Chyzhevsky, Shporluk, and other authors in the same vein became accessible only in the 90s. V. Yevdokymenko, who then headed the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy, in his book *Critique of the Ideological Foundations of Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalism*, provided information about authors and texts that were then kept in “spetskhrans” (special restricted-access collections). Access to them was granted by special permission—to critics of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.”

Still, it was possible to fish out some things, those that somehow avoided being removed from the general-access fund for scholars. In a collection of books kept in the department, a small book titled *The Writings of Ivan Franko. “Young Ukraine.” Part One. Guiding Ideas and Episodes*, Lviv 1910, fell into my hands. I made detailed notes from the article “At the End of the Year” and from Franko’s correspondence with Lesia Ukrainka, where the focus was on the role of the intelligentsia in the formation of the people’s national self-awareness.

But during the “Thaw,” Ukrainian humanists made considerable efforts to return the works of writers and poets that had been removed from circulation, particularly from the “Executed Renaissance.” The collection compiled by Yuriy Lavrynenko did not reach me then, although it was circulated in samizdat, perhaps in a single copy—the one that Maksym Rylsky dared to bring through the “Iron Curtain.” But reprints and handwritten copies, possibly also from this book, were distributed: to this day, I still keep Tychyna’s early poems, copied by hand. For many, an acquaintance with his early poetry was a revelation. The Sixtiers were already looking after the “fiancée,” but no longer from the twilight of a rowan night, but with a sense of energy and will capable of destroying the scarecrows of inherited fear.

* * *

The purely romantic orientation of thought that accompanied the ethno-folklore movement of that time did not satisfy me. More precisely, I joined it emotionally—I listened to folk choirs with enthusiasm and, with pleasure, at least occasionally, participated in caroling. But I believed that the national movement should have a solid intellectual foundation—a well-thought-out, rationally weighed program that would complement the romantic and poetic way of feeling and thinking. Reading and reflecting on questions of ethnology, I took notes. But I did not refrain from expressions that clearly contradicted official ideology, and therefore I would black out certain words or sentences (expecting that, if necessary, I could easily restore them from the context). Some of these notes were confiscated during a search, and the investigator (Karavanov) questioned me about what exactly I had blacked out here.

* * *

From the events of my postgraduate life, an episode of communication with intellectuals from Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan) comes to mind. I met them thanks to the practice at the time of sending postgraduate humanists from the Asian republics to Ukraine for advanced training courses at Kyiv University. Thus, I developed friendly relations with them. At one time, I had read Auezov’s *The Path of Abai* (in Russian translation) and was imbued with the poetics of a completely different way of life in a completely different natural environment. The image of Togzhan has lived in my imagination ever since among other idealized images of women. This, like my school-time fascination with *The Knight in the Panther’s Skin*, in Bazhan’s translation, laid a small path for my imagination into other cultural worlds. This is how I gained the experience of “empathy,” a sympathetic entry into a foreign cultural world.

From those communications, I remember my visit to one of the dormitory rooms on Lomonosova Street—in a large circle, probably around a dozen and a half, of my friends from Asia. I was invited for “plov.” The plov was authentic. The conversation, of course, was not supposed to go “out of bounds”—given the very likely presence of someone who was “obligated to be there.” But even before this visit, I had a frank conversation with one of the participants of our meeting, a Kazakh postgraduate student—a tall, strong, dark-skinned young man (I perceived him as a “typical” Kazakh). The conversation took place during an accidental meeting on a bus we were taking from Kyiv State University to Lomonosova Street. I was certain that our meeting was not a planned coincidence. The young man, tersely but frankly, spoke to me about the threatening situation of Kazakh culture and language; from his point of view, it was much more severe than that of Ukrainian. It was about a major change in the ethnic composition due to the well-known relocations and the fact that these settlers spoke Russian. And, with rare exceptions, they did not want to learn Kazakh, having been raised as “internationalists.”

* * *

Of the publications in ’70 and ’71 that were not related to my dissertation topic, besides the already mentioned “Critique of Scientistic Conceptions,” Yevhen Prychepiy and I co-authored an article for the 200th anniversary of Hegel’s birth (it was published, I believe, in the newspaper *Radians’ka Ukrayina*). I wrote two (or three?) more articles—for *Trybuna Lektora* (The Lecturer’s Tribune). The first one, co-authored with Vasyl Ovsiyenko, was published back in 1969. The manuscript of one of the articles has survived—about preaching and sermonizing, about Francis of Assisi and Savonarola, with an inscription in someone’s hand: “For expert review by Zhovtobryukh.” The organizer of these publications was Serhiy Vasyliev. It was necessary to use the opportunity, while clarifying the rhetoric of sermonizing, to create at least some counterweight to atheistic ignorance and to emphasize the ethical greatness of figures like Francis. I also wrote a small preface to *The Logic* of Kononovych-Horbatsky (published in *Filosofs’ka Dumka*). All these were texts written incidentally and in a hurry. As it turned out, they were the last before a long silence.

* * *

More for the “soul” than out of necessity, I read the Stoics (in Russian translation). From that reading, I have preserved excerpts without any commentary. But I made various preparatory reflections related to moral philosophy, the relationship between the religious understanding of sin and the problem of evil, questions of aggression, benevolence, and tolerance; only fragments of these have survived. My study of the Stoics, I think, left its mark on my perception of the environment in which I soon found myself. The ethics of Stoicism was inscribed in its time. Kafka corrected this “obsolescence” of Stoicism: he directed thought and imagination to modern varieties of absurdity. In the novella about the self-awareness of a young man transformed into a monstrous bug, I sensed a premonition of possible situations.

The arrests of ’72 pushed all my intellectual plans aside.

* * *

The arrests of ’72. Svitlana Kyrychenko, the wife of Yuriy Badzyo, who worked as a literary editor for *Filosofs’ka Dumka*, informed me about the arrests in January 1972 at the Institute of Philosophy. We had a friendly relationship (which has been preserved to this day), communicated often back then, but not about samizdat matters: Badzyo was not just “exposed,” he had been expelled from the CPSU back in ’65, after which he did not cease his active opposition activities. So my “pointers”—direct communication with him—would have been superfluous. Svitlana edited some of my philosophical articles, and I must note her attentive and tolerant attitude toward the text, without imposing her own lexical and stylistic preferences. In her memoirs (published in *Molod Ukrayiny* and *Kuryer Kryvbasu*), she mentions separate episodes of our communications from that time.

In the first week after the arrests, the focus was on stories and rumors: who, when, how. The rumors initially circulated in the closest circle but quickly spread to a wider one. Some people began to be restrained in their communications, especially in public. A period of “self-determination,” differentiation, and distancing began. Behind this was not only a choice of behavior and state of mind, but also one’s immediate future. The probability of ending up behind bars increased significantly.

For those who refused to lie low, the question arose of how to act in the new situation. It arose for me as well: my previous mode of behavior—an orientation toward intellectual work combined with the distribution of samizdat—needed to be reviewed. My “underground” lost its meaning under the new conditions: the circle of people capable of being even readers of samizdat, let alone distributors, not only narrowed—only individuals remained. The spread of fear meant the loss of even the very uncertain hopes for a gradual process of democratization and national revival. I will not say that at the moment of making my decision to enter into open conflict with a system whose nature I knew well, I experienced a feeling of heroic enthusiasm. Rather, I had a feeling of humility before the demand of an inner law, to use Kant’s language.

* * *

The symbolism of the “underground.” The greater part of the unconscious, it seems to us, does not interfere with our consciousness. The subconscious, however, connects with consciousness through countless secret paths: it awaits its time to reveal itself in the sunlight of our soul. Its most important appearance is dreams. The most interesting of the “symbolic” dreams are those that prophesy or warn. I do not recall when I came to believe that the image of the dungeon in my dreams symbolized my “underground.” Chronologically, it is difficult for me to locate the beginning of these recurring dreams. It seems they appeared back in my student years. Then they disappeared and reappeared again, and so on until the end of the 80s.

The dungeon—a gallery of underground passages: long corridors from one hall to another, the walls of the passages and halls darkened, indistinct. I walk quite confidently through the long passages, I know them well, it’s not the first time I’ve passed through. Difficulties appear only at the entrances to a new hall. The most difficult thing is to enter and exit the underground gallery. This requires crawling efforts. The entrance is somewhere on the southern slope of the hills in Novi Bezradychi. Having crossed the valley on either side of the Stuhna River, I am already near the secret entrance. The exit is behind the Vatutin cinema building (on the former Chervonoarmiiska Street). Why exactly there, I could not find an explanation (perhaps a forgotten impression lies behind it).

Later (during my imprisonment and, probably, during the first years after returning to Kyiv), as a continuation of this dream—the dungeons of Volodymyrska Hill. The entrance is also hidden—down a staircase on the side of the building where the Institute of Philosophy is now located. The passages lead to an underground room, from it a passage to another, and further on—caves-passages that stretch to the south. There are places there where samizdat texts are hidden. In the room, immediately to the right of the entrance, is the desk of one of the “dissidents,” my friend, he works here. He is in very simple clothes, resembling a camp uniform. My desk is near the opposite wall. My friends keep their recent writings in these desks, interspersed with samizdat texts. In the dungeon it is clean and calm, nothing threatens here, evil does not penetrate here. Anticipating events, I will say that the camp symbolism of dreams is terrestrial, sometimes celestial, even cosmic. Mordovia, the Urals, and Buryatia have no dungeons.

I think I became an “underground man” out of a sense of threat, which forced me not to publicly express what I thought. But, as can be seen from what was said earlier, I did “break out” sometimes, although without catastrophic consequences for myself. For I was not going to leave my underground prematurely, without armor. The arrests forced me. Perhaps it’s for the best, however it might have been. Because I was already beginning to resemble a character who kept “fiddling and preparing” while others were rising from the trenches and going on the attack.

* * *

Writing the letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU. The idea was to react to the arrests with an open protest. If we take into account that public protests by Ukrainian intellectuals during the 60s and early 70s were a known phenomenon, even if in a relatively narrow circle, then I could not assess my decision as something extraordinary. It was extraordinary only for me: it meant a “turning point” in my spiritual biography.

To take upon myself the sin of silent agreement with a new wave of political repression was difficult. I was seized by a premonition of danger, with far-reaching consequences. For I associated all my hopes for a cultural and national revival with those who were arrested. In my mind and imagination, they were a living shoot of the Will of an enslaved and suppressed people. They were opposed by a hostile force with a well-thought-out and cunningly implemented plan for the destruction of the people. They almost succeeded in carrying out the plan of destruction—to kill the people to such an extent that its revival would seem incredible. When I look at photographs of peasants from the beginning of the 20th century to the post-war ones that my brother Petro took, I see not only the replacement of embroidered shirts with gray and black rags, but the disappearance of people’s posture: the appearance of crushed, humiliated, crumpled faces. They could not be otherwise, after EVERYTHING, especially after ’33.

I found no convincing arguments that could undermine my decision. Behind any of the “saving” arguments that my mind invented, there was either hidden fear or cleverly disguised egoism. The arguments seemed very convincing: family circumstances, state of health, the possibility of realizing my abilities—and thus serving the people and humanity, etc. My wife was pregnant, and we had a young daughter, Myroslava. Even if I were not arrested, which was highly unlikely, I would certainly be deprived of my job. And my wife would follow. This was for certain: if not terror, then taking away a piece of bread, even from children, was an old way of creating obedient and submissive people. From those who refused to join the collective farm, the land was “cut off” at the house foundation: they said “cut off,” because it was from a living thing.

To the named “circumstances,” one could add personal characteristics: an “intelligent.” But all these circumstances and characteristics applied to almost all those arrested. Psychoanalysis was also no help in using its methods to discover unconscious or concealed motives that I had managed to cover up with moral considerations. The communist ideologues of the psychiatric explanation for the actions of the protesters of that time tried to present them as people incapable of social adaptation. But almost any of them, if they had abandoned their protest and tried to secure a decent but “quiet” life for themselves, could have achieved it. This also applied to me: neither my position after defending my dissertation, nor my relationships with my surroundings (with people) gave me any reason, in terms of personal and domestic circumstances, to consider myself unable to “adapt.” But this could only be achieved at a high price: a compromise with one’s own conscience has a limit of admissibility. Beyond that, it threatens absurdity, spiritual chaos. Not everyone can withstand this. Some sought oblivion in vodka, others committed suicide. By this I do not mean that people could not find some acceptable way for themselves to coexist with an environment saturated with violence and hypocrisy. But it was not easy.

* * *

Pronyuk was against my plan: among his “arguments,” the decisive one was the reference to my abilities; to this day, I am grateful to him for this faith in my potential. He was convinced that I would only waste my time and strength in the camps. I won’t say he was wrong. But this is a problem of choice. Including alternative understandings of philosophy as a path to truth. Eventually, Yevhen reconciled himself to my decision and proposed his own course of action: my protest would also be “included” in his project.

His plan was to act in a proven way: to prepare the next issue of the *Ukrainian Herald*. Shortly after the arrests, “we” (this word here covers an indefinite circle of people) began to collect data on the arrested: it was passed on by relatives, friends, or acquaintances of the arrested. Yevhen took on the collection of this information. I do not remember exactly when the manuscript “Letters to the Investigator” by Borys Kovhar (now deceased, may his soul rest in peace) came into our hands. As Yevhen became more convinced of my determination, and I myself settled on the genre and style of my protest (it was to be an “Open Letter to the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPU”), Yevhen proposed that the next issue of the *Ukrainian Herald* should contain a preface, brief information about the arrested, Kovhar’s “Letters to the KGB Investigator,” and the text of my protest.

One of the motives for releasing the next issue of the *Herald* was to at least partially undermine the investigation’s certainty that it was produced by the arrested. Rereading this text, I am making an insertion thanks to the presentation of Chornovil’s 3rd volume, where—from a speech by Mykhailo Kosiv—I learned not only how the issues of the *Herald* were prepared, but also about the appearance of the sixth issue (which Chornovil prepared but did not manage to publish): this issue did indeed play the role that ours, of course, could not have played. It was too different from the previous ones. It is now known that S. Khmara, V. Shevchenko, and O. Shevchenko were guided by the same plan as ours, and they managed to prepare the 7/8 issue of the *UH*. And even to transmit the text abroad.

It was more important to show that the arrests would not stop either the publication of the *Herald* or the distribution of samizdat. This was important in this new situation. The Ukrainian intelligentsia responded to the wave of arrests in ’65 with collective protests, and Chornovil’s work *Portraits of Twenty “Criminals”* became an important achievement of Ukrainian samizdat. Now people began to say (and, I think, justifiably so) that collective protests would not yield the desired result, they would only “expose” those with dissident sentiments.

* * *

Although I addressed my Letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU, in reality, as in other similar situations, the text was intended for a wider circle of readers. Yevhen and I agreed that we should produce over a hundred copies for distribution. We thought about various methods of distribution, including dropping them in mailboxes or even sending them by mail (the second method was too naive). For this purpose, the addresses of officials, scholars, cultural figures, etc., were collected. I do not remember when exactly I finished writing the Letter. Perhaps at the end of March or the beginning of April, I had the first draft, which I gave to Yurko Badzyo. I gave another copy of the same version, typed on a typewriter, to Vasyl Ovsiyenko. Yuriy Badzyo, apart from some minor stylistic remarks, advised me to remove certain places where I was overusing communist rhetoric. I agreed; it improved the text. After that, I retyped the Letter on a typewriter (I borrowed it from my relative Tamara Ivanova—the wife of my cousin, the son of my aunt Vasylyna). The Letter was probably ready for reproduction in the second half or at the end of May (I provide this clarification here in view of the circumstances I will mention later).

In general, the Letter, even after Yurko’s editing, at least rhetorically, remained within the bounds of an internal critique of the official ideology. True, even at the level of rhetoric, as anyone can now see, it also contains some elements of external critique. For example, it is said of Articles 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”) and Article 187-1 that these articles contradict not only the then-constitutional law of the Ukrainian SSR on freedom of speech and the press (Article 105), but also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations. In doing so, Article 19 of the Declaration is quoted: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” And it goes on to say that “Since no law should contradict universally recognized international norms, as well as the current constitutional law, the laws expressed in Articles 62 and 187-1 must be liquidated.”

Elements of external critique are also contained in the reference to the codes of democratic countries, which “…Do not provide for judicial prosecution for criticizing this or that social order, for the order exists for man, not man for the order. An order that declared itself absolutely perfect would thereby be doomed to decline; criticism of existing social relations (economic, administrative, cultural, etc.) is a guarantee of their improvement. Only law of a clearly Francoist character can recognize the justice of laws analogous to those expressed in Articles 62 and 187-1 of the CC of the UkrSSR. The severity of the punishments defined by Articles 62 and 187-1 further increases the possibility of arbitrariness.”

But when today, taking into account the communist rhetoric, people speak of such texts as “national-communist,” such an assessment of these texts takes into account only their stylistics. And this is not a very reliable basis. A period of bitter disappointment lies between the convinced Ukrainian national-communists of the 20s and the 60s–70s. I did not know anyone in the dissident environment who was a convinced national-communist. Perhaps Tkachenko from the older generation belonged to them: Pohorilyi introduced me to him after my return from exile, characterizing him as a “national-communist.” But to what extent this is true, and whether he did not choose communist rhetoric as a means of self-defense, remains an open question.

In fact, as the struggle against national-communism of the 20s shows, even a completely sincere belief in an ideal communist society did not protect anyone from accusations of “bourgeois nationalism.” On the contrary, it was precisely the internal critique of the ideology that party ideologues assessed as the most dangerous: it destroyed the stereotypes or, more precisely, the mythologemes, cultivated with great effort by the system. Internal critique loosened these sclerotic formations, and this was more dangerous for the system than the spread of ideas of some completely different philosophy or alternative ideology. After all, in the case of external opposition, it still takes effort to deduce consequences from an alternative philosophy or ideology that would undermine the communist quasi-religion.

But something else is more important: all the dissidents’ appeals to official bodies at that time (regardless of whether they contained communist rhetoric or not) were based on a logic that contradicted the Marxist class principle. For the most important value-laden concepts (freedom, human rights, justice, equality) in the dissidents’ texts are elevated above the class principle. I think that the critique of any ideology by showing its internal contradictions or the contradictions between its declared principles and its practice is mortally dangerous for any ideology. Especially for a party that shows obvious signs of hypocrisy—declaring principles that its political practice contradicts.

Showing that what was said cannot be “qualified” as “anti-Soviet propaganda” or a denial of socialism (since the question immediately arises, how to understand “Soviet” and “socialist”?) somehow prompted people to think. It was enough to affirm national consciousness and democracy—human rights (“socialism with a human face”)—and this would inevitably mean the end of the communist empire and dictatorship. My Letter draws attention to the fact that the term “bourgeois” is used as a label for intimidation and to justify repression. It was in such “deconstructions” that I used some of the simplest elements of semantics: here my studies in analytic philosophy found a practical application.

* * *

In hindsight, I must correct another error in the already mentioned publication in the journal *Suchasnist* (No. 7, 2007): the surname of Raisa, who worked as a typist at the Institute of Philosophy, was Politsyna, not Sydorenko. In the now-declassified documents (some of which I quote below), it is stated that Yevhen Pronyuk arranged with Politsyna on June 21 for her to type about a hundred copies of the Letter, and after that, Vasyl Ovsiyenko took the original of my Letter to Politsyna in Nemishayeve (near Kyiv) on June 26. Since Vasyl had already graduated from Kyiv University by that time, I advised him to go home, assuring him that we would do everything else ourselves. By early July, the copies of the letter were ready; all that remained was to pick them up. Meanwhile, Yevhen had no one who could do it. In this situation, he decided to turn to Larysa Masenko, a now well-known linguist. According to Yevhen’s story, he first asked her if she could dare to take a risky action for the sake of Ukraine, and then explained what it was about. She agreed.

But on July 5, Raisa refused to hand over the copies of the Letter to her, insisting that Yevhen come for them himself. This refusal seemed extremely suspicious to me: who wouldn’t want to get rid of a dangerous cargo that someone had come to pick up? In a conversation with Yevhen at the Institute, I insisted that under no circumstances should he venture to go for the papers himself. The scenario in which Yevhen picks up the reproduced copies of the Letter while the original of the Letter, not yet sent to official institutions, is seized from me was completely unacceptable. For Yevhen, who was undoubtedly being followed, to go to Nemishayeve was a completely hopeless undertaking, even if Raisa’s suspicious refusal had not occurred. If Raisa doesn’t want to hand it over, let her keep it: if everything is “clean,” she will eventually bring them to the Institute herself just to get rid of them. In the meantime, Yevhen could just “lie low” and wait. My official protest was one thing, but the reproduction and distribution of my Letter was something else entirely.

As we can see, the reproduction of the Letter was not properly organized by us. The best option would have been for all the organizational work of reproducing the Letter to have been done without my involvement after my decision to write the protest. The fact that I had to participate in organizing its reproduction, and even involve people from my circle—first and foremost Ovsiyenko—does not speak to the good planning of the whole action.

So, I warned Yevhen that I would act independently. Because I could not delay. Here I must make another correction to the already published text. The declassified documents state that on July 5th (and not the 6th, as stated in that text) I handed my Letter to Petro Yolon, who was then the secretary of the party organization of the Institute of Philosophy. At the same time, on my way to the Institute, I gave one copy of the Letter to the Dispatch Office of the Central Committee of the CPU (the Horodetsky building), addressed to Shcherbytsky, and sent the second by mail from the Main Post Office, addressed to Brezhnev. Yolon, having barely glanced at the pages of the Letter, immediately began to look for a way out—how to save me. As I recall, he told me that this meant nothing yet, that everything could be sorted out, that he, supposedly, had not even seen or read my Letter. I do not remember what else he said. But I explained that there was no way back, that I had sent copies to the official authorities, and then I left the office. As he told me just now, he immediately began to read the Letter, but then two KGB agents (one of them the “curator” of the Institute of Philosophy) came in and took the typewritten copy from him. That is, after submitting the Letter, I spent one more night at home. As I now recall, on July 6th I was on my way to the Institute already with a premonition of my arrest. On the 6th, Yevhen was detained with the copies of the Letter he had collected from Politsyna. And as for me, after my arrival at the Institute, two KGB agents approached me and said they had to conduct a search of my apartment. We left the building; a car was waiting across the street, ready.

We drove off.

* * *

We drove up to the building on Darnytskyi Boulevard, went up to the 5th floor, and entered the small room in our communal apartment. I have already mentioned that this apartment was mostly inhabited by teachers. Vira and my daughter Myroslava (she was five years old then) were at home. The search began and lasted, probably, about two hours. We had anticipated the search and prepared for it: everything that would be of “interest” to “them” was hidden elsewhere: with the families of Vira’s sisters, the younger Maria and the older Aniuta, some of the books with my niece Nadiyka—the daughter of my cousin Maria. But in the common corridor on a shelf lay a general notebook, and in it, copied by Vira, was “Internationalism or Russification?” But the KGB agents, fortunately, did not search this common corridor. They confiscated the typewriter on which I had typed the Letter and various other small things. After the KGB agents left with me, Vira’s neighbor and friend, a history teacher named Valentyna Andriivna Shcherbyna (originally from the Dnipropetrovsk region), to whom Vira had given samizdat, took this notebook and hid it on her own shelf.

It was time to say goodbye: the feeling that I can recreate in my memory can be conveyed by the word “pang”—as a special kind of heartache in which a sense of pity and guilt is combined. One last glance at my wife’s figure at the moment of farewell. They assure her that they are taking me for just a few days. So, I was “detained” on the sixth of July, and on the eighth I was arrested, the decision was made to hold me in custody “in the interests of the investigation.”)

* * *

But below I present three of the many now-declassified documents in the “Block” case, which show the real situation in which we were operating from about mid-June (the designation “Document” with numbers 1-3 is my own). At the end of each document, I provide a reference with its code, adopted in the Sectoral State Archive (HDA) of the Security Service of Ukraine.

Document 1.

June 27, 1972 No. 614-1

Top Secret

Copy No. 1 Series “K”

CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF UKRAINE

to Comrade SHCHERBYTSKY, V.V.

The Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR No. 591-1 of June 19, 1972, informed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine about the ideologically harmful and hostile actions of certain employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR. Among such persons were indicated PRONYUK, E.V., born in 1936, non-party member, a bibliographer at the Institute; LISOVOY, V.S., born in 1937, Ukrainian, member of the CPSU, junior research fellow; and BYSHOVETS, V. E., born in 1936, Ukrainian, member of the CPSU, junior research fellow.

On June 26 of this year, operational data was received that PRONYUK, through his connections, is taking measures to reproduce 8-9 copies of DZIUBA's anti-Soviet tract "Internationalism or Russification?" for subsequent distribution of this material among his circle. Along with the tract, he handed over for reproduction in one hundred copies a 14-page typewritten text of the so-called “Open Letter to the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPU,” the author of which is listed as LISOVOY.

The "Open Letter," by its content, is a slanderous anti-Soviet document. It attempts to justify the illegality of the arrest of DZIUBA, SVITLYCHNY, and other subjects of the case “Block,” contains claims about the "unconstitutionality" of Articles 62 and 187-1 of the CC of the UkrSSR, which provide for responsibility for anti-Soviet activity and slander of the Soviet system; the idea of the rapprochement of nations is assessed as genocide "conducted under the banner of socialism," and the thought of conducting an "open discussion" in the party on the national question is expressed.

Emphasizing his full solidarity with the actions of the arrested persons, the author asks to be arrested and tried as well. /The text of the “Open Letter” is attached/.

LISOVOY and PRONYUK, as well as their like-minded associate BYSHEVETS, have been taken under investigation.

Measures are being taken to identify and suppress hostile

actions on their part.

ATTACHMENT: text on 25 sheets.

CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY UNDER THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE UKRAINIAN SSR

/V. Fedorchuk/

As we see from this report, from mid-June our actions, aimed at reproducing the issue of the *Ukrainian Herald* we had prepared and my “Open Letter,” were already being monitored by the KGB.

Document 2

June 30, 1972 No. 626-1 Kyiv

Top Secret

Series “K”

Copy No. 1

CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF UKRAINE

to Comrade SHCHERBYTSKY, V.V.

SPECIAL REPORT

The Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR No. 614-1 of June 27 of this year reported that E.V. PRONYUK, a bibliographer at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR, is taking measures to reproduce one hundred copies of the typewritten text of the so-called "Open Letter" to the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPU, the author of which is listed as V.S. LISOVOY, a research fellow at the same institute and member of the CPSU.

On June 30, it was established that PRONYUK, through his like-minded associate V. V. OVSIENKO, born in 1949, member of the Komsomol, a graduate of the philology department of Kyiv State University, handed over one hundred envelopes and a list of addresses to a typist known to the KGB, to which they intend to mail the said "open letter."

According to OVSIENKO, this document will be mailed from various cities of the republic. The list of addressees includes a number of writers, union, republican, and regional writers' organizations, creative unions, editorial offices of some newspapers and magazines, as well as individual regional and city committees of the CPU.

A photocopy of the addresses is attached.

The KGB under the CM of the UkrSSR is seeking opportunities to document and suppress the hostile actions of PRONYUK and his like-minded associates. However, these measures are complicated because PRONYUK, LISOVOY, and their accomplices are behaving cautiously, taking measures to detect surveillance by KGB bodies, and trying not to leave incriminating evidence of their hostile activities.

LISOVOY lives in a communal apartment with six neighbors, which creates serious obstacles for a covert check for the presence of the manuscript of the "Open Letter" and other anti-Soviet documents in his possession. Complications of a similar nature have so far not allowed these measures to be carried out with respect to PRONYUK and BYSHOVETS.

ATTACHMENT: text on 4 sheets.

Chairman of the Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR

V. Fedorchuk

The tracking of our actions related to the reproduction of our issue of the *Herald* and my *Open Letter* became possible due to the monitoring of the activities of Raisa Politsyna, who was forced to be a KGB agent (under the pseudonym "Valia"). This is stated in the document presented below.

Document 3.

July 13, 1972

Top Secret

COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY UNDER THE

COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE USSR

Moscow

MEMORANDUM

on the arrest of employees of the Institute of Philosophy

of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR, PRONYUK and LISOVOY

In 1972, the Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR intensified the investigation of a group of employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR who maintained criminal ties with the subjects of the case “Block,” SVERSTIUK, SVITLYCHNY, DZIUBA, and others, who were arrested in January of this year. This group included:

PRONYUK, Yevhen Vasylyovych, born in 1936, Ukrainian, a bibliographer at the institute. His father was previously sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment as a member of an OUN gang.

LISOVOY, Vasyl Semenovych, born in 1937, Ukrainian, member of the CPSU, junior research fellow at the institute.

BYSHOVETS, Vasyl Yelyseiovych, born in 1936, Ukrainian, member of the CPSU, junior research fellow at the institute.

PRONYUK came to the attention of the KGB as early as 1965, when, according to the testimony of those arrested for conducting anti-Soviet nationalist activities, OSADCHY, HORYN, HRYN, HEVRYCH, as well as witnesses PENKOVSKY and YUSKIV, it was established that he was involved in storing and reproducing anti-Soviet nationalist literature and samizdat documents, which he systematically gave for familiarization to the aforementioned persons and his other close contacts. During interrogation on 21.X.1965, PRONYUK testified that he took some anti-Soviet documents for familiarization from Svitlychny, through whom he became acquainted with the subjects of the case “Block”—OSADCHY and HORYN.

For storing anti-Soviet nationalist literature, PRONYUK was expelled from the ranks of the CPSU in July 1966, and in August of the same year, he was removed from scientific work and transferred to the Institute's library to the position of bibliographer.

Remaining in his previous positions, PRONYUK established contact in 1969 with KOROBAN, a student at the Kyiv Institute of Foreign Languages, with whom he co-authored the anti-Soviet document “On the Social Situation in the USSR.”

In 1970, KOROBAN was sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment for hostile activities, and PRONYUK was not criminally prosecuted due to an aggravation of his illness /open form of tuberculosis/.

Starting from 1968, PRONYUK’s regular contacts with the now-arrested subjects of the case “Block”—SVERSTIUK—began to form. With PRONYUK’s help, SVERSTIUK engaged in the hostile cultivation of LISOVOY, BYSHOVETS, and a number of other persons, ideologically connected them to a local anti-Soviet group, and actively used them in the reproduction and distribution of samizdat materials. Upon SVERSTIUK’s arrest, the “Program of the Ukrainian National Communist Party” was seized from him.

With the help of these individuals, SVERSTIUK organized in 1971 the reproduction of the anti-Soviet manuscript “Tales of a Survivor” by the subject of the case “Block,” career OUN member SHUMUK /on July 7 of this year, SHUMUK was sentenced by the Kyiv Regional Court under Art. 62 of the CC of the UkrSSR to 10 years of imprisonment and 5 years of exile/.

After the arrest of SVERSTIUK, this group was headed by PRONYUK. According to agents "Valia," "Ovod," the "NN" service [surveillance], and operational equipment, in addition to the aforementioned LISOVOY and BYSHOVETS, the following scientific staff of the Institute of Philosophy were involved: M.M. ROZHENKO, S.H. KUDRA—members of the CPSU; V.M. TSYMBAL, non-party member; S.T. KYRYCHENKO, literary editor of the journal "Filosofs'ka Dumka," non-party member; L.T. MASENKO, research fellow at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR, non-party member; V.V. OVSIENKO, graduate student of Kyiv State University, member of the Komsomol, and others.

PRONYUK and his like-minded associates set themselves the task, after the arrest of DZIUBA, SVITLYCHNY, SVERSTIUK and other leaders of the so-called “national movement,” to head it, to resume the publication of the illegal anti-Soviet journal "Ukrainian Herald," so that, as PRONYUK stated, "to respond to events and not lose the continuity” of the arrested subjects of the case “Block,” and they sought means for the reproduction of anti-Soviet materials.

While conducting their hostile activities, PRONYUK and LISOVOY displayed great sophistication and ingenuity, were very cautious and conspiratorial, well-informed about the working methods of the KGB, and sought to avoid situations that would allow their criminal activities to be documented. They communicated with their like-minded associates through intermediaries such as BYSHOVETS, TSYMBAL, KUDRA and others, and organized counter-surveillance. PRONYUK, for example, passed documents for reproduction through OVSIENKO, and sent MASENKO and SHEVCHENKO to pick up the printed materials, while he himself watched their actions and tried to detect surveillance by the KGB. Meetings, as a rule, were held in open, uncrowded places. In enclosed spaces, they exchanged notes, which were immediately burned.

Starting in 1968, agent "Valia" was used in the investigation of SVERSTIUK and the said group. They actively cultivated her in a nationalist spirit, taught her methods of conspiracy, and prepared her for the role of a typist for reproducing particularly important, from their point of view, anti-Soviet materials. For these purposes, PRONYUK gave "Valia" a typewriter and composed an "instruction" for handling it and anti-Soviet samizdat materials, which indicated that before and after reproducing documents, the typewriter font should be rubbed with sandpaper to change its configuration, typing should be done in thin rubber gloves, carbon paper should be destroyed, and the typewriter, reproduced documents, paper supplies, and other accessories should be kept in a cache equipped in the house.

PRONYUK developed the following cover story for agent "Valia" in case she was caught red-handed by the KGB:

“I bought the typewriter at a commission store from an unknown person who had not yet had time to hand it in, paid 160 rubles for it, I do not know or remember this person. I typed the documents without delving into their meaning; if I had noticed anything anti-state, I would have immediately reported it to the institute's administration.”

In the process of cultivating "Valia," SVERSTIUK, and then PRONYUK, systematically provided her with material support, helped her with her studies, job placement, etc.

On June 21 of this year, PRONYUK, through the intermediary TSYMBAL, summoned agent "Valia" to a meeting and gave her the task of reproducing DZIUBA’s anti-Soviet tract “Internationalism or Russification?” and Lisovoy’s “Open Letter” addressed to the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPU.

On June 26, Vasyl Vasylyovych Ovsienko, born in 1949, Ukrainian, member of the Komsomol, a graduate of the philological faculty of Kyiv University, visited agent "Valia" and, on behalf of PRONYUK, gave her the said tract by DZIUBA /more than 200 pages of typewritten text/ for retyping in eighty copies, and also handed over for reproduction in 100 copies the typewritten text of the "Open Letter," authored by LISOVOY.

In the "Open Letter," the idea of the rapprochement of nations in the USSR is assessed as genocide "conducted under the banner of socialism," the thought is expressed about the need for a "pan-European discussion on the national question" with the participation of DZIUBA, SVERSTIUK, and other persons brought to criminal responsibility for anti-Soviet activity, and an attempt is made to justify the "illegality" of their arrest.

Demagogically claiming that Art. 62 of the CC of the UkrSSR, providing for criminal responsibility for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and Art. 187-1 of the CC of the UkrSSR, providing for criminal responsibility for the dissemination of knowingly false fabrications defaming the Soviet state and social system, contradict the Constitution of the USSR and the Declaration of Human Rights, the author of the "Open Letter" calls for their abolition. "The dissemination of even anti-Soviet ideas, insofar as they may constitute someone's convictions," according to his assertion, "cannot be considered criminal."

Assessing the measures to suppress the hostile activities of the authors and distributors of "samizdat" as an attempt to "freeze public life" and progress, the author of the "letter" calls for the legalization of the "unauthorized production and distribution" of samizdat "literature: artistic, documentary-informational, journalistic, etc."

The "Open Letter" contains slanderous assertions on matters of the economic policy of our state, the development of Soviet democracy, the selection and placement of personnel in educational and scientific institutions, etc.

On June 30 of this year, OVSIENKO visited agent "Valia" a second time and gave her envelopes and a list of addresses to which it was planned to mail the said "Open Letter." According to OVSIENKO, the document was planned to be sent by mail from various cities of the republic to a number of writers, to union, republican, and regional writers' and creative organizations, the editorial offices of some newspapers and magazines, as well as to regional and city committees of the CPU without indicating a return address.

PRONYUK and LISOVOY, intending to widely distribute the "Open Letter" for the purposes of hostile propaganda, resorted to the well-known tactic of Ukrainian nationalists, when they address their anti-Soviet samizdat documents to official bodies and simultaneously, under this cover, widely distribute them in the republic through illegal channels and transmit them abroad.

According to agent "Valia," the purpose of producing and distributing the "Open Letter" was to "inform the public of the appearance of a new leader" of the so-called "national movement" in Ukraine in place of the arrested DZIUBA, SVITLYCHNY, SVERSTIUK, CHORNOVIL, and thus try to activate the anti-Soviet activities of nationalist elements.

On July 5, LISOVOY handed a copy of his "Open Letter" to the acting deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR, P.F. YOLON, and stated that he had allegedly personally handed this material over to the Central Committee of the CPU.

During the further monitoring of the behavior of PRONYUK and LISOVOY, it was established that they had other typed copies of the "Open Letter," that LISOVOY possessed a typewriter, and that BYSHOVETS's wife had typing skills and with her help or through other means they could reproduce the "letter" in case agent "Valia" refused to type it.

In this connection, and considering that PRONYUK had for a long time engaged with impunity in active anti-Soviet activities, involving a large number of new persons to carry out his criminal assignments while evading direct participation in actions that could expose him in hostile activities, and also that he, together with LISOVOY, was taking concrete measures to head the nationalist "movement" after the arrest of the main subjects of the case “Block,” we, with the approval of the Republic's Prosecutor, allowed agent "Valia" to reproduce the "Open Letter" and prepare the addresses on the envelopes. This created a real opportunity to catch PRONYUK red-handed and bring him to criminal responsibility.

On our instruction, on July 5, agent "Valia" notified PRONYUK by payphone that the material was ready and arranged to meet with him that evening to hand it over.

PRONYUK, carefully checking for surveillance, arrived at the meeting place accompanied by two other persons, one of whom was Larysa Terentiyivna MASENKO, born in 1942, Ukrainian, non-party member, junior research fellow at the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR, daughter of the deceased poet T. Masenko. The latter went to meet with "Valia" and on behalf of PRONYUK asked her to hand over the reproduced "Open Letter." In accordance with instructions, "Valia" refused to hand over the documents to her. PRONYUK at this time was observing the agent, but did not make personal contact with "Valia." The second person who accompanied PRONYUK is being identified.

Early on the morning of July 6, PRONYUK himself came to "Valia's" home /the agent lives 40 km from Kyiv/, took the texts of the "Open Letter," the envelopes with addresses, and left for Kyiv, where he was detained. According to agent "Valia's" report, he burned the original lists of addresses to which the "Open Letter" was to be sent.

During a personal search of PRONYUK, 75 copies of the "Open Letter" and 112 envelopes with typed addresses were found and seized.

With the sanction of the Prosecutor of the UkrSSR, on the same day, searches were conducted at the apartments of PRONYUK, LISOVOY, and their close associates BYSHOVETS and TSYMBAL.

One copy of the "Open Letter" and a typewriter were seized from LISOVOY. In PRONYUK’s apartment, 700 of his letters, notes, photos, and tape recordings were found, which are being studied. No materials of significance for the investigation were found at BYSHOVETS's and TSYMBAL's.

During interrogation at the KGB of the UkrSSR, LISOVOY admitted that he was the author of the "Open Letter" and stated that he had typed it himself on the typewriter seized during the search in several copies. On July 5, he sent three copies to the authorities, including the Central Committee of the CPSU, kept one for himself, and allegedly destroyed the manuscript. When asked how many copies of the "letter" were typed in total and to which private individuals or acquaintances it was given, LISOVOY refused to answer.

PRONYUK testified that the 75 copies of the "Open Letter" seized from him, including one identical to the "letter" seized from LISOVOY, and the envelopes with addresses belonged to him. He confessed that, by agreement with the typist for a corresponding fee, he reproduced this document for distribution. For this, he acquired and gave the typist onion-skin paper, 112 envelopes, which he made himself, as well as a list of addresses. He refused to name the typist or give her address.

In the event that PRONYUK, during further investigation, gives testimony against agent "Valia," the latter will provide the KGB with an official statement about PRONYUK's repeated attempts to involve her in the reproduction of hostile documents and other facts of his hostile activity known to her. In particular, she will report that PRONYUK gave her a typewriter specifically for the reproduction of "samizdat," which she avoided under various pretexts. She agreed to reproduce the "Open Letter" in order to uncover PRONYUK's plans and expose his hostile activity.

PRONYUK and LISOVOY, with the approval of the Central Committee of the CPU and with the sanction of the Prosecutor of the UkrSSR, were arrested on July 8 of this year on charges of conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda /part 1 of Art. 62 of the CC of the UkrSSR/.

To the in-cell agent "Kuznetsov," PRONYUK said that the reason for LISOVOY's writing the "Open Letter" was allegedly the court proceedings in Kyiv in June-July of this year in the criminal cases of SERHIENKO and SHUMUK, and the distribution of this document was aimed at "intimidating" the justice system and thereby mitigating the punishment for other arrested individuals whose cases were still being considered by the courts.

PRONYUK claimed that the writing of LISOVOY's "Open Letter" would be known abroad.

At the same time, in a conversation with "Kuznetsov," he stated that he was worried about another document called "Program of the U-communists" /seized from the arrested SVERSTIUK/, which could testify against him.

We will order a lexical analysis and are conducting other operational measures to establish the possible involvement of PRONYUK and LISOVOY in the writing of the "Program of the UNCP."

With regard to other employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR who were associated with PRONYUK and LISOVOY, the Kyiv regional party committee has been informed to take appropriate measures.

On June 12 of this year, at a party meeting of the Institute of Philosophy, LISOVOY was expelled from the CPSU. The meeting instructed the party bureau and the leadership of the institute to deal with each of the employees who were associated with the group of PRONYUK and LISOVOY.

We will report on the results of further operational measures and the progress of the investigation in the criminal cases against PRONYUK and LISOVOY.

The Central Committee of the CPU is being informed in detail and in a timely manner about all materials related to the actions of the said group at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR.

ATTACHMENT: A photocopy of the "Open Letter" /translation from Ukrainian/ on 21 sheets, for addressee only [the last phrase, italicized, was handwritten – V. L.]

CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE FOR STATE SECURITY

UNDER THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE UKRAINIAN SSR

Colonel General

V. FEDORCHUK

[Handwritten note]: Correct. Deputy Head of the 2nd Department, 5th Directorate of the KGB under the CM of the UkrSSR

Major /signature/ /Rudenko/

Raisa was probably caught retyping samizdat texts and forced to cooperate. This was a standard method of recruiting agents in the KGB. I rather sympathized with such people who fell into the nets set by the KGB, from which they could no longer escape. But, in light of what is now known, I recall a phrase from our brief conversation. This conversation took place during a meeting of the three of us (Raisa, Yevhen, and me) at Askold’s Grave, when we were arranging with her to reproduce my Letter. Before this meeting, I had only seen Raisa occasionally at the Institute, I was not well acquainted with her. Generally speaking, there was no need to involve me in these negotiations with her regarding the reproduction of the Letter. Here Yevhen and I were clearly violating elementary rules related to the reproduction of samizdat. The mentioned brief conversation with Raisa took place during this meeting, when Yevhen had stepped away from us for a few minutes. She said that it was a surprise for her to learn that I was cooperating with Pronyuk in the matter of distributing samizdat. In the way she said it, I sensed some kind of hint. Perhaps in this way Raisa wanted to warn me. However, this is just a supposition. But by forcing Raisa to refuse to hand over the copies of the reproduced Letter to Larysa Masenko, the KGB agents effectively “exposed” her. I wrote about the suspiciousness of this refusal even before familiarizing myself with the declassified documents quoted above. Such a refusal was an exception in my entire experience of reproducing and distributing samizdat.

Chapter VIII. The Investigation

Розкрилені висі твої пронеслися, попереду прірва. І ока не мруж.

Ти бачиш розхрестя дороги? Молися,

бо ще ти не воїн і ще ти не муж.

V. Stus

1. The Investigation

They brought me to Volodymyrska Street, to the KGB pre-trial detention center: metal gates opened, they led me into a small room on the first floor. They ask me to undress, an inspection. The procedure doesn't last long, it's all over. They say I can take a book to read; the choice they offer is meager, I don't remember which one I took or if I read it at all. Someone from the service leads me to a cell: hands behind my back, a guard behind me, snapping his fingers (as I later understood, to prevent meetings—they lead you into a niche to wait while another is being led by). This would be repeated daily.

They place me in a “cell”—a small, tall room, with one barred window. At first, for about two weeks, I live in the cell alone. A bed, a nightstand, in the corner a vessel for the toilet (the “parasha,” in the language of the prisoners)—that’s all the “furnishings.” A guard peeks into the “peephole” every so often—external surveillance. In the evening, they turn on the light, very bright: when after the announcement of “lights out” (bedtime), I lay down in bed, it seemed that this light would not let me sleep. I tried to cover my face with a sheet, the “food hatch” (the small window in the door through which prisoners communicate with the guard and receive food) opened: the guard warned that covering the face was not allowed. To lie on my back, I had to cover my eyes with my hand.

I perceive my new living situation as something expected. But the first nights I sleep restlessly. The reason is anxious dreams. Of them, I remember one: from the basement of the pre-trial detention center I “hear” the rattling of bones, which I “perceive” as the bones of previously tortured prisoners. These dreams were unexpected. There was, of course, anxiety: what are they doing to my wife, who else might be affected by my arrest, etc. But such anxieties were a daily accompaniment to my life for many years, as well as the life of everyone who was involved in the writing, reproduction, and distribution of samizdat. Only the level of threats had increased: I found myself face-to-face with a situation that I had previously considered only probable. And yet, at the beginning of my stay in the pre-trial detention center, I assessed these dreams of mine as a possible reaction of my psyche to the new situation. Only later, in the light of later “enrichments” of my experience, did I question these dreams.

Summonses for interrogation began. My investigator, Karavanov, charged me with writing the “Open Letter,” which was qualified as “anti-Soviet.” I did not agree with such an assessment of its content. At the time of my arrest, I, like most Ukrainian dissidents, was convinced that the expression “Soviet power” was used as a cover for the dictatorship of the party-state elite. The defense of the soviets, as institutions of representative democracy, from the usurpation of their power by the centralized party-state apparatus was expressed by me in 1969 in the “Open Letter to the Deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR,” signed with the pseudonym “Anton Koval.” There, the need to return to a multi-party system, the free competition of parties for their representation in the soviets, was also expressed.

* * *

Internal critique of ideology. The content of the “Open Letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU,” as well as my explanations during the pre-trial investigation, lies in the vein of an internal critique of the state ideology in the USSR. Such a critique was possible because the communist ideology in the USSR continued to declare positive fundamental principles (social justice, internationalism, etc.), which were clearly contradicted by some other principles, and especially by the practice of implementing these positive principles. The internal critique of ideology and political practice is aimed at showing the ideologue and the politician what they are actually doing and what the consequences of their actions are. The advantage of internal critique is that the critic does not impose their own system of concepts and mode of speech on the adherents of a certain ideology, but speaks their language. In this way, he is able to enter into a dialogue with its adherents on their own “turf.” It is clear that the self-confident communist bureaucrats did not need any critical analysis. They were sure that they knew very well what they were doing. The main thing for them was first to seize power, and then to hold it. To hold it by any means, since the “bright” goal justifies the means. But in the case of Russian communism, it would be an exaggeration to believe that we are dealing only with the justification of political practice by a “bright” goal. The nature of Russian communism (Bolshevism) cannot be properly explained if we do not take into account that it was a reaction to the collapse of the Russian empire, and an attempt to save it in another way, under other slogans. The role of this factor is too important to be ignored. Such a reaction is repeated in Russian ideology and politics: V. Putin declared that the collapse of the USSR, the communist empire, is a “geopolitical catastrophe.” Because Russian politicians, and with them the majority of ethnic Russians in Russia, can in no way abandon the imperial paradigm of political thinking.

Ivan Franko's prediction in the article “What is Progress?” that the practical implementation of Marx’s ideas would lead to immeasurably greater evil compared to what it was aimed at overcoming, is based on an analysis of Marx's socio-political philosophy. This question relates to discussions about whether K. Marx bears intellectual responsibility for the practical application of his ideas in communist political movements. Especially in those where communists seized and held power, as in the case of the Russian Bolsheviks. When it comes to the responsibility of individuals, Lenin bears the greatest responsibility for the course of events in Russia, taking into account how he adapted Marx's ideas to the conditions of Russia, and what method of practical implementation of these ideas he proposed. Today, the Ukrainian reader has at their disposal various publications on this topic, including archival documents concerning Lenin's direct involvement in establishing a terrorist dictatorship in the USSR and the physical elimination of his ideological opponents.

In the technology of holding power, the Bolsheviks introduced a combination of violence with rhetoric aimed at the “masses.” This rhetoric was based on the inversion of concepts: call white black, and black white. And repeat this massively and ceaselessly. Until, in the mass consciousness, a Russian chauvinist becomes the model of an “internationalist.” And he who defends the right of nations to exist and mutual respect between nations, thanks to brainwashing, will be considered a nationalist in the negative sense of the word (hostile attitude towards other nations). In this way, semblances were created at the level of mass consciousness, in which the proper meanings of terms and principles become distorted. The absence of democracy is true, “socialist democracy,” and the exercise of human rights is “bourgeois democracy.” And so on. The name of the state “USSR” must be put in quotation marks, because behind each letter stands a word designed to cover up a practice that contradicts the meaning of this word in its accepted sense. It was Lenin who initiated the demagogy based on inverting the meaning of concepts. But the success of this demagogy became possible due to the timely removal from society of those who did not succumb to brainwashing. The combination of demagogy and terror became a means of maintaining power.

When today, in response to a principled critique of the totalitarian and imperial policy of the “Soviet” state, some point to certain positive elements, I am for preserving these elements. But the nostalgic emphasis on these elements for the sake of rehabilitating the communist political system and ideology is clearly unfounded. Behind this lies the notion that if a political system is evaluated negatively, then nothing worthy of preservation can exist in it. Meanwhile, in history, there has never been a socio-political order that did not contain something worth preserving. From the fact that we (from the point of view of our value convictions) negatively evaluate the ancient Eastern despotisms, it does not mean a denial of the positive role of the Egyptian pharaohs in maintaining irrigation facilities on the Nile. Even in the Russian Empire at the time of the “proletarian revolution,” there were positive elements worthy of preservation. They were rejected by the Bolsheviks under the slogan “We will destroy this entire world of violence down to its foundations.”

More important is something else: those who emphasize certain achievements of communist policy most often claim that the grandiose task of industrializing-modernizing agrarian Russia was nevertheless successfully accomplished. But if we look at the implementation of the ideology of communism from the perspective of modernization, then the most important question is whether an alternative to the Bolshevik way of modernization existed. And how successful was the communist way of modernization in light of this alternative. Let's not forget that we are talking about half a century. And such an alternative existed—not only theoretically, but was represented in certain practices. I mean the Stolypin reforms in agriculture, and the beginnings of industrialization based on a market economy, as well as mass enlightenment and education. At the time of the Provisional Government, a multi-party system emerged, which could have been established if the Constituent Assembly had not been dispersed, because, after all, “The guard is tired.”

Russian history throughout the 19th-20th centuries demonstrates the same logic. Russian politicians do not undertake principled reforms but limit themselves to half-reforms. Such reforms are knowingly unable to produce the desired result. After failure comes a reaction, which each time is a return to Eastern-type authoritarianism, to dictatorship. To the paradigm established by Peter I. The reaction sweeps away the beginnings of already existing positive changes. In this, an important, if not the most important, motive for this reaction is the attempt to save the empire from its очередного disintegration. Lenin, having defined imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, wrote a theoretical indulgence for the Bolsheviks against accusations of imperialism. And paved the way for the preservation of the empire under communist slogans. We see the reactionary nature of Russian policy in the modern neo-imperialism of Putin-Medvedev as well. And again, the collapse of the empire is assessed as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” Because Russian politicians were unable to think in the formulas of “after empires.” And along with them, of course, the Russians themselves: after all, politics largely shapes public consciousness. And everything returns “to square one.” It is known that the idea of soviets, as organs of representative democracy, arose outside of Bolshevik ideology, but its popularity prompted the Bolsheviks to intercept this slogan in order to nullify the power of the soviets by relying on a correspondingly interpreted principle of “democratic centralism” and on the recognition of the Bolshevik party as the leading force in society. And accordingly, the activity of the soviets was completely subordinated to this leading force.

After the Second World War, soldiers, having been in European countries, became convinced that the “proletarians” live better in these countries than in the “proletarian” state. More and more, the inability of the “Soviet” political system to ensure economic progress and universal well-being became apparent. With the exception of the military sector, and partly the energy and extractive industries, the main sectors of the economy on which the well-being of the people directly depended (agriculture, light and food industries, etc.) remained backward. Party officials and their children during the Brezhnev period no longer bought suits and shoes of “Soviet” production. But even in the military industry, the lag in electronics prompted the theft of secrets of Western electronic technologies. No wonder, if you consider the ban on “cybernetics” as a “bourgeois” science. With fertile lands, particularly in Ukraine, during the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era, a dire need for grain purchases from abroad was growing. In my “Open Letter,” the ineffectiveness of “Soviet” economic policy is pointed out to one degree or another.

But more importantly, the Bolshevik method of modernization was carried out not only at the expense of the cruel exploitation of human resources, but through the commission of mass crimes against humanity. And even if the communist economic policy had turned out to be effective, the commission of these crimes would have been decisive in assessing the ideology and practice of Russian communism as criminal.

* * *

It would be naive to perceive my use of the rhetoric of the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism in the ideological struggle of that time as evidence of the author's adherence to the official philosophy or ideology. Undoubtedly, I could conduct an argument using the official language. In my Open Letter, there are obvious signs of overuse of this language. They remained even after Yuriy Badzyo had cleaned up its initial version a bit. But it is important to bear in mind that the implicit subtext of my critique was an analytical approach. For the focus of my attention was on the analysis of the meaning in which terms that had become labels were used in the official ideology of the time—“Soviet power,” “socialism,” “nationalism,” “internationalism,” etc. Still, my “Open Letter” belongs to the rhetoric of ideological struggle. The opposition of Lenin to Stalin remained a means of ideological struggle in the 60s–80s, aimed at expanding democratic freedoms. The same applied to discussions on the national question. Lenin's criticism of great-power Russian chauvinism, against which he was forced to declare a “mortal battle,” although motivated by pragmatic considerations, allowed him to be quoted in defense of the right of nations to self-determination. But my references to Lenin should not be taken as evidence that I did not know the flaws of his philosophy or his role in initiating the terrorist dictatorship. Although at that time we really knew much less about Lenin's personal involvement in terror.

In order not to frighten my addressees with the radicalism of my position, in my Letter I did not openly state that the dissident movement was directed against the existing totalitarian political system and against the concealment of Russian imperialism by the word “internationalism.” But it was not just a calculation not to scare the addressees. The statement that the dissident movement was directed against the “Soviet” totalitarian state precisely because it is dictatorial, totalitarian, was not suitable for the defense of the arrested. After all, such a thesis would have been a boon for the investigators: they would have latched onto it, emphasizing that Lisovoy recognizes the entire dissident movement as being directed against the “Soviet” state. The argument that this state is not in fact Soviet would not have been mentioned. The KGB agents were well-versed in this technique. If I had declared that the arrested dissidents were indeed acting against the existing political system as a totalitarian one, it would have been enough for the investigation to seize on this statement of mine, omitting my indication of the motive for such an action.

A better method was a partial critique of state policy—economic, social, legal, national-cultural, etc. It was better to show the blatant hypocrisy of the ideology: that Soviet power is not actually the power of the soviets (as organs of representative democracy), that internationalism is not actually internationalism in the positive sense of the word, and so on. And the conclusion as to what kind of state we are dealing with should follow as a conclusion from this partial critique. Because it becomes obvious and can be made by an “ordinary Soviet person.” This is a more convincing approach. A general assessment of even the modern Ukrainian state as oligarchic, authoritarian, etc., is also not very effective. It is better to go “from the bottom up”—from an analysis of specific political actions, the result of which would be a general conclusion. What has been said does not mean to diminish the value of generalizations. But for the defense of the arrested dissidents, as well as for self-defense during the investigation, a partial internal critique of state policy and ideology was more effective.

Also, most of the witnesses did not believe that it was necessary to speak sincerely about the true position of the accused, whether philosophical or political. Of the witnesses, only my university classmate Voropaev, with whom I studied for the last two years at the university, testified at the investigation that I had criticized Lenin in my student years. His testimony is recorded in our “Criminal Case” file (Volume 3, pp. 217-218). He put it this way: “Lisovoy liked to flaunt the so-called achievements of bourgeois philosophy and always tried to find alleged inconsistencies in V. I. Lenin’s works *Materialism and Empirio-criticism* and in the *Philosophical Notebooks*. Lisovoy often confused V. I. Lenin’s flexibility in matters of tactics and strategy of the revolutionary struggle with alleged political instability in practice and eclecticism in theory. All this in Lisovoy was not of a militant nature. Although he did not propagate it, he did express such opinions.” In general, for a witness to declare the absence of democracy in the USSR, the party-state dictatorship, and, therefore, the anti-Soviet and anti-socialist character of the political system itself, meant taking a position that, in turn, would be assessed as anti-Soviet. With corresponding consequences.

To what extent could I and some other Ukrainian dissidents be called supporters of “socialism with a human face?” I believed and still believe today that there were grounds for this. For Ukrainian dissidents defended not only the cultural identity of the Ukrainian nation and the rights of national minorities, but also the rights of certain social groups from the perspective of the elementary requirements of social justice. Yevhen Pronyuk, together with Koroban, wrote a separate article dedicated to the social question. In my Letter, signed with the pseudonym “Koval,” and in the “Open Letter,” the importance of solving social problems from the point of view of achieving an elementary level of social justice is also emphasized. Modern “Ukrainian” communists prefer to remain silent about this. Because they do not want to admit that their privileged position satisfied them then and later. Belonging to the ruling bureaucratic stratum or the “new class,” to use Milovan Djilas's term.

However, after familiarizing myself with our Criminal Case file, I discovered that the texts I considered to be reliably hidden had been secretly seized by the KGB agents without proper documentation and attached to our Criminal Case file. These included detailed excerpts and commentaries on M. A. Shafir’s book “The Competence of the USSR and the Union Republic,” various notes on ethnology, excerpts, and preliminary drafts of my poems. Before I became acquainted with our Criminal Case file, I did not think that I had preserved any preliminary versions of my poems and handed them over for safekeeping. I kept some of them, in their main motifs, in my memory, and published a few of them in later editions. While reviewing our “Criminal Case” file, I wrote an application for the removal of the texts mentioned here from our “Criminal Case” file, so the originals of these texts were returned to me.

In my fairly detailed commentaries on Shafir's book and in the notes on ethnology, a purely analytical approach prevails, without the use of the jargon of official ideology, not to mention the poems. Perhaps this also gave grounds to speak of my insincerity. But how important is it, from what philosophical positions someone who points out to an ideologue the obvious contradictions in his ideology or points out to a politician his actions that clearly contradict the proclaimed principles proceeds? Some of the publicistic poems contained transparent hints.

The era of Omega is coming,

empires are searching for the newest methods,

with the help of modern machinery

they strive to hold on here and there.

But it’s time to admit some things:

the lie is losing its power,

cunning too,

no matter what cortege

all this was led by.

Still here and there peoples are in yokes,

and individuals still go to crucifixion

but the spring waters are already washing away

even the most cunningly made dams.

Let history be foolish or whatever,

it closes the doors on time,

it is now closing the jaws

of the last empires in the world.

* * *

As the materials of the pre-trial investigation show, I chose a purely formal position: my defense was reduced to various kinds of remarks, acknowledgments of the sharpness of certain formulations, corrections, and retreats, and so on. These were futile efforts. If some of the investigators did "in their souls" recognize the justification of my criticism, this could in no way affect their actions. After the destruction of the “ideological” ones in the Stalin era, the main type of party and Soviet official became the one who valued his cushy job. And did not want to lose it by listening to reasonable advice or his own conscience. Hence the inevitable degradation of the entire political system, built on violence and fear. Cursing at subordinates became commonplace in party-bureaucratic practice during the Brezhnev era. Petro Yolon recently told me about an event that occurred before the start of the party meeting of the Institute of Philosophy on July 12, which expelled me from the CPSU. Before the start of this meeting, the secretary of the Kyiv Regional Party Committee, Rudych, handed Yolon a paper with information about me, prepared by the KGB, to convey this information to the meeting participants. After reviewing it, Yolon noted that it lacked arguments about the motives that guided Lisovoy in writing his Open Letter. Rudych agreed with this remark and immediately called the KGB, expressing a wish to provide more complete information. In response, not only he but also Yolon heard a torrent of curses. Someone dared to doubt that what was written by such a formidable institution as the KGB was unacceptable. For some time, my wife’s sister, Maria Vasheka, worked as a secretary in the Kaharlyk district committee of the Komsomol. Above her, on the second floor, was the party district committee, where she was invited to take the minutes of meetings. The district committee leaders spoke to the collective farm chairmen in the same language—with curses. One might not even mention this, because it is well known. In this case, it is not about the use of curses as such, but about what stands behind them. Since intimidation was considered the best way of “persuasion,” curses were considered the best way of “argumentation.” The KGB agents were aware: as soon as people lose their fear of the KGB, the entire political system will fall.

In comparison, the manner of my communication with Karavanov looked quite decent. When I occasionally forced a debate on Karavanov, he would remark that he was an officer and was carrying out his duties. By this, he simply explained what was allowed for him and what was not. Once, in response to some of my arguments, he said: “Do you realize what kind of state machine you are rebelling against?” His remark about the “machine” was not just an intimidation. I will speak further about the now obvious use of means from the arsenal of this “machine.”

But it is also worth bearing in mind that the investigators deliberately limited the list of questions subject to discussion and sought to drive the course of the discussion into a predetermined formalism. They were not interested in clarifying the true position of the accused. On the contrary, the opinion of the accused was often deliberately primitivized and distorted. My investigator Karavanov would insert various little words, for example, the word “allegedly,” to weaken the categorical nature of my formulations. He counted on the fact that I would not be able to force him to rewrite the protocol every time. And he purposefully cut off any of my attempts to get into clarifying what to consider Soviet, socialist, or communist. When the question of understanding the term “Soviet” arose, the investigation referred to an “expert analysis,” carried out in the well-known manner explained in my “Open Letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU.” In one of the seized poems, it is said thus:

For every thought, one can find a hangman—

some specialist-expert,

some certified facelessness will be found,

that will soothe its conscience with something.

But the stigma of a worthless scoundrel

can no longer be washed away

neither from the performers,

nor from the commissioners of the expertise.

The same points in my Letter that really needed certain clarifications, such as the limits of freedom of speech, were futile to discuss with Karavanov, who, as a matter of principle, avoided any discussions. For indeed, the question of how a democratic political system should defend itself against clearly anti-democratic (totalitarian) ideologies is worth discussing. The National Socialists in Germany came to power by democratic means. So, if soviets are to be considered institutions of democratic self-government, then the question arises as to what extent the spread of some aggressive anti-democratic ideology creates a threat of the destruction of democracy, represented by the power of the soviets as fundamental institutions of representative democracy. After all, the emergence of such a threat requires the introduction of certain prohibitions on the public propaganda of a clearly totalitarian or criminal ideology. For example, fascism or communism. But Karavanov did not want me to make certain clarifications to my thesis. It was more advantageous for the KGB to use some thesis formulated too categorically. And the thesis that Lisovoy advocates for complete freedom of speech, including for anti-Soviet agitation, seemed advantageous to them in this regard.

* * *

The KGB tried to explain any criticism of the completely ineffective, even absurd, “Soviet” policy by the influence of “bourgeois” ideology. And, accordingly, by communication with persons whom the KGB considered to be mouthpieces of such ideology. An additional explanation was the clarification of the circumstances of the dissident's personal life and mental peculiarities. Karavanov’s question for me to briefly tell my biography was aimed at revealing the personal motives for my “nationalist” and “anti-Soviet” convictions. It was unpleasant for me to reread in January-February 2010 the account of my biography (in response to the question posed by Karavanov), the text of which is in our Criminal Case file. But from a formal point of view, this account corresponds to the truth. I had no serious conflicts with the authorities, no obstacles in pursuing a teaching and academic career. Being in internal conflict with the ideology and political practice, I avoided external conflict with the political system until I came out of my “underground.” But the motives for this conflict did not stem from any narrow personal, selfish interests. I believed that any person, regardless of the circumstances of their personal life, if they were to think honestly, would inevitably come to the conclusions I expressed. Perhaps in a certain modification. And this applies to all dissidents.

* * *

A defeat during the investigation. And so, not recognizing the validity of the accusation, I refused to answer questions. Without entering into discussions, Karavanov emphasized that his job was to clarify the circumstances related to the writing and reproduction of the Letter. Eventually, I gave in: I began to explain how I “produced” the Letter—as one would, say, a weapon or poison. Then, how I reproduced it. I considered the change in my position a moral-psychological defeat. Although I refused to name anyone during Karavanov’s interrogations, the very fact that I agreed to explain the reproduction of the Letter led to my naming several people involved in it. Their involvement was merely episodic and technical. At my request, Ivan Haiduk (a student at the journalism department of Kyiv State University) passed on copies of the Letter. My wife’s friends, Kateryna Vysotska and Liudmyla Stohnota (both from the village of Lishchynka, near Kaharlyk), were involved in similar “technical” episodes. None of the three were connected to my long-term activities in distributing *samvydav*. Kateryna Vysotska, who had passed on my Letter, was detained and held in a cell on Volodymyrska Street for three days. But since she held firm to the position that she had not read the Letter but had only passed it on at my request, they were forced to release her.

What I have said only confirms the validity of Serhiy Bilokin’s remark, with which Vasyl Ovsienko also agreed, that in the 1960s, no text had been created for *samvydav* that would provide instructions on how to conduct oneself in “dealings” with the KGB. Especially during an investigation. Sometimes it came down to elementary but life-saving methods of behavior that gave the KGB no opportunity to repress or blackmail a person. One of Kateryna Vysotska’s friends advised her to stick firmly to the position during interrogations that she had not read my Letter but had only passed it on at my request. Since the KGB officers adhered to basic legal norms, at least in cases of isolated actions, they were ultimately forced to release her from custody. They had no legal pretext.

Among my relatives, my sister was summoned for interrogation several times. I mentioned earlier that after finishing the seven-year school, Liuba entered a vocational school and then worked at Shoe Factory No. 6 (on Artema St.), lived in rented rooms, sometimes in basements. When I was working at the Ternopil Medical Institute, she married Anatoliy Stepanov, a Russian, a lecturer at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (now deceased); their daughter Svitlana was born. Anatoliy was a noble man with a strong character, and he was largely free of chauvinistic complexes. A confirmation of the latter is his attitude toward raising his daughter Svitlana: he insisted that she be registered as Ukrainian and attend a Ukrainian school, not a Russian one. After I returned from imprisonment, I observed that he tried to speak Ukrainian with his daughter (he spoke Russian with my sister) and prepared his lectures for students in Ukrainian.

Anatoliy was also summoned for “talks.” He never told my sister what they wanted from him. But they could not persuade him to cooperate. And he could not have given any “testimony”: I never gave *samvydav* texts to either Anatoliy or Liuba to read (though I might occasionally store *samvydav* texts at their apartment). I did, however, tell my sister about the national movement in Ukraine and about *samvydav*. They tried to persuade my sister to cooperate with the KGB so that she would influence me accordingly. She did not agree to play such a role. They continued to summon her for “talks.” But when the next call came with an “invitation” for my sister to a “talk,” Anatoliy answered the phone and said something to them in such a way that they stopped their calls.

* * *

Karavanov had a poor command of Ukrainian. And, as I have already noted, he sometimes deliberately distorted my answers, phrasing them as favorably as possible for his agency. So, in some cases, I demanded that the protocols be rewritten. He did not, with few exceptions, get into arguments about the content of the letter. He was only interested in certain passages. For example, the phrase “Only a law of a Francoist character can recognize the justice of laws analogous to those expressed in Articles 62 and 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR” gave him grounds to assert that I was equating “Soviet” legislation with fascist legislation. The investigator was also interested in the part of the Letter where I mention the existence of instructions that prohibit the dissemination of certain types of information. Regarding this, the Letter states: “Citing various, most unexpected arguments, one type of information after another is forbidden. For instance, in recent years alone, it has been forbidden to report in the press on certain types of infectious and epidemic diseases (a special instruction exists for this). In essence, it has become impossible to speak publicly about the threatening facts of environmental poisoning, about the level of child and other types of crime, about the scale of alcoholism and drug addiction, about the terrible state of many historical monuments (just visit the outskirts of Chernihiv), and so on.” This quote directly points to the existence of corresponding “instructions,” which were themselves classified as state secrets. I learned about the existence of instructions regarding the statistics of infectious diseases when I was working at the Ternopil Medical Institute. I don’t know what the Institute’s administration was guided by, but one day I was invited to the rector’s office and given an official document that contained information about such prohibitions.

There was one more point of particular interest for my investigator: did I know who Anton Koval was? This question was put to me several times in one form or another. One of the interrogations regarding this “episode” aroused my suspicion. This time I was moved to another room, a long one, with a single window and a table placed in the middle. Two people questioned me. Repeating my “I don’t know,” I felt myself in a strange state. Had I become the subject of an experiment, for example, in the development of truth-testing methods? I recalled a publication in one of the central Russian newspapers (it appeared, I believe, in ’70 or ’71) about the use of some kind of radiation as a means of influencing political prisoners in Franco’s Spain and in China. Why this information was released (or allowed through?) at that time remains a mystery to me to this day. Most likely—for intimidation. Still, even in this case, I wasn’t certain that my mental state in that situation was caused by external interference. Whatever means of influence were in question (psychotropic or electronic), the results of self-observation needed to be convincing. Later, I will mention the more obvious external interventions on my nervous system and psyche. I considered self-criticism important in circumstances that already predispose one to exaggerated suspicions. Especially since I had read reports from the camps in which political prisoners expressed suspicions about the use of psychotropic drugs (I mentioned earlier that I had retyped them at the request of Nadiika Svitlychna).

* * *

So, during the interrogations conducted by Karavanov, I refused to name the people who were involved in the reproduction of the Letter. The investigation period was extended for me by a decree signed by the prosecutor, with a corresponding characterization of my position. From that characterization, I learned once again that I was indeed a “nationalist” and was stubbornly holding on to my anti-Soviet convictions. This gave me reason to believe that my position was generally correct. But at the end of October, investigator Rybchenko was brought into the interrogations. He was a young man, about my age, and behaved, unlike Karavanov, in a friendly manner. He spoke good Ukrainian. Perhaps this change from the “tough” investigator to the “kind” one was planned. But the consequence of the aforementioned concession was the most dramatic event for me. During one interrogation about the reproduction of my Letter, instead of saying “the typist,” I said her name (“Raya”). I remember well that he noticed my distress, and I can say with certainty that he was quite sincerely sympathetic. To ease my state, he said in a special tone something like, “It’s not worth your anguish.” There was a certain hint in that, but at the time, I could not know for sure what lay behind it. But even if I had known about Raisa’s cooperation with the KGB, it would have changed little in my own assessment of this mistake. I don’t recall how my communication with Rybchenko continued after that, but I assume he persuaded me to write the statement to Fedorchuk, which I present below.

To the Chairman of the Committee for State Security

at the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, V. V. Fedorchuk

from the accused V. S. Lisovyi

Statement

To confirm once again that I see nothing secret or “underground” in either the procedure of writing or the procedure of reproducing the “Open Letter to the Members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Members of the Central Committee of the CPU” which I composed, I hereby clarify the circumstances of the reproduction of the “Open Letter.”

I arranged for the retyping of the letter with the former typist of the Institute of Philosophy, Raisa Politsyna, without a specific agreement as to the number of copies or the timeframe for reproduction. She agreed to type the “Letter,” which she later confirmed. I do not remember the exact time of this agreement or the aforementioned confirmation. I can only say that it happened at least several months before the letter was submitted.

After I had finished writing the letter and had typed it myself on the typewriter confiscated from me during the search, I passed one copy of the Letter and the list of addresses to Raisa Politsyna through a former student of the philology department of KSU, now a teacher, Vasyl Ovsienko.

I met Vasyl Ovsienko while teaching logic at KSU. He used to visit my home, we did not hide our friendly relations, and we co-authored an article in *Tribuna lektora* [The Lecturer’s Tribune]. He happened to visit me at that time, and I asked for his help. It was a matter of him passing to Raisa Politsyna both the copy of the “Open Letter...” and the list of addresses, which he did. I gave him, I don’t recall exactly, either 15 or 20 rubles from my own funds for paper and envelopes. I do not know how the envelopes were made or where the paper was purchased. But Ovsienko told me that it had been done. Ovsienko did all of this at my request; I convinced him that the document I had written was not anti-Soviet or slanderous, and he agreed with that. Since Vasyl Ovsienko was himself overburdened and exhausted by his final exams, I turned to Yevhen Proniuk with a request to pick up the typed copies, which he promised to do and, judging by the case documents, fulfilled his promise. Whether he paid for the work, I do not know.

I ask that the persons I have named here, Raisa Politsyna and Vasyl Ovsienko, be treated as humanely as possible, since the primary blame for their actions lies on my conscience.

October 30, 1972

/Signature/

* * *

Vasyl Ovsienko was arrested only on March 5, 1973, which means they had been watching him for almost four months and only nine months later added him to our case. I will not speak here about what he had to endure: he has spoken of it in his memoirs. After he was added to our case on April 20, 1973, I saw my task as confining all testimony to the three of us. In any case, they had already determined a sentence for the three of us. But in that situation, the main burden fell on Yevhen Proniuk, as the supplier of most of the *samvydav* materials. He refused to answer questions and thus took the whole case upon himself.

Even now, from a distance, I see the investigation period as the most difficult in my life from the point of view of a moral ordeal. But it was much harder for Ovsienko. What was saving for me was the realization that I should not be consumed by moral self-condemnation, for that would weaken me in my resistance. To break a person morally, to undermine their will, has been a tested method of the “Chekists” since the beginning of the Bolshevik seizure of power. In this situation, I found some support in the philosophy of Stoicism (I mentioned earlier that I had read the Stoics shortly before my arrest). The Stoic emphasis on the greater importance of self-assessment compared to external evaluation served as a support for me in many situations later as well, during my time in the camps.

Considering the prospect of the dissident movement becoming a mass movement, even before my imprisonment, I was inclined to the view that as many people as possible should gain experience in resistance, even at the cost of defeats. If one considers the dissident movement to be a matter for special people, with special nerves and psyches (heroes), then such a movement, under the existing conditions, would remain the affair of a small number of individuals. After all, everyone, before joining the movement, would set such high standards for themselves that the fear of not holding up would paralyze their resolve. I have already mentioned that the assessment of one’s own ability to resist was an important motive for many to avoid participating in the movement, even by way of distributing *samvydav*.

2. The Ideology and Ethics of Ukrainian Dissidents. Repressive KGB Technologies.

The ideology of the Ukrainian dissident movement. There was a significant difference between the ideology of the UPA’s national liberation war, on the one hand, and the dissident movement, on the other. An ideology and ethics oriented toward a state of war inevitably contain a clear demarcation between good and evil. This excludes hesitation, leaving no room for those who stand between the fronts. It is enough to recall the philosophy and ideology of the resistance movement against fascism. A turn to the side of evil, betrayal, is severely punished. But after the defeat of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the dictatorship, combining terror with ideology as a false consciousness, achieved significant success in cultivating a person with the worldview and psyche of a *Homo sovieticus*. After the defeat of the UPA’s national liberation war, the cultivation of this type of person was transferred to the territory of Western Ukraine. The ideology of the dissident movement was aimed at a social environment that had already been influenced by this ideology. The goal of the movement was not only the intellectual realization of the nature of the authorities and their ideology, but also a transformation at the subconscious, psychic level. Since the influence of ideology was combined with terror and genocide, it was necessary to overcome the fear of the authorities, inscribed at the level of the subconscious. We are dealing with radical transformations of mass consciousness and psyche in the process of transition from a totalitarian and imperial state to a democratic and national one.

The ideology of the dissident movement was oriented toward the formation of civic and national consciousness. It was non-violent and included an attempt at open dialogue with the authorities. The addressees of a significant number of texts created by dissidents were official persons and institutions. Since the authorities did not react to these appeals, rejecting the path of public dialogue and repressing its initiators, the goal of the movement became enlightenment. Its main tool was the distribution of *samvydav*. But the circle of people capable of overcoming the psychic inertia of obedience and fear was narrow. And this meant that transformations in mass consciousness would require a long time.

Even in retrospect, the assessment of the dissident and Helsinki movements remains high—as a challenge to the inertia of obedience and fear, as an example of civic courage. Such an assessment is even more important than the actual consequences of the dissident movement—its role in the political processes that culminated in the collapse of totalitarianism and the dissolution of the USSR. But the real influence of this movement on mass consciousness remained limited.

The activities of many people who acted in the same direction but avoided direct conflict with the authorities and their ideology had a wider influence. They were forced to make various kinds of compromises. This was a whole range of diverse strategies and activities: the rehabilitation of certain trends and entire sections of the natural sciences and humanities (genetics, cybernetics, sociology, semantics, etc.), the covert critique of the official version of dialectical and historical materialism, the expansion of artistic styles and the undermining of the canons of “socialist realism,” the publication of works by banned authors, an emphasis on valuing the sovereign personality and national identity, and so on. This intellectual and cultural movement, initiated by the “Thaw,” was the environment in which the dissident movement proper appeared.

* * *

The ethics of sacrifice and heroism. I mention these now well-known historical circumstances here only in connection with the attitude toward the ethics of sacrifice and heroism—an important precept of the Ukrainian dissident movement. Leaving aside the multifaceted question of the sources of such ethics, I agree with those who point out that one of its intellectual sources was the philosophy of existentialism, which (in Sartre’s version) was aimed at the ideological justification of the Resistance movement against fascism. But there were also its own sources of this ethics, which I have mentioned earlier. The readiness for a sacrificial act is an ethics aimed at action in extraordinary situations: war, saving people from mortal danger, etc. But it can also be designed for a long-term historical perspective, when a person or a movement emphasizes that society is in a dangerous situation and that a sacrificial and heroic act is necessary to avert inevitable degradation or disaster. An example of such an orientation toward a long-term historical perspective is early (“catacomb”) Christianity.

The basis of this uncompromising ethics of sacrifice and heroism is the emphasis on values and principles—as motives for behavior and the duties based on them. The question of how such an ethics should correlate with practical wisdom—the weighing of the appropriateness and effectiveness of the chosen methods of action in a given situation—is debatable. Without ethical principles and the values associated with them, the criterion that allows one to assess the character and extent of the concessions that individuals and movements are forced to make for the success of their action in a real situation disappears. The dialogue between ethical idealism and practical wisdom (realism) runs through the entire Western intellectual and spiritual history. The complexity of the relationship between strict adherence to principles and practical wisdom lies in the fact that the impossible became possible as a result of a certain movement’s readiness for long-term persecution, suffering, and self-sacrifice.

But since ethical idealism in its extreme forms neglects practical wisdom, it is capable of pushing people toward unjustified sacrifices. Strict adherence to principles—without taking into account the manner and extent to which these principles can be realized in a given situation—often turns out to be an unsuccessful mode of action. The most important question is when the choice of better methods of action and the avoidance of futile sacrifices crosses the line beyond which practical wisdom already means the justification of concessions that undermine fundamental values and principles. After all, the demand to be a realist in the realization of ethical goals can lead to extreme forms of conformism. In political activity, practical wisdom (as a counterweight to the emphasis on principles and values) is designated by the term “political realism” (Realpolitik). This is not about neglecting principles and values, but about choosing better strategies aimed at the realization of principles. In many real situations, for the sake of realizing certain values and principles, one has to move step by step, taking into account the available opportunities.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the UPA’s national liberation war was reduced to the resistance of small groups, the ethics of sacrifice and heroism (in accordance with the precept “Homeland or death”) began to contradict practical wisdom. And from this point of view, Vasyl Kuk’s appeal, aimed at avoiding futile sacrifices, becomes justified. But the sacrificial opposition to evil, the realization of principles, the defense of fundamental moral values forms the pole that opposes practical wisdom, which is aimed at taking reality into account to ensure the success of action. It is best when these two poles are in constant interaction, in mutual correction.

In the case of the intellectual-cultural movement of the Sixtiers, we are therefore dealing with discussions about the justification of certain compromises in opposing manifest evil. For those who were not captivated by the illusions introduced by the official ideology, the realization that they were making morally unacceptable concessions was a source of moral suffering. Hence the vacillation between an open challenge to the dictatorship and an agreement to make concessions, albeit at the cost of retreating from principles. Later in these memoirs, I will have occasion to speak about the problem of choosing between an uncompromising ethics of sacrifice and heroism on the one hand, and practical wisdom on the other. If we limit ourselves to figures of the younger generation, examples of vacillation between these two poles are present in the behavior of a whole series of intellectual and cultural figures of the 60s–80s (Dmytro Pavlychko, Ivan Drach, Ivan Dziuba, and others). The most innocent compromise, which testifies to a person’s unwillingness to make morally unacceptable concessions, was the position of silence (for example, the behavior of Lina Kostenko after the arrests of 1972). In my Letter to the Central Committee, obvious signs of compromise rhetoric, calculated for the addressee, are the references to Lenin’s authority and the emphasis on the need to resist the restoration of Stalinism, and so on. A completely justified protest against “neo-Stalinism” is combined with the illusion of its opposition to “Leninism,” which in reality was the source of Stalinism.

In fact, the collapse of totalitarianism and the dissolution of the USSR, if we leave aside the geopolitical context, were the result of a combination of the dissident movement, whose participants were oriented toward an ethics of sacrifice and heroism, on the one hand, and the aforementioned broader intellectual-cultural and ideological movement, on the other. These interconnected movements also influenced people from the communist nomenclature. This ultimately led to Gorbachev’s *perestroika*.

I have already mentioned that the official ideology contained the illusion of a “parallel” world of “true communists”—honest, just, courageous fighters for the happiness of the “working people.” And those who succumbed to this illusion (as in the case of the tragedy of Shypenko in the university’s “Buza” case) inevitably weakened themselves psychologically in their opposition to the dictatorial regime. In one of my conversations with him, Yevhen Sverstiuk sympathetically remarked that it was easier for him during the investigation compared to those who based their position on an internal critique of communist ideology. In response to some of the investigation’s appeals to this ideology, Yevhen would remark that Marxism and the communist ideology based on it had never interested him and did not interest him now. We are dealing not so much with alienation at the level of reason (for Yevhen did know the ideas of Marxism and the ideology of communism) as at the moral-psychological level. A striking description of that drama, whose sources are rooted in the opposite moral-psychological attitude, can be found in Mykhailo Osadchyi’s memoirs, *Bilmo* [The Cataract].

* * *

Repressive KGB actions against the backdrop of the collapse of communist ideology. To one who takes up an investigative case concerning politically motivated repressions in the USSR, the texts with the testimony of the accused and other documents, filed in volumes, say nothing about the state of the person whose testimony is recorded in the protocols. The reader or researcher of this testimony can only guess what lies behind a sudden change in the accused’s position in favor of the investigation. Much has been done to date to research the terror, the main instruments of which were the Cheka, GPU, and NKVD. But the full scale of crimes against humanity is only just being revealed. In the preface to the book *Cheka-GPU-NKVD in Ukraine* (Kyiv, 1997), its authors Yuriy Shapoval, Volodymyr Prystaiko, and Vadym Zolotaryov note that the aim is to create “the necessary conceptual, factual, and source-informational basis for future research.” Still, concerning the activities of these “organs” in Ukraine, the majority of important documents are kept in Moscow (if they are indeed still kept, and not destroyed). A testament to the fear of declassifying documents is their destruction by Stasi employees in the GDR. I have already mentioned that, as a result of the declassification by the Security Service of Ukraine of part of the documents concerning the “Blok” case, it became known that in 1990, documents of operational-investigative actions, particularly against dissidents, were destroyed (or taken to Moscow?), with the exception of a few individuals.

As for the KGB, enough evidence of various kinds exists today to characterize the activities of these “organs” in the 1960s–70s in some of their most important aspects. To protect itself from the punitive “sword of the revolution,” the party-state nomenclature was forced to introduce elements of legal procedural restrictions—under the slogan of the party’s control over this “sword.” The decisive step in this regard was the “Statute on the KGB at the Council of Ministers of the USSR,” approved by the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1959, which indicated that the KGB acted under the “direct leadership and control of the Central Committee of the CPSU.” Among its most important tasks, after foreign intelligence and combating espionage and sabotage, was defined the struggle against the “hostile activities of anti-Soviet and nationalist elements within the USSR.” In 1967, by merging a number of special departments, the infamous Fifth Directorate was created, its purpose being to combat “ideological diversions.” Undoubtedly, the introduction of minimal legal restrictions was nevertheless a positive step—at least some elements of legality.

The consequence of these changes was that physical torture in cells, with few exceptions, was no longer used. And if it was used, it was only in a disguised form. In the camps, punishment cells, and prisons, it was easier for the KGB to conceal their involvement in various types of physical torture (including brutal beatings) than in an investigative isolator. But even in the mid-1960s, KGB officers allowed themselves very crude treatment of imprisoned dissidents during investigations. Fabricating criminal charges on political grounds was carried out covertly, often using provocations. Only some of them have become known today (Vadym Smohytel, Mykola Horbal, Vasyl Ovsienko, and others). Murders, both abroad and within the USSR, could only be carried out as special operations. Moreover, all such actions were not carried out on the basis of written orders (as far as I can judge, for this is a matter for factual research). To assess the purpose and manner in which the KGB might have resorted (at least since the second half of the 1960s) to extreme measures (torture, murder, etc.) requires additional evidence. In the case of the murder of Alla Horska (and the probability of the KGB’s involvement is high), it can be assumed that the brutality of this murder served as a means of intimidating the dissident movement. But these were exceptional actions: they were done at the “operational level,” where the decision itself was not recorded in a written order.

So the KGB became a structure that sought to maintain its “facade” in the form of ostensible legality (which was already a good thing), while hiding the dirty part of its activities in the shadows. They took into account the naive candor of various orders and instructions from party leaders and “Chekists” of the previous period of the repressive “machine’s” activity (“to decompose,” “to compromise,” to carry out provocations, etc.). The introduction of elements of legality required legally trained “cadres.” Accordingly, officials who were not inclined to take the position of the “hawks” began to appear in the KGB structures. This was a manifestation of similar trends in the party structures. But in the KGB, as a military structure, the differences between moderates and “hawks” were less pronounced than in the party. How small this distance was can be judged by comparing V. Nikitchenko and V. Fedorchuk. At the lower cadre level, this difference could be greater.

All important decisions, primarily personnel-related, were dictated from Moscow. An example is the removal of Shelest or the replacement of the “softer” Nikitchenko with Fedorchuk. The ideologues sought to spread the idea that the severity of punishments in Ukraine was the result of local “excesses.” But they invariably removed from the leadership of party and repressive organs in Ukraine anyone who did not show sufficient firmness, especially in the fight against “nationalists.” In Ukraine, the so-called “excesses” were the result of the fact that any leader (down to the head of a collective farm) who showed a lack of firmness (i.e., cruelty) was not only regularly removed from his post but also exposed to repression himself—as a saboteur, a malingerer, and so on. The scale of repression and the harshness of sentences in the trials of Ukrainian dissidents were dictated from the Kremlin.

None of the officials and functionaries wanted to leave “traces.” The majority of “dirty” actions (those that go beyond the bounds of formal legality) were not recorded in writing at the operational level. With few exceptions, as became known only as a result of the recent declassification by the Security Service of Ukraine of some of the documents from the “Blok” case. But since most of the documents preserved in the archives of the Security Service still remain classified, it is impossible today to objectively assess the shadow side of the KGB’s activities. This is especially true of the activities of the KGB’s Operational-Technical Directorate, created in the same year, 1959, by merging a number of special departments. What scientific research, besides means of eavesdropping, secret murder, etc., was developed for the needs of this department? How many people worked on classified programs in various research institutions? Due to the secrecy of all KGB operational activities, even those people who voluntarily or forcibly collaborated with the KGB do not dare today to make public the information they know. I think their sense of threat to their security is not unfounded.

If we limit ourselves to the KGB repressions directed against the dissident and Helsinki movements, then a more or less described set of methods of action characteristic of the KGB during the 1960s–80s is available today. We find this in various testimonies and memoirs of dissidents and in the research of historians (H. Kasyanov, A. Rusnachenko, Y. Shapoval, and others). They can be arranged on a spectrum from “soft” to the most severe and exceptional. We get the following sequence: (a) prophylactic-educational—“persuasion,” which mostly amounted to warnings and intimidation, the use of means of “influence”; (b) involvement of collectives (discussions in “committees” or meetings, issuing various kinds of reprimands, etc.); (c) discrediting; (d) actions concerning vital interests (at stake were: work, studies, postgraduate studies, obtaining housing, defending a dissertation, the possibility of publishing works, threats to relatives, especially children or friends, etc.); (e) prophylactic arrest; (f) conviction on a criminal charge, particularly as a result of provocation; (g) conviction on a political charge; (h) placement in a “psychiatric hospital”; (i) maiming, murder. As is evident from the documents declassified by the Security Service of Ukraine, at the level of operational investigation, some quite obvious signs of exceeding the bounds of legality were recorded in writing—for example, actions aimed at discrediting individuals or actions aimed at arranging for unemployment, etc.

The communist regime was writhing in convulsions. Both the social and national aspects of communist ideology could not withstand elementary criticism. The bourgeoisie as a class (“owners of the means of production”) no longer existed, and the thesis about the influence of “bourgeois ideology” on young people raised by the communist system was unconvincing. And among such were the leading figures of the dissident movement (I. Svitlychny, V. Chornovil, I. Dziuba, I. Drach, and others). The regime suffered its main defeat at the level of “prophylactic” talks, regardless of who conducted them. One can “zombify” a person through “educational” work, starting from kindergarten and school, but as soon as critical thinking awakens in them, all the consequences of this zombification are destroyed. The crisis of ideology means that the arguments based on it lose their persuasiveness. The advent of Brezhnev was an attempt by the nomenclature to save its dominant position, achieving stabilization by returning to repression. With a corresponding tilt toward more decisive actions aimed at suppressing the dissident movement. Moreover, the significantly harsher sentences for dissidents in Ukraine were conditioned primarily by the national component: the loss of Ukraine, even as a prospect, meant the most painful blow to Russian imperialism.

* * *

In the shadow of investigative actions. Later, weighing the different positions among dissidents regarding the assessment of the KGB’s activities, I observed a certain inconsistency. One position boils down to underestimating the level of professionalism in the KGB’s activities, particularly in the use of various practices and means in the fight against dissenters. The naive attitude of Western services to the KGB’s methods of action and technologies is a separate story, partly known today. This also applies to the underestimation of various scientific and technical developments in the relevant subdivisions of the KGB. If B. Stashynsky had not managed to outsmart the KGB (to penetrate the West and explain at the trial how he killed S. Bandera), the version that Bandera died of a heart attack would probably still be in force today.

This does not mean that the attitude “The KGB knows everything,” which the KGB sought to spread for the purpose of intimidation, would have been useful for the dissident movement. But when I heard someone’s story about their stay in an investigative isolator, in which the narrator assumed from the outset that everyone else was in a more or less similar situation, it surprised me. It is a good thing that Oleksandr Bolonkin at one time published in *Ogonëk* an account of his stay in a “pressure cell” during his preliminary detention in Ulan-Ude. Without this, my experience of being in a similar “cell” would have remained unique. I consider inconsistent the position that was based on the assumption that the KGB could only allow itself actions that clearly went beyond the bounds of formal legality outside the investigative prison. And that in its treatment of a person completely isolated in a cell of an investigative isolator, it could not resort to illegal actions.

We see an implicit assumption about adherence to the generally established regime in all cases where, based on one’s own experience, one judges the behavior of another prisoner in conditions of complete isolation. My personal experience does not confirm such an overly optimistic assessment of the introduction of legal restrictions on the KGB’s activities. So, while acknowledging a certain evolution in the KGB’s activities since the late 1950s and not equating all KGB officers with fanatical executors of their superiors’ will, I was at the same time not inclined to belittle the KGB’s equipment with various means and professionally trained “cadres.”

A second example of an overly optimistic assessment of the consequences of the aforementioned introduction of the KGB’s activities into the “legal field,” in my view, is the position of those who categorically deny that KGB officers could use means of intervention in the neuropsychic activity of their prisoners—psychotropic or other means. My experience calls such a view into question. And although this experience rather prompts the posing of questions and the formulation of hypotheses, I consider its public disclosure to be socially important. This is even under the condition that I lack additional information that would allow me to explain to myself the uniqueness of my personal situation.

* * *

On intervention into the body and soul. First, some preliminary remarks. In comparison with the terror of the repressive structures that, under other names, preceded the KGB, a new threat became obvious: instead of inflicting physical suffering, the nerves and psyche became the object. Against the backdrop of the crisis of the official ideology, the idea was put forward that psychiatry could help out in such a situation: this was not a completely new idea, as the history of the repressive organs since the Bolshevik seizure of power shows. The idea that all these dissidents could be classified as unable to adapt to the social environment opened up new possibilities. This strategy found its theoretical justification at the level of some leading psychiatrists in Moscow (see, for example, A. Korotenko, N. Alykina. *Soviet Psychiatry: Delusion and Intent*. K., 2002 and other publications). This side of the KGB’s developments remains classified to this day. Perhaps the most indicative sign that the KGB had inclined toward using psychiatry as a means of combating dissenters was the large-scale campaign to “cleanse” Kyiv of ideologically unreliable “elements” on the eve of the 1980 Olympic Games. Some of these “elements” (and precisely from among the dissidents) were placed in a psychiatric hospital.

I will note that explaining the actions of dissidents as a certain kind of psychic deviation was consistent with the “common sense” of those people whose minds cannot grasp any ethically motivated action. After all, such an action contradicts the direct vital interests of the actor. If a person overcomes the fear that signals a threat to life, are they not acting under the influence of hidden or even subconscious urges, which they only cover up (even unconsciously!) with ethical arguments? Hence, the thought suggests itself that such a person is either guided by an “overvalued idea” (as stated in P. Hryhorenko’s “diagnosis”); or hidden subconscious motives are concealed behind their ethical argumentation. To a person who has never risked their comfort, let alone their life, guided by ethical motives, such actions seem to be a manifestation of abnormality. Since in the 60s–80s the KGB employed not so much fanatics as cynical pragmatists, their “common sense” was consistent with this logic. On the other hand, an ethically motivated act evokes in some people a hidden envy or even irritation (so-called ressentiment): this is the source of a not always conscious tendency to discredit such acts or behavior. To discredit by seeking out hidden motives in them—offense, envy, the desire for fame, pride, circumstances of personal life, and so on. For a materialist, ethical idealism is something false and, therefore, the result of psychic deviations.

* * *

In my experience, I distinguish between what is obvious, which I have not and do not question, and that which only prompts the posing of questions and the formulation of assumptions. First, about the obvious facts, which I have already mentioned in some of my video interviews (O. Dyrdovskyi and others). These include the use of sounds to affect the nervous system: this phenomenon is well known to every reader from the example of flinching at an unexpected sharp sound. I have no doubt that in this case, we are talking about a deliberate, purposeful action. The frequency of use and the intensity of the sounds (the degree of their irritancy) grew gradually and became a serious problem for me, starting somewhere from the second month of my stay in the investigative isolator.

The sounds were varied: some of them resembled the fall of a brick on metal, shots were also heard (similar to pistol shots), and the nature of others was difficult to identify. I only heard these sounds in my cell. The spatial source of most of them, as far as I can judge from my perception, was located in the courtyard. But could they, I thought, allow shots to be fired in the courtyard and for this to be heard in other cells? Is the source of these sounds not rather some recordings, and the microphone diaphragm camouflaged in the wall or ceiling? I will note that at the very beginning of the investigation, I heard a woman crying in a neighboring cell, whose voice very much resembled my wife’s. But I assumed that this resemblance was intensified by my anxiety. Perhaps so. Some of the sounds were continuous and resembled the rotation of some kind of millstones (the spatial localization of the source of these sounds was difficult to determine). The last of my cellmates, with whom I served out my detention in the isolator, had a “habit” of unexpectedly but regularly clapping his hands with all his might. The effect of all these various sounds made it difficult to concentrate, to read anything, or even to think. Whether the sensitivity to these sounds was the result of adding some psychotropic substances to my food remains a question.

As the strength and frequency of the use of these sounds increased, I developed intense pain (obviously of a nervous character), which was localized, as it seemed to me, in the area of the solar plexus. I finally complained to the isolator’s doctor—a plump, middle-aged woman. After listening to me, she said that my symptoms were the result of the peculiarities of my nervous system and my stay in a confined space. A too-transparent hint. The head of the investigative isolator, O. S. Sapozhnikov, in response to my complaints, spoke of building repairs.

I have no doubts about the external origin of another type of action. I mean the actions that, as I assumed, were the result of some kind of “irradiation” that caused convulsions. I assumed that the object of the “irradiation” was, most likely, the spinal cord, as it caused muscle contractions. Such muscle contractions and the tossing of my body in bed occurred mainly before sleep and during sleep. The convulsions continued throughout my time in the camps and in exile, and for another ten years after my return from imprisonment. The symptoms faded gradually. It is much more difficult to speak with certainty about the external origin of some dreams, which I considered unusual for myself (I have already mentioned one of them at the beginning of my stay in the investigative isolator). In them, the important thing was not so much the visual images as the certain emotional states I experienced. The peculiarity of these dreams is that you perceive them as something on the border between sleep and reality. Mostly, each of us is aware that something seen is a dream, and not reality. In this case, there was no such certainty: it seemed that it could even be reality, but perceived in a darkened state of consciousness, say, in a state of hypnosis.

I will mention here only one, the most vivid of them. I am being led down (by whom, I do not “see,” I only feel that “they” are walking beside me) into a basement. Then I find myself as if inside some giant press, formed not by planes, but rather by large hemispheres (the size of a large room). These hemispheres, in some unknown way, begin to squeeze me—not my body, but my Self. A feeling of compressing space appears. I do not “see” and do not feel the “walls” of the enclosed space that would prompt me to look for a way out. I am being squeezed by some force that resembles gravity. The feeling of the “hopelessness” of an atom, which my Self has become, appears: it is being flattened by an invisible force.

Were such dreams caused by the conditions in which I found myself? Possibly. But if the KGB had psychotropic drugs at its disposal, capable of causing special emotional states (relaxation, depression, anxiety, fear, listlessness, etc.), then why not add them to the food? After all, it is very easy to do. My experience (sensation and self-observation) testifies rather to the high probability of the use of such means. And although this probability allows me to assert this only in the form of assumptions (which, therefore, require additional confirmation), it would be irresponsible not to speak of this experience. One can exclude such a possibility a priori either by citing the KGB’s technological inability to do so, or by assuming that it could not use the available means due to adherence to ethical and legal restrictions. To think that adherence to ethical or legal restrictions made such actions impossible is to show a lack of realism. So, with a high degree of probability, one can assume that the simplicity of using psychotropic drugs in the conditions of detention in a cell of an investigative isolator rather suggests that they were used. Although this is only an assumption, which is unlikely to be verified, my experience rather confirms than refutes it. Still, only the declassification of the relevant research conducted for the needs of the KGB and the testimony of people who were involved in such research or in the use of the corresponding means would give us indisputable proof. But to this day, those who were forced in various ways to work for the KGB do not dare to do so. I think, not only from fear of condemnation, but also out of concern for their own safety. And I cannot say with certainty that they have no grounds for that.

But speaking generally, in the imagination of the dissidents of the 60s–80s, there were pictures of the tortures that everyone who had previously fallen into the clutches of the repressive structures had undergone. Behind us, the dissidents, stood millions destroyed, brutally tortured by the repressive structures of the Cheka, GPU, and NKVD. As for the aforementioned interventions on my nervous system, I did not assess them as being unequivocally aimed at causing harm to my physical health, let alone physical destruction. If the goal were to achieve these aims, the KGB had at its disposal sufficient means whose use would have been unnoticeable. I also did not observe that these interventions significantly undermined my consciousness or mental abilities (as opposed to the emotional-volitional sphere). True, from my self-observations, the sound “interferences” (superimpositions) affected memory—for example, of the text one is reading, or of someone’s spoken phrases. It was difficult to concentrate or to think consecutively. The study of such interferences (simultaneous or consecutive in time) is a well-known topic in psychological research, particularly in the study of the processes of memorization and forgetting.

* * *

As for the doctor’s remark about my peculiarities being the cause of my heightened sensitivity to sounds, some episodes in these memoirs seem to confirm the validity of such an etiology. From the memories of the war, it is enough to mention my reaction to the shell explosions during my stay in the root cellar. My memories of the war contain the assumption that the war displaced earlier childhood impressions from my memory. And similarly, the imagination’s departure beyond the bounds of reality in a state of fright (in the case of the “thieves”) could be a basis for assessing the aforementioned dreams as being conditioned by certain peculiarities of my psyche. Indeed, the nerves and psyche of a child who, at the age of four, found himself in a space of military operations and remained in it until the age of seven, could not have failed to suffer blows that must leave their mark. So I had reason to agree with the expressed diagnosis, but I categorically rejected it as a deliberately planned means of pressure. And today, in retrospect, I am convinced that it was so.

My conviction that my state was not the ordinary result of my peculiarities was based, in particular, on my own self-observation and self-assessment. I think that the mentioned episode in my childhood, with the imagination’s departure beyond the bounds of reality, became an impetus to develop in myself a critical attitude, connected with the demarcation of the illusory and the real. Including a cautious self-criticism, aimed at resisting the tendency to exaggerated suspicions. To critically weigh every assumption I made. I believed that even if the KGB had in its arsenal powerful means of influencing the nervous system and psyche and could use them, as long as I preserved my self-consciousness and my Self stood guard over my personal identity, they would not be able to confuse me: *cogito, ergo sum*. One can influence the emotional sphere of the psyche and even the volitional qualities, but as long as a person preserves the light of self-awareness, they are able to resist. A victory by destroying the very center of self-consciousness would, in fact, mean the defeat of the psychotechnologists themselves. For they sought to use psychotechnics only as a means to break a person morally; causing a mental illness would not have contributed to achieving such a goal.

* * *

Thus, the theoretical problem that the psyche and the self-conscious Self become objects of manipulation in a technocratic totalitarianism transformed for me from a theoretical hypothesis (which I had expressed before imprisonment) into a practical situation. Into a sense of threat of the undermining of personal identity in conditions of complete and prolonged isolation. The threat that your nervous system and psyche become the object of manipulations whose purpose is unknown to you became real. Moreover, the use of psychotropic drugs allows, in combination with previously collected information about the person, to modify the psyche, unnoticed by the person themself (by enhancing certain peculiarities or flaws of the person).

From this point of view, one can explain the KGB’s interest in the peculiarities of a person’s behavior and psychic states, which I read about in the interrogations of “witnesses,” primarily my relatives. The KGB pushed them toward the idea that it was not my “anti-Soviet” convictions that motivated my actions, but my psychic peculiarities and experiences. And some of my relatives gave in, inventing corresponding facts to lessen my guilt. Thus, entries appeared in the interrogation protocols that I had sat for a long time on my mother’s grave, and so on. I assume that some part of this information was assigned to operational data to justify the decision to send me for a psychiatric examination. What was entered into the case protocols served as a means of intimidation with the prospect of being placed in a psychiatric hospital. But regardless of the purpose for which the aforementioned actions were applied, I was aware of the consequences of these actions for the emotional sphere of my psyche. When I compared my well-being on the first day of my stay in the cell with the state I was in at the end of the investigation, I had to assess myself as largely terrorized. Such consequences would inevitably have occurred, even if one proceeds from the optimistic assumption that the named actions were used for therapeutic purposes.

And yet, despite the suffering from pain, the situation in which I found myself acquired for me the character of a spiritual adventure. My “Self,” or, in other words, my subjectivity, my personal identity, was being tested. In my attitude to this new experience—external and internal—my cognitive interests were important. After all, at Kyiv University, I had specialized in psychology, and later I showed an interest not only in normal psychology but also in psychiatry, reading something on the side whenever I could. And this interest gave some meaning to what I was experiencing: an adventure as an opportunity to gain an unusual internal experience, albeit at a high price. Sometimes I got the impression that in some cases, my “manipulators” were deliberately enriching my experience, counting on the fact that I, with my rationalistic and realistic way of thinking, would appreciate their capabilities with due interest.

Looking ahead, I will note that in the late 80s–early 90s, I had occasional discussions with activists of the movement for “pure consciousness,” that is, a consciousness free from external interventions. It was about intervention in the psyche by any means, the object of which could be consciousness, emotions, will, internal speech, imagination, and so on. Today, in her anti-American rhetoric, Natalia Vitrenko from time to time mentions “American chips” that are implanted, as one might guess, without the person’s knowledge. But if we leave aside these politically motivated statements, I treat some of these activists with understanding. Because I consider the problem important, and their concern justified. Even the mass media, especially television, can be involved in the “zombification” of the population, using various means of suggestion. But my disagreement with these activists was and is that general statements about the possibility or reality of such interventions are powerless if they are not based on corresponding facts. Moreover, such statements can cause very undesirable social consequences—leading to a worsening of the psychic state of people prone to suspicion and self-suggestion. It would be reckless to neglect these consequences. Such discussions can become effective only if the attention of psychologists, neurophysiologists, and psychiatrists is focused on the technical possibilities opened up by new technologies and on clarifying the possible ways of abusing these technologies.

In conclusion of this section, I will make a relevant remark. The communist tradition, which influences legal consciousness in modern Ukraine as well, inclines one to think that every accused (arrested) person is already guilty. The concept that the accused has been isolated only “in the interests of the investigation” and that the accusation has yet to be proven is difficult to instill. Even investigators are held captive by this erroneous notion when they believe that the conditions in which the accused finds himself are something he has already “deserved.” I am not even talking about the widespread practices today of forcing the accused, including through torture, to give testimony against themselves or even to incriminate themselves. Since we are dealing not with exceptions but, according to human rights activists, with a widespread phenomenon, this, in my view, should prompt the authorities to take extraordinary measures. But as scientific progress is made in the study of psychic processes and the development of various manipulative psychotechnologies, these technologies may replace the use of physical torture, since their use is more difficult to control. In any case, proper control by lawyers, relatives, and public organizations over the state of a person who has been temporarily detained or isolated in the interests of an investigation is necessary.

* * *

But beyond that, as far as possible, while in the investigative isolator, I tried to maintain my physical condition. I am indebted to the last of the “currency speculators” with whom I shared a cell for inspiring me with his example to wash with cold water in the toilet; I began to do this regularly. I did gymnastics and washed with cold water, even when I was sent for a psychiatric examination. The time spent on this “examination” was a temporary respite for me from the incessant terrorizing with sounds in the investigative isolator. A young man, probably from the staff, was placed in the room with me: he behaved with restraint, without any provocations (that is, without any actions calculated to get a reaction from me).

The psychiatrist, Dr. Natalka Maksymivna Vynarska, gave me scientific books, and I could, finally, read. I went for walks alone in the courtyard in front of the windows of this institution. Shortly before the expert conclusion was announced, Vynarska approached me during a walk for a short conversation. The purpose of the conversation was a question she put to me: would I admit my guilt if I knew that in the opposite case, I would be thrown into a psychiatric hospital for many years. I felt that she was friendly toward me and that her question was not an attempt at intimidation or pressure. And so I answered her quite sincerely that even in a situation of such a choice, I would not admit my guilt.

* * *

Upon completion of the investigation, I wrote a Statement (it is in volume 27 of our Criminal Case No. 58, which is stored in the archive of the Security Service of Ukraine).

To the Head of the Investigative Department of the KGB

at the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR

V. P. Turkin

from the accused V. S. Lisovyi

Statement

Having familiarized myself with the materials of Case No. 58, I wish to add the following to my testimony. In the accusatory Resolution, it is asserted that, in carrying out the actions enumerated therein, I proceeded from nationalist positions. If nationalism is to be understood as national egoism or some variety of Ukrainian chauvinism, then I categorically deny this assertion of the resolution. It is not supported by the materials collected by the investigation. In particular, in the “Open Letter…” there are no assertions of any inferiority or inadequacy (biological or moral) of non-Ukrainian nations, nor is there any preaching of hatred toward any people, including the Russian people. The “Open Letter…” specifically emphasizes a demarcation from nationalism as national egoism. The Letter speaks only of eliminating the infringement of national interests in Ukraine—precisely in the name of true friendship between the peoples of the USSR, particularly with the Russian people. In the “Open Letter…” I point to facts that harm such friendship, and from this, I proceed in my critique of these facts. Likewise, no witness asserts that I have ever, anywhere, demeaned the dignity of any people or preached hatred toward any people or race. I remember well that I never, even by some inattention or tactlessness, offended anyone’s national dignity.

In my “Open Letter…” I do indeed assert the infringement of national interests in Ukraine. This manifests itself, in my opinion, in the reduction to a minimum of national-state autonomy, and in errors in cultural and domestic policy. These errors consist, in particular, in the erasure of the national characteristics of the Ukrainian people—language, customs, etc., and in repressions against those people who try to awaken the national self-awareness of Ukrainians. It is precisely in this connection that I speak of genocide. I do not deny that this word could have been avoided here in this meaning, since it is not a matter of physical destruction. I testified about this at the time. But the word “genocide” means the murder of a people, and in speaking of the erasure of the ethnic characteristics of the Ukrainian people, I had in mind the psychic death of the people. For if a people loses its national identity—language, customs, a full-fledged national culture—then it, in one way or another, ceases to exist as a people. At the same time, I believed, as I believe now, that the vividly expressed national identity of any people is the force that awakens the interest of other peoples in it, and thus contributes to the unity of peoples in a fraternal family. If, however, the accusatory resolution calls the defense of legitimate national interests nationalism, then, in my opinion, such nationalism is an integral part of proletarian internationalism, and does not contradict it.

My understanding of the national question is not some exception in Marxism or a result of reading “*samvydav*” works: even before becoming acquainted with these works, I had developed such a view as a result of studying the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. It is known that the principle of national self-determination in Marxism is considered an organic part of the principle of internationalism. Lenin’s statements on the interconnection of the principle of internationalism with the principle of national self-determination are well known among specialists in the humanities of a Marxist orientation. And it is certain that I, as a lecturer of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, was familiar with these views even before any acquaintance with the works of “*samvydav*.” On the contrary, the works of “*samvydav*” named in the accusatory resolution I read and disseminated because, with few exceptions, I found no contradiction in them with the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the national question.

On the other hand, I never extended the principle of self-determination of nations with respect to Ukraine to the demand for Ukraine’s secession from the USSR. While believing that it is illegal and unjust to persecute those people who advocate such a demand if they proceed from Soviet and socialist principles, I myself never and nowhere advocated such a demand. This is not in the “Open Letter…,” nor in the testimony of witnesses. Therefore, even the principle of national self-determination I apply far from its full scope. In the “Open Letter…” I raise the question only of expanding the national-state autonomy of Ukraine; it is clear that such a position cannot be assessed as bourgeois-nationalist or nationally-egoistic. The critique of other shortcomings of our reality, presented in my “Open Letter…” also cannot be qualified as nationalist.

I believe that the assertion of the nationalist character of the “Open Letter…” written by me is thoroughly erroneous and must be revised.

September 11, 1973. Signature

A similar statement could have been written regarding the assessment of the Letter and the distribution of *samvydav* as “anti-Soviet” activity.

* * *

The trial, which lasted from November 26 to December 6, 1973—that is, after a year and a half of being in the investigative isolator—was over. Yevhen Proniuk received the maximum sentence (7 years in strict-regime camps and five years of exile), I received 7+3, and Vasyl Ovsienko, 4 years in the camps. I perceived Vasyl’s admission of guilt as a forced concession. But at the same time, I still believed that he would not turn from the path he had chosen. Which, ultimately, was confirmed.

They announced that, in accordance with the law, I had the right to write an appeal regarding the “validity” of the sentence. I hesitated and yet wrote such an appeal, despite the fact that my stay in the KGB investigative isolator had already become extremely unbearable. It ended in late March–early April (I was already in the camp by mid-April). I was taken by a “voronok” to the station, put in a “Stolypin” car, and the train moved: on the road again.

In the first volume of my operational-investigative case file (ff. 12–14), there is a character reference for me, which provides a kind of summary of my time under investigation.

MEMORANDUM

concerning LISOVYI, V. S.

- LISOVYI, Vasyl Semenovych, born May 17, 1937, Ukrainian, a native of the village of Stari Bezradychi, Obukhiv district, Kyiv region, with higher education (in 1962, he graduated from the philosophy department of Kyiv State University), a Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, who before his arrest worked as a junior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR, was expelled from the CPSU in 1972 in connection with being brought to criminal responsibility, married, with two minor children under his care—a son, born in 1972, and a non-biological daughter, born in 1966, not previously convicted, who before his arrest resided in the city of Kyiv, Darnytskyi Boulevard, 1, apt. 52/7, was arrested by the KGB at the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR on July 8, 1972, in connection with the partial realization of the operational development case “Blok,” and on August 27, 1973, he was presented with a final charge that, on the grounds of nationalist convictions and dissatisfaction with the existing state and social system in the USSR, over the period of 1967–1972, for the purpose of subverting and weakening Soviet power, he produced, stored, and disseminated anti-Soviet and slanderous documents containing fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system.

As established by the investigation, LISOVYI received most of the hostile documents for acquaintance, storage, and dissemination from PRONIUK, Yevhen Vasylovych, who was brought to criminal responsibility in the same criminal case. Among the documents that LISOVYI stored and disseminated were such hostile materials as *Report from the Beria Reserve*, *Chronicle of Resistance*, *Amidst the Snows* by V. MOROZ, *The Cataract* by M. OSADCHYI, *Woe from Wit (Portraits of Twenty “Criminals”)* by V. CHORNOVIL, *Internationalism or Russification?* by I. DZIUBA, issues of the illegal anti-Soviet journal *The Ukrainian Herald*, and others.

In addition, in March–April 1972, LISOVYI, together with the aforementioned PRONIUK, who was brought to criminal responsibility in the same criminal case, and the former graduate student of Kyiv University, OVSIENKO, Vasyl Vasylovych, took an active part in organizing the publication and dissemination of the March 1972 issue of the so-called *Ukrainian Herald*, and in June 1972, he composed an anti-Soviet document in the guise of the so-called “Open Letter to the Members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the CPU,” familiarized a number of persons with its content, and, for the purpose of wide dissemination of this hostile document among private individuals and institutions, together with PRONIUK and OVSIENKO, organized its reproduction on a typewriter.

Acknowledging the facts stated in the resolution to bring him to criminal responsibility, LISOVYI denied his guilt and the anti-Soviet orientation of his actions.

LISOVYI is charged with committing crimes under Art. 62, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR (anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda).

LISOVYI is intellectually developed, is proper in his conduct, neat and polite, disciplined. He had a positive attitude toward work and took part in the social life of the collective at his place of work. He does not consume alcoholic beverages, but he smokes.

By nature, he is withdrawn, cautious, irritable, but knows how to restrain and control himself, prefers to be alone. He is distinguished by forgetfulness. He did not violate the regime’s requirements.

As the investigator communicated with him and established contact, LISOVYI became more accessible in communication, willingly conversed on abstract topics, particularly about poetry, since he himself writes poetry, although he has no published literary works.

LISOVYI is not indifferent to his fate, is attached to his family, but tries not to show his feelings. He tries to highlight his role in the committed crime and somewhat mitigate the fate of PRONIUK, under whose influence he was, and of OVSIENKO.

He dreams of continuing his scientific work in the future, although he admits that his conviction may negatively affect the realization of these plans.

During the investigation, contact was established with LISOVYI, and under the weight of the collected evidence, he spoke about his actual role in the commission of the crime, and the role of other persons in it.

In the course of the investigation, he was sent for a stationary forensic psychiatric examination, which revealed no psycho-neurological deviations in him.

LISOVYI has not repented for committing the crime and does not condemn his actions.

On November 20–December 6, 1973, the criminal case against LISOVYI, PRONIUK, and OVSIENKO was heard in an open session of the Kyiv Regional Court.

The criminal activity of the defendant LISOVYI has been proven. The court, having found LISOVYI guilty of conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, sentenced him to 7 years of deprivation of freedom in a strict-regime corrective labor colony and assigned him an additional measure of punishment in the form of exile for a term of 3 years.

The Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR, by its ruling of February 28, 1974, left the sentence of the Kyiv Regional Court against LISOVYI unchanged.

Senior Investigator for Especially Important Cases

of the Special Department of the KGB at the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR

Lieutenant Colonel /Karavanov/

March 11, 1974

* * *

The symbol of the road. The separation of criminal prisoners during the “etap” (prisoner transport), as well as the existence of separate camps for political prisoners, was a sign of de facto recognition of the special status of political prisoners in the USSR in the 60s–80s. So, in the “Stolypin” car, I, as befitting the status of a political prisoner, was placed in a separate compartment from the criminal prisoners. A very taciturn elderly man was placed with me. The man smoked hand-rolled cigarettes of fragrant tobacco. A considerable temptation for me, since I had decided that I would not smoke in the camps (and indeed I did not smoke for several years of being in the camps and in cells). My neighbor’s silence suited me: an opportunity to finally be “with myself”—without intermediaries.

The impression of the etap—as a symbol of the road of suffering and death for many generations of Ukrainians—was given to me by the spectacle of prisoners being transferred from train to train in Moscow. Here began the roads of countless “enemies”—those who were not destined to perish in the military struggle against the Bolsheviks for an independent Ukraine: the dekulakized, the national communists, figures of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance, UPA fighters, their deported families, peasants sentenced for stealing ears of grain, and so on. The communist empire, feeling, albeit subconsciously, its historical doom, sought to demonstrate unshakable firmness—to instill in its victims a horror of its cruelty. The etap—columns of prisoners surrounded by a convoy, with dogs and rough shouts—was supposed to instill a sense of hopelessness in the opposition to this cruel force.

* * *

In this narrative of mine, the symbol of the road, as a change of spacetimes, is the most important metaphor, with all the multivalence of its meanings. Although none of us chooses the space and time of our birth, the given spacetime in which we are fated to be born and live is an opportunity to choose the direction of our movement. In the village of my childhood, the word “dolia” (fate) referred to a flat, round plant, at most the size of a palm, similar to the cone-shaped bread baked for a wedding. It is attached to the ground by a single root, and its oblong leaves, like rays into space, symbolize the aspirations of the soul—desires, plans, dreams.

Each of the spacetimes in these narrative-reflections of mine—the village, the city (Kyiv-Ternopil-Kyiv), imprisonment (camps and exile), the return to the “big zone,” Ukrainian society after the collapse of the USSR—has its own “surface” and its own hidden subtext. The clatter of the wheels of the “Stolypin” train meant not only a change of scenery, but the end of an act that ought to be described in the style of the absurd. My present road inspired hope for liberation from the stuffiness of the premises where the illusion of the reality of an already doomed world was being created. By the word “doom” I mean here not so much my conviction in the short future of the communist regime and the USSR, as it actually turned out (I had no such certainty), but spiritual-existential doom. If even the investigators see themselves only as “cogs” in the machinery of repression and do not dare to think, then the foolish machinery of dictatorship must descend into idiocy.

* * *

Chapter IX. Camps and Exile

1. General Notes. Mordovian Camps

Chronology of camps and exile. As for the events and chronology, in writing this chapter, I relied not only on my memory but on my correspondence with my wife, the *Chronicle of Current Events*, and letters and memoirs of other political prisoners. The declassification of documents by the Security Service of Ukraine related to the “Blok” case helped to clarify and correct many things. The time of my stay in the camps is geographically divided into two periods—two camps in Mordovia and three in the Urals, in Perm region. After the transport from Kyiv at the end of March 1974, in the first days of April, I was placed in camp 3-5 (ZhKh-385/3-5), in the settlement of Barashevo (a camp from the Dubravlag complex). In this camp, I was soon punished with several terms in the SHIZO (punishment isolator, up to 15 days), and on the eve of the new year 1975 or in the first days of January, I was thrown for five months into the camp prison—PKT (“cell-type facility,” up to six months). After returning to the zone, I didn’t stay there long, because on July 25, 1975, I was again sent to the PKT for six months. However, in the third month of my PKT term, on October 19, I was sent by plane to the Kyiv KGB isolator, where I stayed until January 24, 1976. Then—a stay in the 19th camp (ZhKh-385/19), Potma station, Lesnoi settlement. In the second half of August 1976, I was sent to the Perm camps. First to the 37th camp (VS-389/37), Polovynka settlement, at the end of November—to the 36th (VS-389/36), Kuchyno settlement (Skalninsky camp administration). In June 1977, I was sent for the second time to the Kyiv KGB investigative isolator: the period of stay was from June 18 to September 18, 1977. At the end of May 1978, I was moved from the 36th camp to the 35th (VS-389/35) at Vsekhsvyatskaya station. I was taken from the camp to exile on June 5, 1979.

I served my exile in Buryatia, initially in the settlement of Novaya Bryan, Zaigrayevsky district. But on June 11, 1980, I was arrested and placed in the investigative prison in Ulan-Ude. On July 15, I was sentenced under Art. 209, part 1, 41 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“evasion of labor”) to one year in a camp. I served my sentence in a camp for criminals—in the village of Tsolga (OV-94-5-“V”), Mukhorshibirsky district, Buryat ASSR. I served the rest of my exile in Buryatia, in the settlement of Ilka, Zaigrayevsky district, together with my wife and children, who moved to me. In the summer of 1983, our family arrived in Kyiv.

* * *

My story about the camps and exile will be impoverished in its description of the daily life and events of camp life. Even if I had set myself the goal of describing the daily life and events of camp life in more detail, I would not have succeeded in doing so properly. Primarily due to the peculiarities of my attention and memory. Notes could have helped if I had managed to write and save them (Mikhail Kheyfets, resorting to cunning, managed to do so). It is also important that I was not an activist in the camp struggle, although I did participate in various kinds of protests. The attention of those political prisoners who took the initiative in various protest actions or transmitted information from the camps to “the outside” was inevitably focused on the details of daily life and events of camp life. I have great respect for the publications of political prisoners who, in various ways, made public, recorded, and preserved information about camp life. Fortunately, a significant amount of such information has already been made public today: reports, statements and appeals, letters, memoirs. Various texts are available today in electronic version in the Virtual Museum of the Dissident Movement; the *Chronicle of Current Events* is also on the Internet. All issues of *The Ukrainian Herald* have been published. The publication of the *International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents*, vol. 1, Ukraine, in two parts (books)—compiled by Yevhen Zakharov and Vasyl Ovsienko (Kharkiv, Prava Liudyny, 2006)—is worthy of high praise.

The peculiarities of the perception of time in the closed spacetime of camps, cells, and prisons also matter. The first thing on the surface of this perception is the feeling of the slow passage of time, known to every person from the experience of waiting. In the camps, the “waiting” for release from the camp or prison is mainly aimed at the distant future. You involuntarily recall how much time you have left to serve. The very first way to “fight” this slowness is not to think about the end of your term. Especially given that it could always be extended. For dissidents, an example of “reconciliation” with time were political prisoners who had served sentences of 25, or even more, years. But in retrospect, this slow time is mercilessly shortened: you look back on what you have experienced and find that days, weeks, years shrink. The most important reason for this shortening is the impoverishment of life in terms of significant events. Being cut off from the world, both natural and human, and the artificiality of the living space is the main reason for this impoverishment. The excessive regulation of life and the daily primitive physical labor left very little free time for cultural and intellectual pursuits. And for most political prisoners, regardless of their level of education, such interests were important. For me, intellectual impressions from a rare book that I managed to obtain, or from communicating with people who were thinking about the same problems that interested me, always belonged to the most important events.

Even during free time in the barracks, filled with many prisoners, it was not easy to concentrate. Even if it was not about writing, but reading some more complex texts. Meanwhile, in the cells (SHIZO and PKT), a prisoner who refused to work had free time, but only for contemplation. The plan was not to leave any time for political prisoners to maintain their professional or spiritual level of life. This largely applies also to the methods of punishing criminals—not only in the penal system that existed in the USSR, but in the one that operates in modern Ukraine. One can only welcome modern attempts to humanize this system. But that is another topic of conversation.

* * *

This largely confirms Yevhen Proniuk’s warning that in the camps I would only waste my time. Instead of having, on “the outside,” better conditions for my intellectual pursuits. And indeed, my most important achievement in the camps lies not in the intellectual, but in the existential plane. The existential experience concerns not so much testing myself in this new situation as a hidden delight that I am finally where, given the essence of the political system, I should be. I mean a special feeling that rises above the real relationships with the people with whom I now found myself inside the fence. In my opinion, this feeling of unity was best expressed by Yevhen Sverstiuk in the poem “On a Generous Evening”: the motif of this poem became even more expressive in the sung version by Olena Holub.

In the camps, the dissidents met the previous generation of the national liberation armed struggle—from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. They had gone through much more difficult trials than we, the dissidents. For us, it was not only this experience of their courageous opposition to the repressive regime that was important, but also their attitude toward us, the new wave of political prisoners. Although the ideology of the Ukrainian dissidents differed significantly from the ideology of the OUN, most of the UPA members agreed that the struggle for an independent Ukraine in the new situation required an updated ideology. But what mattered most was the moral support for the dissidents from people who had gone through torture, hard labor, prisons, and camps for decades. They helped to overcome the moral crisis for those dissidents who failed to hold up during the investigation and were forced to admit their guilt.

* * *

Intellectual pursuits. Nevertheless, throughout my time in the camps and in exile, I stubbornly tried to use every crack for intellectual pursuits. It probably helped that even on “the outside” I never had proper living conditions and peace for such pursuits. In the camps, there was an opportunity to receive books through the “Knyha – poshtoyu” (Book by Mail) service: although I ordered them myself, more often Vira did. Still, the choice was limited: mostly I had to be content with what I “got,” not what I considered most necessary.

Of philosophical literature, I read only a few books during my entire time in the camps and in exile, if we leave aside journal articles. A means that helped to concentrate (it was also used by other political prisoners) was making summary-commentaries. I thought I had made such commentaries on Aristotle’s *Analytics*, but I did not find them among the papers I brought back from exile. Only summary-commentaries on Hegel’s *Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences* (in Russian translation) have been preserved. I also made excerpts from some other books and journals. The preserved excerpts testify that, in addition to philosophy, psychology also occupied a significant place in my interests.

More promising were my reflections and notes in the camps, aimed at clarifying the content of fundamental philosophical concepts. Such an undertaking, even if I had started to implement it on “the outside,” would justifiably be assessed as too ambitious. For such articles are usually written by different authors who specialize in particular sections of philosophy, as we see in most Western encyclopedias. Moreover, writing them requires taking into account a large number of publications. And therefore, this undertaking of mine in the camps seems quite utopian. But I did write down my thoughts in a notebook under the title “Philosophical Dictionary.” Ultimately, these reflections turned out to be useful for me—for writing articles on this topic in the 90s and early 21st century. Useful precisely because I was forced to rely only on myself: this increased my sensitivity to the expositions I later found in Western encyclopedias.

* * *

In line with my interest in the worldview aspects of literary works (initiated on “the outside” by an article about the poetry of Bohdan-Ihor Antonych), I wrote various kinds of notes-commentaries on the literary works I read. My interests lay in the broad theme of man and the world in literary works. On the outside, concentrating on reading and writing philosophical texts left very little time for this secondary theme of my interests. In the camps—of everything I “got” and read—only a few texts were important from this point of view. I wrote my “notes on what I read” in the form of small but preferably finished articles—on the *Odyssey* and the *Iliad*, the *Divine Comedy*, Shakespeare’s dramas, some prose writers and poets of the 20th century (Camus—*The Stranger*, *The Plague*, T. Mann—*Buddenbrooks*, Faulkner—*Intruder in the Dust*, Runeberg—*The Blind*, poetry by Whitman, Rilke, etc.). When I considered them at least relatively finished, I would copy them in letters to Vira, and so the dates of their writing are known. From others, I only made excerpts—Goethe’s poetry, Flaubert’s *Sentimental Education* (M. 1954), Joyce’s *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* (journal *Inostrannaya Literatura*, 1976, No. 10, 11, 12), Philippe Hériat’s *Time to Love* (M. 1971), Pablo Neruda’s poetry (*Sonnets of Love*), etc. From Ukrainian literature, I find in my papers commentaries on a work by Les Martovych, “Superstition,” as well as excerpts from the poems of Taras Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, and Ivan Franko. I made these excerpts so as not to forget the poems I valued.

I was interested in the role of literature and art in the transformation of worldviews—in the transition from one era to another in the course of dynamic Western civilization. In this change of worldviews, the role of literature and art is no less important than the role of philosophy. In the USSR, this topic was easier to research precisely in literary and art studies: compared to philosophy, they were better protected from ideological control. Since I wrote these notes of mine without access to the interpretations of other authors, their source base was impoverished. Moreover, what I experienced during the investigation played the role of that interference that pushed a significant part of what I had read earlier to the periphery of my memory. Therefore, I wrote these notes of mine “close to the text”—what thoughts does this text evoke in you? Still, I sought to preserve them—in the hope that I could use them in the future if such an opportunity arose.

In these notes of mine on literary works, as in my poetic exercises, is embodied a direction of thought that goes beyond the bounds of analytical philosophy. I mean a way of thinking that was an accompaniment to my rationalism. In it, the soul spoke that it knows truths that reason does not know (B. Pascal). And the mentioned notes, and especially the poetic texts, give voice to that voice of the soul. Behind this lies the well-known problem of the dialogue between two tendencies in Western philosophy—the analytical and the existential-hermeneutical. The reader today can turn to the recently published small book by S. Critchley, *Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction*, in which the author explains the content of this dialogue in an accessible, almost popular presentation.

As I have already mentioned, at the time of my imprisonment, I had not yet mastered the problems of hermeneutics. Before my incarceration, I had only a rudimentary knowledge of phenomenology and Heidegger’s philosophy. More significant for me was the intellectual evolution I underwent at the Institute of Philosophy, which consisted of a transition from speech act theory to the philosophy of practical action. This led to my rejection of scientism and my critique of it. A speech act can be seen as a type of practical action, which presupposes the existence of motives. Explaining motives compels one to consider the subjectivity of the agent, particularly their value preferences. Although an individual is generally the creator of new ideas, including value-laden ones, the language and inner world of any agent can be explained when we take into account the socio-cultural environment in which a person lives and acts. And this prompts us to consider the activity of any agent in the broadest possible context. An important, if not decisive, component of this context is a certain intellectual or, more broadly, cultural tradition. I have already mentioned earlier (specifically, when characterizing Yevhen Sverstiuk’s way of thinking) the attempts to combine existentialism with this emphasis on the importance of cultural tradition—as the transmission of “wisdom” from generation to generation.

* * *

To maintain and improve my knowledge of English and German, I read some fiction in these languages (thanks to my wife, who made sure I had these books and dictionaries). These were, once again, mostly random books (I compiled glossaries for some of them, which helps me recall what exactly I read back then). From what I could “get my hands on,” I read several works of fiction in English and German. From the book “Once Upon a Time: English Fairy Tales” (Moscow, 1975), I translated several tales (Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” R. Stout’s “The Adventure of the Poultry-Yard Inquest,” F. Brown’s “The Story of Merrymind,” C. Dickens’s “The Magic Fish-Bone,” and O. Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”). In exile, I translated one of the fairy tales from the book “Deutsche romantische Märchen,” Moscow, 1980 (I cannot find this translation among my papers). During my time in the camps and exile, I translated a significant number of Bunin’s early poems and two early poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. In my last year in the camps, dissatisfied with the Russian literary translation of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” I made my own translation, which I read to some of the political prisoners in zone 35 (at Vsekhsvyatskaya station). As I recall, Valeriy Marchenko, for all his demanding nature, rated my translation more positively than negatively (the text of the translation has not been preserved in my papers). To improve the stylistics of my own speech, I worked on the vocabulary and phraseology of the Ukrainian language: this includes a significant number of notebooks with various excerpts from literary works (e.g., “Vocabulary and Phraseology of the ‘Eneida’”), from folklore, and so on. Most of them have been preserved. Among the preserved notes, some are written in pencil—an indicator that I wrote them in the PKT.

* * *

Poetry. I mentioned earlier that writing poems, like listening to music or an attraction to painting, stimulated the imagination and feelings, providing a respite from mental fatigue. So, from time to time, I engaged in poetic exercises as a side activity. Some naive poems, written back in the Ternopil period, I dared to publish in a regional newspaper in the Ternopil region (after I had already left for graduate school). During my graduate school years, I submitted something to the journal “Dnipro,” and it’s a good thing I received a rejection (signed by Ol. Shuhai). A man from the journal’s editorial board (I don’t recall his last name), upon meeting me, said it would be better for me to focus on philosophy. I agreed with his conclusion and destroyed my notebook, which, I believe, was worthy of such self-criticism. During my graduate school years, I tried to modernize my poetic style—moving toward expressionism and surrealism with elements of naturalism. Before reviewing our “Criminal Case” No. 58 in February 2010, I thought that none of my pre-imprisonment poetic exercises had survived. But now I have discovered in that “Case” poems that were secretly confiscated from someone to whom I had entrusted them for safekeeping. These are some preliminary drafts, not fully finished, like most of the poems I kept “in the drawer.”

The circumstances of camp life inclined me to create texts in a poetic style. Since I, like other political prisoners, was often “thrown” into the ShIZO and PKT (and in the ShIZO, often without being sent out to work), composing verse was a salvation. You can’t compose a philosophical text in your head: the thought eventually gets tangled. One could play chess, as Natan Sharansky did (which he recounted in a recent video interview). Or one could “write” poems, because the text is memorized. But above all, what mattered was that only through the power of imagination could one transcend the confines of the cell. In a cramped, gray cell, only imagination and feelings can retrieve from memory the impressions of nature’s elements and of a life animated by legends, myths, and rituals. The grayness of the surroundings is thus compensated by the richness of impressions preserved in memory. I think this is close to what Ihor Kalynets meant when he said that he owed his survival in prison to poetry. Important in these visions of mine was the poetic interpretation of fragments of ethno-culture, sourced from the rural environment of my childhood and youth. I mean the attempts to “discover,” behind the external rituals, some hidden meanings that held life-affirming potential in industrial or post-industrial societies. These can only be revealed with the help of creative imagination and the feelings associated with it. We see such a revelation of hidden meanings in the professional painting of our primitivist artists and in the modern, folkloric-inspired musical compositions of today.

* * *

Among the larger works written in the camps is the long poem “Shevchenko”: variations on themes from T. Shevchenko’s poetry—with sections titled “God,” “The World,” and “Fate” (the text has been preserved, but I rejected it). Among the larger pieces where the poetic form was mainly reduced to rhythm and in which thought prevails (the use of metaphors is impoverished), is the “poem” “Conversation on the Way of the Cross.” I wrote it in the form of monologues—of Fate, the Emperor (Power), Malice, Despair, Goodness (Compassion), and Faith. I disregarded the plot of Pilate and Christ due to the ambiguity of Pilate’s image in the Gospels, which made him attractive for literary interpretations (see, for example, the article by L. N. Kogan, “Jesus and Pontius Pilate: Three Interpretations of One ‘Eternal’ Theme” // Philosophical and Sociological Thought. – 1990, No. 9). The text of the “Conversation” has been preserved, but upon rereading it, I found serious flaws—this time ideological. Firstly, if the voice of the Emperor is the voice of Power, then in a dialogue between Power and Christ, it is advisable not to reduce power to arbitrariness but to present it as the embodiment of earthly justice, embodied in law. And from this perspective, the subject of reflection should have been the relationship between realistically achievable legal justice and transcendent, divine justice. I was also not satisfied that in this “poem” of mine, the dialogue between the high priests and Christ is absent. And it is important because it concerns the relationship between Christian universalism and ethnocentric religious worldviews. In short, I somewhat impoverished the philosophical scope of the theme.

I did not try to perfect every “text,” but rather to “run through” in my memory the visions I had barely sketched out in their initial form with a few phrases. I would copy these “drafts” in letters to Vira, although I warned her that they were just “raw” versions. After my imprisonment (with the exception of two or three poems), I stopped my versifying. It turned out there was very little time to work on previous notes. I turn to them only occasionally. For “rest.” As for political texts, while in Kuchino, I wrote only one: an appeal to the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR with a critique of the so-called “Brezhnev” Constitution of the USSR, adopted in 1977, and my proposals for a new Constitution of Ukraine.

* * *

To give the Reader an idea of how important my wife’s support was for my intellectual interests, I present here excerpts from two of my letters; they are not exceptions in our correspondence, but rather the opposite. Unfortunately, not every political prisoner had such support from relatives, and for them, communication with other political prisoners became the only means of connection with the “big zone.”

Letter from October 22, 1976. “First of all, thank you, my dear Vira, for your worries and care. Thank you in advance for the ‘Foreign Literature’ journal (if you manage to get it), and also for the package I just received. And for the information you gave in your last letter about the books that have been published over there. I remember in one of your previous letters, you told me about Aristotle and Hegel. I just don’t know what the current situation is with Hegel. According to my information: the third volume of the Encyclopedia is expected, ‘The Philosophy of Religion’ and ‘The Science of Logic’ seem to have been fully published. Be so kind as to let me know how it is with buying these Hegel books. And is the publication of Aristotle complete?

Regarding Bunin. I would like to continue translating this poet’s poems, but it is difficult to do so in the way you suggest. Because I need to select them myself (taking into account the imagery, etc.), and this can only be done with the two-volume collection of his poems from the ten-volume edition (the first two volumes) at hand. From the notes I’ve written, I have unfinished notes on the poetry of Heine and some rather raw, but completed, notes on the poetry of Rilke. This is all cumbersome material to copy into a letter.”

Letter from March 27–April 1, 1977. “These days, for more than a week now, in my free hours, I have been reading the press. Some of what I’ve read will, I think, interest you. Of the journals I received and read (at least one or two of the first issues), the most interesting were ‘Voprosy Psikhologii’ (Problems of Psychology), ‘Vsesvit’ (The Universe), and ‘Priroda’ (Nature). In the journals ‘Vitchyzna’ (Fatherland), ‘Dnipro,’ ‘Voprosy Filosofii’ (Problems of Philosophy), and ‘Voprosy Literatury’ (Problems of Literature), I find one or two, rarely several, interesting publications. But still, even in these journals, something worthy of attention occasionally appears. But first things first. Primarily about poetry. Among Ukrainian poetry published in the newspaper ‘Literaturna Ukrayina’ and in the journals, one rarely finds poems written at a high artistic level. If I were to choose from everything, it would be only on the grounds that the authors, mostly younger poets, show some talent, and their poems are, let’s say, pleasant to read. Nothing more. I have found few of these.

Among the poets showing talent, one can include the poems of Svitlana Yovenko (‘Vitchyzna,’ No. 12, 1976; ‘Dnipro,’ No. 3, 1977), Tamara Kolomiiets (‘Dnipro,’ No. 3, 1977), and Nina Matviichuk (‘Vitchyzna,’ No. 3, 1977). These poetesses have a command of word and form, and some poems are masterfully crafted. But they lack vividness of imagery, concentration, and movement of thought. The latter could be conditionally designated as the ‘Goethean principle,’ a spiritual depth. And these poetesses seem to have many ‘spiritual problems’: all sorts of categories appear here, but behind them, one does not feel that deep thread that every poet finds only through hard-won searching.

Of the translations, I have read Robles’s ‘Italian Spring’ (‘Vitchyzna,’ No. 1, No. 2, No. 3), the Joyce Carol Oates stories I wrote to you about (‘Vsesvit,’ No. 1), as well as Vezhinov’s ‘The Barrier’ (‘Vsesvit,’ No. 2) and a number of other, smaller works. I am now reading James Joyce’s novel ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (‘Inostrannaya Literatura,’ No. 10, No. 11, 1976). Of these works, if you have the opportunity, I recommend you read ‘The Barrier,’ as well as the last one I named here. Now for the scholarly articles. I am writing about those that would be useful for you to read as well. In ‘Voprosy Psikhologii’ No. 1, there is an article by L. I. Aidarova and G. A. Tsukerman, ‘The Psychological Necessity of Studying “Poetics” in the Native Language Course.’ It is valuable for its orientation towards developing students’ understanding and perception of literary language—thus, it is indirectly aimed at introducing students to artistic verbal creativity. Overall, it seems to me, it is written with a very strong bias towards a formal, semantic-analytical approach. And the question of the peculiarities of students’ worldview is left aside. This, obviously, was not within the scope of the issues being considered. But without it, the proposed approach is just a path to mastering the technology of verbal creativity.

Somewhat unexpected to me was the view expressed by linguist A. S. Melnychuk in the article ‘The Philosophical Roots of Glossematics’ (‘Voprosy Yazykoznaniya,’ No. 6, 1966). Since he is, as far as I know, considered a serious researcher, his superficial interpretation of structuralism seems strange.”

* * *

The main leitmotif that defined the most important themes of my intellectual interests in my notes and poetic exercises is the symbol of the Road and the problem of choosing a direction of movement (The Divine Comedy, Faust, the Way of the Cross). In Dante, the situation of choice is symbolized by Purgatory: the road down (into the abyss) and the road up. From this perspective, the work of Goethe, especially “Faust,” is important. In the foreword to the ten-volume Russian translation of Goethe’s works (M., 1975), Vilmont emphasized Goethe’s aspiration to combine an orientation towards supreme meanings-values (truth, goodness, justice) with the need for action inscribed in real space and time. This refers to Faust’s reinterpretation of the phrase “In the beginning was the Word” as “In the beginning was the Deed” (“deed” as “action”). And to the combination of two souls in Faust—the contemplative and the active. Supreme ideal values are important guideposts that mark the direction of movement. But what is decisive is how much people, through their actions in specific circumstances, take practical steps toward approaching that ideal. In my view, the author of the foreword rightly cautioned against exaggerating aestheticism in Goethe’s thinking and against the poet’s understanding of the limited possibilities of literature and art in achieving realistically attainable, earthly justice. In the transformations that came to be denoted by the word “modernization,” science and technology, economics, law, and politics began to play a much more important role than literature and art. In the aforementioned foreword to Goethe’s works, the author, refuting Goethe’s orientation towards aestheticism, quite rightly notes that Goethe tried (during his Weimar period) to engage in practical politics. And this orientation toward practical activities in the affirmation of good is one of the motifs of “Faust.” This is connected not only to Goethe’s attempts to engage in political activity but also to his scientific research, which the author of the foreword highlights, referring to Vernadsky’s assessment of his scientific studies.

* * *

Barashevo. My camp life began in Barashevo: Vira’s first letter to the camp in Barashevo (ZhKh-385/3-5) is dated April 4, 1974. Nearby was camp 3-4 for female political prisoners and a hospital (3-3). The clothing in the “strict-regime” camp was entirely black (in contrast to the striped clothing in the “special-regime” camps). In my imagination, the black clothing symbolizes the mourning of the peasants after the 1930s and World War II. So, they changed me into a black robe and led me from the checkpoint into the “zone.” A long rectangular plot of land opened up before my eyes, with barbed wire and watchtowers around the perimeter. On one of the shorter sides of the rectangle was the “checkpoint,” then a one-story residential building for political prisoners (the “barracks”), and on the opposite side, a long, one-story building—the workshop for labor. They took me to the barracks and pointed to an empty bed. Almost in the middle of the barracks, behind a massive square pillar supporting the ceiling.

The camp in Barashevo was small, with about fifty prisoners. As I later became convinced, the categories of political prisoners in this camp were roughly the same as in other camps for political prisoners: (a) participants in the national liberation war from Ukraine and the Baltics; (b) individuals convicted of collaborating with the occupying German authorities; and (c) dissidents—from Ukraine, Russia, the Baltic republics, Armenia, and Georgia. Almost every camp had Jewish Zionists, mostly “refuseniks” convicted in the Leningrad trial and similar trials for attempting to hijack an airplane. One or two of the political prisoners in Barashevo were “introduced” to me as “Beria’s men.”

My time in Barashevo was the most difficult. I had to somehow orient myself in the new environment, in the daily life and relationships. Moreover, I arrived at the camp with thoroughly frayed nerves, and some of my chronic illnesses were bothering me. Soon, problems began with my work—sewing gloves: the sewing machine would break, the thread would get tangled, and complaints about meeting the “norm” started. I put that word in quotation marks because it soon lost its unequivocal meaning.

* * *

Here I will make some comments on the agents’ reports about my interactions in Barashevo. Agent “Izotop,” in his report dated April 10, 1974, which is in the first volume of my operational-investigative file (p. 15), reports: “Lisovyi, V. S., arrived recently, is behaving quietly. From the first days, he maintains relations with Roketskyi, Nikmanis, and Zalmanson. He grew close to Nikmanis on the topic of ‘the philosophy of yogis,’ as Nikmanis has a handwritten book on yogic teachings. With Zalmanson, he maintains contact on their common topic: the study of English. He and Roketskyi mostly seclude themselves and talk one-on-one. In general, they talk about Ukrainian national problems. Lisovyi informs Roketskyi about recent events, quotes works of a nationalist nature (perhaps written by him, or maybe by someone else). In all likelihood, he showed or told him about Stus.”

As can be seen from this report, the agent draws conclusions by guesswork, perhaps having overheard some separate phrases. I cannot fathom what the word “showed” means here. The same agent, in a report dated June 24, 1974, wrote: “The last hunger strike, timed for election day, was organized and proposed by Lisovyi, V., with Shybalkin being the second most active. Lisovyi and Shybalkin maintain friendly relations. Shybalkin himself has lately become very aggressively disposed against ‘Chekists and their henchmen,’ as he puts it. Zalmanson and Roketskyi also participated in the hunger strike. Shybalkin persuaded everyone to do it; he played the role of administrator for Lisovyi.”

It is true that I had a sympathetic attitude toward Viktor Shybalkin. But from my memory of Shybalkin’s image, I do not think he would have been the executor of my orders. Quite the contrary. Perhaps in his report, the agent is saying what the “superiors” would like to hear in order to have a reason to persecute me. But what is most untrue is the following report from the same agent, dated October 23, 1974: “Stus, V., Roketskyi, V., and Lisovyi, V., stick together. Recently, disagreements have appeared in their relations. Stus, V., is claiming the role of leader and is constantly prodding Lisovyi, V., into hunger strikes, work stoppages, etc.; lately, Lisovyi does not like this. Roketskyi has also lately started to argue a lot with Stus on various issues.” I remember well that in his relations with me, and, I think, with others as well, Stus never claimed the role of leader: it was not in his character. He might complain about something, but he would not dictate. I think, in this case, we are once again dealing with an attempt to provide grounds for the persecution of Stus.

* * *

Behavior in the camps. Opinions have been expressed that the relationship between the MVD and the KGB from top to bottom in the 1970s was not entirely “friendly,” but contained “blemishes” of competition and even hidden alienation. But what was decisive for the MVD was the KGB’s supervision of the camps for political prisoners. The camp administration, even if it had wanted to, could not show disobedience. The KGB’s demands to apply more effective means of “re-education” to a political prisoner, such as the ShIZO, PKT, or prison confinement, could hardly be ignored by the camp administration. In any case, the number of gloves sewn as a political prisoner’s contribution to the “construction of communism” meant nothing compared to the camp administration’s actions aimed at achieving the main goal—“re-education” and repentance.

In the newspaper “Izvestia” on May 17, 1996 (my official birthday), an article by Besik Urigashvili titled “Here’s Yavas” was published, which contained an interview with a man who “conducted educational work” among political prisoners in Barashevo: “Here I worked with the politicals,” Balashov recalls with pleasure, “that was in the seventies. It was good to interact with them. They were cultured, educated. True, when I read them the front-page article from ‘Pravda’ about the international situation, they would turn away. There were some difficult ones among them too. There was one, from Kyiv. A doctor of philosophical sciences. He refused to work. And they were sewing gloves. And this one says: ‘I will only work in my specialty.’ So we arranged work for him in his specialty. In the punishment cell.” Indeed, refusing to work became the main basis for my punishment throughout my time in the camps and exile, but to a large extent because they first had to force me to refuse physical labor. By creating the appropriate circumstances.

Refusing to work was considered a transition to the status of a political prisoner. I did not object: if it is considered so, so be it. But I did not write a statement about transitioning to the status of a political prisoner, as this would have obliged me to maintain such a position consistently. Still, I understood what kind of “work” the KGB and the camp administration needed. Hence their attempts to create various kinds of obstacles in the work to have a pretext for carrying out repressions. The assessment of “normal” behavior or “work” of political prisoners from the perspective of the political prisoners themselves was completely different. As I can judge from my own impressions, this assessment lay on a spectrum between two poles—the ethics of sacrifice and heroism on the one hand, and various degrees of moderation on the other. Vasyl Ovsienko in his memoirs recalls how, in response to Stus’s insistence on declaring an indefinite hunger strike, Levko Lukianenko argued against the expediency of such an action, considering its effectiveness and the state of the political prisoners’ health.

As for my own behavior, some political prisoners wanted it to be more radical. I was not inclined to conflicts with the camp administration and guards unless I was provoked. In general, this corresponds to my character. In reality, I am more emotional on the inside than I appear on the outside, but I am used to controlling my feelings. But sometimes—so rarely that I remember almost every case in my adult life—I burst out in indignation. The idea of my peaceful behavior in the camps is also an exaggeration. Because I recall a whole series of instances of my rebellious or even “aggressive” behavior. In the notice to Vira about my being punished with a second term in the PKT in Barashevo (the original notice has been preserved), it is stated: “Lisovyi, V. S., has been punished for refusing to work and violating the internal daily routine of the institution. In conversation, he behaved tactlessly and left the office without permission. Head of Institution ZhKh-385/3 /Shorin/. August 29, 1975.” (Shorin was known in the camp by the surname Aleksandrov).

Sometimes I fell for blatant provocations. For example, while serving another “punishment” in the ShIZO, I encountered a provocation from a guard who, in response to my request for toilet paper, would extend and then snatch the paper away from my hand. Then, through the door, I started shouting, calling them all “damned fascists.” But in one case, my anger led me to a reckless, risky action (I have already mentioned this case in one of my video interviews). It happened in the 36th camp in Kuchino. Upon exiting the residential zone into the work zone, I could not endure a strip search by a guard (surnamed Rak) and rushed at him with my fists raised. If desired, this could have been classified as an assault. But this guard, whom the political prisoners rated very negatively, had the good sense to treat my outburst with humor. As for sharp disputes that sometimes escalate into anger, there were more of those during my time in the camps. Especially in response to some rudeness from the guards.

But it is also true that I mostly tried to remain moderate. I did not go on protests in the form of long-term hunger strikes because I had to consider my chronic illnesses. Moreover, in many cases, the question of the justification for protests, especially long-term hunger strikes, arose. When I learned that a prisoner had declared a “fatal hunger strike,” the immediate question was what he could realistically achieve with such an action and how much harm it would do to his health. Despite my appreciation for the moral aspect of such protests and the resonance they could create beyond the zone (particularly in the West thanks to the “Chronicle of Current Events”), I believed that human life was more valuable. In general, I adhered to the rule: to stand in solidarity with political prisoners in collective protests, to be in clear opposition to the political system and its ideology, and to the camp administration. I joined collective protests mainly with a one-day or three-day hunger strike. I participated in some discussions or collective cultural events. I also joined protest strikes in the form of collective refusal to work.

In the political camps, the logic of self-defense made it impossible to say that someone from the administration was better—for example, to consider that this person at least treated the prisoners decently. Or to assert that the food was not just “slightly improved” but satisfactory. Because the administration was seen as a means of “re-education,” that is, repression. Therefore, to praise, say, the camp warden for his polite treatment of political prisoners would mean a signal “upwards” to have him replaced. Similarly, stating that the food was “satisfactory” was dangerous for its consequences—its deterioration, “so they wouldn't get fat.” I experienced firsthand the masking of actions that some guards in the ShIZO sometimes used: you are roughly pushed out of a damp or cold cell, and you emotionally protest against this rudeness, and meanwhile, you are pushed into a dry or slightly warmer cell. But you must be indignant at their actions and preferably even write a complaint against them. The pragmatics of the struggle for survival prompted the avoidance of any positive characterizations, the inevitable consequence of which would be a worsening of the situation. This masking of a good or even life-saving action is an inevitable consequence of pressure from above: benefactors are not suitable for the machinery of repression.

* * *

In the camps, I tried to adhere to the principle of calmly accepting the peculiarities of the political prisoners’ behavior that seemed strange to me. After all, I couldn't know what a person had been through and what deformations their psyche, and consequently, their behavior, had undergone. I think that Raisa Moroz’s observation in her memoirs about the naive attitude of the environment in which Valentyn Moroz found himself in the West is not without grounds. So, I also calmly accepted the alienated, cold attitude of a few political prisoners toward me, or even statements that I could have considered offensive or dismissive. I made it a rule not to rush to judgments, as the motives for such actions were unclear. I became convinced in some cases that I had incorrectly judged certain actions, being mistaken about their motives. Moreover, the KGB used the tactic of deliberately causing conflicts between prisoners. But such conflicts were rather exceptions: the political prisoners were aware of the use of such practices. In their attitude toward me, I felt not only goodwill but also the prisoners' attempts to protect me from repression and to ease my situation. In his document “The Daily Life of the Mordovian Camps” (Vol. 5 of the ten-volume edition), Chornovil noted: “Protesting against the physical destruction of Lisovyi, a group of political prisoners in the 19th zone held a solidarity hunger strike with him in February of this year.” This refers to my placement in the PKT in January 1975.

On a purely daily level, I had to choose my own survival strategy, for who knows better than you yourself how you feel physically and mentally. However, in Barashevo, I heard hints from some political prisoners that my behavior was not entirely correct, even from the perspective of survival. They mentioned the death in this camp of Yuriy Galanskov at the end of 1972. Given this, it is not surprising that, for one reason or another, some political prisoners judged my behavior as not conforming to the “norm.” Viktor Shybalkin expressed such a reservation in Barashevo.

In general, even in the camps, I adhered to my own version of Stoicism: to take into account the attitudes of others towards me but to give preference to self-assessment. Sometimes I felt that my Stoicism was taking on features of Christian humility. But only up to the point where I encountered actions from the camp administration or guards that prompted me to rhetoric of indignation and accusation. Nevertheless, despite the daily circumstances of life in the camps, I continued to reflect on the same philosophical problems I had thought about before my imprisonment. In the camps, I still had a better opportunity to read and think, in contrast to the “life” that the KGB agents had arranged for me in the KGB investigative isolator in Kyiv.

* * *

Communication. As I have already noted, I am limiting my story about the camps to fragments concerning my interactions with political prisoners, as well as with family and friends in the “big zone.” I am not a very communicative person, although I value communication—both as a component of life and as a source of thoughts worth considering. Given that I went through almost all the political camps in Mordovia and the Urals, I communicated, at least episodically, with a very large circle of people. Not only with Ukrainians, but also with Russians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Armenians, Moldovans, and others. So, if I were to try to cover even episodic communications, the list of people would be very long. For instance, with Zoryan Popadiuk, our camp paths crossed only once—in a prisoner transport vehicle. Looking back, I don’t always remember the time and situation in which episodic communications with some prisoners took place or the content of occasional conversations. So, please forgive me for not mentioning many people here, and for my story being extremely selective.

The value of communication does not necessarily depend on the level of education or profession of the interlocutor, but rather on their life experience and way of thinking. But, as in “freedom,” the intensity of communication depends largely not so much on the similarity of characters as on the mutual perception that ensures “ease” in communication. In the camps, as in freedom, the absence of preconceived stereotypes in the interlocutor, through which they “see” you, is favorable for communication. A conversation becomes uninteresting when the interlocutor asks questions to which they already have ready answers, because then dialogue is lacking. In many other cases, the very fact of communication was more important. For example, during my time in Barashevo, the joy of an unexpected meeting with Vasyl Ovsienko in the hospital at the end of August 1974 surpassed the content of our conversations.

Some of my communications in the camps took place on my own initiative. I was interested in the theological views of Vladimir Osipov (author of the underground journals “Veche” and “Zemlya”), and I asked him to briefly explain these views. I had, it seems, no more than two conversations with him: they were enough to understand the essence of his theological concept. Since his idea of Russia as a theocratic Orthodox monarchy did not take into account the vital interests of the non-Russian nations within the USSR, I lost interest in continuing our communications.

In Barashevo, the Jewish prisoners (Boris Penson, Israel Zalmanson, Eduard Kuznetsov) initiated a discussion in a small circle, to which they also invited me. But from the conversations, I did not take away any idea that I would remember. I mostly remember a particular idea when I mentally say “aha!” This means the discovery of a thought that is important to me, which I can no longer forget. But I did happen to remember a phrase that one of the Jewish men said to another. It went something like this: “Everything you are only now getting around to reading, I’ve long since read and forgotten.” This is one of the features of the Jewish mentality that manifests in conversations among fellow countrymen: frankness, sometimes cynical. Afterwards, I would recall this phrase every time, so as not to panic about the fact that of all I had once read, only dim traces remained in my memory. Or when I couldn't remember at all whether I had read this text or not. In Barashevo, I had the fortunate opportunity to communicate with Vasyl Stus, Viacheslav Chornovil, and Volodymyr Roketskyi. Volodymyr was firm, independent, and not inclined to long conversations.

* * *

Vasyl Stus. When I arrived at the camp in April 1974, Vasyl was in the PKT (in the Lesnoy settlement, 19th camp), his term for which ended in the last ten days of July. In a letter from the PKT to his wife and son dated May 8, 1974, Stus noted: “Now, it seems, after this casemate term is over, I won’t be so lonely (my namesake will be there, a Lybidskyi, with seemingly close interests).” And after arriving at the camp, in his letter “To my parents and wife” dated July 28–30, he remarks, “Now I am not so bored, because there is someone to exchange a living word with, and I got along with my namesake as if with an old acquaintance. He has started to feel much better than before, and that comforts me (because with him, I feel more cheered and at home). When you see my namesake’s Vira, greet her from me in turn. For now, he and I are feeling not bad, but moods here change like the weather. But overall, it is much better than when you saw us during the weekend (don’t think festive!) gate pass.”

Vasyl could have learned about the closeness of our interests incidentally, perhaps from Svitlychnyi: I am referring to the aforementioned article about Antonych. After all, I was outside the circle of communication with people from the rebellious literary scene, if we leave aside some individual episodes. And I did not communicate with Stus “in freedom.” What we had in common was, above all, a wide range of intellectual interests—from literature and art to the humanities and philosophy. Stus was seriously interested not only in philosophy but also in psychology: this is evident from his correspondence. He possessed a high level of philosophical erudition—especially considering the limited access to the latest philosophical texts. But even the lack of such texts he compensated for with penetrating intuition.

In my memory, the image of seeing Stus for the first time is preserved, associated with the characteristic feature of his walk: the erect, tall, proud figure of a man striding along the wire fence. Stus was not talkative; he was focused on his intellectual work. He mostly read and wrote half-reclining on his bed. Our beds were nearby: they were separated only by the massive square pillar supporting the ceiling. Of his pre-imprisonment poems, I had read only the collection “Winter Trees” in samizdat. I was not enthusiastic at the time: I wanted more clarity of form and content. In his maturation, the Poet moved toward greater clarity and even monumentality. Sometimes Vasyl would read me preliminary versions of his poems; he was interested in my impression or remarks. But I was not fit for the role of an advisor: Stus possessed an immeasurably richer lexical and stylistic resource compared to me. As for the general impression, I mostly approved of the basic outline of the poem and the repertoire of metaphors employed.

Nor could I be an advisor in his other work—poetic translations from German. Translating literary texts requires finer distinctions of semantic shades of words and a good knowledge of phraseology. My German vocabulary and phraseology were oriented towards philosophical terminological language. Moreover, in graduate school and at the Institute of Philosophy, I had switched to reading exclusively English-language texts. So, it was better that Yuriy Badzio remained the reviewer of his translations of Rilke and other German poets. From this, I conclude that in general, I probably did not live up to Stus’s expectations regarding the productivity of our conversations. But beyond that, I felt not just good with him, but even joyful—especially during our “conversations over tea,” mostly during breaks from work. From time to time, after saying his “to hell with this work,” he would invite me to have some tea to talk. Then the content of the conversation became unimportant: the pleasure that we could communicate, talk about something, mattered more.

Stus’s personality is among those who embody heroic enthusiasm in Western spiritual culture, like Giordano Bruno. He is a personality who, by the constitution of his spiritual orientations and way of behavior, most consistently embodies the ethics of heroism and self-sacrifice. I use the word “embodies” in the present tense. And hence his uncompromising assessment of any retreat or concession to the onslaught of evil. I, however, leaned toward greater moderation, because I believed that a person can better assess their own situation and capabilities and has the right to decide which strategy of behavior to choose in a given situation. Moreover, while highly valuing the courage of dissidents in open confrontation with evil, I believed that intellectual and creative activity “in freedom,” although associated with compromises in order to act “within the bounds of the possible,” is an no less important link in the resistance. And that it was no easier for people who faced conflicts with their own conscience in order to do something positive than it was for us in the camps. In such cases, it is a matter of the price of compromise. Vasyl, of course, also valued positive achievements, even if obtained at the price of compromise, but he felt like a free man and felt a duty to resist despair and a mentality of submission. But he disliked declarations and in conversations did not seek to emphasize his principles and values, which he considered important. What I remember most is this combination of intransigence in his own behavior with the kindness I felt from him in our interactions.

Every culture should have personalities like Stus—as an embodiment of the unbreakable spirit. To mark the path of moral revival for degraded societies. The real success of the movement “upward,” instead of “downward” (into the abyss), depends on how many people reach for them, overcoming their fear of the violence of evil. The metaphor of the abyss is important in Stus’s thinking. In the letter of July 28-30 cited above, he notes: “To stand over the abyss, feeling a slight dizziness—that is a far more interesting creative situation for me than being bored in the chaotic Kyiv creative hubbub. And—besides everything else—we, not being actors, do not choose situations. Situations choose us, and we can neither renounce them nor refuse them, thank God.” When I come across attempts today to define Stus’s way of thinking, or let’s say, way of feeling and worldview, with the word “mysticism,” it evokes a feeling of rejection in me. Behind it, I see an attempt to use this word only in a positive and very general sense—in the sense of a mysterious depth of worldview, feeling, and thought. In such a case, they do not bother to clarify what ways of thinking and styles of speech are denoted by this word. In fact, even the notion, found back in the Romantics and Rilke, that poetry is the “voice” of God in the soul of the poet, does not correspond to Stus’s view of his own creativity. But that is a separate topic of conversation.

My communications with Stus were constantly interrupted: either he or I would be thrown into the ShIZO or the PKT. In the punishment cells, every political prisoner struggled with hunger, especially if he refused to work, and in the cold season—with the cold. I, like many other political prisoners, was thrown into the ShIZO so often that I lost count of those punishments. I must have served such a punishment at least three times before I was placed in the PKT for five months just before New Year’s or in the first days of the new year 1975. So, Stus, in his letter “To his wife” (January 7, 1975), had to state: “Lately, I am completely all alone. My namesake isn’t here, and he won’t be for a while—I'm staying all alone for almost a whole quarter.”

* * *

After returning from the PKT to the camp, I met Viacheslav Chornovil (he was “transferred” to Barashevo while I was in the PKT). After my return to the camp from the PKT, two events occurred: the first joyful one—Stus, Chornovil, and I had visits. My visit with my wife took place right after Chornovil’s visit. As Vira and the children were entering the visiting area, she met his wife Atena, who was leaving the visiting building. On the second day of my visit, it was time to say goodbye to Vira, and together, through a crack, we saw three men emerge from the barracks: Vasyl Stus, Viacheslav Chornovil, and Volodymyr Roketskyi. Drawn up to their full height, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, they moved confidently toward us, toward the checkpoint: suddenly they stopped and, smiling, full of energy, they waved to us. And so they remain in our imagination to this day—as an embodiment of brotherly unity and will.

But not long after, I witnessed an attack on Stus: it was carried out by one of the planted inmates. I have already mentioned this in one of my publications (in the journal “Ukraina,” No. 16, 1990). It happened in the room where political prisoners line up for food: it was dispensed to us through a window in the wall. I did not see the attack itself: when I entered the room, I saw Stus pinning the inmate to the ground, and on Vasyl’s cheek, under his eye, a wound was bleeding. Stus could have given a proper response to this seemingly feeble inmate. But there was a certainty that he had been planted in the camp precisely to provoke Stus into actions that would make it possible to open a criminal case against him.

When I was taken away again to the PKT at the end of July, I did not think that I was saying goodbye to Vasyl forever. Until his return to Ukraine in body. In body, but not yet in spirit. His faith, that after bidding farewell to a foreign Ukraine forever, he would still return to his native Ukraine, is a source of faith for many. But his spiritual return to Ukraine is happening slowly and with difficulty: confirmation of this, among many other things, was the dispute over naming Donetsk University after Stus. But the students’ initiative, and even the controversy surrounding it, shows that he is indeed returning to his Ukraine. Slowly, complexly, but returning. And I believe that he will eventually return. The question is: when?

* * *

Viacheslav Chornovil. I perceived Chornovil as a recognized leader of the dissident movement. Perhaps one of several leaders, but from the perspective of the pragmatics of the struggle, the most outstanding. And this left its mark on my perception of him and my attitude toward him in the camp. After all, everyone who reproduced and distributed samizdat treated him with great respect. But if one were to make comparisons, there were significant mental differences between us. Chornovil was, above all, a man of action, of considered action, but with an emphasis on action. I, on the other hand, am primarily a man of thought. True, a thought shifted toward an appreciation for practical philosophy, which means a greater relevance of humanitarian problems related to the justification of action. To put it more simply, in the phrase “considered action,” my efforts are focused more on consideration, on thought, rather than on action. There were also important differences in our temperaments: Chornovil is more of an extrovert, I am more of an introvert.

Also significant at the time of our meeting in Barashevo was the difference in our acquired experience. Chornovil had behind him the experience of open confrontation with the political system and its ideology. I had no such experience. I saw my protest against the 1972 arrests as the reaction of an intellectual to a large-scale aggression of evil. One can assess this act as a manifestation of civic courage or even a heroic act. But when, in the 1990s, one of my students tried to include me in the list of heroic figures, I felt uncomfortable.

So, as a man of action, Chornovil also strove to act in the camps: he wrote protests and petitions, organized collective actions, and was a good pragmatist in the difficult conditions of camps and prisons. True, he was sometimes disappointed in the effectiveness of his “petitions,” but as a man of action, he continued to do it. I, however, preferred to reflect on fundamental problems that might only become relevant later. Aware of the peculiarities of my character, Viacheslav worried a great deal about me, especially in view of the continuous repressions. Most indicative in this regard are his words about me in the document “The Daily Life of the Mordovian Camps” (Vol. 5 of the ten-volume edition), and in a letter “To parents, sister, and son Taras” (September 13-16, 1975 – Vol. 4, Book 1), he remarked: “I am not sure that he will endure, in body and spirit, that almost uninterrupted double portion. Especially since he has a temperament that makes the bitter worse. In the end, I do not judge, because everyone is free within certain limits of decency to choose their own line of conduct. I only state the fact with bitterness and see the same root causes.”

Perhaps, in view of such an assessment, he did not try to involve me in any actions. And our relatively brief communication in the camp was limited to occasional conversations on general topics. But then we corresponded when I was in exile. I even copied out for him some of my poems: in one of them, he advised me to discard the ending, which I did. Unfortunately, I have not found his letters among my papers, just as I haven't found many postcards and letters from Olena Antoniv, who morally supported me when I was in Barashevo. Looking ahead, I will note that after Chornovil’s murder, I regretted that in one of my publications I had entered into a discussion with him about nationalism. But I am comforted by the fact that he saw it as my attempt to clarify the problem. And at the presentation of the anthology “Conservatism” in 1996 (held at the Parliamentary Library), we embraced. And right there in our conversation, he remarked that there was an urgent need to clarify the meaning of the Ukrainian national idea. I consider my article on this topic, included in the anthology “Nationalism,” partly as a fulfillment of his request back then.

* * *

I stayed in Barashevo for less than two months, because at the end of July I was punished with a second term in the PKT, this time for six months. In my first letter to Vira from the PKT (July 27, 1975), written in pencil, I report: “I am writing to you again from the same ‘pe-ke-te’ from which I returned before our visit. My transfer was hasty and unexpected, and since no more than two weeks have passed since my return, my time in the zone is perceived as just an episode. I arrived at the PKT on July 25th—the term of confinement is six months.” So Viacheslav, in his letter “To parents, sister, wife” (August 6, 1975), after asking himself what to write about, continues, “Whether about the fact that I am left alone? Because one of my namesakes has gone off God knows where again, the other’s ulcer suddenly burst, he was bleeding internally, he will probably be operated on… And because of all that (and there were other ‘joys’), the past month seemed to me the hardest of all here, though it began well—with visits. However, I restrain myself from any drastic steps and for now get by with ‘small steps’ (what is that in our language?). Since I wrote my last letter, I have read almost nothing, petitions (ultimately fruitless) took up all my free time. I just finished reading ‘Hamlet’ in ‘Vsesvit’ and Faulkner there as well.”

* * *

In the Kyiv Investigative Isolator of the UKGB. But in the third month of my stay in the PKT, I was “taken on a transport stage” and sent by plane to Kyiv, to the KGB investigative isolator. When Vira found out that I was not in the camp in Barashevo, it alarmed her, and she sent a telegram of inquiry. In response, she received a notification dated November 19, 1975: “Regarding your telegram received from the GUITU of the MVD USSR, we inform you that the convicted Lisovyi, V. S., has been sent to the investigative isolator of the UKGB for the city of Kyiv. – Acting Head of Department of Institution ZhKh 385 A. Krivov.” And I, in my letter to Vira from the investigative isolator, dated November 11, 1975, inform her: “On November nineteenth it will be a month since I’ve been in the investigative isolator. The transport here was completely unexpected for me; one day there in the PKT I was told to get ready for a transport stage, and then, on the day of departure, it was explained where exactly. The journey here was very short for me and, therefore, did not exhaust me.” In the first volume of my operational file (pp. 112-117), it is stated that from October 28 to January 24 (until the end of my stay in Kyiv), a KGB agent with the pseudonym “Roshin” was in the cell with me.

I was in the investigative isolator from October 19 to January 24, 1976. I had meetings with colleagues from the Institute of Philosophy—the then-head of the Department of the History of Philosophy of Ukraine, Volodymyr Yevdokymenko, and Serhiy Vasyliev. Each of them, at the request of the KGB, wrote a report about this meeting with me. Both reports have been preserved in handwritten form in the first volume of my operational file. Volodymyr Yukhymovych later came to see me in the 35th camp (VS-389/35), at Vsekhsvyatskaya station. Such trips for meetings were planned by the KGB for the purpose of “re-education.” I present here two excerpts from Yevdokymenko’s “report” on our meeting, which took place on December 10, 1975.

“To my question whether he considers himself an anti-Soviet person, Lisovyi did not give a direct answer, saying that it is first necessary to conduct a ‘terminological’ analysis of this concept. This indicates that his ‘criticism’ is of a deeper nature than he himself tries to make it out to be.”

“Lisovyi did not make any attacks or anti-Soviet statements. However, I am convinced that he remains in his old ideological positions. He is a rationalistic man, with a firm character, a stable psyche, stubborn, with established views that he is no longer able to change. If the process of breaking his views does occur, it will be very slow. To expect his public ideological repentance at the present time is premature. However, I believe that he does not intend to engage in any practical political activity, having understood its futility.”

In this case, Yevdokymenko spoke cautiously about my deeper criticism because he knew well about my inclination toward analytical philosophy. And this was justified on his part: so as not to set the KGB on a direction of philosophical thought that was just emerging and to which the label of “bourgeois philosophy” was being attached. As for the “breaking of views,” the KGB mostly used the phrase “ideological disarmament.” Behind this was the task of achieving obedience: think as you please, but speak “correctly.”

* * *

This time the conditions of my confinement were quite normal—for such an institution. No means of pressure that I experienced during the investigation. There were not even persistent persuasions from the KGB agents for me to repent and admit my “guilt.” I think they were primarily relying on the repressions I had already endured in the camps. And they entrusted the task of persuasion to the person planted with me; he did it without pressure, rather inclining me to repentance through his conversations.

On January 16, I had a visit with Vira. But the next day, Vira received a notification from the Prosecutor’s Office of the Ukrainian SSR with the following content: “Your complaint, in which you ask for medical assistance for your husband, the convicted Lisovyi, V. S., has been reviewed by the Prosecutor’s Office of the UkrSSR. It has been established that Lisovyi, V. S., as of 14.01.76, had not arrived at institution YuA 45/183 in Kyiv. – Deputy Head of the Department for Supervision of Places of Deprivation of Liberty, Senior Counselor of Justice K. K. Stetsenko.”

Vira was very disturbed by this message, as I had not complained about my health during our visit. Moreover, it was not clear what institution was hidden behind the mentioned abbreviation. She immediately wrote a statement addressed to K. K. Stetsenko. In it, she stressed that she had not sent any requests for medical assistance for me to any institution and that during the visit on January 16, she had seen me in good health. It is possible that this statement from Vira averted the implementation of some KGB plan. One of the documents states that I was sent from the investigative isolator to the camp on January 24, 1976.

* * *

In 1975, the KGB developed a plan of measures regarding Vira, aimed at stopping her activity and her “re-education.” A corresponding document was created (contained in the first volume of her operational-investigative file, pp. 217-222), which I present below.

Secret

“I APPROVE”

CHIEF OF THE KGB DIRECTORATE of the UkrSSR COUNCIL OF MINISTERS for the City of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast –

Major General (signature) (V. LODYANOY)

October 24, 1975

PLAN

of agent-operational measures for DOP No. 579 on

“Tikhaia” – LISOVA, Vera Pavlovna

Under operational surveillance case R-579, opened on December 12, 1975, “Tikhaia” is being studied –

Lisova, Vera Pavlovna, born 1937,

native of the city of Kaharlyk, Kyiv Oblast, Ukrainian,

non-party member, with higher education, married,

no prior convictions, working as a teacher in a children’s

preschool institution No. 50, residing in Kyiv, Bratislavska St., 4, apt. 192.

“Tikhaia” is the wife of one of the active subjects of the “Blok” case, LISOVYI, V. S., convicted in 1973 for nationalist activity under Art. 62 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code to 7 years of imprisonment in an ITI [Corrective Labor Institution] and 3 years of exile. In 1973, when her husband was arrested and under investigation, “Tikhaia” received from Ovsienko, V. V., and Vysotska, E. Ya., and kept 4 copies of the so-called “Open Letter to the Members of the CC CPSU” of anti-Soviet content, authored by LISOVYI, V. S.

According to information received from the agent network, “Tikhaia” maintains contact with a subject of surveillance by the UKGB for the city of Moscow and Moscow Oblast, the so-called “democrat” – KORSUNSKAYA, Irina Vladimirovna, who is suspected of involvement in the collection and transmission abroad of slanderous information for the so-called “Chronicle of Current Events.”

Thus, according to a report from an agent of the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the UkrSSR Council of Ministers, “Rita,” “Tikhaia,” while traveling in November 1974 to visit her husband in Dubravny-ITI, and on her way back, stayed in Moscow with KORSUNSKAYA, from whom she received material assistance in the form of food products and money.

In December 1974, KORSUNSKAYA came to Kyiv and, according to data from the “NN” service, clandestinely met with “Tikhaia,” who gave her a notebook and some papers with unknown content.

In order to study the behavior of “Tikhaia,” to establish her connections, the nature of her relationships with them, especially with KORSUNSKAYA, DOP No. 579 was opened on “Tikhaia” on December 12, 1974.

However, despite the measures taken, it was not possible to establish the nature of her connection and the circumstances of her acquaintance with KORSUNSKAYA.

At the same time, through the agent network and mail interception measures, data was obtained that “Tikhaia” maintains contact with the subjects of the “Blok” case, “Lisa” and “Fariseika,” as well as the wives of subjects of the “Blok” case convicted for nationalist activity: SVITLYCHNY, SVERSTIUK, SERHIENKO, and others. They communicate among themselves and support each other.

Furthermore, on June 6, 1975, the foreign anti-Soviet radio station “Radio Liberty” broadcast an interview with Alla Glazman, a Jewish woman who had left Kyiv with her parents in March of this year for permanent residence abroad, in which information was disclosed about the men arrested for nationalist activity: “Tikhaia’s” husband – LISOVYI, as well as PRONYUK, SERHIENKO, SVERSTIUK, and others.

An analysis of the summary of the radio intercept of the said broadcast from the a/s [anti-Soviet] radio station “Radio Liberty” on 6/VI-1975 and of Alla Glazman’s connections in Kyiv gives reason to believe that Glazman received this information from “Tikhaia.” This may be confirmed by the fact that Glazman had been on friendly terms with “Tikhaia” for a long time and visited her apartment right up until her departure abroad. This is also evidenced by the fact that the reported details of LISOVYI’s personal life could only have been obtained by Glazman from a person close to him – his wife, “Tikhaia.”

On July 18, 1975, the service intercepted and legalized an outgoing international document from “Tikhaia” addressed to Glazman in the USA, which essentially contained a continuation of the previously provided information about the arrested subjects of the “Blok” case.

In particular, “Tikhaia” in her letter reported: the address of the ITI where her husband LISOVYI is serving his sentence; the dissolution in the past of the “Homin” choir and its leader YASHCHENKO, who was unemployed for a year; details of her trip to the camp to visit her husband and the procedure for granting this visit; detailed information about her husband: his poor health, that in a year in the camp he had 3 punishments, declared a hunger strike three times, and spent 5 months in the PKT; about meeting CHORNOVIL and STUS in the camp, etc.

As can be seen from the content of this document, it is not innocuous and was sent abroad with a specific intent.

The fact that in 1975 “Tikhaia” began to receive parcels from various capitalist countries (England, Belgium, France) from persons unknown to her also deserves attention.

“Tikhaia’s” receipt of parcels from abroad can be regarded as the provision of material assistance to her as the family of a man arrested for anti-Soviet activity.

In coordination with the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the UkrSSR Council of Ministers, with the sanction of the leadership of the UKGB for the city of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast, personal contact was established with “Tikhaia” on June 25, 1975, with the aim of deterring her from carrying out hostile activities, detaching her from the nationalist environment, and positively influencing her husband – LISOVYI, V. S., who was convicted for nationalist activity and is serving his sentence in Dubravny ITI, through her. An operative conducted 2 educational conversations with “Tikhaia.”

Taking into account the foregoing and for the purpose of further vetting “Tikhaia” in terms of identifying and documenting facts of possible hostile nationalist activity she may be conducting, and also in accordance with the directive of the KGB of the USSR Council of Ministers No. 5/9-3473 of 11/IX-1975 “On Suppressing the Hostile Activity of Persons Engaged in the Illegal Production and Distribution of the Anti-Soviet Collection ‘Chronicle of Current Events,’” the following agent-operational measures shall be conducted under DOP No. 579 on “Tikhaia”:

1. The vetting of “Tikhaia” shall involve UKGB agents “Medvedev” and “Antonov,” as well as agents of the 2nd Department of the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the UkrSSR, “Myroslava” and “Edelweiss.”

With the aim of revealing the hostile plans and intentions of “Tikhaia” and creating conditions for documenting specific facts of her criminal activity, each agent shall be assigned a task and a line of conduct for eliciting the information of interest to us.

Executor: Cmr. Levchuk. Deadline: October-November 1975.

2. As has been established, the husband of “Tikhaia” – LISOVYI, V. S., serving his sentence in Dubravny ITI for conducting nationalist activity, continues to maintain hostile positions. In this connection, LISOVYI is being transported to the investigative isolator of the KGB of the UkrSSR in Kyiv for individual educational work, which will be carried out according to a separately developed plan approved by the UKGB leadership.

Taking this into account, continue the operative’s contact with “Tikhaia” with the aim of positively influencing her, and through her, her husband – LISOVYI, to dissuade the latter and persuade him to renounce and condemn his nationalist activity.

Executors: Cmrds. Levchuk, Balaban. Deadline: October-December 1975.

3. With the aim of exerting positive influence on “Tikhaia” and her husband – LISOVYI, V. S., during his stay in the investigative isolator of the KGB of the UkrSSR in Kyiv, establish personal contact with and prepare for upcoming conversations Lisovyi’s former colleague – VASYLIEV, a member of the CPSU, a candidate of philosophical sciences, who was on friendly terms with the LISOVYI family and, after Lisovyi’s arrest and conviction, repeatedly visited “Tikhaia’s” apartment.

Executors: Cmrds. Balaban, Pavlenko. Deadline: October-November 1975.

SR. AUTHORIZED OFFICER of the I SECTION of the 5th DEPARTMENT of the

COUNCIL OF MINISTERS of the UkrSSR for the City of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast –

Sr. Lieutenant (LEVCHUK)

AGREED:

CHIEF of the I SECTION of the 5th DEPARTMENT of the UKGB of the COUNCIL OF MINISTERS of the UkrSSR

for the City of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast – Major (ZAIKA)

CHIEF of the 5th DEPARTMENT of the UKGB of the COUNCIL OF MINISTERS of the UkrSSR for

the City of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast – Lieutenant Colonel (GAL)

October 24, 1975

No. 5/1-7890

* * *

Lesnoye. Since my term in the PKT had already expired, I was released into the camp, but not to Barashevo, but to the 19th (ZhKh-385/19), Potma station, Lesnoye settlement. This camp was large, the largest of the Mordovian camps for political prisoners. I found myself in a benevolent environment: I have already mentioned that during my first term in the PKT, the political prisoners in this zone held a hunger strike in solidarity with me. At first, the administration assigned me to hard labor—cutting boards on a machine. Moreover, the few people who did this had to carry long and heavy boards into the workshop. Mykola Konchakivskyi, probably the strongest among us, despite decades spent in the camps, tried to take the thicker end of the board, leaving the tail end for me. Full of energy and prone to humor, Mykola was for me the embodiment of an unbreakable will. Eventually, on the advice of one of the political prisoners, I turned to the camp warden to be transferred to some physically lighter work. As a result of this “submissiveness” of mine, I was transferred to work as an electrician. This was the easiest work I had during my entire time in the camps.

Most of my interactions in the camp were occasional. Mykola Hutsul, a generally taciturn man, would walk along the barracks aisle, along which the beds were arranged, and toss out some friendly, humorous phrases. I would say something back to him. Ivan Myron (surname), captured at 21 in a hiding place and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor, gave me several German-language books, including a German encyclopedia, a German grammar of English, and others, which I still use today. I regularly communicated with Ihor Kravtsiv from Kharkiv and Kuzma Matviiuk from Uman. Ihor and I were connected by the commonality of our way of thinking—rationalism and reasonable pragmatism when considering social and national problems. It was easy for me to communicate with him. Ihor already had well-thought-out views, and on some issues, we argued, so the conversation was useful.

Before his imprisonment, Kuzma taught at the Uman College of Agricultural Mechanization and, together with Bohdan Chornomaz, conducted national-educational activities, particularly by distributing samizdat. Both of them communicated with Nadiia Surovtsova. He was deliberate in speech and behavior. From time to time, we would meet to talk. Kuzma tried to give me some practical and useful advice.

Of the collective actions, I remember a discussion organized by the Estonian dissidents Serhiy Soldatov and Artem Yuskevych (pseudonym Mazepa), to which some Ukrainian dissidents, including me, were also invited. There is an article about Yuskevych, an ethnic Ukrainian, in the “International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents,” and therefore, as in other such cases, I will not repeat what is said there. I will only note that the views and activities of both are interesting from the perspective of combining the democratic and national movements in the activities of dissidents. This was not just a theoretical position: both were involved in the creation of underground organizations in Estonia—democratic (Soldatov) and national-democratic (Yuskevych). Yuskevych’s book “Russian Colonialism and the National Problem” (signed with the pseudonym “Yuriy Mazepa-Bakaivskyi”) was translated from Russian into Estonian. As I recall now, the disagreements in the discussion primarily concerned how the democratic movement should be combined with the national one. My position, expressed in the first open letter (“of Anton Koval”), was to choose the path of broad autonomy for the republics.

In the 19th camp, I had two meetings with UKGB officers. The first meeting appeared to be accidental on the surface. A young Ukrainian-speaking man, who behaved friendly and tried to convince me that there was no point in my sitting here: I just had to write a repentant statement and I would be free. I refused to talk on this topic. The second meeting, I assume, happened on my official birthday—May 17. I was called from the barracks and invited into a room. There were two men in the room, and on the table was a bottle of wine and some snacks. I refused the treats. Both of them, in a completely friendly manner, insisted that as soon as I wrote a statement admitting my guilt, I would be free immediately.

My stay in the 19th camp was not long—from the beginning of February 1976 to the second half of August, when I, along with some other political prisoners, was sent to the camps in the Urals, in the Perm Oblast.

2. The Perm Camps

Polovinka. I arrived at the 37th camp (VS-389/37, Polovinka settlement, Chusovskoy district) on September 6 (according to the camp warden’s notice in response to Vira’s inquiry). The camp was a wide, flat courtyard, a rectangle, close to a square. On the shorter side of the rectangle was the barracks: a two-story, quite decent building. On the opposite side was the workshop, where lathes stood. Overall, the zone looked good, it was well-maintained. There were not many political prisoners in the camp, perhaps about twenty. Among the prisoners were members of the Rosokha youth underground organization: the Marmus brothers, Volodymyr and Mykola, Mykola Slobodian, and Petro Vynnychuk. Others included Vasyl Dolishnii and Oleksa Riznykiv. If you came out of the barracks, to the left was a long wooden table with benches. Once, at this table, we, the Ukrainian political prisoners, held some kind of discussion, the content of which I no longer recall.

But I do remember my conversations with Oleksa Riznykiv. Not only among the UPA fighters, but also among Ukrainian dissidents, there are people with fascinating life stories of struggle that began in their early youth. Oleksa Riznykiv from Odesa is one of them. But our conversations with Oleksa were focused on an idea he had leaned towards as a student in the philology department of Odesa University. I mean his linguistic interests, which were based on a view of the meaning of words from the perspective of syllables. His diploma thesis, with a preface by Mykola Pavliuk, has now been published (Oleksa Riznykiv. Skladivnytsia. Odesa, 2003).

I also developed a special sympathy for Vasyl Dolishnii, another person with a legendary biography. At fourteen, he became a UPA courier, was captured at sixteen, and endured torture and hard labor. But what fascinated me, as it probably did many others, was his love of life and humor. He also drew me into discussions about the hidden primary meaning of words. If I add to this some of Iryna Kalynets’s letters that she sent me in exile (something from Indo-European studies—unfortunately, along with some others, they were stolen from me), then in the camps, I went through a full course on the archaic primary meaning of words.

When I went to work in the workshop, it turned out that no one was interested in our labor. The lathes stood idle, and no one gave us a production task. Vasyl, not without humor, suggested taking brooms and sweeping the workshop and the yard outside. He really did take a broom and started doing it. Because he was worried about me: he wanted to avert another accusation of “parasitism” against me. But I refused to play games and stopped going to “work.” I think I had a conversation with someone from the camp administration, after which something strange happened, at first glance. They housed me in a separate, perfectly decent room, with one or two beds. With a nightstand that resembled a desk. But I again refused to “work,” because I was probably writing not what was supposed to be called “work.” So from there, they escorted me to the ShIZO, and since, after serving it, I again did not start “work,” a couple of days later I ended up in a punishment cell. But upon completion of my term there, they sent me to another camp—to Kuchino.

* * *

Kuchino. So I ended up in the 36th camp (VS-389/36). In an official notice from the camp warden A. G. Zhuravkov, sent to Vira, it was stated: “Your husband arrived on November 24, 1976, to serve his sentence at the institution at the address: Perm Oblast, Chusovskoy district, Kuchino settlement.” This was the most developed of all the political camps. An exemplary camp of the GULAG system, and it is a good thing that the “Perm-36” Museum was founded on its basis (anyone can get acquainted with the history of this camp and its structure via the internet). Until the early 70s, it held “especially dangerous state criminals.” In preparation for the political repressions of the early 70s, it was re-equipped to punish political prisoners, not only on strict but also on special-regime, effectively prison-like, but with the prisoners being led out to work. The first political prisoners were brought here in 1972. Many political prisoners from the older generation and the “new wave” of dissidents passed through these camps.

I was sent to a workshop where they manufactured parts for electric irons. At first, they put me at a press that cut the ends of the wire for the yet-to-be-bent heating elements for the irons. The work was easy and completely mechanical: take and place a new element and press the pedal of the press. It was hard to find fault with anything. But the situation changed as soon as I was transferred to work at a press that riveted the contacts for the iron’s electrical supply onto a plate. So an opportunity arose for accusations of careless or deliberate production of defective goods. In this way, to still harm the successful construction of the “bright future”: I had placed and fixed the part incorrectly. I refused to work and, consequently, ended up in the punishment cell.

* * *

As in other camps, in this one, I episodically communicated with many political prisoners who represented different nations. Of the Ukrainian dissidents, at the time of my stay, there were Yevhen Sverstiuk, Ihor Kalynets, Oles Serhienko, Semen Gluzman, Dmytro Hrynkiv, Dmytro Demydid, and Stepan Sapeliak, to name just a few. Leaving aside episodic communications, I will speak only of the more important ones. With Yevhen Sverstiuk, we often communicated during breaks from work: when I was working at the press, our workstations were next to each other. From his samizdat works, I already knew his way of philosophical thinking and speech, which I have already mentioned. In the camp, we did not engage in discussions of philosophical problems. For me, our short conversations were important more for the feeling of calm certainty that Yevhen’s manner of behavior and speech exuded.

My impressions from communicating with Ihor Kalynets were somewhat different. Of the nine collections he wrote before his imprisonment, I had read only “The Fire of Kupala.” Since I highly valued the work of B.-I. Antonych, I received his first collection with enthusiasm. And I came to consider Kalynets the most elitist poet in Ukraine. I will leave aside here the discussion of the aesthetic concept of “art for art’s sake” or artistic modernism. And I will not go into a discussion of I. Kalynets’s poetry: literary critics have already said a lot about his poetry and, I hope, will say more, better than I can. But in my memory, a special impression of Ihor reading his poems remains. Especially the poem “Veronika, the Tear.” I also copied out for Myroslava poems from “The Little Book for Dzvinka.” I noted I. Kalynets’s progress as a movement toward increasing the semantic space of the poem in depth: the presence of a multi-level semantic structure, in which the changing meanings in the metaphors mutually echo one another. It resembles a prism that draws one in with the play of its meanings into the depth of individual or historical-social being—memory. That is how I can convey my impression from back then, if I limit myself to a few sentences. From some phrases, I understood that Ihor also knew about my attempts to write poetry, but I considered it inappropriate to read my “raw material” against the background of his filigree poetic style. And yet, the motif of poetic rethinking of ethno-cultural symbols was present in my poetic visions as well—more in visions than in the articulation of these visions.

I constantly communicated with Oles Serhienko, the son of Oksana Meshko. He was a staunch polemicist. I was critical of some of his views regarding Ukrainian-Russian and Ukrainian-Jewish relations: I believed that the sharpness of his judgments contained simplifications. But we did not get into arguments, and our relations were very friendly. On the other hand, I was a witness to very “passionate” disputes between Serhienko and Sergei Kovalyov on the national question. Most Russian democrats at that time were inclined to think that the establishment of democracy would automatically resolve the national question as well. But I remembered Ivan Franko’s warning in his correspondence with Lesia Ukrainka that in the event of Russia’s democratization, the Ukrainian nation might find itself unprepared to assert itself under conditions of democracy. Due to a weakened national consciousness. To a large extent, Franko’s warning came true. I assume that, despite the high temperature of Serhienko’s disputes with Kovalyov, the latter may have derived a positive grain from such disputes in the camps. Ivan Drach once mentioned that at a meeting in Moscow with Ukrainian cultural and public figures, Sergei Kovalyov, on behalf of the Russian people, asked for forgiveness for the policy of Russification. A rare or even unique exception among Russian democrats. And Kovalyov’s position, as the person responsible in the Russian Duma for human rights, regarding the events in Chechnya, also indicates his desire to distance himself from imperialism. And for that, as the death of Politkovskaya shows, civic courage is needed.

* * *

In the 36th camp, I met another participant of the Rosokha youth underground group—Stepan Sapeliak. I remember he decided to study Latin, so I gave him my Popov textbook. Much later, in 2003, I participated in the presentation of his book “Dissident Chronicles from the Time of Head-Chopping,” published by “Smoloskyp.” Some pages of these memoirs are searing: what did this young, sensitive, emotional man with a rich imagination go through? I also got acquainted with the founder of the Union of Ukrainian Youth of Galicia, Dmytro Hrynkiv, and a member of the same Union, Dmytro Demydid. Hrynkiv was energetic and sociable, in contrast to his accomplice, who was very reserved in communication. I episodically communicated with many other prisoners—from the older generation and dissidents. Who among the political prisoners did not communicate with Hryhoriy Herchak? He was not only a heroic but also a colorful personality, with diverse talents. Of the collective actions, I remember the holding of a Shevchenko celebration in the camp with the participation of Y. Sverstiuk, I. Kalynets, and others.

* * *

Second stay in the Kyiv investigative isolator. I am writing about my second stay in the Kyiv UKGB SIZO only by relying on declassified documents, primarily from my operational-investigative file. Because my memory has failed me: in the first version of this chapter of my memoirs, I did not mention my second stay in Kyiv at all. And some events that took place during this stay, I attributed to my time in the SIZO in 1975. So here I am correcting my mistakes, based on the documents. And I am distinguishing between the events that I chronologically combined in the description of my first stay in Kyiv. My mistake was facilitated by the fact that the correspondence with my wife concerning my first stay in the SIZO in 1975 constitutes a whole bundle of letters. Meanwhile, when I rushed to check the fact of my stay in the SIZO in 1977, I found only three of Vira’s letters in which this second period of my “re-education” is mentioned very vaguely. More data relates to my departure from the camp to Kyiv. In Issue 46 of the Chronicle of Current Events for 1977 (in the “Perm Camps” section), there is the following report: “On June 23, a visit between Vasyl Lisovyi and his wife was supposed to take place. Two hours before her departure from Kyiv, she received a call from the KGB and was told that her husband was not in the camp. Vira Lisova, having arrived in Moscow, after two days of running around the GUITU, found out that he had been taken to Kyiv. As it later turned out, he had been sent from the camp back on June 13. As in 1975 (Chronicle 39), Lisovyi was brought to Kyiv for ‘re-education.’ They want to get a written and, most likely, public repentance from him. The KGB has long been trying to enlist the help of Vira LISOVA. She replies that she cannot persuade her husband, a convinced communist, to reconsider his views (Chronicle 30). Vira is told that by refusing to persuade her husband, she is encouraging his ‘bad behavior’ in the camp and increasing his suffering (LISOVYI has spent more than half of his served term in PKT and ShIZO).”

Vira remembers that before her trip for the visit, she really could not find out where I was. At the Kyiv KGB, they told her that they did not know where Lisovyi was. So she, with the children and bags, went to Moscow to find out from the MVD if I was indeed in the camp before setting off for a visit with me. She left the children and bags at the Shykhanoviches’ place (Yuriy Shykhanovich used to visit Kyiv and see Vira). At a reception in Shchelokov’s apartments, one of his deputies finally gave an answer, ironically remarking: “You were planning to visit him, but he went to visit you”—that is, to Kyiv.

So, here I recount some facts from this second “re-education” of mine in the Kyiv SIZO—from June 18 to September 18, 1977. Besides the visit with my wife and children, I had a visit with my sister Liuba and my brother Pavlo. Liuba looked depressed in this “dreadful” building. But our visit was supervised by a KGB agent who, with his aggressive remarks, provoked me to say everything I thought about the activities of the KGB. I think it was Kirichek, who was “looking after” my wife, about whom I will say more later. So I reminded them that they were continuing the work of their bloody predecessors and that monuments would be erected in this institution to those whom they had convicted of anti-Soviet activities. And so on. For Liuba, this outburst of my anger was probably also useful in reducing her fear of this institution. I saw my brother Pavlo for the last time (he died before I returned). Among the documents, a report from my cellmate “Bodryi” dated July 12, 1977, has been preserved (as a rule, they were KGB agents). In it, he reports: “On Friday, July 8, Lisovyi, coming from a visit with his brother, said that his brother had advised him to stop engaging in politics.” He further reports that “on July 9 or 10, some woman could be heard crying in the cell. Her crying was accompanied by the words ‘what are you holding me here for.’” In the section on the investigation, I have already mentioned that the KGB used this means of influencing the psyche of the prisoners. In general, “Bodryi’s” retellings of my conversations with him in the cell cannot be trusted. He invented too much, guided by the goal set before him—to work on discrediting me. But his reports contain phrases he invented for no apparent reason: as if I had declared on the first day he was placed with me that I was from Western Ukraine and so on.

* * *

From the documents, I learned that my second stay in the Kyiv investigative isolator was connected with the implementation of a previously conceived plan to discredit me. This involved the writing of some letter by “Bodryi,” which he passed on through someone to Antonenko-Davydovych. With the caveat that he should read the letter and immediately return it. In this letter, “Bodryi” related that I was criticizing the Ukrainian opposition milieu and that a repentant statement lay in my nightstand, which I was about to submit. But Antonenko-Davydovych, through Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, passed the letter to Vira, with the instruction that she read it immediately and return it. And so it was done. After reading the letter, Vira immediately wrote a protest statement addressed to Fedorchuk, warning that their plan was already known and that they would not succeed in carrying it out. In connection with the writing of this statement, she was summoned for a conversation with V. Kirichek, who had been “looking after” her for a long time. Kirichek declared that her statement was baseless, that she had made it all up. Although Vira had not copied the letter, she dared to reply that if necessary, she could present a copy of that letter. According to Vira, it was noticeable that this flustered him. In any case, the KGB did not carry out their plan. I learned about this whole story with the letter much later.

In the fifth volume of Vira’s operational case file (pp. 147-150), there is a Memo, signed by Kirichek, from which I present excerpts here.

MEMO

On December 2 of this year, an explanatory conversation was held in the UKGB building with “Tikhaia” regarding her statement addressed to the Chairman of the KGB of the UkrSSR Council of Ministers No. 1602 of 31.X.77. It was explained to “Tikhaia” that the KGB organs have no connection to the correspondence of a convicted currency speculator, and she was also warned to cease her slanderous fabrications.

“Tikhaia” stated that she does not violate the law, and all her actions (letters and complaints to various authorities) are due to her desire to achieve the early release of her husband – Lisovyi, V. S.

Here she also made a request to help her in this, using the statement written by Lisovyi, in which he promises, in case of his early release, not to engage in hostile activities. To the operative’s explanation that Lisovyi, V. S., is obliged to write a statement to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR condemning his past anti-Soviet activities, “Tikhaia” began to lean towards the idea that she needed to go for a visit in the near future and talk to her husband, to try to convince him to write the required statement.

She was also made an “earnest request” not to spread the facts stated in the letter (given that they have already been spread among the people we need), as this harms Lisovyi’s reputation, and neither the KGB organs, nor “Tikhaia” herself, are interested in this.

“Tikhaia” tried to find out what Lisovyi’s assistance to the KGB organs consisted of, promising that she would keep it a secret, but she was given the answer that she might not keep her word and thereby “subconsciously” harm her husband.

Deputy Chief of the 1st Section of the 5th Department

of the UKGB for the city of Kyiv and K/o

Capt. Kirichek

2.XII.77.

It is understandable that Vira’s attempt to obtain permission for a visit with me, ostensibly for the purpose of convincing me to write a repentant statement, cannot be taken naively. But in this same Memo, the sincerity of this intention of Vira’s is called into question: alarmed by these KGB actions aimed at discrediting me, she rather wanted to warn me.

The plan for discreditation was also connected with the intention to publish some text written by “Bodryi.” This is evidenced by a document in the 5th volume of Vira’s case file (p. 133).

“August 31, 1977, No. 5/2 – 6690

To the Chief of the UKGB of the UkrSSR Council of Ministers

for the city of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast

Major General Cmr. Yevtushenko, N. K.

Re: No. 5904 of 16.08.1977.

The publication of materials from “Bodry” in the newspaper, which compromise Lisovy and his accomplices in the correctional labor institution, will not, in our opinion, achieve its intended goal, as the agent is a recidivist criminal and is unknown in nationalist circles.

We consider it expedient to study the possibility of sending these materials, after fundamentally rewriting them, through a covert communication channel from “Bodry” to someone among the residents of Kyiv who knows Lisovy, in the hopes that this letter will be brought to the attention of his like-minded associates.

We agree with the planned preventive measures regarding Lisovy.

Deputy Chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR

Major General Yevtushenko Vk. No. 9664. September 1, 1977.

* * *

The following document also speaks to the plans for discrediting him in the camp:

November 3, 1977

To the Head of the Department for the Perm Oblast

of the Skalninsky ITL of the UVD

of the Perm Oblast Executive Committee

Major I. K. Pomaz

Settlement of Skalnoy, Chusovskoy Raion

Perm Oblast

Given that we are implementing measures to discredit V. S. Lisovy among his contacts in Kyiv, we ask that you simultaneously, to arouse suspicion against him in the correctional labor colony, conduct several conversations with the subject’s fellow inmates, in the course of which, without referring to Lisovy, you give them reason to suspect that information about them was received from Lisovy during his time in Kyiv.

In doing so, please take into account that V. V. Marchenko, who is currently in Kyiv, has been informed via the in-cell agent “Bodry” that Lisovy may have been recruited by the KGB (a copy of the agent’s report and his conversation with Marchenko is attached).

Deputy Head of the 5th Department of the UKGB under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR

for Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast

Colonel (signature) Hal.

I should note that throughout my entire time in the camps and in exile, I considered it unacceptable for me to write anything that could be read as an admission of guilt or a renunciation of my convictions, even if it were framed as a tactical move dictated by my particular circumstances—for example, my state of health. Nor did I write requests for a pardon, as that would also have implied an admission of guilt. I believed I had to affirm my position, which consisted of defending the nation and human rights as the core of a democratic political system. And at crucial moments, I was prepared to reaffirm this position.

Although discrediting political prisoners, particularly dissidents, was a general KGB strategy, in my case, as the “subject” of this effort, the KGB clearly exaggerated my influence both among political prisoners and within the dissident community at large. By constantly throwing me into ShIZO and PKT (and these repressions continued even after this second period of my “re-education”), the KGB was, in fact, acting contrary to its own plan to discredit me. During my second stay in the pre-trial detention center, if the goal was to diminish my stature in the dissident movement, the KGB could only have used the short statement I did end up writing at the end of this second stay in the Kyiv pre-trial detention center. I did not find a copy of this statement in the documents, so I cannot quote it. But I remember its content and can relate it almost verbatim: with this statement, I assure you that, in the event of my early release, I will avoid actions that would lead to my punishment. The KGB could have used this statement to release me, finding some formal justification for it. But my statement could not have satisfied them. From a formal standpoint, it did not mean I was depriving myself of the right to protest any illegal repressions—those that contradicted the Constitution or recognized international legal norms. Therefore, I could continue to insist on the unconstitutionality of the articles the KGB relied upon in its repressions.

And yet, writing such a statement was a concession. And here, the above-quoted statement by Chornovil, with its emphasis on “root causes,” is relevant. In resisting an evil that seeks to destroy you, any concession, as a manifestation of weakness, provokes evil, because it reinforces its conviction that you can be broken. After all, the agents of evil, as a rule, have a negative view of dialogue. And they are not inclined to make concessions themselves, except perhaps as cunning maneuvers to lull one’s vigilance and deliver a more painful blow. I am convinced that my statement was assessed as an opportunity to “finish me off.” After all, there were still three years of camps ahead, and exile on top of that. And so, on September 18, I was sent from the pre-trial detention center to Kuchino.

* * *

Around the middle of January 1978, due to my deteriorating health, I was sent to the hospital in Camp 35. My wife noted in a letter dated January 28: “If you had only been in the hospital for a few days by January 16, then how and who would know what pills to give you.” In my letter to Vira on February 2, I write: “I had a letter from Vasyl Ovsienko. If you see him, give him my regards and thanks for the photo (the second one). Ivan [Svitlychny] has jaundice; he is here in the hospital. I can’t manage anything poetic for Oksen right now; let him wait a bit, I’ll come up with something longer and more literary for him. It’s a shame the New Year’s cards didn’t reach everyone I wanted to greet: Halyna [Didkivska, wife of Ye. Proniuk], Halyna Polikarpivna with Myros [Ye. Proniuk’s son], Svitlana [Kyrychenko], Yurko [Badzio], Serhiy [Kudra] and Yaroslava [Serhiy’s wife], Liusia [Stohnota] and her fellow countrywomen, Liolia [Svitlychna] and Nadiika [Svitlychna].”

* * *

At the initiative of Serhiyenko, I wrote a text in Camp 36 criticizing the “Brezhnev” Constitution in connection with the preparation of the republic’s version of the new constitution. The text was addressed to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR as my proposals for the draft of the new Constitution of the UkrSSR. The text, as I recall (it has not survived), turned out to be too long, over ten pages, which complicated its transfer to the outside. The main thrust of my critique was that the text of the “Brezhnev” Constitution was saturated with ideological formulas and contained clear contradictions. Oles took the text from me. Semen Gluzman also read it, because he said a phrase to me that went something like this: “You are not the one who should be writing such a text.” I don’t know what he meant. In the first version of this chapter, published on the website of the Virtual Museum of the Dissident Movement, I suggested that this text had been destroyed. However, as I learned from the declassification of documents by the Security Service of Ukraine, the text I wrote was confiscated by KGB agents, although the original is not preserved in my operational file. Nevertheless, a document written by KGB officer Honchar (preserved in the fifth volume of Vira’s operational file, pp. 217–220) gives an idea of its content.

MEMORANDUM

regarding the statement by V. S. LISOVY, sent on April 7, 1978, to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the UkrSSR

LISOVY’s statement is of a hostile nature with slanderous attacks on the Soviet social and state system and the policy of the CPSU and the Soviet government.

As if to preempt the possible consequences for preparing and distributing an anti-Soviet, nationalist libel, the author begins by accusing the heads of state institutions of a biased approach to criticism and, as an example, cites his criminal prosecution in 1973 for sending an “Open Letter to the Members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine” to the authorities with a critique of the national policy of the CPSU and the Soviet government.

In the first and second sections of the statement, examining the new Constitution of the USSR and the draft Constitution of the UkrSSR from anti-Soviet positions, and in particular their ideological basis, he asserts that “Marxist ideology, like any other, is ‘aimed at the disunion and opposition of some groups of society to others, not at their unification.’”

In this connection, he believes that “the basis of a Constitution that purports to be at the level of modern legal science should not be ideological, but moral.”

Regarding the democratic rights and freedoms granted to the country’s citizens by the USSR Constitution, he proposes “not to restrict freedom of speech and the press with any political frameworks; any political views should be expressed and propagated, except for those that aim to destroy democratic institutions.”

He proposes to give a more precise “ethical-legal or ideological-philosophical” definition of the Soviet state, slanderously asserting that “the barrack-like, preemptive understanding of socialism and communism by the country’s military-bureaucratic apparatus has for decades led to mass terror in the country against people of various philosophical persuasions, including Marxists.”

Referring to Article 50 of the USSR Constitution, which proclaims freedom of speech, press, and assembly, he states that the legislator does not specify the legal norm of this article, “if it is to be understood as complete freedom of speech, then why does the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR contain Articles 62 and 187-1 (and corresponding articles in the codes of other republics).” The vague wording of this article, according to the author, “leads to abuses by officials through the attachment of labels like ‘enemy of the people,’ ‘enemy of socialism,’ and so on. In addition, LISOVY believes that freedom of speech also includes the right to criticize, so there is no need to proclaim it as a separate article, ‘for which, by the way, Soviet law considers it legitimate to punish as slander (Art. 187-1 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code), especially since it is widely used by the KGB to falsify charges.’”

Considering Articles 70, 72, 73, and 76 of the USSR Constitution, the author asserts that they are inconsistent and in some cases contradictory. For instance, while proclaiming a union republic (Articles 72, 73, 76) a sovereign socialist state, Article 70 “completely nullifies the sovereignty granted to them, asserting that federal ‘union laws are binding on autonomous units...’ and further, ‘the country is undergoing a constant process of destroying republican self-government by narrowing the sphere of competence of its state bodies.’”

The applicant believes that the national question in the Constitution is presented from centralist, great-power positions. “...the right to secede from the federation is a phrase that has no factual force, and propaganda for a republic’s secession from the USSR is immediately classified as a terrible crime.” In this regard, in his opinion, Article 7 of the USSR Constitution should be reworded as follows: “The development of the distinctiveness and national self-awareness of the peoples of the USSR is the foundation of their unique culture, a source of mutual interest, meaningful communication, and cultural mutual enrichment of peoples. Any persecution of individuals and organizations cultivating national distinctiveness and national self-awareness is prohibited by law.”

He asserts that Article 52 of the USSR Constitution does not grant equal rights to believers and atheists, “since some have the right to atheistic propaganda, while others are not granted the right to religious propaganda.” He argues that Article 51 disputably interprets the status of political organizations, and Article 6 “generally places the CPSU above constitutional law.” In Lisovy’s understanding, Articles 40 (proclaiming the right to work) and 60 (proclaiming work an obligation) should be combined into one, “since the latter completely absorbs the former.”

According to the author, the text of the USSR Constitution is carelessly and illiterately written from a legal point of view, and “the soviets, as organs of popular rule, in their current participation in the socio-political life of the country, are a dead form.”

In the third part, the author slanders the position of Ukraine within the USSR and puts forward a number of proposals that are hostile in content. He writes: “I ask that the remarks expressed be taken into account when editing the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, whose sixty-year history is one of continuous humiliation and repression, aimed at the destruction of national distinctiveness, the primitivization of national culture, and, finally, the destruction of the people as such.” In this connection, LISOVY considers “Ukraine’s secession from the USSR and the formation of a sovereign state” to be the main condition for satisfying the national needs of Ukrainians.

He also proposes to include in the Constitution of Ukraine:

“Instead of an ideological basis for the law, adopt a moral-legal one, ‘as befitting citizens with different political views and religious beliefs.’ The axiom of the Constitution should be the equality of people and nations, and the political ideal of the state structure—a democratic republic.

Clearly and fully specify the fundamental rights of citizens, the freedoms granted to them, etc., to avoid their arbitrary interpretation.”

Constitutionally prohibit:

Secret surveillance and persecution of citizens for their beliefs;

political censorship authorizing the publication of literary-artistic, philosophical, religious, and other works;

The KGB, as an organ of political surveillance, the persecution of citizens and organizations that promote national self-awareness and agitate for Ukraine’s secession from the USSR.

Declare all amateur organizations, including the Communist Party of Ukraine, to have equal legal status with cultural-educational, philosophical, political, religious, and other organizations,” and so on.

SENIOR OPERATIONAL OFFICER, 2ND SECTION, 5TH DIRECTORATE OF THE KGB UNDER THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS OF THE UKRSSR – MAJOR

/HONCHAR/

June 8, 1978

I will now note that Honchar, after assessing my Appeal at the beginning of the Memorandum as a hostile document, went on to present its main theses quite adequately, without distortion and with understanding. So, due to historical circumstances, his summary gives an idea of my Appeal’s content, since it is not known whether the original is preserved in any safe. It is also true that not only at that time but even in the early 1990s, I continued to use the term “ideology” predominantly in a value-negative sense. Only later did I come to the conclusion that the term “ideology” should be used in a value-neutral sense: it all depends on which ideology we are dealing with.

* * *

Vsekhsvyatska. From Kuchino, I was sent to Camp 35 (VS-389/35) at the Vsekhsvyatska station. I have not found a document in my papers with the exact date of my arrival at Camp 35, nor could I clarify it from my correspondence with my wife. But the *Khronika tekushchikh sobytiy* (Chronicle of Current Events, Issue 49 of May 14, 1978) reported: “Vasyl Lisovy has been transferred from Camp 36 to Camp 35. At the same time, his co-defendant Yevhen Proniuk has been transferred from Camp 35 to Camp 36.” From this, it follows that I was “moved” to Camp 35 in the first half of May 1978. Ukrainians in this camp also predominated not only in number but also in their level of organization. From the older generation, there were Myroslav Symchych, Vasyl Pidhorodetsky, Dmytro Kvetsko, Dmytro Verkholiak, and others. Among the dissidents were Yevhen Sverstiuk, transferred from Kuchino earlier than me, Mykola Matusevych, Myroslav Marynovych, Zinoviy Antoniuk, and Valeriy Marchenko (who was placed in this camp after an attempt at “re-education” in Kyiv).

At first, I had to master the profession of a lathe operator. My teacher was Mikhail Dymshits (sentenced in the Leningrad trial, initially, along with Eduard Kuznetsov, to the death penalty). I liked him: he was reserved, deliberate, and tactful. But I didn’t get to work as a lathe operator for long, because I was soon “re-qualified” as a stoker: in the boiler room, I worked at different times with Igor Ogurtsov, Yevhen Sverstiuk, and Mykola Matusevych. For a time, I wheeled coal in a wheelbarrow from the yard to the boiler room over slippery snow. This was the most physically demanding work I had in the camps. Then I shoveled coal into the furnace, which was easier. Meeting and communicating with Mykola Matusevych was a source of comfort for me. The reason was his character: he radiated energy and optimism, and he filled his conversations with humor. In this way, he tried to pull me out of my usual “melancholy.” He really did manage to transfer a share of his youthful energy to me.

I had an unexpected meeting with Yuri Orlov, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group. He had recently appeared in Camp 35. I don’t clearly remember the content of our conversation and, given the need for secrecy, he probably couldn’t specify his plan. He was interested in whether I would agree to join in its execution. Wary of further repressions, I refused to participate. However, considering the content of the document, this wasn’t my topic: in the camps, I did not write appeals or complaints concerning the conditions of imprisonment. I could only sign protests that were already written or participate in some collective actions.

Yuri Orlov described his plan and how it was carried out in his book *Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs from a Russian Life* (Moscow, 2006), which was presented at the Smoloskyp publishing house in early 2008. He arrived for this presentation with Lyudmila Alexeyeva. In this book, he expressed his general impression of Camp 35 thus: “Ukrainian nationalists predominated in this zone. The clear leader among them was Valeriy Marchenko—no relation to Anatoly Marchenko—but he also died later in confinement. Almost all of them had written renunciations of their Soviet citizenship and held very firm. The KGB men hated the Ukrainians, it seemed, more than other political prisoners.” And about his plan, he says that he decided to propose to his new friends that they prepare a Helsinki document on the situation of prisoners, compiled by the prisoners of different nationalities themselves. And to submit this text to the next Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Madrid. And then he notes: “We did it. The Ukrainians Marchenko, Antoniuk, Marynovych, the Lithuanian Plumpa, the Estonian Kiirend, and I divided up the topics. Each part was signed by the one who wrote it.”

And yet, at the end of my camp term, after participating in a general strike initiated by Paruyr Hayrikyan, I ended up in PKT. The *Khronika tekushchikh sobytiy* (Issue 49 of May 14, 1978) reported: “On April 16, Ogurtsov, Lisovy, Matusevych, Plumpa, Butchenko, Ravinsh, Hayrikyan, Tilgalis, and Kvetsko began a 10-day strike. A tenth prisoner, A. Altman, also intended to participate, but he was taken from the camp a day before the strike began. Lisovy was punished with ShIZO, then in April-May he was punished with PKT, and in early June, he was taken on a transport directly from the PKT (his camp sentence of 7 years was ending on July 6. He still had 3 years of exile to serve). Ogurtsov, Matusevych, and Plumpa served 40 days each in ShIZO with short breaks. In June, Ogurtsov was sent to Chistopol Prison until the end of his term (until February 15, 1982). Matusevych received 5 months of PKT, Plumpa 2 months. Butchenko served 15 days during the strike, and from April 25 he was placed in PKT for 2.5 months.”

I was taken from the camp on June 5, 1979 (the reduction of the term was a result of crediting time spent on transports—one day of sentence for every three days of transport). I get into the “voronok” (paddy wagon) and suddenly, a surprise: inside is Yevhen Proniuk, with whom my paths had never once crossed in the camps. A joyous meeting. We talked the whole way. I read Yevhen my poems; he liked them. So we were together in the transit prisons and on the train, until the railway tracks separated us. He—to Kazakhstan, I—eastward, to Transbaikalia, to Buryatia.

* * *

Relationships between the Families of Political Prisoners. The communication among the families of prisoners in the “big zone” and those who showed solidarity with them was a “window” in our barbed-wired and barred world. Not every political prisoner, especially among the dissidents, had relatives who could communicate with the dissident community in the “big zone.” For ordinary rural or even some urban families, the arrest of a relative was perceived only as a tragedy: they had neither the appropriate political consciousness nor any connections with dissidents. Moreover, circles of communication for people with dissident sentiments existed in Kyiv and Lviv, but not in many other large cities, let alone smaller towns. These were circles where information about our lives was shared, and the communication between families was crucial moral support for us. Letters provide the best illustration of this.

Here is an excerpt from Vira’s letter of September 2, 1975: “And on Sunday, we also had a great pleasure, because we organized a pre-school celebration. Yevhen wanted Myros to go off to school like this, so during a visit and in a letter he gave us a rough script, and Svitlana and Yurko developed it in detail and organized it at Halia’s apartment. The logistics were handled by Halia with Halyna Polikarpivna and Grandma Hrunia. There were three first-graders: Myros, Bohdanka, and Roman, and two second-graders: Slavtsia and Dmytryk Vasyliv. It was very lovely. Someday you will hear this celebration on tape. It was simply charming, though a bit too long. Greetings from the parents were read. Slavtsia with Dmytryk and Svitlana’s Serhiiko also greeted the first-graders. There was a farewell to dolls and cars, and math problems and riddles, and poems and quizzes, and Slavtsia and Dmytryk addressed you both. We took pictures, we’ll send them to you later. And we ran in the forest (remember, where Halynka, Yevhen, and I walked in the winter). We came home at 8:00 PM and went straight to bed, because school was tomorrow. So, greetings to you and Vasyl from everyone who was with us.” [Mentioned in this excerpt from the letter are: Myros—son of Yevhen Proniuk, Bohdana—daughter of Yurko Badzio, Roman—son of Vasyl Byshovets, Slavtsia—our Myroslava, Dmytryk—son of Vasyl Stus, Svitlana’s Serhiiko (son of Svitlana Kyrychenko, wife of Y. Badzio)].

V. Chornovil, in a letter dated April 11, 1976, reports: “Don’t expect a second March letter, because I addressed it to Spokiyna street. There I also wrote a little separately to Taras [Chornovil] and to Olena. I know that Taras was in Kyiv for the holidays and that they stayed with the Lisovy family, because I got a postcard from Kyiv.” Vira had a very friendly relationship with Olena Antoniv. She was benevolent and easy to communicate with; Vira felt a great spiritual kinship with her and loved her. Olena came with Taras, and they also visited Kaharlyk together. Taras would stop by Bratyslavska Street on his way to his grandmother’s in Vilkhivtsi in the Cherkasy region. Vira visited Olena with the children several times, and they toured Lviv. When Zinoviy Krasivsky was released from the psychiatric hospital in 1979, they visited Ivasyuk’s grave together that summer. According to Vira, after Ivasyuk’s funeral, hundreds of people would gather at his grave every evening for the whole summer. Vira was told that “they descend from the mountains”—proud people from the mountains. But Myroslava visited Lviv much more often, sometimes with friends, and then Taras would be their guide. She was with Olena the day before her death, and that night she had a prophetic dream; she said that something had happened to Auntie Olenka.

In every letter, collective greetings were passed on to us—from the families of prisoners and from friends. Here is a typical excerpt from Vira’s letter of April 27, 1977: “Greetings to you from Yurko and Svitlana, Halyna, Valia [Stus’s wife]. I just received a letter from Vasyl [Stus]. He has already rented a small room for himself. He is happy that he will be writing poetry in quiet. He is asking for the latest works on mining in German” [this was how he managed to have Rilke’s poems in German inserted into the German text].

The families of political prisoners and those who associated with them would gather for the birthdays of children and adults. Friends gathered for Svitlana Kyrychenko’s birthday, among them Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska and Borys Dmytrovych Antonenko-Davydovych. And at Vira’s birthday party, besides the closest friends, members of the UHG Mykola and Raia Rudenko, Oles Berdnyk, Mykola Matusevych, and Myroslav Marynovych were present.

* * *

After Oksen’s birth, Vira was on maternity leave. But one day, a lab assistant came from the Research Institute of Pedagogy, through whom it was conveyed that she should resign of her own accord. However, the lab assistant also passed on a piece of advice from Tamara Ivanivna Tsvelykh that she should not submit her resignation, as they had no right to fire her. Later, my wife did write a resignation letter and began looking for work she could do from home—editing, embroidery, and the like. Oksana Meshko was the first from the Kyiv dissident circle to visit Vira and the children. The families of Kyiv political prisoners communicated regularly, passing on information obtained mainly from letters, sometimes guessing what was encrypted in a letter or hidden behind a hint. Communication with families from other regions often took place during relatives’ trips for visits. Vira traveled to the Zhytomyr region twice to visit Vasyl Ovsienko’s mother.

Vira’s relatives from Kaharlyk provided great assistance to my family: her sister Aniuta and her husband Fedir Yovkhymenko, Mariia and her husband Borys Vasheka, and her sister Natalia. Her relatives disregarded threats to help her. By that time, district departments of the KGB had already appeared; their offices had no signs on the doors and operated secretly. They also monitored the relationships between relatives and Vira. Vira’s younger sister Mariia was fired twice from her job “at her own request”: the first time for retyping samvydav texts, which the secretary of the district Komsomol committee found in her desk (she was working as a typist in the district Komsomol committee at the time); the second time from the district department of public education, where she worked as a secretary. The second dismissal was at the insistence of the district KGB. The reason was that her sister’s husband was convicted for political reasons.

Among my relatives, Vira was visited by Nadiia Berdnyk (the daughter of my cousin Mariia), Halia Lisova (the daughter of my brother Petro), and Olya Medvedieva (the daughter of my aunt Vasylyna). Among friends, Serhiy Kudra and Serhiy Vasyliev, whom I have already mentioned, were not afraid to visit and help my family. Yaroslava, Serhiy Kudra’s first wife, an elegantly beautiful and nationally conscious woman, often visited Vira and the children. With her, Vira visited Mykola Bondar, who had returned after serving a seven-year sentence in strict-regime camps. Bondar had taught philosophy at Uzhhorod University since 1968 and was dismissed in 1969 for criticizing party-state policy. He scraped by with odd jobs and sent open letters to Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny. He was arrested in Kyiv on November 7 when, mingling with demonstrators, he unfurled a banner with a message something like “Shame on the party leaders of the USSR.” He was sentenced by the Kyiv Regional Court to seven years in strict-regime camps. After his release, he lived in a village in the Cherkasy region, resided in a dormitory, and worked on a collective farm.

In general, the Kyiv circle encompassed not only communication among the families of political prisoners but also those with dissident views who were not frightened by the intensifying repressions. In my wife’s case, her communications were closest with her fellow countrywomen (from Kaharlyk), Liudmyla Stohnota and Kateryna Vysotska, as well as with Mariia Ovdienko, Oksana Meshko, Leonida Svitlychna, Alla Marchenko, Svitlana Kyrychenko, Mykola and Raia Rudenko, and others.

* * *

My wife’s defensive actions. The KGB’s accusations against Vira can be summarized as follows: (a) transmitting various kinds of information abroad aimed at defending me and other Ukrainian political prisoners and dissidents; (b) Vira’s contacts (“sviazi”), both direct and written; (c) her participation in the distribution of aid in Ukraine from the Solzhenitsyn Fund. The main motive for these actions, according to the KGB, were “anti-Soviet” and “nationalist” convictions, in the KGB’s specific understanding of these terms. Vira recalls that she was largely prompted to actively defend me and other Ukrainian dissidents by Oksana Yakivna Meshko, who would say with bitter reproach that “Ukrainian women are not worthy of their husbands.”

Once, when Vira was returning from a short visit with me, a woman from Lithuania approached her near the ticket counter in Potma and started talking to her. That’s how they met. They traveled to Moscow together. This woman had good relations with Russian dissident circles—with the circle of Andrei Sakharov. She introduced Vira into this environment, acquainted her with the families of Yuri Shikhanovich, Andrei Tverdokhlebov, and Galina Lubarskaya. The next time Vira traveled with the children for a multi-day visit, she stayed at the Shikhanoviches’ apartment. Yuri Shikhanovich informed Vira that a press conference with foreign journalists on human rights was to be held at Tatyana Khodorovich’s apartment that day and suggested she take part in it. Vira agreed and gave a brief summary of events in Ukraine, including the repressions against me, Proniuk, and Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, who was facing particular pressure at that time. This was already mentioned in the previously cited document concerning the operational plan of measures against Vira.

As for the distribution of aid from the Solzhenitsyn Fund, Tatyana Khodorovich approached her with a request to get involved in this matter during a meeting in Moscow. In doing so, she noted that it was difficult to find people in Ukraine who would dare to do it, because they were afraid. After such a preface, Vira felt it would be awkward to refuse. So she agreed to transfer aid from a pre-prepared list. Not necessarily directly, but using her circle of contacts. I recall her complaining that the lists were far from balanced in terms of who in Ukraine should be given aid first. As she had predicted, this activity of hers, which lasted about two years (until she moved to join me in exile), became the subject of accusations and threats from the KGB.

Vira’s activity in defending me (I have mentioned some episodes earlier), her communication with the dissident community, and her involvement in the Fund’s activities prompted the KGB to increase pressure on her. This is linked to the elevation of her status in 1976—her transfer from DOP status (case of operational verification) to DOR (case of operational development), which could be followed by arrest. The fifth volume of her operational-investigative file (pp. 98–102) contains a memo on her from 1977, which shows how the KGB assessed her activities.

Analytical Memo

on DOR No. 193

Subject of DOR No. 193 “Tikhaya” –

Lisova, Vira Pavlivna, born 1937,

native of Kyiv Oblast, Ukrainian, non-party member,

higher education, temporarily unemployed,

residing at 4 Bratyslavska St., Apt. 192,

being the wife of Lisovy, V. S., convicted for anti-Soviet activity, she is a close contact and like-minded associate of the subjects of case “Blok”—“Krysa,” “Yarema,” “Kobra,” “Lisa,” “Fariseyka,” “Fanatichka,” and others. In addition, “Tikhaya” maintains contact with Moscow “dissidents” Hryhorenko, Turchin, Korsunska; in 1976, she took part in their gathering at Amarik’s apartment, organized for the latter’s “send-off” abroad.

“Tikhaya” maintains correspondence with foreign correspondents in the USA at her home address, as well as through relatives living in the town of Kaharlyk. In July 1976, the subject had contact with an emissary of the Canadian nationalist center OUN-s [in the document, “-s” is probably a mistake] “Mariia,” who visited “Tikhaya’s” apartment.

On June 6, 1975, the foreign anti-Soviet radio station “Svoboda” broadcast an interview with A. Hlazman, a Jewish woman who had emigrated from Kyiv for permanent residence abroad, in which information was relayed about those arrested for anti-Soviet activity: Lisova V. P.’s husband Lisovy, as well as Proniuk, Serhiyenko, Sverstiuk, and others. Hlazman had been on friendly terms with Lisova for a long time, visited her apartment, and learned details of the Lisovys’ personal life.

In July 1975, the PC service selected and legalized an outgoing international document from Lisova to Hlazman in the USA, which essentially contained a continuation of previously provided information about the arrested subjects of the “Blok” case. Currently, Lisova’s correspondence with Hlazman has weakened.

In the same year, 1975, Lisova began receiving packages of goods from various capitalist countries from persons unknown to her (England, Belgium, France), which gives reason to regard these facts as material assistance provided to her in connection with the arrest of her husband for anti-Soviet activity.

In coordination with the 5th Directorate of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, contact was established with Lisova in June 1975 with the aim of deterring her from engaging in hostile activity, separating her from the nationalist environment, and exerting a positive influence through her on her husband, Lisovy.

In the process of working with the subject, she constantly states that she does not wish to speak with representatives of the KGB and does not intend to influence her husband, as she is convinced that he was unjustly convicted, and she believes that the KGB unlawfully summons her for talks, and that KGB officers are not representatives of the Soviet authorities. At the same time, Lisova constantly informs her like-minded associates about the talks conducted with her and receives instructions from them on how to behave with the KGB, as well as moral and material support. For instance, after a talk with her on March 9 of this year, measure “S” [the letter “s” probably denoted eavesdropping on conversations] recorded conversations with “Blok” contacts “Lisa,” “Kobra,” “Sera,” as well as subjects of DORs “Podstrekatel” and “Beglets,” in which Lisova informed them in detail about the talk held with her. Based on this information, members of the so-called “committee” compiled “Memorandum” No. 8 of a slanderous nature. In addition, on March 22 of this year, Lisova spoke with a certain Yura (Moscow—an international call from a pay phone in Moscow) and told him in detail about the talks being conducted with her and about her being fired from her job.

Further, the table lists Vira’s “contacts.” In most cases, a codename is indicated next to the surname. Vira’s contacts are divided into groups. The first group includes: Svitlychna L. – “Kobra,” Rudenko M. – “Radikal,” Kotsiubynska M. – “Fariseyka,” followed by the surnames Badzio, Lukianenko (without codenames), and then Cherednychenko – “Krysa,” Cherednychenko – “Yarema,” Kyrychenko – “Fanatichka.” The second group: Matusevych – “Podstrekatel” (Instigator), Marynovych – “Beglets” (Fugitive), Stohnota – “Khudozhnyk” (Artist), Vysotska – “Khoristka” (Choirgirl), Didkovska – “Dora.” The third group is designated as “out-of-town contacts”: Hryhorenko, Moscow; Turchin, Moscow; Korsunska, Moscow. The fourth – “foreign contacts”: “subject of o/p” [operational surveillance?] “Mariia,” Alla Hlazman (USA), Teodor Huk (USA).

Vira used to visit Hryhorenko at his home in Moscow after he was released from the “psychiatric hospital,” and also during his visit to Kyiv to meet with Rudenko. The name Teodor Huk was used by Taras Zakydalsky. In 1976, he sent Vira a letter from the USA under his own name, which was confiscated (it is in Vira’s file, vol. 4, p. 211). Then he tried to send letters to Kaharlyk to Vira’s father under the name P. Lisovy, with a return address in London (one such letter is in the 2nd volume of my operational file, p. 101). He sent a package to Kaharlyk, which Vira was forced to refuse because at that time Kirichek was terrorizing her about foreign packages coming from “hostile elements.”

* * *

In April 1978, Vira was issued an official warning. V. Kirichek in his Report, contained in the same fifth volume (pp. 189–193), describes it as follows:

REPORT

(on the issuance of an official warning)

On April 6 of this year, a prophylactic measure was conducted in the UKGB building and an official warning was issued to the subject of DOR “Tikhaya” –

– Lisova, Vira Pavlivna,

born 1937, native of the town of Kaharlyk,

Kyiv Oblast, Ukrainian, non-party member,

higher education, employed as a home-based embroiderer

at the Darnytsia souvenir factory,

residing in Kyiv at 4 Bratyslavska St., Apt. 192.

This measure was carried out using legalized materials about “Tikhaya” and her husband Lisovy, published in the foreign anti-Soviet nationalist publications “Suchasnist” No. 9 for 1976; “Smoloskyp” No. 4 for 1976; “Ukrainske Slovo” for June 1977.

During the prophylactic talk, “Tikhaya” did not admit to hostile activity in her actions and stated that by sending documents about herself and Lisovy abroad, she pursued the goal of helping to secure the speedier release of her husband, who was, in her words, unjustly convicted. She does not see any slanderous nature in the sent documents and claims that she was allegedly unaware that “Suchasnist,” “Smoloskyp,” and “Ukrainske Slovo” are nationalist publications and that this does not interest her. When the operational officer tried to explain to her that these publications use the documents she sent for anti-Soviet propaganda, “Tikhaya” called this explanation a “distortion of facts” and an “insult to her person.” At the same time, she told the operational officer that she would complain about him to higher authorities, as he was violating her rights by groundlessly accusing her of anti-social activities.

Considering that during the prophylactic conversation the subject did not draw the right conclusions and remained in hostile positions, an official warning was issued to her, and a written explanation was demanded regarding the substance of the facts on which the warning was based.

“Tikhaya” tried to refuse to provide a written explanation, but after persistent demands, she assured the operational officer that she would come to the UKGB on April 7 of this year (since April 6 was her daughter’s birthday) and write such an explanation. On April 7, “Tikhaya” indeed appeared at the UKGB (with her two young children) and brought an explanation that she had prepared at home, motivating it by saying that she did not have time to sit in the UKGB and write, as her children were waiting for her. Just as from the oral conversation, it is clear from the explanation that the subject did not draw any conclusions as a result of the prophylactic measures, disagrees with the official warning issued, and remains in her previous hostile positions, covering them with arguments about her desire to alleviate the fate of her allegedly unlawfully convicted husband.

In this regard, the operational officer stated to the subject that the KGB, given her persistent refusal to change her hostile ideological beliefs and to stop spreading slanderous information, is obliged to continue working to explain the erroneousness of her views, to prevent her from causing any political damage to the state, and to obtain from her objective assessments of the substance of the accusations brought against her. To this, “Tikhaya” replied that she would not renounce her beliefs, as she considers them correct, and demands that the KGB leave her in peace.

Based on the foregoing, despite the official warning issued to the subject, I believe that the measures taken did not achieve their goal and that work with the subject to exert ideological influence and to restrain her from active hostile activity must be continued. It is also advisable, given “Tikhaya’s” desire to receive corresponding explanations regarding the accusations brought against her from more authoritative persons than the operational officer, to organize a conversation with her at the level of the UKGB leadership.

Deputy Head of the 1st Section, 5th Department of the UKGB

Capt. Kirichek 8/4/78.

Kirichek would summon Vira for interrogations and speak rudely to her. On one occasion, he brought her to a pre-infarction state, and she ended up in the hospital. So Vira was forced to write a statement addressed to Fedorchuk, in which, among other things, she expressed outrage at his behavior and declared that she did not want to have any conversations with him.

Instead of Fedorchuk, Deputy Chairman of the KGB, Major General V. M. Yevtushenko, had a talk with her. The fifth volume of her operational file contains a Memo about this meeting (pp. 203–206), written by Kirichek on Yevtushenko’s instructions. Kirichek recounts Yevtushenko’s advice to Vira that instead of appealing to the “anti-Soviet” organization Amnesty International, she should persuade me to submit a petition for a pardon to a Soviet court. This was the KGB’s position: Lisovy’s early release was possible, they said, if he admitted his guilt by renouncing his “anti-Soviet” and “nationalist” convictions. At the end of the memo, Kirichek recorded Yevtushenko’s recommendation concerning Vira’s complaint about Kirichek’s behavior: “It is recommended, taking into account Lisova’s request, that another operational officer continue prophylactic-educational talks with her, and that V. V. Kirichek periodically join the talks, thus creating psychological contrasts favorable to the UKGB organs in the subject and encouraging her to have a positive emotional aspiration towards the ‘new’ operational officer.

Deputy Head of the 1st Section, 5th Department of the UKGB, Capt. /signature/ Kirichek 5/19/78.”

And indeed, Major S. A. Lysenko began to “take care” of her, trying to be polite, while Kirichek joined in only occasionally. Vira, despite her refusals to have “talks” with the KGB agents, was forced to use these conversations to find out about me (in many situations, she was probably deliberately kept in the dark about my whereabouts) and to ascertain the KGB’s intentions regarding me. As the documents show, the KGB agents reproached her for using the KGB for her own interests but not making the concessions the KGB desired: she continued to communicate with the dissident community, pass on various kinds of information, and so on. And yet, it was probably as a result of this “diplomacy” of hers that in 1978 her DOR (case of operational development) status was changed to DON (case of operational observation). Though in 1979 she was put back on DOR status.

* * *

Oksana Yakivna Meshko often left samvydav materials and texts of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) at Vira’s apartment for their further storage somewhere else, in particular, outside of Kyiv. Once she came to Vira and said that she was completely “surrounded,” that she was being constantly followed, and that she needed to pass UHG texts to Alia Marchenko. This must have been in 1978–1979, when many UHG members had been arrested. Oksana Yakivna often passed texts written by UHG members to Alia for her to pass on to Pavlo Protsenko, who delivered them to Moscow, to people from the Moscow Helsinki Group. Vira told Oksana Yakivna to leave the texts with her, although she was afraid: what would happen to the children if she were arrested? The next day, very early, she left the building and saw a man standing near the entrance. This alerted her, but she walked on without looking back towards the tram stop. Only as she was getting on the tram did she confirm that the man had not followed her. So she went and delivered those papers to Alia.

* * *

Our apartment was searched three times. One search was conducted by the police in response to Vira’s complaint that someone was secretly entering the apartment (secret searches were one type of operational action). A second one was conducted on the grounds that Vira’s surname was found, among the surnames of other dissidents, in the notebook of a man arrested during an attempt to rob a department store in the Lviv region. In a letter to me dated January 28, 1978, Vira wrote: “About the search we had on January 23 in connection with the robbery of a department store somewhere in the Lviv region. The robber allegedly named me as an acquaintance of his, where stolen goods might be. The robber’s name is Dykyi. I have never heard such a name among my acquaintances, of course. They asked again about some supposed statement of yours.” During the search, Myroslava, on Vira’s signal, managed to throw one encrypted note into the toilet and flush it. The note contained information about aid to the families of political prisoners from the Solzhenitsyn Fund, which Vira was supposed to send to Moscow for a report. Although the distribution of aid from this fund was limited in Ukraine, the KGB was trying to stop this activity in Ukraine.

On the same day, they came to search Alia Marchenko’s apartment, announcing that they were conducting it in connection with case No. 13. She refused to open the door for them, so they broke it down and burst into the apartment. They found five thousand rubles on her. She stated that it was her father’s money, the well-known historian, Professor Mykhailo Marchenko. Later, she did manage to win back the money confiscated from her.

In the fifth volume of Vira’s operational file, there is a document concerning the arrest of Dykyi on October 30, 1977, in connection with the robbery of the “Verkhovyna” department store in the town of Boryslav, Lviv Oblast. The document states that Dykyi, Stepan Ivanovych, born in 1927, a native of the village of Pidhorodtsi, Skole Raion, Lviv Oblast, has had a criminal case opened against him under Article 81, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR. Then follows the text: “On November 2, a search was conducted by police at the residence of ‘Tarantul’ [the codename they gave him], as a result of which 6 notebooks with records of an anti-Soviet, slanderous nature and addresses of contacts, including subjects of operational records cases, were discovered and seized.” This is followed by a list of many dissidents’ surnames, written with errors, and their addresses. The documents lack a more detailed characterization of Dykyi, which would allow one to determine whether this was a provocation or something else. Perhaps Dykyi really did attempt a robbery, and the KGB just seized the opportunity, planting notebooks with a long list of Ukrainian dissidents’ names on him in order to have grounds for conducting selective searches? These questions will likely remain unanswered.

The third search was conducted on November 29, 1979, in connection with the KGB gathering materials to arrest Hryhoriy Prykhodko in Dnipropetrovsk (he was convicted along with Ivan Sokulsky in 1981). But this was just a pretext: this is evidenced by the Memo on a conversation with Vira regarding her relationship with Prykhodko, included in the fifth volume of her file (pp. 302–304). The grounds for the search were, again, the discovery of Vira’s name in Hryhoriy’s notebook and, probably, his letter to Vira, seized by the KGB agents (it is in the fourth volume of Vira’s file, p. 45).

* * *

Throughout my entire time in the camps, Vira tirelessly submitted applications for a review of my case and complaints about the illegality of the repressions against me in the camps to various institutions—the Central Committee of the CPSU, delegates of the 25th Congress of the CPSU, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the UkrSSR, and the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. All appeals to official Soviet institutions received replies that the court verdict in my case was well-founded, as were the punishments in the form of ShIZO or PKT. Therefore, Vira pinned her hopes on international human rights organizations. Her letter to Amnesty International was published in the journal “Suchasnist” (No. 9, 1976), which was reprinted in a condensed form in the English-language brochure “Three Philosophers—Political Prisoners in the Soviet Union,” published by the “Smoloskyp” publishing house in 1976. This brochure contained brief information about me, Proniuk, and Bondar. Vira sent texts of a similar nature to other international human rights organizations. She also appealed to the general secretaries of the communist parties of Canada and France. A reply came from Georges Marchais (in French), which someone known to Mariia Ovdienko translated for Vira: it spoke of the impossibility of helping in my case.

3. Exile

Novaya Bryan. First, I will note that what I present here is a significantly updated account of my exile compared to its previous version. This update was made possible by the aforementioned circumstance—the declassification of documents related to the “Blok” case. Thanks to this, I was able to make a number of clarifications and correct certain errors. I arrived in exile on June 21, 1979, after 16 days on the road (my exile term was later reduced—one day off for every three days on the road). In the “Stolypin” railcar, I would lecture the convoy guards for their profanity and rough treatment of the criminal prisoners. Upon arrival, I was handed over to the special commandant’s office of the Zaigrayevsky Raion Department of Internal Affairs of the Buryat ASSR. On June 21, I sent a telegram to Vira that I had arrived at the address: Buryat ASSR, Zaigrayevsky Raion, Novaya Bryan settlement, 3 Tereshkova St., dormitory No. 2, room 8. I was supposed to work at the local factory (“Novo-Bryansky Head Plant, Buryatavtoremont Production Association”) and was housed in the factory dormitory. Following Yevhen Proniuk’s advice, on the first day I had my picture taken at a local photo studio in the uniform of a strict-regime prisoner. Vira came for a few days with Oksen, who was about to turn seven. For the first time in many years, I finally had the opportunity to spend a longer time, and completely freely, with both of them and get to know my son better.

I started going to work at a lathe. At first, I was given a very simple task—cutting threads on screws: just hold the die straight! I could have patiently cut those screws for all three years of my exile. But such a prospect was undesirable for the KGB. What about “re-education”? I don’t recall how many weeks passed, maybe even a month, and then I come to the workshop and find myself in a familiar situation: there is no free lathe for me. I should have guessed how this would end. As expected, I stopped going to the workshop. I even made a cardboard sign for myself with the words that I was a political prisoner and had been deprived of work. I hung it on a string and went to the almost deserted town center, went to the post office, where a woman who worked there sympathized with me. This was Nina Georgiyevna Nepitayeva, one of the two women who worked at the post office.

As I managed to clarify (thanks to the newly available texts), I moved from the dormitory to an apartment in the summer, even before being fired from the factory. Nina Nepitayeva helped me find this apartment. It was a small room in a two-room, single-story house at 35 Lenin Street, located outside the center with its multi-story buildings. The houses on it were mostly single-story, often ordinary village huts, but among them were better ones, sometimes two-story. The house I moved into resembled a village hut, with two rooms. A lonely old woman named Mikhailova lived there, who, as I was later told, was from a family of Old Believers. She treated me with sympathy. Vira later got to know her and even had her picture taken in her old-fashioned clothes.

At the end of the summer, I completely gave up my attempts to go to work at the workshop. Finally, on September 13, 1979, the factory’s trade union committee unanimously decided to “Give consent to the factory administration for the dismissal of the lathe operator’s apprentice, workshop No. 5, Vasyl Semenovych Lisovy, under paragraph 4 of Art. 33 of the RSFSR Labor Code.” The next day, the General Director of the “Buryatavtoremont Production Association,” V. M. Pukhovskoy, fired me by his order.

* * *

Vira, worried about my situation, came to help me. We went to various institutions. In one office, a woman from the administration dared to tell us not to waste our efforts, because there was an order not to hire me. And yet, we spoke with the chairman of the local collective farm (with the symbolic name “Hihant” [Giant]), who promised work on his farm. Vira calmed down a bit and left. In October 1979, I did get a job at that collective farm. But what kind? One of the workers took me to a cowshed, now empty of cows but full of manure, and said that I had to clear a shallow ditch so that water could drain from a large, dark puddle that had formed in the middle of the manure piles. A clear mockery. I could have acted as I had before in such situations: in response to the ridicule, quit this “job.” But I decided to be patient. But after a week, not only did I feel ill, but I turned completely yellow. An ambulance took me away. I ended up in the hospital (Onokhoyskaya Hospital, infectious diseases department).

A somewhat strange hospital. It mostly had children, maybe only three or four adults. But two older boys, aged 11-14, had a habit of tormenting the younger girls and boys: pinching them, pulling them; they would cry. So I started to reason with these hooligans, I told the nurses about this bullying. In general, I thought it was a strange hospital. More for children than for adults. They gave me some pills. I was in the hospital for a little over a month. The doctors and nurses treated me well, and I am grateful to them for curing me. Among the documents, I found a medical certificate which states that I was in the hospital “from 10.25.1979 to 12.05.1979. Diagnosis: infectious hepatitis.” I returned to my old woman. I did not go back to work at “Hihant.”

I learned from the radio about the “entry” of troops into Afghanistan and on December 29 sent a telegram, again, to Brezhnev. A few phrases: I consider the action a mistake that will have grave consequences. Not just reason, but a premonition of grave consequences prompted me to protest, even though I was aware of its futility.

My landlady’s grandson (he lived in the center, in a multi-story building) invited me to celebrate the new year, 1980, at his home. I arrived late, when the guests had already left. The grandson’s association with me gave the KGB a reason to take an interest in him. I learned this now from a document dated March 11, 1980, signed by Bituyev, the head of the Zaigrayevsky Raion KGB Department of the Buryat ASSR. It states: “Lisovy resides at the apartment of a lonely elderly woman, Mikhailova, in the village of Novaya Bryan, whose grandson, Kokshin N. A., works at the factory. According to Mikhailova, the subject visits Kokshin’s apartment and sometimes stays the night with him. The latter also, during the subject’s illness, picked up his correspondence arriving at the Novaya Bryan post office, general delivery.

For the purpose of establishing operational contact, study Kokshin at his place of work and residence. Deadline: April. Bituyev.”

Among the documents is Kokshin’s explanation that his grandmother agreed to let me rent a room on the condition that “Lisovy will provide her with some help around the house.” But for the grandmother, it was probably more important not to be completely alone in her hut. Frail, neat, and laconic, she rarely asked for my help, trying to do everything herself. Though in the winter I would bring in firewood and load it into the stove that divided and heated our two small rooms. The toilet, as in all village huts, was in the yard. In the winter of 1980, I suddenly fell ill: something like the flu, a high fever. Given my living conditions, I had no right to be sick. So I resorted to very radical measures. I took probably two aspirin tablets, covered myself with my sheepskin coat, and burned with fever through the night, throwing off my soaking wet underwear and putting on dry. After lying like that for a night and maybe another day, I broke the fever and recovered within a few days.

* * *

All my mail was monitored. As is evident from the available documents, the KGB authorized a woman who worked at the post office with Nina Georgiyevna Nepitayeva to do this. No correspondence or package could be handed to me without the sanction of the local KGB. The KGB agents required the woman to submit regular monthly reports on everything I sent and everything that came to me. The KGB agents decided what should “get out” from me and what could be given to me. As can be seen from the number of confiscated postal items (this can be judged by reviewing the second and third volumes of my operational-investigative file), I was only given a little, and only a few of my letters reached the addressee. Below are excerpts from two overviews for December 1979 – January 1980 (I mark omissions with a symbol).

December 1979 – early January 1980. “On December 13, Lisovy sent a registered letter to the FRG to Brigitte Becher, in which he requested stylistic and philosophical texts in German. In a reply letter on January 8, 1980, Brigitte promised to send them to him soon. On December 13, Lisovy wrote to N. Detroux in Belgium (regarding philosophy books—my note). On December 13, [a letter was sent] to Mykola Danylovych Rudenko, who is serving a sentence… Lisovy sent similar letters to Mykola Matusevych and Dmytro Verkholiak, Kuzma Dasiv, who are also serving sentences. On December 20, Lisovy sent a letter to Anna Horbach in the FRG, whom he thanks for a book she sent him, which he very much wanted to have. On January 2 of this year, Lisovy wrote a letter to his wife in Kyiv… On January 8, Lisovy writes to his sister, Nijolė Sadūnaitė… During the past period, Lisovy was sent over 40 documents from abroad (England, FRG, Holland, USA, on behalf of the organization Amnesty International)… Almost all were confiscated…”

January 1980.

“To the Head of the Zaigrayevsky RO

KGB of the Buryat ASSR

Major Bituyev P.A., village of Zaigrayevo

On January 30, a document from Lisovy proceeded to the address of V. M. Chornovil, in which he writes: ‘…by all accounts, they are really cleaning out Moscow (and maybe not just Moscow, in Russia they do the same as in Kyiv). You have probably already heard about Sakharov. Of course, if they are now ignoring the serious protests of foreign communist parties, etc., then our protests mean even less, but I still sent a protest about Sakharov to the Prosecutor General (indeed, on January 28, a registered letter to the Prosecutor General of the USSR was processed—we did not open it, just as earlier he filed a protest against the intervention in Afghanistan in Brezhnev’s name—we did not open it). Because in such extremely serious cases and actions in their consequences, it is not proper to remain silent. What do you think about this, let me know. I received a postcard from Ovsienko; in addition, Nijolė forwarded his letter to me. He is having a very hard time there, but what can be done, except perhaps some more statements to his local authorities there. I am going to do that, as I can’t think of anything better…’.”

In addition, Lisovy sent requests to various ‘book-by-mail’ stores in Kyiv, Moscow, and Minsk with a request to send him the following books: 1. Barmenkov V. I. “Freedom of Conscience in the USSR,” 2. Burmistrov K. D. “The Role of Procuratorial Supervision,” 3. Griškevičius P. “The Soviet Political System,” 3. Blatova “International Law,” 4. Yadov L. “Self-organization and Forecasting of an Individual’s Social Behavior,” 6. Antonov B. G. “Under the Mask of Fighters for Human Rights.” He also ordered two dozen records from the Aprelevka mail-order base (the nature of the records is not yet known).

From the Boguchansky RO of the UKGB of the USSR for the Krasnoyarsk Krai, a query was received regarding Lisovy in connection with his contact with Nijolė Sadūnaitė, who is being checked under an operational records case (a corresponding response has been sent by us).

On January 29, a document from his daughter Myroslava followed to Lisovy’s address… She urges him to be prudent. Lisovy himself wrote in several letters to his wife about the inexpediency of the family moving to Buryatia for the period of his exile, as he does not want them to suffer any persecution and restrictions.

Reported for possible operational implementation. Head of the 5th Department of the KGB—Colonel /Shapayev/

* * *

Without quoting other such reports, I present here excerpts from one more (volume 2 of my operational-investigative file, p. 54).

July 15, 1980. To the Head of the Zaigrayevsky RO KGB of the B. ASSR

No. 5/4 – 1282 Major Bituyev

Ulan-Ude city, Zaigrayevo village

We also report that FRG citizen Anna-Halyna Horbach, who maintains constant written contact with Lisovy and provides him with material assistance, is, according to data from the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, the subject of an operational file, codename “Slava.” The subject and her husband, Horbach, Aleksey Fedorovich, who is also actively engaged in anti-Soviet activity, and their son Mark was in Ukraine in 1973 with an assignment from Ukrainian nationalist centers, was caught red-handed, and was expelled from the USSR.

In connection with the above, the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR requests that measures be taken to stop Lisovy from transmitting anti-Soviet and slanderous information to these persons…

Arkadiy Illarinovych Zhukovsky, who resides in Paris and maintains a stable connection with Lisovy, similar to Horbach, is one of the leaders of the foreign organization of Ukrainian nationalists-Melnykites, organizes and personally participates in the hostile activity of the OUN-ites against the USSR by establishing illegal channels of communication with nationalistically inclined persons in the USSR. In this connection, the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the UkrSSR is taking measures to intercept the channels of communication being established by the Melnykite nationalist center to Ukraine…

Attachment: Incoming 4373 – 2 pages,

incoming 4374 – 4 pages,

photocopy No. 585 of 7.07.80 – 4 pages

* * *

At the end of April, Nina Nepitayeva offered me to move into their summer room (Russian: *gornitsa*) in their house at 74 Lenin Street. Her husband, Ivan Sergeyevich Nepitayev, born in 1951, had a secondary technical education and worked as a carpenter at the already mentioned Novo-Bryansky Head Plant. The couple had two small children—a girl and a boy. Oksen became friends with the boy. Because Vira and the children arrived the day after my arrest on June 11 and had to wait for my trial, which took place on July 15. During this time, the two families became friends, and I will mention our communication with the Nepitayevs again after my return from the camp. In a memo from the fifth volume of Vira’s operational file (pp. 254-285), it says, “On June 10, a meeting took place with the subject of DON ‘Tikhaya.’ At the meeting, ‘Tikhaya’ said that on June 11 at 10:30 from ‘Boryspil’ airport, she is flying with the children to her husband in Buryatia.”

* * *

I could have avoided imprisonment and the camp by appealing to the district KGB for help in finding a job. The KGB could have helped, but on certain conditions. That is what the KGB agents were counting on when they arranged for my unemployment. From experience, I already knew: if the KGB decided to use refusal to work as an opportunity for repression, this institution had a myriad of ways to force me to refuse work. By creating certain conditions, including extremely humiliating ones, as was the case at the “Hihant” collective farm. And not only there. In the “Excerpt” from the Protocol of the collective farm board meeting that took place on April 22, 1980, signed by the chairman of the collective farm, Lukashevich, it is said: “He arrived at the ‘Hihant’ collective farm for work in October 1979, worked for 6 days, and Lisovy fell ill. After recovering, Lisovy did not return to work from 12/4/80. The board repeatedly summoned him, talked with him… One proposal was made: to dismiss Vasyl Semenovych Lisovy from work as of 4/22/80.”

So, from the end of April, I no longer looked for work, although I foresaw how it would end. And it was futile to look for it without the appropriate permission from the KGB. I was engaged in intellectual work in my little room, the walls of which were made of mighty half-logs, smooth and painted on the inside of the room. In particular, I wrote several poems: in one of the confiscated letters that came into my hands only now, as a result of the declassification of documents, I discovered a preliminary version of my poem “Kriz bil” (Through Pain), published in a later revision in the journal “Ukraina” (No. 16, April 1990). Before Vira and the children arrived, I painted one of the walls of my room (at the Nepitayevs’) with a landscape of trees and flowers. But the KGB agents decided not to allow me to see my family, taking me from my little room on June 11. The day before my family arrived. The real motives that prompted the KGB to resort to yet another round of repressions (they couldn’t put me in ShIZO and PKT while in exile, after all) are partially explained by a Memo in the second volume of my operational-investigative file (pp. 61-64), excerpts of which I present below.

MEMO

/on subject of KND No. 3 Vasyl Semyonovych Lisovy/

On June 11, 1980, the subject of DON-56 / KND No. 3 / Lisovy V. S. was arrested by the MVD organs on a criminal case initiated against him under Art. 209, part 1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code for leading a parasitic lifestyle, expressed in his refusal to find employment. Before his arrest, Lisovy, while awaiting the arrival of his family, was occupied with arranging his living situation, although on May 5 of this year, he was officially warned by the police organs in connection with his persistent refusal to find work, which he himself baselessly motivates by the presence of an illness. /According to the results of the last commission examination of his health, conducted on June 26 of this year in the consulting clinic of the Republican Hospital, Lisovy was found to be almost fully able to work./

On June 13 of this year, his wife arrived with two children and settled in the village of Novaya Bryan in the apartment he was renting. Upon learning of her husband’s arrest, she immediately informed his contacts about it. In particular, she wrote to Ye. Proniuk: “I’m racking my brain over this latest arrest. I think they got him for nothing less than Afghanistan…” /This refers to the letter that Lisovy sent to the General Secretary of the CPSU with demands to end the “occupation” of Afghanistan/.

It should be noted that abroad, there is heightened interest in Lisovy from representatives of foreign anti-Soviet and nationalist centers. Thus, the following persons maintain regular correspondence with him, send him the literature he requests, packages, parcels, and provide material assistance: Arkadiy Zhukovsky from France—according to data from the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, he is one of the leaders of the foreign organization of Ukrainian nationalists-Melnykites; Anna-Halyna Horbach from the FRG—according to data from the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR and the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the UkrSSR, she is engaged in nationalist activity, maintains written and telephone communication with those being monitored in the “Blok” case, receives anti-Soviet and slanderous information from them, which is then used in anti-Soviet campaigns abroad.

Also, a great many letters and postcards from foreign correspondents with expressions of sympathy and support are being sent to his address; in May of this year alone, over 40 birthday greetings were processed. During his time in exile, about 20 inquiries from abroad about Lisovy’s conditions of stay in the republic have been received by the MVD, OVD, and prosecutor’s office, and within two weeks of his arrest, 14 letters and telegrams from Belgium, the FRG, France, and England with expressions of protest over his arrest were received by the city and republican prosecutor’s offices. For June, Lisovy was invited to the anniversary conference of the Canadian Philosophical Association in Montreal. The invitation was sent by the president of the said organization himself, and in July he is invited to the Congress of Philosophers in France, in Strasbourg, by the President of the University of Humanistic Sciences, a certain Braun. In the invitations, Lisovy is greatly praised, called a Professor, a famous philosopher, whose works are allegedly widely known abroad, and is asked to do the honor of attending these forums.

Lisovy himself, during his exile, was engaged in reading scientific literature on philosophy, economics, sociology, and studying foreign languages /German and English/; he ordered books from book-by-mail stores and also received them from his correspondents from abroad. In addition, he wrote poems in Ukrainian and sent them to his acquaintances for review or simply for familiarization.

On July 9 of this year, Lisovy was presented with an indictment in the criminal case by the MVD organs, but he did not plead guilty, stating that he is not able to work due to illness. He made this statement despite official medical documents on the results of the examination of his health, which directly state that he, Lisovy, is practically able to work.

Sen. O/O of the 1st Dept. 5th Dept. KGB of the Buryat ASSR

Captain /signature/ /Antonov/

I said that what is stated in this memo partially explains why the KGB again took to repressing me. Because, as I have already noted, cutting screw threads with a die at the factory, I could have calmly worked for all three years, without being re-educated. This did not suit the KGB agents. That is why they deprived me of a lathe. An inducement to turn to them for help. And the first condition would have been to renounce my “contacts” (even if only written ones) mentioned in this memo, just as they demanded from my wife. The KGB repeated this technology of cornering a person later—after I served my exile and our family returned to Kyiv. Vira wanted me to show some degree of diplomacy to make our life together in Novaya Bryan possible until the end of my exile. I mean the kind of diplomacy that Mikhail Heifetz spoke of when describing how he managed to find work in exile. But I was so convinced of the KGB’s persistence in turning me into a creature intimidated by violence and devoid of principles that for me this path was cut off. Especially in a situation of being forced into contact through insidious violence. So I simply reconciled myself to any consequences of my choice. As for the listed expressions of solidarity with me by Western intellectuals, the KGB had isolated me well, confiscating the mentioned flow of correspondence and letting through only occasional letters of their own choosing. There was a certain calculation behind this, not always known to me. Except perhaps for the usual test: he’s communicating, therefore, he’s not afraid of us. And therefore, additional means of re-education must be applied.

* * *

In the “press-khata.” On the day of my arrest, I was placed in the pre-trial detention prison in Ulan-Ude. I have already briefly mentioned my life in a cell of this prison in my publication in the aforementioned issue of the journal “Ukraina.” I also mentioned there that Aleksandr Bolonkin was held in the same pre-trial detention center around the same time, who later, in his publication in the journal “Ogonyok,” spoke about his stay in a special cell—a “press-khata.” The expression “press-khata” is prison jargon, perhaps even planted to intimidate. Some prisoners hinted to me that this wasn’t even a real “press-khata.” That is, it all depends on how one is “pressed.” It refers to “manhandling”—inflicting pain through physical actions by some of the fellow inmates held in the same cell. At least in my case, such actions seem innocent compared to the tortures that all the “enemies of the people” went through, particularly members of the OUN or fighters of the UPA. I’m talking about limited actions: I don’t know to what extent these limitations were a result of adhering to KGB instructions or were the invention of the inmates themselves.

In the cell with double-decker bunks, where there were about ten prisoners, only two or three were the most aggressive. I later met one of them in the camp. There he treated me quite normally. One of them would come up and hit me with his fists, mostly on the same arm above the elbow, and sometimes in the side. When my arm turned blue and swelled, and the pain became intense, I had to offer my other arm, and it also began to hurt. The prisoner did this calmly, as if performing some procedure, and I would give him a “moral” lecture. Various other minor shoves don’t count, like, for example, shooting paper wads with a rubber band: one could protect oneself from them by hiding bare arms and legs under a blanket. I speak of limited actions because they didn’t hit vital organs.

Only one incident went beyond these “limits.” A package came for me from Vira. When they opened the “kormushka” (food hatch) and announced it, I tried to get it myself, telling the one who was already poised to do so. In response, he lunged at me with reckless boxing-style blows to my chest. My breath was caught, and I fell. I leave it unevaluated, as in other such cases, whether I should have received that package and eaten the food sent to me. I note this, even if some of my readers think I am excessively suspicious. But, in the end, I wouldn't have eaten those products myself anyway, so everything could have been done differently, without the use of brute force. But, as I noted earlier, in the conditions of camps and prisons, simple logic is often inapplicable. When I once received chocolate in a package in the camp and was told that we were “not allowed” to have it, I replied: why throw it away, it’s better to give it to some children. Was that not a manifestation of my naivety?

The second incident threatened to become an even greater “bespredel” (lawlessness). There was a good-natured prisoner in the cell who uncomplainingly did everything he was told. I tried to take his place and probably said that he shouldn't be the only one to clean: general cleaning was done by everyone, except for a few who passed it on to people like this prisoner. I don't remember specifically what else I said, but eventually, one or two of the more aggressive ones pronounced a sentence that I should beat this person. And if I didn’t do it, I would be beaten or raped myself. Since I refused to carry out such an order, those two dragged me and laid me on a bunk, standing over me. But at the moment they saw my readiness for any continuation, they suddenly left me and walked away. But on some evenings before bed, when everyone had already settled into their bunks, I could tell the prisoners about the dissident movement. They listened attentively, some even asked questions, only a few were ironic, probably as a precaution. With these stories, I seemed to compensate myself for everything else. I also told them about my political charge. Probably, on the eve or the day of the trial, I had to undergo a medical examination. A still young woman examined me: when I took off my clothes and she saw the bruises on my body, her eyes filled with tears. I still keep the mournful expression on her face in my memory and preserve a feeling of gratitude for her compassion.

* * *

The Trial. The Camp in Tsolga. My wife and children arrived the day after my arrest. She learned of my arrest from the Nepitayevs. One can imagine her state. With the children, she waited more than a month for the trial, which took place on July 15, 1980. She declared that she would act as a defender in the trial. Her request was granted. The first question to me during the judicial investigation: what was my attitude toward my previous sentence. I could have not answered this question as one that did not pertain to the substance of the case. But it was important for me to confirm my position once again. So I answered quite calmly that I had not acknowledged and did not now acknowledge any guilt. The trial did not last long. Vira’s arguments that I had tried to find work and that the “unemployment” was deliberately arranged for me were, of course, not taken into account. The sentence, in accordance with Article 209, part 1, and 41 of the RSFSR Criminal Code (evasion of labor), determined imprisonment in a camp for one year. That is, “the full monty.”

I served my sentence in a camp for criminals—in the village of Tsolga (OV-94-5-“V”) in the Mukhorshibirsky Raion of the Buryat ASSR. The most vivid image I remember is the spacious camp yard, where prisoners were lined up in a long column with metal bowls in their hands—for food. They would toss us a ladle of some kasha, potatoes, or soup. The prisoners, including me, were starving. The prisoners treated me neutrally, some—rudely-neutrally (“get out of the way”), most—simply neutrally, some—benevolently, even friendly. Probably partly because I fell outside their categories, as it became known that I was “political.” But perhaps only partly. Because once, one of the prisoners called me over, saying someone wanted to see me. It turned out that an “avtoritet” (authority figure), as I later learned, wanted to meet me. I don’t remember the content of the conversation with him, but I think he was interested in who I was and what I was convicted for. But I clearly remember how, as we parted, he tossed a phrase to one of those present: give this “muzhik” (peasant, regular guy) some tea. So, I was assigned to this category. The tea, as in the political camps, was brick tea, so the prisoner handed me a neatly cut part of the brick, perhaps the size of a matchbox. I recall an instance (it seems not a solitary one) when in the toilet room a silent prisoner warned me: “Be careful, you’ll get ‘contaminated.’” Meaning, I shouldn’t wash my hands in the sink where homosexuals wash.

The administration treated the prisoners, including me, rudely. But I did not witness any extremes, e.g., beatings. Someone advised me to write an application to enroll in the camp’s technical school. I did so and for some time attended classes. I was mastering the profession of a lathe operator. Before the New Year holiday (on the eve of 1981), many prisoners, including me, were thrown into ShIZO. Then I was assigned to relatively light work—stuffing mattresses with cotton wool. At this work, I more or less calmly served out the year of my imprisonment. I was taken from the camp on time (June 11, 1981), first sent to the pre-trial prison in Ulan-Ude, and a few days later—to the disposal of the special commandant’s office in Zaigrayevo. As I was told, exiles are sent back to where they were taken from.

* * *

It was only in connection with the declassification by the SBU of materials related to the “Blok” case that I learned about the powerful wave of protests that my arrest provoked in Western countries. True, Taras Zakydalsky told me in the early 90s that in the US, particularly among philosophers, a protest movement against the arrest of Ukrainian philosophers had been organized. It is clear that the KGB concealed all these protests and appeals from me. And not only those addressed to the Prosecutor or the Prosecutor’s Office of the Buryat ASSR, but also to me personally. The vast majority of these protests were sent by individuals associated with Amnesty International. But a significant number of appeals and protests came from private individuals. As I have now learned, a significant number of these protests came from professors, and probably also students, of various colleges at Oxford University (England). Overall, protests came from individuals from many European countries: most from England, Belgium, the FRG, and France. Such appeals continued to arrive even after I had served my one-year prison term, with a large portion of them dated 1982. Behind this was the anxiety that the KGB might again use the article on “parasitism” to prevent me from returning to Kyiv after my exile ended. This was directly emphasized as a warning in some appeals. This was a common practice. Especially unexpected for me was the invitation to a philosophical congress being prepared by the University of Strasbourg, on behalf of Lucien Braun. I present its text here in a Russian translation (this translation was made for the KGB’s needs after it was received).

Université des Sciences Humaines

de Strasbourg

Faculté

Langues, Littératures

et Civilisations étrangères.

Esplanade – 22,

rue Descartes.

Tel (33) 61, 39, 39 –

Paris 385 Strasbourg, le 25 juin 1980

USSR

Buryat ASSR,

Zaigrayevsky raion,

Novaya Bryan,

ul. Lenina 35

To Vasyl Lisovy

Dear Professor,

I have the honor of sending you the attached documents (program, registration form) concerning the 18th Congress of the Society of Philosophy.

You would do the University of Humanistic Sciences of Strasbourg, of which I am President, a great honor if you would agree to participate in the work of this Congress.

Hoping that we can count on your participation, please accept, Professor, the assurance of my respect.

L. Braun,

Professor of Philosophy,

President of the University of Humanistic Sciences of Strasbourg.

Given that I had only managed to finish my postgraduate studies and defend my dissertation, and I later assessed my first publications as preliminary, it is clear that in this case, a great role was played by the sense of solidarity of colleagues who wanted to protect and support me in this way. I think that the wave of protests caused by my second arrest and imprisonment was an important, if not decisive, factor that saved me from being imprisoned a third time, again under the article on a “parasitic lifestyle.”

* * *

Ilka. After serving my time in the camp, the special commandant’s office in Zaigrayevo sent me not to my old place, in Novaya Bryan, but to the settlement of Ilka in the same Zaigrayevsky Raion. The special commandant advised me to turn to the director of the Ilka auto repair plant for employment. A certificate dated June 15, signed by the plant director A. Mupkin, states that as of July 1, 1981, I was hired as a lathe operator in the mechanical workshop of this plant. At first, I lived in an apartment rented from some lonely old woman, across from the plant. But since Vira and the children decided to move in with me, during her visit we bought half a house, repaired it, and lived in it until the end of my exile. Our house (at 20 Profsoyuzna St.), as the local residents told us, had been built by deported Lithuanians and their families, punished for their participation in the national liberation movement.

The family moved to join me in the second half of August 1981. Before that, Vira visited the KGB and warned them that she would abide by the law, that she would not be absent from the apartment for more than six months. And she hoped they would not do what was done in Moscow with the Podrabineks’ apartment (Sasha Podrabinek was a political exile, his wife came to him in exile, gave birth to a child, could not travel to Moscow, and the apartment was sealed). But in Vira’s case, the KGB was interested in her moving to me in exile. This is stated in a memo, the text of which I present here.

MEMO

based on materials of DON No. 312 on “Tikhaya”.

The subject of DON “Tikhaya” being studied is:

Lisova, Vira Pavlivna, born 1937, native of the town of Kaharlyk, Kyiv Oblast, Ukrainian, non-party member, with a higher education, works as a librarian at Kyiv Secondary School No. 183, resides in

Kyiv at 4 Bratyslavska St., Apt. 192

“Tikhaya” came to the attention of the KGB in 1974. The grounds for opening a DOP on her (in December 1974) were agent-provided, investigative, and other operational materials attesting to the subject’s nationalist convictions, her involvement in the storage and distribution of anti-Soviet documents, including the “Open Letter to the Members of the CC of the CPSU,” authored by her husband Lisovy V., convicted in 1974 for nationalist activity under Art. 62 part 1 of the UkrSSR Criminal Code to 7 years of imprisonment and 3 years of exile.

“Tikhaya,” being a like-minded person and close contact of many subjects of the “Blok” case, during her trips for visits with her husband, also met with anti-Soviet-minded individuals living in Moscow—Korsunska, Velikanova, and others.

In the process of working on the DOP, through agent networks and OTM [Operational-Technical Measures], it was established that “Tikhaya” was influencing her close contacts in a hostile spirit, defaming and slandering Soviet reality, and attempting to transmit slanderous information in private correspondence with foreign correspondents.

In July 1975, the foreign anti-Soviet radio station “Svoboda” [Radio Liberty] broadcast an interview with A. Glazman (a close contact of “Tikhaia”), a Jewish woman who had emigrated for permanent residence abroad. In the interview, she disclosed information about Lisovyi, Proniuk, Serhiienko, Sverstiuk, and others who had been arrested for anti-Soviet activities. In July of the same year, the “PK” service [Mail Censorship] intercepted and processed an outgoing international document from “Tikhaia” to A. Glazman in the USA, which essentially contained a continuation of the information about the arrested subjects of the “Blok” case that was used by Radio Liberty.

Furthermore, beginning in 1975, “Tikhaia” started receiving material aid from various capitalist countries in the form of parcels from individuals unknown to her (England, France, Belgium, etc.).

In view of the foregoing, in July 1976, an operational development case [DOR] was opened on “Tikhaia.”

In the course of developing the subject, data were obtained indicating that she maintained close contact with many subjects of operational surveillance cases, in particular, with “Fariseika” [The Pharisee Woman], “Fanatichka” [The Fanatic Woman], “Marta,” and “Dora,” as well as with the now-convicted for anti-Soviet activities Matusevych, Marynovych, Rudenko, Meshko, Berdnyk, and others. She also took part in a gathering organized by Moscow dissidents on the occasion of the “send-off” for the anti-Soviet figure Amalrik, who was expelled from the USSR.

Furthermore, data were obtained that she was transmitting slanderous information to nationalist centers abroad, which was then used in anti-Soviet propaganda by such nationalist publications as “Suchasnist,” “Smoloskyp,” “Ukrainske slovo” (Press Service of the ZP UHVR), the radio station “Svoboda,” and others.

In 1977, while returning from an unsuccessful attempt to visit Lisovyi (who was at that time undergoing individual re-educational work in the KGB pre-trial detention facility of the Ukrainian SSR), “Tikhaia” and her children stayed with her Moscow contacts, to whom she gave slanderous information about alleged persecution by the KGB. This information was later used in hostile campaigns abroad against the USSR.

On the basis of the processed materials, “Tikhaia” was subjected to a prophylactic conversation in April 1978 in the UKGB building, and she was issued an official warning in accordance with the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 25, 1972.

After the prophylactic conversation (during which the subject did not admit to her hostile activity), “Tikhaia” wrote a statement to the Chairman of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, in which she asked him to protect her from what she claimed was persecution by the KGB. In connection with this statement, a conversation was held with the subject on April 20, 1978, by the Deputy Chairman of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, Major General Comrade V. M. Yevtushenko.

Considering that the subject did not engage in active hostile activity after the prophylactic conversation, but, while remaining in her nationalist positions, continued to maintain contact with the subjects of the “Blok” case and their contacts, in June 1978 the operational development case on “Tikhaia” was reclassified to an operational surveillance case [DON], and individual re-educational work with her was continued on the basis of personal contact.

In the course of meetings with the operative, “Tikhaia” tried to prove her loyalty to the existing system and convince him that she was not engaged in hostile activities. However, as incoming agent-operational materials and conversations with the subject testify, she behaved insincerely and tried to use the personal contact as a cover for conducting hostile activities.

In October 1980, materials were received from agent “Myroslava” indicating that “Tikhaia” was involved in receiving and distributing material aid from the so-called “fund for assistance to political prisoners.”

In 1979-1980, in the course of personal contact with operative Major Comrade S. A. Lysenko, “Tikhaia” was persuaded to travel with her children to her husband, V. Lisovyi, who was serving his exile in the village of Nova Bryan in the Buryat ASSR, and to live with him until the end of his term of exile.

In July 1980, the subject traveled to the village of N. Bryan. However, because her husband was arrested at that time and sentenced to one year of imprisonment for parasitism, the subject returned to Kyiv.

Currently (in July of this year), “Tikhaia” intends to go again to live with her husband, who, after serving his sentence in a correctional labor institution, will be serving his exile in the village of N. Bryan for 2 years, starting from July 1981.

“Tikhaia” intends to restrain Lisovyi from rash actions and prevent him from being prosecuted again for hostile activities.

In order to disrupt and sever ties with like-minded individuals who supply “Tikhaia” in Kyiv with funds from the so-called “fund,” which she subsequently distributes among convicts and their families, the expediency of the subject’s departure from Kyiv to her husband is obvious. In addition, there is reason to believe that “Tikhaia” will transfer all contacts related to the “fund” to the proven and reliable agent “Myroslava,” whom the subject trusts completely.

Deputy Head of the 5th Department of the UKGB of the Ukrainian SSR

for the city of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast

Major Levutskyi

18.V.1981

Sr. Operative of the 1st Section of the 5th Department of the KGB

Bur. ASSR

Major /Dambaiev/

14.I.1982

I should note that later, in some documents of the operational investigation, dissatisfaction was expressed that Vira had not passed on any information about the “fund” to “Myroslava.” And what information could she have passed on? After all, the people in Moscow who distributed the aid themselves chose who they could trust. And who in Kyiv could have distributed it.

* * *

So in September, our whole family was together. Oksen started third grade at the Ilka secondary school, and Myroslava started ninth. The residents of Ilka treated us well, as did the teachers at the school with the children. Myroslava commanded respect; she was genuinely well-read. Although her favorite subject was biology, she read a lot of world, Ukrainian, and Russian literature.

She finished school almost with honors, with only a few B’s. After some minor jobs on a lathe, I was assigned to drill holes for automobile discs. The discs were heavy, but I was satisfied with the simplicity of my work. And so I drilled those discs until the end of my exile. The workers treated me well, and I had no reason to complain about the factory management either.

Vira ran the household. We had a small garden near the house with currant bushes, and also a small vegetable patch where we grew potatoes. We planted flowers in the yard, and on the wall next to the front door, I painted a large, bright sunflower. The fruit trees we were used to in Ukraine did not grow here. Only a small apple tree with apples slightly larger than crabapples grew near our house. We bought firewood to heat the stove: a dump truck would bring logs of mighty trees—larches and pines. I took pleasure in touching the strength of these trees as I split their bodies with my ax.

The Buryats lived in a separate part of Ilka, across the river: we would cross a small bridge to buy milk from them. In winter, the milk was first frozen in a container and then stored as frozen discs, which were placed on a shelf in the entryway. The winter was harsh, without any thaws. The climate was one of contrasts: a dry, sunny summer with wind blowing in one direction, and a severe winter. Temperatures below minus forty degrees Celsius were not uncommon. But we found the thirty-degree frost in Buryatia easier to bear than ten-to-fifteen-degree frost in Ukraine. The air was dry. The store had a poor selection—vermicelli, canned goods, and sometimes in the fall, they would bring apples, watermelons, and some vegetables. As in Nova Bryan, the locals bought a lot of vodka. But, unlike in Nova Bryan, where drunken brawls would break out on payday, it was calmer here.

* * *

Two houses down from us lived a lonely old woman (Afanasieva), very old; Vira and I would drop in to visit her. After the revolution, her husband had been an enthusiast for establishing communes. She told us what it was like to live in those communes: people’s homes and land were taken away, and they were settled in a barrack. For a time, this granny, then a young woman, lived in such a barrack. They did everything by command: they went to a common table and to bed at a signal. They lived on the verge of starvation and were forced to steal bread, hiding it between their legs. But one day, they were forgotten; no food was brought, and the guards disappeared. They had to leave the barrack, and each faced the problem of how to survive, now that they were deprived of everything. Her husband was arrested and shot. The granny was still mobile and even sometimes walked across the road to the well for water. Still, the neighbors, including us, would stop by and ask if she needed water brought or any other help. One winter, her bucket came loose and fell into the well. I had to recall my teenage skills—climbing down the well to retrieve the bucket. Fortunately, the well was not deep: the ladder I brought was sufficient; I only watched the blocks of ice hanging over my head.

* * *

One time, a history teacher from the Ilka secondary school invited Vira and me on a “picnic” to the taiga, and we took Oksen with us as well. The teacher’s husband (an engineer who worked at the Ilka auto repair plant) drove us all to the taiga in his car. It was our first trip into the taiga. It impressed us with its grandeur: mighty larches, cedars, pines, some of them fallen. It was an unforgettable impression. But, among other conversations, we mentioned the demands of university students in Ulan-Ude for instruction to be conducted in the Buryat language. This was an event that had gained notoriety at the time. The history teacher said something like: “As long as the Party secretary of Buryatia was a Russian, they were more submissive, but as soon as a Buryat took over, they even wanted their own university in Buryat.” Vira responded: “And where else should they have their own university, if not in Moscow?” After that, the teacher changed her attitude toward Vira and stopped speaking to her.

Here, in Buryatia, the same national policy was in effect as in Ukraine: the city centers were settled by immigrants, with a predominance of Russians and Russified national minorities. This was instead of having cities formed with a predominance of the local population, which would have led to the emergence of Buryat-speaking cities. Hence the prevalence of the word “poselok” [settlement], where the relocated and settled lived. The word “perekochevali” [migrated], which we heard specifically in Buryatia, was popular among ethnic Russians.

The Buryats, however, lived compactly and separately in the countryside. Consequently, the city center or the entire city acted as a “pump” that drew in and Russified the Buryats—those of them who decided to move to the city. Having moved, they were forced to communicate in Russian, and their children attended Russian-speaking kindergartens and were already forgetting their parents’ language. The “pump” was working. Moreover, as long as the village lived in relative isolation, traditional culture was preserved on its own. But the process of modernization, the foremost indicator of which is the growing role of cities (and urban, modern culture), due to the dominance of a foreign culture in the cities, begins to deform the traditional rural culture as well. Not to modernize, but to deform it. For rural people increasingly seek work in Russified cities. The first consequence is the deformation of language—a phenomenon in Ukraine we denote by the word “surzhyk” (a Russo-Ukrainian pidgin). The policy is well known to Ukrainians: what the Ukrainian national communists wanted to do—to create a Ukrainian-speaking working class in the cities—was assessed as a serious threat to the communist empire. For this meant the creation of a modern Ukrainian nation. Hence the general practice in the USSR—the transformation of cities into centers of Russification.

In 1982, Leonida Svitlychna had to leave the ailing Ivan, who was in exile in Maima (Gorno-Altai Oblast). She had to leave for about two weeks to be at her apartment in Kyiv, in accordance with the aforementioned requirement. So she asked Vira to stay with Ivan during that time. Vira agreed and went to take care of Ivan. Her conversations with Ivan were interesting and worthy of a separate story. From there, Vira wrote letters to Nadiia Svitlychna in the USA (she lived near New York). But, in connection with the aforementioned national policy, in Maima, as in Buryatia, there was the same tension between the Russian-speaking population (with a predominance of ethnic Russians) and the bearers of the local culture—with a predominance of Altaians. And the reason for this was the same effort to turn cities or “settlements” into melting pots, into centers of Russification.

One more unforgettable trip is worth mentioning here. This happened not long before our departure for Ukraine. The Niepitaiev couple invited us to visit the sites of the Decembrists in Petrovsk (Chita Oblast). The host, Ivan Sergeevich, had a car that could fit the five of us—Ivan, Nina, Vira, me, and Oksen. The feeling of an echo across the centuries with the fates of the political prisoners—the Decembrists—did not leave us from the moment we set foot on the site of their penal servitude and exile. We spent some time near the well-preserved wooden house of the Ukrainian Decembrist Ivan Gorbachevsky; I even sat on the steps of the house. We were impressed by these sturdy buildings, built of mighty timber, over which time seemed to have no power. The dry climate of Buryatia contributed to their good preservation. We also visited Gorbachevsky’s grave.

But at the same time, during the drive, we saw in the taiga the striking consequences of man’s wasteful activity: large areas of felled trees, left to rot—as if some catastrophe had swept through and left ruins in its wake. The second thing we observed in Nova Bryan, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent in Ilka, was a plain outside the town completely littered with garbage, mostly household waste. Was garbage not being taken to any dumps at all? Or was it just dumped outside the town for the wind to carry across the plain?

* * *

The KGB did not bother Vira or me during our entire time in Ilka. Just as during my time in Nova Bryan, I had no conversations with them, nor did they summon me for any. With one exception. The investigation of Zorian Popadiuk, who was serving exile in Kazakhstan, in the Aktobe region, became the occasion for an interrogation on December 2, 1982. In September 1982, he was arrested (and in early April, convicted under Part II of the article on anti-Soviet agitation). But this was just an occasion, as it was no problem for them to conduct a secret search of our apartment. And if we had been keeping any letter from Zorian that could be useful for the “case,” they would have seized it at the post office or conducted an official search of our apartment for it. Rather, in this case, the investigation of Zorian was just a pretext for a conversation.

MEMORANDUM

on the interrogation of V. S. Lisovyi

On December 2, 1982, the subject of DON-56, V. S. Lisovyi, who is serving a sentence of exile in the Zaigraevsky district, was interrogated as a witness by investigator V. G. Kozhevin of the KGB of the Buryat ASSR, on the instruction of the investigative bodies of the KGB of the Kazakh SSR.

An operative was present during the interrogation.

In the course of the interrogation, “L” was asked questions about his daily life, his contacts in the district and beyond, his relationships with work colleagues, his worldview, and his future intentions.

Lisovyi said that he was, for the most part, satisfied with his current situation: the attitude of those around him is not hostile, he is provided for materially on an equal footing with everyone else, and, with rare exceptions, he has no health complaints. The relationships within his family are normal; his wife constantly cares for him and the children. He raises his children without imposing his views on the existing reality, as, in his words, “they see everything for themselves, draw their own conclusions, and reality teaches them better than any instructors.” He would gladly exchange his position as an exile for residence abroad, but he does not intend to go abroad after serving his term of exile and is not taking any steps in that direction.

When asked about his attitude toward his past activities, Lisovyi tried to evade the question but said that a mature person rarely changes his convictions, and even outward agreement often conceals his inner conviction of being right. At the present moment, he is making no attempts to resume his activities, as he has grown tired over the last 10 years, but the future will show who was right.

At present, he is concerned about his future life—where he will be able to find work, and the attitude of acquaintances and his environment upon his return to Ukraine.

The interrogation sought to establish when, where, and under what circumstances “L” met the person under investigation and whether he maintained contact with him. “L” said that he met the person under investigation when he was serving his sentence in a corrective labor camp in the Mordovian ASSR. He was being transported from his unit to the medical section, and along the way, a young man from another unit was put in the vehicle for transport to a punishment cell [SHIZO] or cell-type premises [PKT]; they got acquainted and exchanged addresses. “L” wrote to him only 2 or 3 times and received as many letters in return. He did not try to keep the letters, but it is possible they are at home and he is prepared to present them. “L” does not remember who sent him the address of the person under investigation when the latter was sent into exile.

On the way to the house where “L” lives, the investigator and the operative encountered the subject of DOR-673, “Tikhaia,” with “L.” She immediately understood who they were talking about when “L” mentioned his name, and stated that there had been one letter from him of a mundane nature, which had not been preserved.

Upon entering the apartment, “Tikhaia” took out a stack of letters and offered to let them look through them, and then to search the entire apartment. She constantly said that Vasyl did not know this person, that the letter was the only one and contained no “sedition,” and that no letters were kept except for business-related ones and those from Sverstiuk, who is their friend.

During this time, “L” took no action to find the letters.

Upon returning to the office, the interrogation continued.

Regarding the substance of the interrogation questions, “L” answered evasively, not naming specific individuals or addresses. He did not deny the fact of being acquainted with many people convicted for anti-Soviet activities, but he “forgot” where, with whom, and with whose help he met them.

During the interrogation, he appeared outwardly calm and, through counter-questions in a polite manner, tried to find out what the investigation knew about the activities of the person newly brought to justice.

The interrogation lasted about 3 hours; no new data on the connections of “L” in the district and beyond were obtained.

Operative of the Zaigraevsky

District Department of the KGB of the Buryat ASSR Captain /signature/ (G. Cheremnykh)

* * *

The term of exile (determined by a separate, clarifying court order) ended on May 8, 1983. After that, I voluntarily continued to work at the factory until mid-June. A few days later, our family packed up and departed by plane for Kyiv, with the exception of Myroslava, who had already passed her secondary school exams but stayed for the graduation party. She lived with the family of a classmate. As planned, we first flew from Ulan-Ude to the capital of Uzbekistan, stayed for one day, and spent the night with acquaintances. From there, with a layover in Almaty, we arrived at Boryspil.

Our return home, like that of any other political prisoner, was considered by the KGB services as an event to be closely monitored. This is indicated by a document marked “Secret. Urgent.” Among other things, it states: “Lisovyi has purchased an airline ticket for the route Ulan-Ude – Irkutsk – Tashkent – Kyiv. They will fly to Irkutsk on June 23 on flight 457. From Irkutsk to Tashkent on June 23 on flight 3717; the purpose of the trip to Tashkent is unknown.

The special commandant’s office of the Zaigraevsky District Department of Internal Affairs has prepared documents for Lisovyi to establish administrative supervision over him at his place of residence. The documents will be sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR. The Irkutsk and Tashkent UKGB are requested to monitor the Lisovyis’ stay in the said cities. Chairman of the KGB of the Buryat ASSR, Major General Vereshchagin. 22/VI-83.”

Chapter X. The Weakening of the Leviathan (1983-91)

1. The Museum of the History of Kyiv.

Return to “the big zone.” So, with Myroslava’s arrival, our whole family gathered in our apartment on Bratyslavska Street. For me, this was a new, better home compared to our “communal apartment” on Darnytskyi Boulevard. When it was Vira’s turn to receive an apartment (I was under investigation in the KGB pre-trial detention center at the time), she was told that our family (two adults and two children) was entitled to a three-room apartment. And that Vira could wait to receive the apartment until the investigation was over. If I were released after the investigation, we would get a three-room apartment. Vira had no reason to hope for that. So she agreed to a two-room apartment in a “Khrushchyovka,” with walk-through rooms, where the two of us still live today. In the early 90s, when Myroslava and Oksen got married, Myroslava and her husband lived in one room, and the two of us and Oksen with his wife (two beds side-by-side) lived in the other.

After my return, I was supposed to “check in” monthly with the police, but the police were indifferent to my compliance with this procedure. I assume that the police officers justifiably believed that “supervising” former political prisoners was a KGB matter. Perhaps they had not received any instructions from the KGB regarding my check-ins. In any case, after a few visits to the police, I stopped “checking in.” I was registered without any hassle. The main problem was finding a job. The official refusal was the excuse that I had a higher education diploma, and personnel departments were not allowed to hire such people for low-skilled work. I went to a “Moloko” [Milk] store near our building; I had read an announcement that they needed a loader. The store manager was quite friendly toward me. Perhaps my Ukrainian language, not surzhyk, put her on guard. She refrained from making a decision, took my “details,” and told me to come back in a few days. As expected, she refused me.

Serhii Kudra tried to help, as he had been forced to work various jobs after his dismissal from the Institute of Philosophy. On his advice, I agreed to train for the profession of “train assembler.” This time I was sent for a medical commission, which concluded that I was “unfit” for health reasons. I went to the Library of the CPSU, now the Parliamentary Library. One of its senior officials was frank, saying something like: “You know that you won’t get a job anywhere without permission from the appropriate institution.” I, however, had been hoping for some “crack” in the total control.

This reminded me that I had indeed returned to “the zone,” albeit a “big,” freer one, but still “the zone.” Political camps, unlike criminal ones, are merely a spatially separated, and therefore visible, essence of a totalitarian society. A visualization of its spirit. The summer passed. In September, an unexpected guest visited our apartment—an officer, the deputy chief of the Kyiv police. He was interested in my unemployment. His visit was a signal that the “appropriate institution” had already given the order, and the police had to do the “dirty work.” Again the same threat—accusation of “parasitism.” Now I was to be treated as a “recidivist,” under the second part of the article.

I make a compromise: I phone the KGB, asking them to see me regarding the problem of employment. I was informed of the appointment date by phone. I went to the meeting with Vira. The KGB officer spoke politely and did not remind me of my “anti-Soviet” beliefs. He was interested in where I wanted to work. I said at the Institute of Philosophy. After some time, he informed me in a telephone conversation that the “bosses” at the Institute of Philosophy were “turning up their noses” and that there was an opportunity to get a job at the Museum of the History of Kyiv. I agreed. A few days later, he informed me by phone that I could show up at the Museum to be processed. I was hired for the position of junior research fellow, with a probationary period: I had to “pass a tour,” an exam, to prove my ability to perform the duties of a tour guide.

While finishing this section of my memoirs in mid-February 2010, as a result of the declassification by the Security Service of Ukraine of documents related to the “BLOK” case, I read in one of the documents (Oper. file LVS. Vol. 2. Sheet 325.):

To the Head of the 5th Directorate of the KGB

Colonel Comrade Chernenko

Regarding DON on “Sluga” [The Servant]

After returning to Kyiv, “Sluga” was engaged in searching for work; however, having been placed under certain conditions by covert means, he was unable to find employment and was forced to turn to the state security organs.

This circumstance was used to conduct a thorough conversation with him and subsequently to establish personal contact. According to the plan, the first stage was intended to exert a restraining influence on him, to prevent him from resuming his hostile activities, and then to take steps toward his ideological disarmament.

In coordination with the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, he was assisted with employment as a junior research fellow at the Museum of the city of Kyiv, which has a normal work environment and also has operational positions for studying him.

Head of the Directorate of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR

for the city of Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast

Lieutenant General - M. V. Bandurystyi.”

* * *

After returning from exile, the political situation was almost no different from what it had become after the arrests of 1972. Political repressions continued. In October 1983, the gravely ill Valerii Marchenko was arrested; less than a year passed before his death. In that same year, 1984, Oleksa Tykhyi and Yurii Lytvyn were driven to their deaths in the camps. At Valerii’s funeral in Hatne, as at the funeral of Antonenko-Davydovych, the same small circle of people was present. And in September 1985, we were all struck by the news of Vasyl Stus’s death, with the suspicion that it was a murder. In any case, and regardless of the actual circumstances, the regime was guilty of the deaths of these named and unnamed political prisoners. The long road of suffering and pain continued, as expressed by me in the poem “Through Pain.”

* * *

Less than a year passed before another tragic event—the Chornobyl disaster. I stood on the fourth-floor landing of my building and watched an endless line of unusual, seemingly smoke-covered vehicles moving down the wide street. This was more than the usual state of alarm: did it not signify the end of the history of this city, gray with age? And to what extent did this catastrophe threaten all of Ukraine? One could assume that we were dealing only with a large-scale technological disaster that was difficult to predict. If it were not for the obvious irresponsibility of the communist nomenclature. And of the mass “Soviet” person. In this case, I use the word “mass” in its sociological sense. I note this to ward off the accusations of those who see any attempt to develop a critical self-awareness in the people as an insult to them. The source of such accusations is primarily certain varieties of idealization of the people, rooted in romanticism and the populism associated with it. This was especially facilitated by the demagogic communist rhetoric addressed to the working people, who were transformed into a mass of rightless and submissive people. And the very phrase “working masses,” unbeknownst to the speakers themselves, pointed to this fact.

For populists, the line from Ivan Sokulskyi’s poem, “Всё вперёд і вперёд, на мотузці так звично, суне мертвий народ із відсутнім обличчям” [Ever forward and forward, so accustomed to the rope, a dead people shuffles on with a missing face], is not an attempt to turn a loyal subject into a citizen, but a slander against the “ordinary Soviet person.” The warning that society was in a threatening situation and that the train, driven by the blind, was heading toward a catastrophe, was expressed in the 60s. And not only in the form of hints, but even in a style accessible to the understanding of the “ordinary Soviet person.” At least Oles Honchar’s “The Cathedral.” At one time, Lyubov Kovalevska’s article, published in “Literaturna Ukraina” regarding violations of technological requirements during the construction of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, resonated only within a small circle of the intelligentsia. The Afghan adventure, which led to the deaths of thousands of young men, did not provoke noticeable protests in a pacified Ukraine. The inertia of insensitivity to the saving word was at play. The reason—the civic irresponsibility of loyal subjects, cultivated by terror. Hence the mass person’s abdication of his responsibility for the state of society and its policies. An unconscious sediment in the collective psyche became a much more influential motive for behavior than what later appeared on the surface of consciousness. On this “surface” during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, as jokes about them testified, only the “wisdom” of the leaders was called into question.

Today, such irresponsibility or indifference is sometimes denoted by the word “neprytomnist” [unconsciousness]. Although this word is coming into fashion, it lacks clarity of meaning. It is better to speak of “neprysutnist” [non-presence], if the phrase “buty ne pry suti” [to be not with the essence] is used in the sense of the people’s lack of awareness of their threatening situation. This means being “not oneself”—to be captive to malignant illusions, dangerous for personal and collective life, including the life of future generations. We are not dealing with a loss of consciousness (unconsciousness), but with a special state of “false consciousness.” Clarifying the inherited ideologemes formed by the Russian communist empire is a topic for post-totalitarian and post-colonial studies. I will turn to them later, in my memoirs of the 90s. For now, I perceived all the events of the 80s—the Afghan adventure, the political repressions, the deaths of Marchenko and Stus, the Chornobyl disaster—as interconnected.

So there were enough reasons to continue the struggle. At least in the form of statements and protests. Such statements and protests were published by members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the Ukrainian Helsinki Union (from 1988). They remain an important source of information about the political repressions of that time. It was not until 1988/89 that the majority of political prisoners were released, though by no means all of them. But politically motivated repressions continued. In July 1988, there was a crude detention of civic activists and their removal beyond the Kyiv city limits (which prompted Serhii Naboka and Oles Shevchenko to send a telegram of protest to M. S. Gorbachev). Vira and I, returning from an anniversary evening for Dmytro Pavlychko’s 60th birthday (held in the hall of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute), went out with the “Homin” choir to “October Square,” where we witnessed choir members being beaten because two young men were holding yellow-and-blue flags. Two or three young men were thrown into cars and driven away as the youth—there must have been more than a hundred of them on the Maidan at that time—chanted the word “fascists.” In my written testimony to the prosecutor of the Leninskyi district of Kyiv, M. O. Zinkevych, I noted: “I am against the use of the police and OMON groups against peaceful demonstrations and rallies. And in the event that such demonstrations and rallies could indeed cause dangerous consequences due to a breach of public order, the actions of the police should be restraining, not aggressive.”

* * *

The phrase “the big zone” points to the similarity of the two “zones,” but there was a significant difference between them. In the “small zone,” you are among your own; you do not need to refrain from expressing your “anti-Soviet” views; you feel free. In the “big zone,” you have to be careful if you are not prepared to become unemployed and then imprisoned. This happened repeatedly to all who continued to fight the regime. I, of course, did not give up the fight, but I decided, at least temporarily, to avoid actions that would give the regime an opportunity to imprison me. This refusal of active opposition had clear signs of a compromise.

But since I did not renounce my “anti-Soviet” views, my new situation was different from my former underground existence. But this compromise was not only a consequence of taking personal circumstances into account. It was also due to the urgent need to clarify the intellectual foundations for a national and civic revival. So, I thought, let the KGB associate its goals with my compromise and be content that I am not reproducing samvydav or making “anti-Soviet” statements. I, however, must use the “window” free from repression to carry out my own plans. I am referring to my work on problems that, as I foresaw, would become relevant in the near future. And they indeed became so as Gorbachev’s “perestroika” expanded the space for freedom of speech. Moreover, from the beginning of “perestroika,” access to Western literature in various fields of philosophy—social, political, and so on—expanded more and more. But still, on the level of moral well-being, I had no grounds to justify my compromise. Fortunately for me, thanks to political changes, my compromise lasted no more than five years. After the repeal in March 1990 of the sixth article of the USSR Constitution on the “leading role” of the CPSU, Ukrainian political parties began to form: open political discussions became a common phenomenon. So in 1989-90, I took part in various kinds of political actions and discussions. I fasted for one day with the students in the “Revolution on Granite.”

* * *

The Museum of the History of Kyiv. At the Museum of the History of Kyiv, I found myself in a friendly environment. The director of the Museum, Tamara Khomenko, was demanding about discipline, but without any prejudice or special requirements in her attitude toward me. I felt that she was worried: in the event of my “anti-Soviet” actions, the KGB would try to use her to repress me—to look for “anti-Soviet” deviations, issue reprimands, in order to eventually deprive me of my job. Based on my interactions, I was convinced that such a prospect could not have appealed to her.

I was assigned to the department headed by Larysa Dobryivechir, a very nice, kind, and humane person. During the four years of my work at the Museum, I had no disagreements with her. It seemed to me (I came to this conclusion from her remarks) that she was well aware of how much communist ideology weighed on the conscience of historians, with the exception, of course, of the “orthodox.” I also developed completely friendly relations with the other employees of the department. Although all the employees, as I recently learned in a conversation with Oleksandr Kucheruk, were specially gathered for a conversation in which they were warned that a person who had been convicted of “anti-Soviet and nationalist propaganda” had been hired at the Museum. And, accordingly, they were instructed that they should influence my views in the “correct” direction.

The duties of each person consisted of conducting tours in the Museum halls, collecting exhibits, and carrying out relevant scholarly research. Most of my efforts and time went into preparing and conducting tours. Still, I was able to read something not only about the history of Kyiv, but also about philosophy. I did not encounter any attempts to provoke me into making statements that would contradict my beliefs. With one exception.

I was supposed to “pass” an examination tour for each hall separately to a research fellow who specialized in that period of Kyiv’s history. After that, I was to conduct a general overview tour of all the Museum halls. Most tour groups visiting the Museum preferred overview tours. The examination tour is a completely justified practice: it is necessary to be sure of a person’s ability to conduct tours if this is assigned as one of their duties. One of the ways to avoid “false ideology” while conducting tours in the Museum halls (which, from my observations, other tour guides also used) was to narrate facts, while avoiding evaluations.

The incident I mentioned occurred in the hall where exhibits from the beginning of the revolution (the Bolshevik seizure of power) to the end of the 1930s were displayed. The woman who specialized in this period, after listening to my presentation, did not accept my tour. The reason: I avoided condemning the participants of the peasant uprisings for an independent Ukraine in 1918-22. It wasn’t even about the neutral label “Petliurites,” but about “bandits.” It is known that Russian chauvinists (under the guise of “Bolsheviks”) called everyone who defended themselves from their robbery and physical annihilation “bandits.” A tradition that finds its continuation in the domestic policy of modern Russia (Chechens are not rebels, but “bandits”). The conviction of the rebels that the Bolsheviks were an aggressive, merciless horde, from which a terrible threat to the very existence of the Ukrainian people emanated, was confirmed immediately after the defeat of the peasant uprisings.

My wife copied data from documents stored in the Kyiv Oblast Archive about the Russian military units that, after the Bolshevik aggression against the UNR, were stationed in all the villages of the Kyiv region. These were the so-called “zagradotryady” [blocking detachments] and “prodotryady” [food-requisitioning detachments]. Today, thanks to our historians, this is already a known page in the history of Ukraine. (The reader can read about this today in Volodymyr Serhiichuk’s book “How We Were Starved to Death” – Kyiv, 2003). Vira managed to copy down the names of the “otvetchiki” [responsible persons]. The lists of peasants and “otvetchiki” themselves point to those who compiled them: Ukrainian surnames were distorted, turned into Russian ones by adding the ending -ov, etc.

During my studies in the seven-year school, by order of the party leadership (I don’t know at what level), a tradition was established of taking schoolchildren from the Kyiv region (or only the Kyiv region?) to Trypillia, to the site of the “Trypillian tragedy.” To this day, my visual memory preserves the picture of “polutorka” trucks moving along a dirt road, filled with children. Today, thanks to the research of historians, much is already known about the uprisings, the greatest intensity of which falls on the years 1918-21. I knew about the complexity of the rebel movement, caused primarily by the disunity of individual rebel units. The tendency toward “otamanshchyna” [chieftaincy] also played a role. But this was not the main reason for the defeat, but the lack of centralized organization. A significant share of the blame for this lack of organization lies primarily with the leadership of the UNR. This is a topic of many discussions.

As can be seen from current historical research (by Roman Koval and others), the uprisings were largely spontaneous in nature. In a literary-artistic interpretation of these uprisings, Vasyl Shkliar recently published his romantic novel “Chornyi Voron” [The Black Raven]. Of course, the participants of the peasant uprisings of 1918-22 and of isolated later ones, in comparison with the fighters of the UPA, were not at the same level of ideological and organizational preparation. The period of time when it was possible through education to cultivate not only a corresponding level of national self-awareness, but also the realization that in the face of a mortal threat to the nation, only an army organized on the principles of centralism could resist the Bolshevik threat, was too short. The closest example was the success of the Polish army under the leadership of Piłsudski (I leave aside here the assessment of the policy of “pacification” in Western Ukraine). In central and eastern Ukraine, educational centers like “Plast” did not have time to appear. But the ideology of the UPA was already a consequence of understanding the reasons for the defeat of the UNR.

But it would have been useless to explain all these circumstances to this woman. She demanded only a principled negative assessment. As in other similar conversations (and I have had and still have to deal with such conversations), I believe that it is a futile task to convince a person in the grip of a false ideology in one conversation. Sometimes, many conversations are not enough for that. In this case, I was probably dealing with just such a case, if we exclude the likelihood of other motives, of external origin. The acquired stereotypes of thinking and ideologemes have such great power of inertia that in many cases they die out only with the death of their bearers. Everything depends on a person’s ability to think and be honest in their conclusions. On the second try, I did pass the examination tour for this hall, not without compromise, of course. In this case, the conflict with my own conscience was particularly painful for me, because it concerned my grandfathers and parents. As I have already mentioned, I was convinced that some of my fellow villagers, living participants of those uprisings, hid the truth about their participation in those uprisings from my generation. To protect themselves and us from dangerous consequences—possible repressions. Only the stories of women, in particular my mother, sowed in my memory the legend of the then sacrificial struggle.

* * *

Besides conducting tours, a research fellow at the Museum was expected to carry out scholarly research. In fulfillment of this duty, I wrote two articles during my time there. One of them, “A Valuable Addition to the Funds of the Museum of the History of Kyiv” (preserved in my papers, contains information about whom I personally visited to take exhibits), and with the second article—about the relationship between a religious worldview and atheism—there was an incident. The problem itself had always interested me—from the point of view of the relationship between a religious and a scientific worldview (I wrote a small article on this topic in prison). But in the USSR, any article on this topic was viewed as one that should praise atheism and criticize religious worldviews. I could not write my article in an open style: I wrote it in a sophistic style, with references to the works of K. Marx, but with hidden subtexts. With an emphasis on the problem of the relationship between paganism (as an appreciation of the earthly) and Christianity. However, my subtexts were easily detected by the staff of the institution that then dealt with atheistic research (located on the territory of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra). They concluded that I was glorifying Christianity in its dialogue with paganism—in the sense of the deification of the earthly. With the hint that communist ideology is a variety of paganism as the deification of the earthly—the absolutization of economics, power, etc. My article did indeed contain such a subtext. But the Museum’s management ignored that review. So it passed without any “organizational conclusions.”

I agreed to perform the duties of a cultural organizer. There were employees who were gifted at singing: so we created a choir group, arranged caroling at New Year’s holidays, etc. One time, Nina Matviienko gave a song performance at the Museum. In one of the “Source’s” reports to the KGB (available in the third volume of my operational file, Sheet 38), it says: “Some time ago, Lisovyi organized an amateur choir of Ukrainian song from among the Museum employees, numbering 15 people. The choir’s rehearsals are held once a week after the workday. They perform only Ukrainian folk songs.” And in a postscript to this report, among other things, it says: “Assignment: To visit, under a plausible pretext, the rehearsals of the Ukrainian song choir organized by Lisovyi. To ascertain the ideological direction of the works used.” As in some other reports, my initiative is clearly exaggerated in this case, since I was not the only one who initiated the creation of the choir. But, as it turns out, even folk songs, from the KGB’s point of view, needed to be selected, filtering out the ideologically hostile ones.

Sometimes I would agree to give short speeches at general meetings of the Museum staff—for the New Year, Women’s Day, etc. At one of the archeologists’ conferences in the Museum, during my short speech, I read a poem written specially for this gathering, which, in a slightly edited form, sounds like this:

The things we call by the professional word,

“exhibits,” know a great deal,

but there are things they cannot reveal,

for they are things, not lines of verse, not poems heard.

Pots, axes, a wooden plow—

they speak of those who made them, to be sure,

but cannot tell how the meadow sparkled pure,

and how the sky lit up within their gaze just now.

Just as they cannot tell us of the countless fates,

that held the vault of generations high,

how in the struggles, in the clashes of wills,

through ages, creation did pass by,

of that which we call good.

This is the most important legend of the exhibits!

If only we could preserve and pass it on,

so that history might live as legend ever on.

* * *

Collecting exhibits. The most interesting part of my work then was collecting exhibits. This allowed me to visit prominent or simply interesting people, who could tell about little-known, and sometimes completely unknown, facts from the life of Kyiv. In all cases, after arranging a meeting, I would come to an apartment, where a conversation would take place about which specific items, photographs, or documents the person agreed to donate to the Museum. I will mention only a few meetings here. I visited Oles Honchar. He was reserved in conversation, which is not surprising. He didn't know me, and it's unlikely his apartment was without "bugs." I visited the apartment of Volodymyr Sosiura’s wife and son. Later, I had another meeting with Volodymyr Volodymyrovych on the grounds of the Dovzhenko Film Studios. Individual, even cautious, remarks by the son only confirmed my idea of the poet’s dramatic relationship with the authorities and official ideology. And about the suffering in his life.

I got acquainted with the wife of Borys Hmyria, Vira Augustivna: she complained about the lack of proper appreciation for her husband’s talent and the cool attitude of the authorities towards him. One of the museum staff explained this attitude by the fact that the brilliant singer had been in the occupied territory. But in fact, the decisive reason for that restraint was the singer’s Ukrainian self-awareness. The evenings that Vira Augustivna organized at her apartment, with listening sessions of his singing recordings, were aimed at popularizing the great singer’s talent. My wife and I attended one of these evenings. Today, as I finish this section of my memoirs, 40 years have passed since the death of the brilliant singer. After reading Tetiana Polishchuk’s article “Borys the Great” in the newspaper “Den” (06.08.2009), I became convinced that the problem of properly honoring the singer is still relevant. For anti-Ukrainian sentiments and phobias find a balanced appreciation of authentic Ukrainian culture very dangerous. Especially when it is combined with high-quality examples of intellectual or artistic creativity. The bearers of chauvinistic prejudices and phobias are amused by the combination of national self-awareness with primitivism. We must be grateful to Hanna Prints for the enthusiasm with which she continued her aunt’s work.

Right nearby on Khreshchatyk, I had a meeting with Anatoliy Dobrovolskyi, the chief architect of Kyiv from 1950 to 1955. He was part of the group of architects that (as a result of the All-Union competition of 1944-46) won the right to develop the project for the reconstruction of the destroyed Khreshchatyk. It was a frank and interesting conversation in which the architect passionately defended the choice of architectural style in the development of Khreshchatyk. He considered the negative assessment of the chosen style to be unfair: he spoke of his desire to take into account the Ukrainian Baroque tradition. It is good that his daughter, Tetiana Dobrovolsky, not only inherited her father's profession, but also actively defends an architectural aesthetic oriented towards considering national tradition.

In her interview (see: http://archunion.com.ua/arch/a-0260.htm/), she notes: "Dobrovolsky is not only remembered, but all his works are being systematically destroyed. And each individual case has its own perpetrator… You probably know that in the early 70s of the last century, interest in national traditions sharply increased, and purely Ukrainian restaurants were built in the capital according to special projects. According to my father’s projects, ‘Kureni,’ ‘Vitryak,’ ‘Poltava,’ and others were built. Unfortunately, today only crumbs of these objects remain in the capital. The decorative paintings on the exterior of the ‘Kureni’ restaurant by the national artist Yelyzaveta Myronova are irretrievably lost. Architect H. Dukhovyshnyi contributed to this, allowing himself to ‘improve’ this restaurant, after which the folk stylistics completely disappeared." My wife Vira and I occasionally talked with Liza Myronova in the 80s. Vira was on friendly terms with her; we would visit her tiny one-room apartment, where there was nowhere for her to put her paintings. She even gave me an aesthetically flawless embroidery for a shirt (white on white).

I had a meeting with Halyna Sevruk at her apartment. The conversation with her was completely free, like old friends. I had met her in the late 60s or early 70s when she was holding an exhibition of her ceramics outdoors in Podil, near the more than modest Svitlytskyi museum (as a dissident, she was deprived of the right to exhibit her works in any premises). In Ms. Halyna's apartment, I saw her painting, done in a modern style. It turned out she was also interested in the philosophy of modern art. Thanks to her, I made notes from Patrick Waldberg’s English-language book "Surrealism," which was interesting from the point of view of distinguishing different trends within surrealism (“emblematics,” “imaginational naturalists,” etc.). And from the point of view of the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious, the technique of “automatism” as a way of initially removing control by the mind in artistic creation, the use of collage, and so on.

Among other visits, I remember my visit to the Smyrnov-Lastochkin sewing factory. I went into the workshop. What I saw was striking. I went with the idea that this was one of the large factories. And I expected its technical equipment to be at least not at a primitive level. But I saw a long room with rows of tables, on which stood various types of sewing machines, from the oldest to newer ones, and women at the tables were manually turning over fabric, dragging it in the aisles between the tables to perform the next operation. I left with the impression of having been in some kind of technical Middle Ages.

* * *

The museum had its own library. I used the advice of Oleksandr Kucheruk, who worked as a photographer at the Museum (his workplace was in the library). During the four years of my employment at the Museum, reading the journals of “Kievskaya Starina” [Kievan Antiquity] was useful for me. From what I read, I remember Sumtsov’s article on the beginnings of school education in Russia: it contained information unknown to me about the initial period of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s participation in the formation of school education in Russia. In addition, I was able to familiarize myself with newspapers that were printed in Kyiv at the beginning of the 20th century (“Izvestia kievskoi dumy,” “Kievskaya mysl,” “Poslednie novosti,” “Kievlianin,” “Iuzhnaia kopeika”), I read the “Notes of the Shevchenko Scientific Society” for 1913, and articles from periodicals that related to Ukrainization. Of the larger publications, I read Markevich’s “History of Little Russia,” V. Antonovych’s “Monographs on the History of Western and Southwestern Russia,” and carefully studied V. A. Rybakov’s “Paganism of the Ancient Slavs.” In Rybakov’s book, I was interested in his method of interpreting artifacts and signs—as a path to reconstructing the worldview of the ancient Slavs. Although he did significant work and processed a large number of sources, his method of interpretation seemed to me in many cases too free. In addition, from my point of view, his generalizations were based on an ideologically loaded concept aimed at exaggerating Slavic cultural unity at the expense of underestimating differences. On the initiative of P. P. Tolochko, a conference was held in Kyiv with the participation of A. Rybakov.

* * *

Architecture. I remember a meeting of the Museum staff with the architect S. V. Babushkin (later the chief architect of Kyiv). The meeting took place at the House of Architects. The hall was full of people. After Babushkin finished his report, I publicly asked him how he envisioned the architectural identity of Kyiv. His answer disappointed me, although it was pointless to expect anything else from him. Referring to the typological nature of modern urban planning, he, in essence, denied the significance of the problem itself. It turned out, then, that only past generations could create original architecture for us. The kind that mostly still attracts tourists today. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the history of art, particularly the history of architecture, knows that Western artistic styles, spreading geographically, underwent modifications under the influence of local cultural traditions. And it is precisely these modifications that interest both researchers and tourists. It turns out that modern architecture is fundamentally aimed at creating a uniform living environment—without any resonance with national or regional tradition.

If we consider modern architecture from the perspective of the dispute between globalization and the preservation of the world’s cultural diversity, then in architecture we have an obvious trend toward globalization. But who is interested in observing in another country, or even in another city, the same thing he or she sees at home? Constructive-functional universalism fundamentally excludes a connection with the soul of someone who lives right here on this land, in this community. And until architects have had their fill of the impression achieved by demonstrating technical capabilities and the abstractionism of external forms, they will continue to move in the stream of this inertia. Of course, the trends in modern architecture should primarily be evaluated by those who are professionally engaged in architectural aesthetics. But we are dealing with obvious phenomena. As long as all these concrete jungles that are being created today do not lose their customers and consumers, the situation will not change. Sometimes just some detail, a hint—for example, the profile of a windowsill or a cornice, the choice of color, the inclusion of even a stylized ornament—is enough to “warm up” a structure. It is not about reproducing tradition in the form of primitive stencils, which in fact make tradition dead.

I would not want to draw extreme conclusions from these theses of mine, but I am concerned about what the aesthetics of the living environment in which humanity will live tomorrow will be. From the fact that V. Horodetsky’s buildings in Kyiv, executed in various styles, do not contain a resonance with the national tradition, it does not follow, of course, that they are devoid of aesthetic value. And yet, a certain policy is needed, which should consist in the development of recommended projects, especially for the mass construction of rural and urban houses. Oriented toward taking into account both national and regional traditions. These remarks of mine are only an attempt to encourage discussions in order to reach a possible consensus on this issue. What is being done today in mass rural construction is strikingly ugly. And in the construction of cities, particularly Kyiv, I do not see, with some exceptions (and they do exist!), even a hint of any understanding of this problem.

At one time, having come across Alvin Toffler’s assertion that technology and ingenuity make it possible to create diversity, I called such diversity “variegated monotony.” An architect can realize his project of a skyscraper by introducing some of his own original modifications into it. But if you, without any detriment to perception, can move this building to any other country, then we are dealing with the creation of a monotonous architecture throughout the entire earthly space. On the wave of globalization, proponents of variegated monotony are having undeniable success today in spreading such architecture. Creating a comfortable, but cold living environment. An environment not aimed at resonating with the soul, which still contains the collective subconscious.

What is important is not only the architecture of buildings, but also the space between them—streets, boulevards, squares, parks. While working on materials from the history of Kyiv, I found publications about an architectural society—the Commission for the Beauty of Kyiv, founded in 1912. Unfortunately, I did not make (or perhaps did not keep) notes from the materials I read. But on November 14 of this year, 2009, on the HKTRK television channel, Olena Druh, a research fellow at the Museum of the History of Kyiv, mentioned this Commission. I recall that in those materials, I came across the development of a project for the construction of Kyiv, which was based on the creation of alleys, squares, and parks—in the space between large streets. It was the idea of a “garden city,” designed to create a cozy, green space between the main, large streets, with benches, as places for rest and communication. This plan, apparently, served as a model and was, at least in part, implemented. And today Kyiv has many parks and squares and is one of the greenest cities in the world. But at the same time, we are today witnesses to a relentless assault on this inner green space of the city. Will the citizens of the adjacent buildings, by demolishing the fences erected on the site of squares and parks, be able to protect their city? With the complete indifference of the authorities and corrupt connivance with such developers. The “indifference” of these officials, of course, is explained by the fact that their “palms have already been greased.”

* * *

I conclude this recollection of my four years of collaboration at the Museum by expressing my indignation at the Museum’s “relocation,” which I have already mentioned. I lack the imagination to comprehend the moral state of the members of the Supreme Court, who not only agreed to the transfer of the Klovskyi Palace to their disposal but stubbornly sought it. Perhaps Vitalii Kovalynskyi best expressed the assessment of their actions in his article “A Year Has Passed, or Requiem for the Museum of the History of Kyiv” (“Dzerkalo Tyzhnia” [Mirror of the Week] from March 19-25, 2005). This action can only be adequately assessed in the context of the process of oligarchization and the corruption associated with it. It also includes the seizure of attractive premises that house cultural and scientific institutions. Today on the chopping block is the Pavlo Tychyna Memorial Museum-Apartment (see the inquiry of Verkhovna Rada deputy V. D. Bondarenko dated 17.04.2009 on the Verkhovna Rada website), bookstores, and painters’ workshops. We are witnessing a brutal attempt to seize and liquidate the well-known bookstore on Khreshchatyk, “Siaivo.” And so on.

2. Teaching

Returning to the beginning of the road. But in August 1987, a month before the end of my four years at the Museum, I decided to resign. This decision was voluntary. Two reasons prompted it—a slightly higher salary, but more important was our desire (mine and Vira’s) to buy a house somewhere near Kyiv. With a vegetable patch and a garden, to be closer to nature. To this day, Vira is eager to plant something in front of our building on Bratyslavska Street and notes with bitterness that “again” her saplings have been broken. We had previously set out in search of the cheapest possible house in the nearby villages to the south. Many empty houses were for sale near Kyiv at that time, relatively cheap, but not for us, with our salaries.

Our combined salary was just barely enough to live on. Myroslava had entered a medical college but left her studies to work as a hospital aide: at that time, a three-year stint as an aide gave one an advantage for admission to medical school; there was a shortage of aides in polyclinics and hospitals. Looking ahead, I will note that the girls and boys who were counting on such a privilege were cruelly deceived. The privilege was abolished without taking into account those who had worked for even the full three years. Oksen, who turned fifteen in the summer of 1987, after finishing the ninth grade in 1988, entered a ceramics school in Opishnia, where he studied for two years. The food at the school was extremely poor. Students whose parents were unable to help them went hungry. And it was hard for us to make ends meet with our salaries.

We are grateful to friends who lent us the necessary amount. We bought a house in the village of Pidhirci. Before that, I had arranged to be hired as a teacher at the Velykodmytrivska school, which I graduated from in 1956: children from Pidhirci, as well as from Novi and Stari Bezradychi, studied at this school. But before I could be officially hired as a teacher for the extended-day group, I had to go through the hassle of getting registered [propiska]. I will leave aside the description of my wanderings through bureaucratic offices. Eventually, I turned for advice to our new next-door neighbor, Ivan Spyrydonovych Myronenko: he lived with his wife in the house next to the one we bought. Thanks to his help, I managed to solve this problem. Ivan Spyrydonovych was very worried that the village was becoming deserted. He wanted someone, preferably a decent person, to buy the neighboring house, which had been empty for many years. He worked as an accountant at the Velykodmytrivskyi collective farm (with which, after consolidation, the Pidhirci farm was merged), and had acquaintances who were able to influence a positive decision in this matter.

* * *

On the south side of our homestead in Pidhirci, right opposite the windows, was a garden plot (already without a house), where back in the 19th century stood the homestead of one of the Mozhovyis, whose daughter was my maternal grandmother. From here, as I already mentioned, she married a Tkachenko in Novi Bezradychi, where my mother was born. Right behind this garden plot lived a woman (now deceased) who was married to a man from the Mozhovyi family. When I spent the night alone in the house we had bought, I had a feeling that the shadows of my relatives were standing guard over my peace.

The house we bought was wooden, plastered with clay (a "zakydka" style house), rotted, and had "settled." We (my wife and I), with the occasional help of the still underage Oksen, fussed with it a lot: we raised the walls with a jack, laid a makeshift foundation, and finally faced it with brick. We were able to face it with brick thanks to the charitable help of Borys Vasheka, the husband of Vira's sister Mariia, and two other men, his friends from Kaharlyk. Our new neighbors also helped. Since the house is located at the end of the street on the Velyki Dmytrovychi side, I walked to my work at the school. I worked as a teacher in "my" school for two years. The first year in the "extended-day group," the second as a history teacher in the upper grades. They allowed it now, it was perestroika. Vira came on weekends, by bus, which took a long detour at the time: its route went through the district center, Obukhiv.

* * *

Deciphering the traces. My teaching at the school I once graduated from symbolizes a return to the beginning of the road. For it was during my studies at the Velykodmytrivska secondary school that not only my awareness of my professional “calling” matured, but also the threat from the political system. And reflections on how this system could be changed. After turning fifty and thirty years after graduating from school, I trod my old paths uncertainly, as if not believing in the reality of my return. It's about the possibility of repetition—as a reproduction of former mental states in the relentless flow of internal experience.

A feeling of the unreality of my return accompanied my first visits to Tarasivka. The house where I spent my childhood and youth was still standing then. Walking down Verkhnia Street (now Pushkin Street), I met the mother of my classmate from the Starobezradivska school, Ivan Herzan. She crossed herself and burst into tears. Behind that lay the experience of the hamlet's isolation in the boundless expanses of the empire with its dark thickets—the Sibirias and Solovkis. In those spaces, everyone declared an “enemy” disappeared irrevocably. The return of an “enemy” from the dark corners of the Russian and communist empires was perceived as a return from “the other world.” And not only in the imagination of my fellow villagers. The erasure from reality of the small group of people who were called “dissidents” in the minds of “ordinary Soviet people” also meant placing them “outside the brackets” of real life.

In the camps, I had recurring dreams of flying over the earth, which most people see at certain periods of their lives. But there were features in them that prompted me to associate them with a special symbolism. I believed that they symbolized the “erasure” of my existence from the “real world” of people who had known me before—from childhood or from later interactions. And therefore, my descent to the ground in these dreams was perceived by the people below as the appearance of a ghost. I always felt the gazes of my fellow villagers on my back. When I left for the “big world” after graduating from secondary school, there were no more windmills with their waving arms, calling beyond the horizon of the mountains in the rays of the western sun. And no more visions of those distant and immeasurably higher peaks beyond the horizons.

* * *

Velykodmytrivska School. I found myself in a friendly environment of teachers. The school director, Volodymyr Vasyliovych Solodukhin, treated me quite benevolently. In the extended-day group, my duties were simple: to ensure that the children completed their homework. In terms of upbringing, I could not match the art of communication with children of my wife, which I had occasion to observe. True, I did try to use some elements of her “ethno-pedagogy.” I tried to improve the children’s oral speech. I had to admit that the Russification of peasants through the spread of “surzhyk” in the speech of children and adults had significantly increased compared to the time of my childhood. Even some of the teachers did not monitor their own speech to avoid “surzhyk.” In particular, probably, because even in modern pedagogical institutes, instructors do not pay proper attention to the culture of future teachers’ oral speech.

In my second year of teaching, they “entrusted” me with teaching history. Perestroika: the district leadership had already dared. I tried to move away from the “dry” language of the textbook to mobilize the children’s imagination. But I didn’t have time to develop my own teaching style. There were enthusiasts in the teaching staff for awakening national consciousness, love for Ukrainian culture, folklore, and language. The greatest of these enthusiasts was Vira Mykolaivna Bereziuk—she taught Ukrainian language and literature. She initiated the creation of a student folklore collective at the school. With the support of Solodukhin, a teachers’ singing group was created, in which I also occasionally took part. Vira Mykolaivna raised a wonderful daughter, Tanya Bereziuk, who was my student at the school. She was a girl of principle, with character. Today she works as a literary editor on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine.

* * *

Vasyl Shcherban. I considered one of the indicators of success in my teaching work to be a student’s discovery of a vision for their personal spiritual perspective—scholarly-intellectual, literary, artistic, or civic. I believed that extra-curricular or after-class communication with such a student contributes to achieving this goal. Even during breaks, between lectures or lessons. My two years of teaching at the school proved poor in such achievements of mine. Of my students, Vasyl Shcherban, from Pidhirci, showed the initiative for such communication. Tall, slender, dark-haired, in his manner of walking and holding himself, he resembled Vasyl Stus. In addition, he was a young man with character, with a sharp sense of justice. He was noble in the literal sense of the word, as if from birth. For no one could say anything about the influence of his environment or family on the formation of his character and views. He was rather one of the “self-made,” who independently achieve certain understandings and principles of behavior. The sharpness of his character and statements led to tensions and even conflicts in his relationships with some teachers and the school director. I had to persuade Volodymyr Vasyliovych, who was irritated by Vasyl’s contentiousness, not to exaggerate these flaws of his. I said that defiance in self-assertion is characteristic of youth. It seemed to me that he, at least in part, accepted my arguments.

My communication with Vasyl continued after he graduated from school, when I was already a fellow at the Institute of Philosophy. For some time, Vasyl served in the army, but suffered a head injury and was discharged early. The consequences of the injury were serious: from time to time he complained of headaches. Our conversations mainly took place in the courtyard of our homestead on Sadova Street. Vasyl had a plan to realize himself in literary creation, in prose and poetry. Perhaps conversations with me pushed him to a too ambitious plan—to write prose and poetry with a philosophical bent, with the inclusion of elements of mystical symbolism. But he only managed to write drafts of his future works. Not only a manifestation of his courage, but even a feat was his affixing of a yellow-and-blue flag in 1990 to the top of the very tall chimney above the boiler house in Velyki Dmytrovychi. He was an enthusiast for creating recordings of songs for the school, he was part of the group “Garba,” which was to carry out this plan (with the participation of Maria Burmaka and others). He died young: his life’s fate turned out to be dramatic or even tragic. If the word “tragedy” denotes the death of a hero that resulted from noble aspirations and a heightened sense of justice.

* * *

Volodymyr Savosko. My communication in Pidhirci with Volodymyr Vasyliovych Savosko (b. 1950) was interesting. His father was a military physician-therapist. Volodymyr studied at the Nizhyn Pedagogical Institute, at the history faculty. He recalled that there were nationally conscious instructors at the Institute who tried to influence the students. Not surprising, if one considers that H. Avrakhov, D. Nalyvaiko, V. Lytvynov, O. Kotsiuba, I. Shpakovskyi, O. Zhovnir, and P. Samorodnytskyi taught at this Institute. At the time of the persecution for the work “The Cathedral,” they sent Oles Honchar a letter of moral support in May 1968. Hryhorii Avrakhov worked as a dean and pro-rector, and later suffered persecution for the book “Lesia Ukrainka. A Seminary.” According to Volodymyr Lytvynov (now a fellow at the Department of the History of Ukrainian Philosophy of the NAS of Ukraine), the work “Internationalism or Russification?” by I. Dziuba was distributed at the Institute, which became the subject of a KGB investigation. From Nizhyn, Avrakhov brought to Kyiv a copy of the text, which became at least one of those they tried to send abroad.

Volodymyr Savosko first taught at the Pidhirci elementary school, then, to build himself a house, at the brick factory in Korchuvate, and he was the manager of the club in Pidhirci. He inherited knowledge about the human body from his father, was a good masseur, and helped people. Probably his father influenced the formation of his philosophy of human life in unity with nature. It was not naturalism, but rather the view that culture should be part of cosmic unity. But Pidhirci at that time could already serve as an example of a thoughtless attitude towards nature. The steep hillsides of Pidhirci are a unique sanctuary for rare plants and herbs. But the Kyiv city authorities arranged a city dump in the valley, right next to the village. Why was another place not found at a suitable distance from the villages? The negative consequences were not long in coming. The birds were the first to react: the hooting of owls was no longer heard, swallows disappeared, and crows reigned supreme. And although the village received an asphalt road, a water pipeline, and gas in return, this did not compensate for the greatest loss—the deterioration of the ecology. That is, the changes occurred contrary to the philosophy that Volodymyr was developing.

Volodymyr also had literary abilities: he wrote poems with a philosophical subtext and humorous stories. We (Vira and I) were surprised by his “populist” manner of communicating with his fellow villagers. With us, he spoke literary Ukrainian, but in communicating with fellow villagers, he spoke surzhyk. He believed that he should not stand out among them with his speech: they should perceive him as “one of their own.” We (more Vira than I) tried to convince him that an intellectual should be a bearer of culture, because that is his purpose. But he did not agree and did not change his “populist” style. He died unexpectedly—in 2002, on the eve of his birthday.

* * *

Nataliia Yovkhymivna Myronenko (maiden name - Ostapenko). In 2010, as I finish writing these memoirs, Nataliia Yovkhymivna, who has turned 85, still has a good memory and still works in the garden, only her hearing has weakened a little. Even now, traces of her girlish and womanly beauty remain. But what is especially important to me is her manner of behavior, characteristic of those rural women and men who in my imagination embody wisdom as a component of traditional rural culture—restraint, judiciousness, tact. And the fact that these traits were able to survive in the cruel 20th century, I perceive as a miracle. Nataliia’s grandfather (father’s father) was a good farmer, had field lands, a windmill, and a threshing floor. He voluntarily gave everything to the collective farm, and therefore was not dekulakized. Her father and mother worked on the collective farm. In 1933, her three sisters, brother, and father died of starvation; she was left alone with her mother. Her six-year-old twin sisters, Khymka and Nadiika, attended the elementary classes of the Pidhirci school, where they gave the pupils some meager soup, so after attending school during the day, both died at night. Her little sister Parasochka, who was about three years old, also died. Her twelve-year-old disabled brother, Senia, also died. Her father lived to see the new harvest, but died in the middle of summer, having contracted dysentery. From stories, I knew that quite a lot of people died in '33 when coming out of the famine. When I recently asked Nataliia Yovkhymivna, in connection with the compilation of lists of those who died from the Holodomor of 1932-33, whether anyone had asked her about the deaths of her relatives, she answered—no. I can imagine if the party organs in the USSR had given an order to the village councils, or at least to the school teachers, to collect some information, they would have done it with the appropriate “enthusiasm.” Out of fear of punishment. But conscience is a fragile thing.

Nataliia had finished five grades by 1933, but with the beginning of the famine, she left school and went to work as a “zaimanka”—herding a cow for a family for some payment (milk, etc.). Because they had to pay taxes: a monetary one, in particular, the so-called “self-taxation,” and a natural one—meat, eggs, milk (if you had a cow). Of these taxes, Nataliia’s mother did not give only milk, because they did not have a cow.

Nataliia’s mother worked on the collective farm. Those who went to work at the Pidhirci collective farm were not fed a hot meal, but were given two hundred grams of bread a day. Mostly the parents divided that bread to bring something to their children. But the mother could not pay all the taxes. And one day, when she was at work on the collective farm, and Nataliia was out herding, people from the collective farm were sent, who removed the metal roof from the house and took it to the collective farm—as compensation for the owed tax. But even after the roof was removed, they continued to demand the tax. The removal of metal roofing was a common practice, with the exception of certain villages, which probably depended on the local authorities. But it is worth bearing in mind that the most elementary expression of sympathy for the peasants exposed the collective farm heads to accusations of simulation and “sabotage”—that is, of subversive activity. This applied to the entire vertical of power in the “union republics.” So, they had to tear the roof off the barn and cover the house with straw. Nataliia’s mother sawed the laths and rafters of the barn into short logs with a hacksaw, chopped them, and carried them to Kyiv to sell. She carried not only firewood to sell in Kyiv, but also charcoal (for samovars).

The Germans took Nataliia Yovkhymivna to Germany. In Germany, at the distribution point for those taken from Ukraine, the son of a farmer-owner, who was fighting on the western front, chose her. Besides the son, they worked the farm together: the mistress worked on a par with Nataliia Yovkhymivna. The owners had a child, a son about three years old. The German family treated Nataliia as an equal, they ate at the same table. When Nataliia Yovkhymivna fell ill, the mistress made sure she was placed in a hospital. So Nataliia Yovkhymivna has a good memory of this German family. When the Soviet troops were approaching, the mistress tried to persuade Nataliia Yovkhymivna not to return to the USSR, but to go with them to West Germany. But she did not agree. The mistress’s young son had become so attached to Nataliia Yovkhymivna that he did not want to let her go. Only in the 90s was the son’s family able to contact Nataliia Yovkhymivna by letter.

Those who did not agree to stay in the West were kept by the American command in camps, in which, under their supervision, the Germans provided normal living conditions, food, etc. With the advance of the Soviet troops, they were handed over to the Soviet occupation administration. But in the Soviet camps, their life was “organized” in such a way that they starved. They were forced to sneak out of the camp to find some food in abandoned farmsteads: they searched for leftover canned goods in the houses, dug up last year’s potatoes in the gardens. The soldiers of the “Soviet” army treated the “Ostarbeiters” with contempt, shouting insulting, obscene words at them. I will note for myself that this contempt of the “liberators” can probably be explained as a malicious revenge for the fact that the “mighty and invincible” army could not protect its fellow citizens from forced removal. Or as an attempt to convince them once again of how their “native” authorities regarded them, since they had learned the lesson of the 30s so poorly that they agreed to return to the USSR. In fact, the deported people remembered that lesson, but their native land was dearer. Although they knew well what awaited them at home.

* * *

Like my work at the Museum, teaching left little time for studying philosophy. Moreover, Vira and I had to spend a lot of time repairing our house. Still, I tried to snatch time for my intellectual pursuits. I began work on a text on analytical philosophy. In Russian, because I hoped there would be better chances to publish such a text in Russia. But to write a text I would be satisfied with, I didn’t have access to Western publications on this topic at the time. And so, in the end, I left the work unfinished. In the late 80s, I translated Karl Popper’s work “The Poverty of Historicism,” which allowed me to publish fragments of the translation in the journal “Filosofska dumka” [Philosophical Thought] (No. 9) in 1990. Later, in 1994, I managed to publish a full translation of this work by Popper. I considered familiarity with this text important for criticizing the concept of “historical laws,” inherited from historical materialism.

* * *

Reinstatement of academic degree. In September 1986, I sent a letter to M. S. Gorbachev with a request to help me in reinstating my academic degree. In November, a reply came: “On the instruction of the Central Committee of the CPSU, your letter was considered by the Higher Attestation Commission [VAK] of the USSR. I inform you that in accordance with p. 67 of the ‘Instruction on the procedure for awarding academic degrees and conferring academic titles,’ the plenum of the VAK at the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR on April 5, 1974, protocol No. 26 §107, deprived you of the academic degree of Candidate of Philosophical Sciences for committing actions incompatible with the title of a Soviet scientist. Head of the State Inspectorate of the VAK of the USSR, H. M. Nesmeianova.” I was forced to write an indignant letter in response to Nesmeianova. In February 1987, the deputy chairman of the VAK sent a letter to the director of the Museum, Tamara Khomenko, stating that the case of reinstating my academic degree should be considered by the Academic Council of the Museum of the History of Kyiv. But then the consideration of this case was redirected to the Academic Council of the Institute of Philosophy. A meeting of the Academic Council of the Institute of Philosophy was held, at which a decision was made in my favor. The director of the Velykodmytrivska secondary school, Solodukhin, spoke at the meeting of the Academic Council in support of this decision. Finally, on May 12, 1989, the Presidium of the VAK adopted a resolution to reinstate my academic degree. I went to Moscow and received my reinstated Certificate of Candidate of Philosophical Sciences. Since I was hoping to be reinstated to the position of research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, I resigned from my teaching position at the school in August 1989.

I submitted an application to the director of the Institute of Philosophy, V. Shynkaruk, with a request to reinstate me to the position of research fellow at the Department of the History of Ukrainian Philosophy, which was headed by Valeriia Nichyk. Her support for my reinstatement was important. I was admitted to the Institute of Philosophy in compliance with all formal procedures. A competition was announced, and the director’s order to appoint me to the said position, dated January 25, 1990, was based on the conclusion of the competition committee. A hope appeared—at last! At last, I might have at least relatively satisfactory living conditions for my intellectual work. And not be engaged in it by overcoming the vise of life’s circumstances with my stubbornness. Like most Ukrainian intellectuals in the 20th century. And I wouldn’t have to think about how to protect the sovereignty of my thought from the bared fangs of an extremely aggressive, primitive ideology.

* * *

3. The Ideology of Perestroika. Helsinki-90

The ideology of perestroika. “Perestroika,” initiated by M. Gorbachev’s speech at the 27th Congress of the CPSU in February 1986, launched a process of political change: the discussion of political problems became freer with each passing year. Although I highly appreciate M. Gorbachev’s courage in initiating “perestroika,” judging by all accounts, he saw his task as getting the “process going”—without a vision of a final state of stabilization. This is probably related to the lack of determination and consistency, the half-heartedness of the reforms, the unexpected returns to old ways of acting, etc. He, of course, had to reckon with his entourage. And this largely explains the lack of determination and consistency.

My first attempts to take part in discussions concerning the ideology of perestroika date back to my time as a teacher. At the center of my attention was the relationship between human rights and the rights of nations to political self-determination. And, accordingly, the clarification of the principles that should underlie the reform of inter-ethnic relations in the USSR. I was counting on being able to publish articles in Russian journals: the most liberal were “Novy Mir” and “Ogoniok,” whose editor at the time was Vitaly Korotich. As an example of verbal acrobatics, I took an article by Alexander Prokhanov, published in the newspaper “Literaturnaia Rossiia” under the title “Tak ponimaiu!” [That’s How I Understand It!] (1987, No. 14, of 04.04). I wrote an article under the title “Ideia i realnost” [Idea and Reality] and sent it to the journal “Novy Mir” (it was not published). Perhaps such a rejection was justified, considering the odious nature of Prokhanov. But for me, his way of speaking was just an opportunity.

I wrote a second article titled “Istoriia i prava natsii” [History and the Rights of Nations] as a response to Alexander Osipov’s article “Turetskii vopros” [The Turkish Question] (“Svobodnoe slovo,” No. 19, of 25.07.1989). I didn’t send my critical response to the author at the time, but I had a discussion with Osipov at a human rights conference in Lithuania in 1990. I haven’t had a chance now to verify how fair my assessments of Osipov’s theses, expressed in the said article, are. But what is certain is that at that time, the vast majority of Russian and Ukrainian liberal-democrats sought to present their position as critical and scientific. In contrast to the position of the national-democrats, which they mostly assessed as being based on historical myths. The term “national-democrats” is conditional and unusual for Western usage. It is conditional because the introduction of this expression was forced, in order to distance oneself from individualistic liberalism, which reduced democracy only to the affirmation of human rights. This is not typical of Western democrats, who combine an appreciation of human rights with an appreciation of the nation, its cultural identity, and political sovereignty. We have an analogy in the use of the expression “national-communism,” introduced to distinguish it from Russian communism, which shifted the meaning of the term “internationalism” toward Russian imperial nationalism.

* * *

I am presenting excerpts from this text here primarily to illustrate my own positions on the national question in the late 1980s (omissions are marked with [...]).

“Dear Mr. Osipov, the initial premises you have chosen for discussing national relations in the USSR—namely, objectivity, logic, and a legal approach—give me hope of reaching a mutual understanding. However, some of your general remarks and arguments remind me of a very familiar way of thinking, or even an ‘ideology’ in the negative sense of the word. You speak of the illegitimacy of using historical arguments that are built on myths, on the doctoring of history to suit interests, prejudices, and so on. I agree. In asserting that representatives of the Ukrainian national movement use the denial of the commonality of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples to support the idea of Ukrainian independence, you present this as an example of mythological thinking. Let us not focus on specific individuals and isolated statements, i.e., certain extremes. After all, the debate about this commonality and its extent has a rather long history and a well-known context. What if, in response to your aforementioned assertion, I say that the argument of the ‘commonality’ of Kyivan Rus’ is used only to prove the absence of historico-ethnic roots of the Ukrainian people? You will say that it is precisely this predetermined nature of historical research and the metaphor of ‘historical roots’ that is the source of deviation from the truth. But what if someone counters your viewpoint (or Likhachev’s viewpoint) with the idea that Kyivan Rus’ was primarily a political entity, encompassing various tribes with different customs, religions, and even languages? You might argue that this is a myth, or in your other version, amateurism and an ahistorical approach. But what if someone says that your idea of a unified Rus’ is a myth, amateurism, and ahistorical? Let’s assume you have as much evidence on your side as your opponent does on theirs—who will be the judge? Or are you left to accuse each other using the same words?

You might say: ‘Pardon me, I only meant to say that one cannot use “history as politics projected into the past” (in particular, to resolve the question of the “historical rights of nations”).’ Yes, in some extreme cases, when something is asserted contrary to historical facts for the sake of political goals, this is unacceptable. However, the possibility of diverse historical approaches (different interpretations of facts) is something not only widespread but even inevitable. Otherwise, by abandoning ‘metaphors,’ ‘myths,’ ‘ideas,’ etc., you will arrive at a positivist version of history as a description of facts, and thus find yourself captive to another myth—the myth of ‘positive history.’ By the way, regarding the impossibility of studying facts without a preliminary idea, proceeding only from the facts themselves, it is better to read, say, Karl Popper. As for the methods of history and the role of interpretation in history, Collingwood’s book ‘The Idea of History,’ published in Russian translation, may be useful. There is a tension between facts and their interpretation: some interpretations can be rejected on the basis of facts. Indeed, the search for historical preconditions of certain phenomena has led even major historians (not amateurs!) to erroneous interpretations. But, in the general case, the relationship between modern consciousness and history, between modern institutions—social, political, etc.—and the past, is a more complex issue. History today is not finished (and cannot be finished in the future, unless one understands the word ‘history’ in a special sense). It is a continuous process of creating meaning: i.e., we must not reduce history to an ‘objective process.’ How we perceive ourselves in the present and how we wish to see ourselves in the future determine our understanding of the past.

Why is the historical argument used to justify the ‘historical rights of nations’? Because the question is whether a given people is a nation, and if so, there must surely be a history of the nation’s emergence as a community—i.e., ethnogenesis and nation-genesis. Your statement about the Pereiaslav Agreement can be understood to mean that this act was a natural consequence of the commonality of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples (after all, your words clearly contain irony regarding a different assessment of this act). Yes, some commonality played a certain role in this case, for instance, Orthodox Christianity. However, read the literature that evaluates this act differently (for example, Braichevsky’s work ‘Reunification or Annexation?’), and consider the ‘official’ historical materials from the 1920s and 30s, where this ‘reunification’ is assessed as the result of a conspiracy between the elites of the Russian and Ukrainian states at the expense of the ‘common people.’ Although the latter assessment bears the stamp of a ‘class approach,’ the ‘class approach,’ for all its one-sidedness, is one of the possible interpretations of history.

What contemporary distinctions must Belarusians point to in order to affirm their right to be considered a separate nation? Naturally, they will refer to history, countering the ‘myth’ of belonging to a single nation (with the Russians) with their own ‘myth’ of their distinctiveness, confirming it historically. A nation [...] is only partly something that has ‘grown’ for the rest, it is something created, and the role of ‘idea,’ and even ‘myth,’ in the process of creating a nation is well known. Of course, when the ideology of nationalism (which, by the way, played a leading role in the formation of all European nations and nation-states) leads to fantastical versions of history, these versions must be criticized. But when a historian tries to select and interpret historical facts in the light of the idea of creating certain historical preconditions for the later formation of a nation, he can achieve this through perfectly correct (from a scholarly point of view) interpretations. So much for the ‘mythologization of history.’

Let’s assume that your incidental historiosophical statements refer only to very specific ‘myths’ (about a Pan-Islamic or Zionist conspiracy or, for example, the mythologization of history to justify the right to a language and territory). In that case, one could say that you are careless in your statements. Or perhaps, due to a journalistic style, you did not set yourself the goal of making more rigorous semantic distinctions. I agree with you that referring to history to resolve linguistic and territorial disputes is an unsuitable method: it often leads to opposing and roughly equivalent versions. However, here, consciously or unconsciously, you are exaggerating. If you study the history of Left-Bank Ukraine and establish that the population of Ukrainian cities increased due to the Russian population as a result of a certain policy, then you must first and foremost assess the justice or injustice of that policy. Since it was the imperial policy of Russia towards Ukraine, you will inevitably condemn it to the extent that you view history from the perspective of your current value orientations. Yes, you might say: that was the past, it is beyond a fair trial. But this position is dangerously prone to spilling over into the present. Considering the linguistic processes in the Baltic states, if you take a principled, value-based approach, you will recognize that the situation where national minorities speak Russian among themselves and with the ‘indigenous people’ is also a consequence of a policy known to you. And it was precisely the occupation of these states that led to such a change in the ethnic composition of the population that the indigenous ethnic groups in the Baltics (except for Lithuania) are threatened with extinction. Or is the question of the survival of ethnic groups outside the scope of rational approaches for you? But even if for someone this problem is not a problem, it remains one for the disappearing ethnic groups. And these issues must be discussed honestly and openly.

You might say: surely we shouldn’t start correcting the consequences of historical injustice by violating individual rights. You advocate for a legal approach, particularly the priority of individual rights over all other rights. In this connection, I want to ask you a question: do you believe that personal freedoms are the only value worth protecting? I, for one, do not believe that protecting this value automatically ensures the preservation of the world’s cultural diversity or even the preservation of a healthy living environment. For me, for example, a rational social and international order (which presupposes the necessary space for personal freedoms) is also a value worthy of support.

Are you sure that modern French people would ever allow such levels of immigration into their country as to threaten the existence of the French language? You might say that this has little to do with the situation in the Baltics: what happened in the past cannot be corrected. Otherwise, it would be a violation of human rights and, in particular, the rights of national minorities. However, doesn’t it seem to you that in this way you could be adopting a dangerous position, from the point of view of its legal consequences: justifying any aggression already committed simply because it has become a part of history. Many Russian democrats are inclined to overlook the fact that the national minorities who form the ‘Interfronts’ are themselves a product of a specific policy and ideology. Their intolerance for national revival, and in particular the revival of the national language and national statehood, can only be understood as a consciousness formed by a specific policy and ideology. This intolerance, given the large number of the ‘Russian-speaking population,’ leaves the ethnic groups that have been victims of colonization no chance of survival. But I have not read or heard any appeals from Russian democrats to the ‘Interfronts’ to understand the historical injustice and to show understanding for the desire of these ethnic groups to survive. Of course, people as products, perhaps instruments or victims of a certain policy and ideology, are worthy of sympathy: their problems, related to their current situation, should not be solved from the standpoint of a new kind of chauvinism (ethnocratism). But the ethnic groups that have become victims of the same policy are also worthy of the same sympathy. In this situation, it is impossible to unconditionally take only the side of national minorities while accusing the ‘nationalists.’

Finally, at the beginning of this letter, I pointed out the deviations you made from your own premises of ‘scholarliness,’ ‘objectivity,’ etc. I meant that you use characterizations of national movements without first familiarizing yourself with the programs and specific actions of the popular fronts and movements. Otherwise, you would not have used the slogan ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’ as an example, which enjoys the support of neither Rukh nor the most influential parties in Ukraine. If you believe that it is not about declarations, but about concrete actions, then in that case it is necessary to refer to facts. And not to isolated facts, but to a generalization of a body of facts that truly provides a basis for generalizations. I could cite many examples of concrete actions by Rukh and other public organizations and parties in Ukraine aimed at implementing cultural-national autonomy in Ukraine (creating cultural societies for national minorities, etc.). But I have not heard of—let alone Pamyat, but the Democratic Union—promoting the revival of cultural-national autonomy for Ukrainians in, say, Moscow or Leningrad. And if you speak of a threat to human rights coming from Georgian, Estonian, Latvian, or Russian nationalism (of the Pamyat type), then in each case, it seems to me, a very specific approach is needed, in particular, a historically specific one. Declarative accusations and the a priori lumping of all national movements into a single image of ‘nationalism’ as an enemy of human rights is fruitless. The common position on which the democratic and human rights movements in the USSR can unite boils down to the implementation of a well-known political and legal model: every nation (in the sense of a nation-ethnos) is recognized as having the right to create ‘its own’ national state.

When people in southern Ukraine or the Donbas talk about the threat of Ukrainization (this, given that proponents of ‘human rights’ calmly accept the consequences of the Russification of a large number of Ukrainians living in these regions), it is precisely these stereotypes that are at play. And the moral duty of Russian democrats consists not in secretly or openly solidarizing with such hostility to the Ukrainian language (or with separatism), but in calling for support for the revival of Ukrainian culture.”

I want to emphasize that my critique here, of course, concerns A. Osipov’s position in 1989. I am leaving aside his publications from the 1990s and the early 21st century. (The Reader can find information online at http://www.cisr.ru/Osipov.html/, with a list of major publications). To understand his current view on interethnic relations in Russia and ways to prevent interethnic conflicts, the Reader can turn to his 21st-century publications (for example, the article “National Equality in Russia // Russia in the Post-Socialist World.”—M., 2006).

* * *

National minorities. From the cited text, it is clear that I use the term “ethnos” as a synonym for the expression ethnos-nation, which the German historian Friedrich Meinecke designated with the term “cultural nation” (Kulturnation). In modern usage, the term “ethnic nation” is predominantly used instead of “ethnos-nation.” An ethnic nation arises as a result of the fusion of previous ethnic communities (ethnoses) into a larger cultural whole. It is, to a large extent, a modern formation, created through a combination of cultural and political factors. Ethnic nations are primarily a product of European cultural and political circumstances. Their emergence is linked to the creation of a common literary language, the invention of printing, the influence of education, and so on. States also played an important role in the emergence of ethnic nations, with the exception of their formation in stateless nations or those with temporary statehood (Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, etc.). And it was precisely due to the emergence of ethnic nations in Europe that the formation of political nations based on an ethnic core, which was a certain ethnic nation, became possible.

In the aforementioned review of Osipov’s article, I was repeating the position I held in 1990-91 regarding the right of national minorities living compactly to territorial autonomy. This thesis is unjustified and even destructive if understood as a general legal principle, as an international legal norm, and not as a practice carried out at the level of national legislation, which takes into account the expediency of such autonomy in view of specific circumstances. The federal political structure in Germany was a result not so much of cultural (dialectal) differences as of the peculiarities of political history. The peculiarities of Switzerland’s political history (the transformation of a confederation into a federation) made possible the peaceful coexistence of territorially localized communities that use German, French, Italian, and Romansh languages. As practice shows, in democratic states, granting territorial autonomy to national minorities living compactly is the exception rather than the rule. This is the case with Quebec (if its Francophones are considered a national minority relative to the Anglophones of Canada). To assert such a right as a norm of international law means to encourage the emergence of many autonomies or even sovereign states, proclaimed by every territory, however small, where a certain ethnic community is numerically predominant, regardless of the characteristics it takes as the basis of its self-identification—be they religious, linguistic, or customs and peculiarities of daily life.

Later, in the 90s, I corrected this position of mine. I began to distinguish between immigrant national minorities, formed by people from ethnic nations whose historical homeland lies outside Ukraine, and such “national minorities” as the Crimean Tatars in Ukraine. Of course, the Crimean Tatars, like the Russians living in Crimea, can be considered a national minority in relation to Ukrainians in the Ukrainian state. But even if this is so, it should not be forgotten that the Crimean Tatars are a special national minority. For they are the only ethnic nation in Ukraine that was deported from Crimea—a territory that is their historical homeland. And from this should follow the recognition of their special status. They are fundamentally different from ethnic Russians in Ukraine, particularly in Crimea. After all, the Russians in Crimea are descendants of the Russian ethnic nation, whose historical homeland is outside of Ukraine. I believed then, and I still believe today, that—as the Crimean Tatars return and settle compactly in Crimea—Ukrainians must be prepared to recognize not only their right to cultural-national autonomy but also to political autonomy, even to the point of recognizing, in the long term, their right to create an independent state. This corresponds to the right of any ethnic nation to self-determination. Looking ahead, I will say that this position of mine was met with rejection by some Ukrainians. I remember a dispute with young people in the leadership of Rukh in the first half of the 90s (in the premises then located on Victory Square). This surprised me, as I believed then, and still believe, that the refusal by Ukrainians to recognize the Crimean Tatars as a separate ethnic nation with the right to political self-determination is a manifestation of Ukrainian chauvinism.

Recognizing the right of nations to self-determination generally does not lead to interethnic conflicts if smaller former ethnic communities have merged into a larger ethnocultural whole in the process of historical development. The situation is much more complicated when many small ethnic groups or communities, formed on the basis of religious or tribal self-identifications, live within a state, as is the case in many countries in Asia and Africa. Anthony Smith, in his book “National Identity,” points to these circumstances as an obstacle to the formation of nations based on an ethnic core. What is to be done when any group with certain cultural or religious differences considers itself a nation and demands political self-determination? The phenomenon of tribalism is an example of how a nation that is just forming can be torn apart into small communities. In such a case, appealing to the right of nations to political self-determination becomes an incentive for ethnic groups to demand not only autonomy but also state independence. Consequently, the combination of socio-economic and ethnic factors leads to interethnic conflicts.

Today, my Reader has access to Donald Horowitz’s fundamental study, “Ethnic Groups in Conflict,” in Ukrainian translation (Kharkiv, “Karavela,” 2006). It is enough to read at least the first three pages of the first chapter of this study to understand why the slogan of “national self-determination” played a certain role in provoking interethnic conflicts. Horowitz points this out directly: “Periodically surfacing, ethnic issues are fueled by the significant spread of the doctrine of ‘national self-determination.’” But Ukrainians, at least at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, were already aware of themselves as an ethnic nation. And by the time of the collapse of the USSR, within the territory whose borders were defined for the Ukrainian SSR, almost all national minorities were immigrant, not “indigenous,” ethnic groups. They belonged to ethnic nations whose historical homeland (with the exception of the Crimean Tatars) was located outside of Ukraine. This is more important than how long these people have lived there. After all, the concept of a historical homeland is not directly linked to the length of residence, but is a result of the international recognition of a certain territory as the historical homeland of a certain ethnic nation. Such recognition is an important means of international order.

In reality, the probability of any radical forms of nationalism gaining influence in Ukraine, even after its recognition as an independent state, was close to zero. The most influential nationalism in Ukraine was the liberal nationalism of the Sixtiers. It was represented by the most influential politician from among the former dissidents—Chornovil. But as a candidate for the presidency of Ukraine in 1991, he garnered fewer votes than Kravchuk. In fact, the biggest threat in countries like Ukraine and Belarus was the excessively low level of national consciousness. This is what undermined, and still undermines, the possibility of achieving a minimally necessary level of national consciousness and, consequently, unity. This, in turn, affects the nation’s ability to control the government, by blocking “divide and conquer” technologies. This dooms Ukraine, not only in foreign but also in domestic policy, to a large degree of uncertainty, the so-called “multi-vector policy.”

A serious geopolitical factor was the inability of the Russian political elite, after the collapse of the USSR, to develop a qualitatively new policy regarding nations—a policy that would be based on the recognition that the era of empires was over. The result of such recognition would have been a new ethic, consisting in the condemnation of the previous orientation towards the destruction of non-Russian nations, and, consequently, atonement for imperial sins, which would have consisted in supporting the revival of the undermined cultures of the various peoples that were part of the USSR. Instead, an attachment to the inherited imperial paradigm prevailed—a reliance on force and cunning technologies to block the life prospects of non-Russian nations. So, instead of appealing to ethnic Russians who became national minorities in the new independent states to support the revival of national cultures, the focus was placed on supporting the so-called “Interfronts.”

Even today, the implementation of a “minimally necessary national unity” as a prerequisite for effective democratic self-government is often met with accusations of imposing cultural uniformity. In reality, it is about a unity in diversity that is not aimed at depriving national minorities of their rights and opportunities to preserve their cultural identity. It also does not mean an orientation toward eliminating dialectal differences within the Ukrainian ethnic nation. When it comes to, say, establishing the Ukrainian language as the language of common civic communication, this implies an orientation of national minority representatives towards bilingualism. Every citizen of Ukraine, regardless of ethnic origin, should support the Ukrainian language as the language of common civic communication, but can use the language of their national minority with representatives of that minority, and establish schools and other cultural or religious institutions for the needs of that national minority. This applies equally to Hutsuls, Lemkos, and other communities that represent dialectal differences within the Ukrainian nation. The cultural policy of modern Germany can serve as an example here.

The concept of a minimally necessary prerequisite for national unity is aimed at ensuring certain elements of unity while preserving cultural diversity. Besides the language of common civic communication (the state language), these elements usually include knowledge of a basic course in Ukrainian history and an idea of the specifics of its culture, respect for state symbols, and a sense of patriotism—a disposition to defend the national interests and independence of the Ukrainian state. Any representative of a national minority should be interested in supporting such a minimally necessary unity, based on their own life interests. And the main focus of persuasion should be the ability to show that the implementation of the strategy just outlined corresponds to the economic and political interests of national minorities. For example, the Russian national minority, in this case, would be able to block attempts to use it as a means of carrying out the neo-imperial policy of the modern Russian Federation, and become a force that affirms friendly, not hostile, relations with ethnic Ukrainians. On the other hand, the affirmation of a unique culture and language also brings certain economic benefits (I think this is too simple to need explanation here).

In the late 80s, scaremongering about the threat of radical varieties of nationalism that would provoke intolerance towards national minorities forced the Ukrainian Helsinki Union to issue various kinds of appeals to national minorities. The most important in this regard was the publication of the “Appeal to the National Minorities Living in Ukraine” (published in the Ukrainian Herald’s edition “UV-Express No. 9—Kyiv-Lviv, 1988”).

* * *

Objectivity and the national interpretation of history. The most important problem, only briefly touched upon in my critical response to Osipov’s article, is the problem of the relationship between the objectivity of historical research and the interpretation, the sense-making, of history. By the term “sense-making,” I denote not so much the causal explanation of historical events, but primarily their evaluation from the perspective of possible historical tendencies and prospects. It is a matter of the connection between retrospection and prospection in historical research. Habermas, in his critique of Foucault’s attempts to reduce historical research to micro-discourses, quite rightly noted that such a method of historical research inevitably leads to a chaotic accumulation of events, and thus historical events and processes become meaningless. Because the historian in such a case neglects the perspective—the consequences to which certain actions and events lead. If a historian does not have a paradigm from whose perspective they examine historical processes, then they have no criterion by which to single out certain events as historically significant. Undoubtedly, the historian must distinguish the factual level of their research from interpretations and evaluations. But as soon as they ask why a given powerful civilization ultimately fell, they must move to the level of the aggregate consequence of various kinds of events and processes. That is, to consider historical events in terms of a choice of historical perspectives.

In the above critical response to Osipov’s publication, the focus is on the question of how the objectivity of historical research relates to the value component of the paradigm on which the historian relies in their research. If a historian examines world history or the history of any people from the point of view of, say, the processes of modernization, which include the formation of a nation, democracy, industrialization, and a market economy (capitalism), then they will evaluate historical processes from the perspective of this very paradigm. A historian of the second half of the 20th century who recognizes that the age of empires is past, if they belong to an imperial nation, must rewrite their national history, written from the perspective of the imperial paradigm. And this must inevitably include the acknowledgment of unjust actions aimed at subjugating other peoples. Thus arises the need for a dialogue about the assessment of the past for the sake of the future—a dialogue with historians of formerly subordinate nations, which must be based on the recognition of equality and mutual respect between nations.

And if we expand this thesis, it is about assessing the past for the sake of the present and the future. And accordingly, this assessment must be based on the principles of modern ethics of international relations. A historian, of course, must point to the customs and moral convictions that motivated the actions of individuals and collective actions in certain spatially and temporally localized societies. But at the same time, they can evaluate these customs or actions as cruel, guided by modern ethical convictions. If we use the word “macroethics” to denote ethics concerning the relations between ethnic communities, nations, and civilizations, then the principles of this ethics allow for agreement to be reached among people, including historians, in the assessment of certain actions and historical events today.

So, the evaluation of actions and events in the context of a particular historical situation is significantly different from their modern evaluation, aimed at achieving understanding between nations on the basis of recognizing their equality and mutual respect. For a modern evaluation is aimed at affirming the ethical principles that should form the basis of modern and future relations between nations. For example, the evaluation of the ideology of Ukrainian defensive integral nationalism in the socio-political situation of the 1920s-30s is significantly different from its modern evaluation from the perspective of modern ethics of international relations—ethics that affirms the principles to which relations between nations should conform in the present and future.

The same applies to the evaluation of prominent historical figures—such as Piłsudski, Bandera, and others. Distinguishing between the positive and negative in ideologies, in collective actions, in the activities of individuals, and a dialogue about this among historians and intellectuals is important for achieving understanding. In this dialogue, the vital interests of each nation must be recognized, and any cruelty or genocide, which cannot be justified, must be condemned—for example, the genocide of Indian tribes. And this applies to reaching an understanding with Russian historians in the assessment of the most contentious Russian-Ukrainian international relations of the past. A modern assessment of the past is made for the sake of the future, for the sake of affirming the values we strive to establish, so that the horrors of our past relations are not repeated. Of course, this refers to historians who are completely sincere in their thinking within a post-imperial paradigm. And this is the way to ensure that historical memory does not divide peoples, but unites them for the sake of a dignified future.

But there is the prospect of another, in a sense even more interesting, dialogue concerning the specifics of each nation’s worldview, including its perception and interpretation of its own history. In this case, it is not so much about understanding common ethical guidelines as about comparing “external” and “internal” receptions of Ukrainian history and culture. By “external” here I mean the views of “outsiders,” and by “internal” the perceptions and interpretations of those for whom the culture of a given people is “native.” I use the word “native,” of course, not in the sense of biological or ethnic origin, but in the sense of being immersed in the cultural tradition of a given people, which allows one to understand its meanings from within. Such a comparison of views in dialogue is fruitful and promising from the point of view of mutual enrichment. In this case, we are no longer dealing with the evaluation of certain facts from the perspective of common ethical guidelines, but with a special interpretation of facts. Moreover, this concerns not only some positive visions of the past. From the early 90s to the early 21st century, the emphasis was mainly on popularizing positive perceptions of the Ukrainian worldview and way of life by “outsiders.” This is understandable, if we take into account the feeling of national humiliation caused by the colonial past. But no less important are the critical visions of outsiders, which allow for the overcoming of certain inherited mental flaws.

These rather elementary things became, for understandable reasons, very relevant in the early 90s. But even today, in the first decade of the 21st century, it is necessary to emphasize them to avoid misunderstandings in international dialogue.

* * *

The ideology of Perestroika. One short text concerning the ideology of perestroika, written by me at the end of 1989, was nevertheless published—in the journal “Philosophical and Sociological Thought” (1990, No. 3). The journal at that time printed a series of articles related to the ideology of “perestroika.” I wrote my text in the form of a response to a questionnaire containing 11 questions. The initiator of the questionnaire (under the rubric “Prospects and Dead Ends of Perestroika”) was Leonid Finberg, who was then on the journal’s Editorial Board. My position consisted in combining human rights with the right of nations to self-determination. Hence the orientation towards transforming the USSR into a voluntary Union of republics, which would be based on the right of each republic to determine the extent of its own sovereignty. This was the general attitude of the Ukrainian national-democratic movement during 1989-90, also proclaimed by the Constituent Congress of the People’s Movement of Ukraine (Rukh) in September 1989. This position was seen as transitional, until a real opportunity to declare state independence arose.

Below are excerpts from my answer to the fourth question of the Questionnaire: “How do you envision the resolution of national problems concerning various ethnic groups: Russians, Ukrainians, the peoples of the Baltics, Transcaucasia, the peoples ‘punished’ by Stalin (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, etc.)? What are the constructive directions for the activities of national movements?”

“If a single, indivisible great state becomes the supreme value of legal consciousness, then such a legal consciousness immediately comes into conflict with a fundamental universal human value—the freedom of peoples. The freedom of peoples is expressed in the right of nations to self-determination, and, therefore, the recognition of this right must be an axiom of the state law that is to define the legal foundations of the Union. It follows that the Union, in terms of international relations, must be a union of fully-fledged nations—precisely fully-fledged, not merely equal. In legal terms, the Union must be a Union of democratic sovereign republics. The concept of sovereignty here means that the people, having transferred part of the powers of the republican bodies to the all-Union state bodies, retain the right and have the practical ability to reclaim any or all of those rights, by proclaiming an independent state. This does not mean that the union republics cannot enter into federal relations, but a federation is not considered a higher concept of the state law that will define the legal basis of the Union.”

“All three principles can be briefly expressed by rephrasing a well-known saying: it does not matter to us whether any republic secedes from the Union, rejoins it, or establishes any other type of connection with it, but it is important that it be a democratic republic. The stability of international relations among all the nations of the Soviet Union in the future and the civilized forms of these relations depend primarily on the resolution of this latter problem. And this depends on the extent to which a commitment is made today to reason, to constructive legal thinking, rather than to realizing the goals of the ideology of ‘single and indivisible unity’ by somewhat improved means.”

As for the thesis about the right of national minorities living compactly to national-territorial autonomy, I have already mentioned above the erroneousness of this thesis in its general formulation.

* * *

In 1989-90, the main issue was preventing violent actions directed against national-democratic movements. Was a peaceful scenario for development possible—even as a path to a civilized “divorce,” to the secession of at least some republics from the Union? The events in Vilnius in January 1991 and the attempted coup d’état on August 19 showed that the peaceful dismantling of the communist empire was in question.

However, after the coup attempt and the adoption of the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on August 24, the prospect of forming a renewed union of sovereign republics (finally an “honest” one!) lost its relevance. M. Gorbachev’s attempt to realize this idea in Novo-Ogaryovo (to conclude a treaty on the creation of a “Union of Sovereign States”) was too late. Ukraine’s refusal to participate in these negotiations on the grounds that an all-Ukrainian referendum on this issue must be held was entirely justified. The results of the referendum held on December 1, 1991, and the position of B. Yeltsin, who sought to free himself from subordination to M. Gorbachev, played a decisive role in the announcement on December 7 in Belovezhskaya Pushcha of the dissolution of the USSR and the agreement to create an interstate union—the CIS. Although the Treaty on the creation of such a union was signed in Alma-Ata by all republics except Georgia and the Baltic republics, the activities of this entity faced difficulties. The reasons were the same—Russia’s desire to maintain a leading position.

History entered a period of rapid change. On December 25, M. Gorbachev announced his resignation as President of the USSR, and on December 30 in Minsk, at a meeting of the heads of state that had joined the CIS, the state structures of the now-former USSR were liquidated. Thus, the last decade of the 20th century became the beginning of a new era in European history, and a celebration of longed-for independence for the “union republics” that had finally broken free from the tight embrace of the empire. Formally, yes; how real it was—is a topic for various analyses and reflections from the 90s to the early 21st century.

* * *

“Helsinki-90.” In July 1988, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was transformed into the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. The UHU had already moved beyond human rights defense and was setting political goals. This led the International Helsinki Federation to refuse to accept the UHU as an associated collective member. The process of the UHU’s politicization culminated in its transformation into the Ukrainian Republican Party at the end of April 1990. Meanwhile, the UN initiated the idea of associating non-governmental human rights organizations with its Department of Public Information. At the end of July, a letter from the UN, dated June 27 (signed by Farouk Mavlavi, Chief, NGO and Institutional Relations Section, Dissemination Division, Department of Public Information), addressed to Mykola Horbal as a member of the UHU (which had already ceased to exist), arrived with a proposal for the UHU to become an associated member of this UN Department. The letter was sent with an attached questionnaire, the answers to which would provide grounds for a positive decision on the UHU’s association with the aforementioned department. Since the UHU had ceased to exist, the absence of a purely human rights-focused non-governmental union prompted Oksana Yakivna Meshko to create such an organization. She even suggested a name—the Ukrainian Committee “Helsinki-90.” And she persistently tried to convince me to head this organization.

This did not align with my plans. If one is to take human rights work seriously, it would have to consume all my efforts and time. But I also couldn’t refuse Oksana Yakivna; she knew how to be persuasive. So, in the “Information Bulletin of the Ukrainian Committee ‘Helsinki-90,’” No. 1 (August, 1990), published by the “Spilka” publishing house in New York, after the Declaration on the establishment of the committee (signed by twenty-seven people), the Committee’s Statute was signed by me as chairman. At the same time, I was trying to persuade Vasyl Ovsiyenko to lead the union. He agreed only to be a co-chairman. Later (from 1993), Yuriy Murashov, a founding member of “Helsinki-90,” became the third co-chairman. From what I can judge from Vasyl Ovsiyenko’s words, it was he who resolved most of the organizational issues, until his tragic death on September 1, 2005. At the time of its creation, about 15 people agreed to be members of the Committee (among them I. B. Brovko, M. A. Horbal, N. V. Belitser, M. I. Holets, Ye. O. Dykyi, R. Lenchovskyi, Yu. I. Murashov).

In 1990, the issue arose concerning the fate of Bohdan Klymchak, who had not been released. Because in addition to the charge of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” he had also been accused of “treason” (for crossing the border) and sentenced by the Lviv Regional Court in 1979 to 15 years in labor camps and 5 years of exile. Information about him had already been passed on to international human rights organizations. Probably in the first half of October, Lincoln Payne from the USA arrived in Kyiv to get more detailed information. I met with him. I remember we were walking along the sidewalk of Kirova Street (now Hrushevskoho) towards Khreshchatyk from the Akademknyha bookstore. We were wary, trying to avoid any provocations, but everything went without any incident. My conversation with Lincoln remains a good memory, and his image became for me an embodiment of the “typical” American: simplicity in communication, openness, frankness, and a sincere interest in helping a person persecuted by a totalitarian regime. He was interested in the general situation in Ukraine and had already managed to meet Oksana Meshko and some other dissidents in Ukraine. I do not know to what extent his personal efforts contributed to the fact that in November of that same year, 1990, Bohdan Klymchak was finally released. Later, after his arrival in Los Angeles, he sent me a letter in which he expressed satisfaction with our meeting and conversation (the letter is signed October 30). In particular, he remarked in his letter: “If there is anything I can do to help the Helsinki Group and the Ukrainian Republican Party, please let me know” (translated from English).

* * *

In the aforementioned first “Information Bulletin,” there was a “Consolidated Information on Resettlement to Ukraine,” for which I wrote a short preface titled “SOS: Ethnocide.” Since what was said in it has not lost its relevance even today, I am presenting this text here.

“The absence of independent statehood for centuries was the main reason why the threat of the disappearance of Ukrainians as a separate people was always quite real. A people who lived as part of various superpowers could not count on a tolerant attitude towards their national identity. In the Russian Empire, the tool for destroying national identity was the prohibition on the existence of a national culture and a church with national rites. No less a threat also comes from the erosion of the ethnic composition of Ukrainians, since in empires the freedom to choose one’s place of residence was always guaranteed. However, it was only in the Soviet empire that the destruction of the national identity of peoples was elevated to the level of a conscious policy. The basis for this policy was an ideological orientation towards the ‘merger of nations’ (so-called internationalism) and the complexes of great-power chauvinism.

The Declaration of Sovereignty, adopted by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, should have marked a turning point in the history of Ukrainians, when the threat of their disappearance as a people finally ceased to hang over them like a Damoclean sword. However, the awakening of national consciousness and the critique of denationalization that unfolded during the period of perestroika, and even the adoption of the Declaration of Sovereignty, have so far had little effect on the real situation. The practice of resettling peoples has ceased, but efforts to revive national identity are meeting with powerful opposition. In this situation, attempts to continue the ethnocide have even intensified.

Previously, during the ‘stagnation’ period, government departments centrally carried out the resettlement of people from outside Ukraine, opening large enterprises for immigrants. At the same time, organized recruitments of the Ukrainian population were conducted for resettlement outside of Ukraine. Such organized recruitments are still being carried out today—even with the family being presented with a key to an apartment in their new place of residence. Meanwhile, today, the expansion of the powers of local authorities and the independence of enterprises can be used to sell land to settlers from other republics in exchange for certain benefits: the installation of a gas pipeline, the repair of a road, or the construction of residential buildings for local needs. In all modern sovereign civilized states, the regulation of immigration is a matter for the highest legislative bodies. Try getting citizenship or moving to a permanent place of residence even to the USA, which has traditionally been a country of immigrants. However, the Ukrainian republic is a sovereign state without a law on citizenship. And again, the old policy of mixing peoples becomes possible on the basis of, so to speak, partial initiative—the initiative of individuals, enterprises, local government bodies. And again, the Damoclean sword of their disappearance as a separate people continues to hang over Ukrainians as a result of the erosion of their ethnic composition. The right has been given to change the ethnographic map of Ukraine, as was done for centuries of national oppression in Ukraine. It is time to put an end to this practice and this right. Sensible regulation of immigration is needed, which would take into account both certain individual interests (for example, family reunification) and national interests (the resettlement to Ukraine of people for whom this land is native).”

I will note that the current situation is significantly different, but throughout the 90s, and even today, what remains in common is that immigration to Ukraine is practically unregulated. The factors causing a decrease in the percentage of ethnic Ukrainians in Ukraine are well known: the departure of Ukrainians to work in Western countries and illegal immigration to Ukraine, mainly through Russia, due to the “transparent border.” Alla Libanova (of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) on August 14, 2009, on Channel 5, noting that a “transparent border” effectively means the absence of a border, at the same time said that the Institute for Demography does not have the financial capacity to conduct research on the number of illegal immigrants in Ukraine, let alone their quality. If Ukraine does not establish control over immigration, it will soon face the very negative consequences of uncontrolled immigration.

* * *

Problems of human rights advocacy. I soon became convinced that in the presence of political pluralism, the activities of public human rights organizations must undergo radical changes. In the past, Helsinki organizations in the USSR were focused on defending people from political repressions, the political motives of which were obvious. After the repeal of the sixth article of the USSR Constitution and the emergence of political parties, even the defense of people subjected to politically motivated repressions became more complicated. On the one hand, political persecutions are disguised as criminal offenses, and on the other, some of the accused seek to present completely justified criminal charges as politically motivated. This calls for an increased level of professionalism in the activities of human rights organizations. There was an urgent need to restructure the very way the Committee operated: involving people with legal education and establishing cooperation with investigative bodies, the prosecutor’s office, etc. This was particularly so given that the Committee’s tasks should include addressing the entire list of human rights, not just civil and political rights. Meanwhile, political activity in the URP or in other political organizations that began to form drew away many of those who had previously been involved in human rights work. We soon faced the fact that some of the statements sent to our Committee required verification. Were there truly political motives hidden behind the criminal prosecutions?

From what has been said, my maturing conviction that I physically could not combine proper human rights work with my work in philosophy becomes clear. And yet, my relatively intensive activity in “Helsinki-90” during the first three years, starting from 1990, proved useful, including for my philosophical pursuits. I am referring to participation, along with some other members of our organization, in international human rights conferences. Ultimately, this prompted me to take up the philosophical questions of human rights and to clarify the relationship between human rights and the right of nations to self-determination. Some of my positions on this problem were highlighted in the article “The West and the Rights of Nations,” published in the newspaper “Slovo” (October, 1991, reprinted in the collection “In the Polyphony of Political Discussions”—“Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Publishing House,” 2007).

* * *

The relationship between individual rights and the rights of nations. I outline here very briefly the essence of the problem for the Reader who may not be aware of the difficulties a human rights advocate faced then, and faces even today, when going beyond the defense of individual rights and raising the question of protecting the rights of human groups and communities. I have in mind primarily the situation of the late 80s and early 90s. But certain aspects of this problem remain relevant to this day.

The League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference affirmed the cultural rights of minorities, but as individuals. This was contrary to President Wilson’s project, which provided for the rights of ethnic groups and the right of peoples to self-determination. This, in particular, explains the problems that the initiative for a legal definition of genocide encountered. Nevertheless, in 1946, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that became the basis for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which already protected groups, not individuals. But the proposal for the prevention and punishment of cultural genocide (cultural assimilation carried out by the state against other ethnic and religious groups through direct and indirect violence), after its consideration by the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly, was omitted from the resolution. The process met with opposition from influential states: the USA, Latin American states, France, and others were against it in 1948, when the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so, Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the Commission on Human Rights, drawing on American experience, rejected the idea of special rights for ethnic groups and national minorities. Nevertheless, in 1960, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 1514—“Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” But Article 6 of this resolution warned: “Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

The conceptual, empirical, and practical difficulties that arise in a legal approach, related to how to single out those groups that are aware of and declare their cultural (ethnic) distinctiveness in order to recognize them as nations, are understandable. I have mentioned the difficulties in using the principle of national self-determination in cases where an ethnic nation has not historically emerged, and instead, many small ethnic communities have been preserved. This is most easily resolved in the case where fairly distinct and relatively large ethnocultural entities have already emerged, which today are mostly designated by the term “ethnic nations”—like the Ukrainians in the USSR, who, due to the peculiarities of their history, overcame their tribal differences. We are dealing with a modern community that feels and is aware of its cultural kinship. And since such a group lives within a “foreign” state, not created by it, from this flows its right to political self-determination.

* * *

The official position of international and Western legal structures was that all peoples of the USSR, with the exception of Russians, were minorities in the USSR. But, on the other hand, Russians in the “union” republics were minorities in relation to those peoples who exercised self-government through republican state bodies. It was precisely this tiered definition of the concept of national minorities that I contested in international discussions in 1990-91. I insisted that, say, Estonians are a nation-ethnos (an ethnic nation), not a national minority, and therefore have the right to live in their own independent state.

What determined such a position from the representatives of the UN, CSCE, and other international human rights organizations? If we turn to international documents, after the adoption of the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” in 1960, the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination is mentioned incidentally in a series of later UN declarations. But at the same time, emphasis is placed on non-interference in the internal affairs of states. For example, in the “Declaration on Social Progress and Development” of 1969 (in the “Principles” section, Article 3), these two principles are written side by side: point (a) proclaims the right of peoples to self-determination, while points (b) and (c) state the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. In general, this is correct; both should be present. But if the existence of dependent peoples-nations is recognized, then states that do not respect the right of nations to self-determination should be named. However, adopting such a resolution and naming, say, the USSR among such states was practically impossible. Hence the emphasis on respecting human rights and the rights of national minorities, particularly from the perspective of preserving their cultural identity. This was what could be effective at that time. And, as we can now affirm, this strategy has at least partially justified itself.

But at the same time, if we step back from the early 90s and look at the historical perspective, international efforts aimed at protecting the world’s cultural diversity as an important universal value should rather be assessed as not corresponding to the real threats of the second half of the 20th century. And they correspond even less so today, at the beginning of the 21st century, in the era of globalization. It cannot be said that the value of the world’s cultural diversity was not emphasized in UN Declarations. In the “Declaration of the Principles of International Cultural Co-operation,” adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in 1966 (by acclamation), the first article unequivocally states: “1. Each culture has a dignity and value which must be respected and preserved. 2. Every people has the right and the duty to develop its culture. 3. In their rich variety and diversity, and in the reciprocal influences they exert on one another, all cultures form part of the common heritage belonging to all mankind.” (I present the theses in my own translation from the English text of “Human Rights: A Compilation of International Instruments.”—United Nations, New York, 1988). But such declarations were not translated into any practical actions. The existence of the Iron Curtain, the closing off from the West of everything that was happening in the USSR, led to the fact that even the physical extermination of the Ukrainian peasantry, which constituted more than half of the Ukrainian nation, went unnoticed. As for the protection of the world’s cultural diversity and the condemnation of the cultural assimilation of nations, primarily in the USSR, at the end of the 80s this issue did not become a subject of legal consideration (in the context of the right of nations to self-determination).

* * *

European Workshop on International Standards in the Field of Human Rights—Kyiv, September 24-28, 1990.

The European Workshop on Human Rights, held in the capital of Ukraine at the end of September, was the second of its kind held in the Soviet Union (the first was held in Moscow in November 1988). The Kyiv workshop was quite representative: almost all European countries were represented, as well as the USA, Canada, the Holy See, the Council of Europe, non-governmental organizations, Amnesty International, the Conference of European Churches, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Political Affairs Committee of the European Parliament. Of the republics of the Soviet Union, only Ukraine was represented; there was also, of course, a delegation from the Soviet Union. From Ukraine, on an official level, officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UN took part in the workshop, and on an unofficial level, several members of parliament, with deputy Smetanin giving a short speech.

As chairman of the Ukrainian Committee “Helsinki-90,” I was hoping I could “squeeze in” to make a small statement, the text of which I had prepared the day before. But my oral request to the moderator who was compiling the list of speakers for the discussion was refused due to time constraints. But I did not give up and kept trying to persuade him to give me at least two minutes for a short statement. The text I had prepared would not fit into the one or two minutes they probably gave me. So I had to shorten the text written the day before on the spot. The fact that I ignored the requirement to use one of the working languages and spoke in Ukrainian provoked a negative reaction from some delegates. But some of the foreign participants of the Workshop considered it permissible that, in addition to the working languages, the language of the country where the Workshop was held could also be heard.

Anticipating my story, I will note that my command of English, German, and Polish was geared towards reading and translating philosophical texts. Opportunities to use these languages in oral speech were rare. I was not fluent in English, but I could get by in conversation or write an English text to then deliver. It was easier for me to say something in English than to quickly grasp what was being said. It was actually the English language that saved me in my communication with the person who was compiling the list of speakers at the Workshop, just as it would later help me on trips to Western countries, particularly for participation in international human rights conferences. In this case, I could have, of course, delivered my speech in Russian, but I deliberately chose Ukrainian. Here is the text of my statement.

“Dear participants of the European Workshop on Human Rights. My name is Vasyl Lisovyi, and I am currently the chairman of a non-governmental human rights organization called the Ukrainian Committee ‘Helsinki-90.’ In 1976, a non-governmental human rights organization was established in Ukraine—the Group for the Promotion of the Helsinki Accords. Anyone who became a member of this human rights organization doomed themselves to long years in labor camps, as at that time, human rights activities in the Soviet Union were brutally persecuted. Among the republics of the Soviet Union, Ukraine stands out both for the number of participants in the human rights movement and for the persistence and consistency of this movement. 21 members of the Group for the Promotion of the Helsinki Accords spent many years in camps for their human rights activities. Four of them, including the famous poet Vasyl Stus, were tortured to death in the camps. The documents on the activities of this group for 10 years, from 1976 to 1986, are collected in Volume 3 of the Helsinki Groups Documents, published in Washington in 1986 by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The Group for the Promotion of the Helsinki Accords was renamed the Helsinki Union in 1986, which was recently transformed into a party. But the human rights situation in Ukraine is such that it is impossible to rely fully on state law enforcement agencies. This is due to the fact that in many state bodies—in the prosecutor’s office, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in the KGB—people with old stereotypes of thinking have retained their positions, including those who once participated in the persecution of dissidents and human rights defenders. Taking this into account, the activities of the non-governmental human rights organization, the Ukrainian Committee ‘Helsinki-90,’ have been revived this year.

I want to draw the attention of the honorable participants of our discussion to one important point. This concerns the support of our human rights organization’s activities by international organizations dedicated to protecting human rights. We, the human rights defenders of Ukraine, highly value the efforts that Amnesty International made in its time to support and protect political prisoners in the Soviet Union. However, in my opinion, the support for our human rights activities, as well as the support for the activities of other non-governmental human rights organizations in the Soviet Union, can be more effective, particularly from the UN. It will not be easy for our human rights organization to achieve legal status even today. There are political forces that are not interested in this. Meanwhile, the UN has a tool that can be successfully used. I mean the transformation of non-governmental human rights organizations into organizations associated with the relevant UN bodies—with the UN Department of Public Information or the Commission on Human Rights. To do this, it is necessary to overcome excessive formalism. The main documents of, say, our human rights organization are transmitted to the West, and they can be the basis for such a decision by the relevant UN bodies.

Since the political situation in the Soviet Union is very unstable due to the confrontation between, on the one hand, national movements for state independence, and on the other, attempts to preserve the system of neo-colonialism, the human rights movement may find itself in a very difficult situation. I hope that this appeal of mine will find understanding in the context of the discussions that have taken place here. Thank you for your attention.”

* * *

Prague-90. Our Committee had a rather numerous participation (about half of its members) in the Constituent Conference of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly in Prague in November 1990. It was a quite representative gathering: representatives from the CSCE, UN, European Parliament, etc., were present. The discussion around the question of whether non-governmental human rights organizations from the republics of the USSR and Yugoslavia should be represented independently in international structures, and not through the mediation of all-union organizations, was sharp. The official position of Western institutions was that they should be represented through all-union organizations. In defending our right to be represented independently, we, the Ukrainians, solidarized on this issue with the Baltic human rights defenders and the human rights defenders of the constituent republics of Yugoslavia, with the exception, of course, of the Serbs. The schedule was very strict. I remember being pleasantly impressed by a brief speech by Galina Starovoytova, who supported the demands of human rights defenders from the union republics to have independent representation. In the general discussion, I also expressed support for this idea.

Besides that, I was struck by Prague as a city-museum. I mean the architecture. We stood together before the monument to Jan Palach, whose act resonated with the fate of similar sacrificial acts in Ukraine. The second unforgettable impression was the culture of service. It’s not just about politeness. In some shop, a saleswoman offers you a choice of several languages for communication, besides English, also German. I later recalled this incident when a member of the Ukrainian diaspora told me how, upon the demand of a cashier at the Kyiv railway station to “speak in a human language,” he convinced her that he spoke only Ukrainian and English.

However, this is our current daily reality—a consequence of an obliging tolerance that some call “culturedness.” In the name of this culturedness, millions of Ukrainians are ready to renounce the defense of their culture, in contrast to the Czechs. And the Slovaks, who affirmed their language against the Czech Slavophiles, among whom was Kollár, who believed that the Czech language should be the common language for Czechs and Slovaks. Dmytro Chyzhevsky, whom the Czechs respect for his contribution to Czech culture, defended the Slovak language against Czech in his articles about Ľudovít Štúr. However, the Czechs, who themselves were overcoming the consequences of their Germanization, refused to impose their language on the Slovaks with the help of cunning practices, as we see in the case of Russians to this day—to make their “brothers” resemble themselves, in the name of a closer brotherhood, of course. Can you imagine a friend who agrees to be your friend only if you become like him? That, in the name of friendship, you would renounce your own personality? And he even has proofs and theories to convince you that you were no different from him since the cradle. The Czechs rejected such “brotherhood” with the Slovaks. Serhiy Vasylovych Komisarenko, a biochemist (at the Palladin Institute of Biochemistry, the first ambassador of Ukraine to the United Kingdom), on Radio “Kultura” (3rd channel) on Jan. 30, 2006, remarked: Russia has 40 buildings in London for its needs; it refused to hand over even one to Ukraine. He appealed to Kravchuk, who said he had spoken with Yeltsin, but without any positive results. In contrast, as a result of the division of Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic shared some of its buildings with Slovakia. So, we have a fundamentally different understanding of “Slavic brotherhood.”

* * *

Conference in Lithuania. At the end of 1990, an invitation, signed by Aleksandr Osipov, arrived at our Committee’s address, with the following opening: “The Initiative Group of the Second International Conference ‘Human Rights and National Problems’ has the honor to invite you to participate in our conference on December 8-10, 1990, in the city of Vilnius (Republic of Lithuania).

The problem of interethnic relations, interethnic conflicts, the relationship between individual and collective rights within the process of collective self-determination, and the formation of national states is among the most complex theoretical and practical issues. The events of recent years in a number of countries in Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and the USSR not only provide the researcher with extensive information for analysis but also, in a number of aspects, necessitate the development of new views and approaches, since for the first time in its history, humanity is facing the most complex national and ethnic problems in the context of the crisis of colonial totalitarianism.

The work of the Second Independent Conference ‘Human Rights and National Problems,’ held in Vilnius, December 8-10, 1990, will be dedicated to this theme. It is expected that anthropologists, Sovietologists, human rights defenders, and experts from independent political organizations will participate in the work of the Conference.”

Further on, the goals of the conference are specified. The organizers of both conferences were a group of people from Moscow (Andrei Gryaznov, Aleksandr Osipov, Aleksandr Eliovich), Leningrad (Yekaterina Podoltseva, Ella Polyakova), and Vilnius (Birutė Pečeliavičiūtė, Imantas Melianas, Galina Ivanova).

I took part in one such conference, which was held in Lithuania (in Vilnius). But it was probably the first of such conferences discussing the same problems, not the second. In my papers, I found only notes prepared for my participation in the discussions (the text mentions the names Osipov, Eliovich, Korchynsky, the last from Ukraine). In the discussions, I had a dispute with A. Osipov regarding the relationship between individual rights and the right of nations to self-determination. Osipov put forward the thesis that in my understanding of ethnicity, I was relying on essentialism (that I imagine ethnoses and nations as something inherently whole). I considered this reproach from Osipov to be a misunderstanding.

* * *

Conference in Estonia (Tallinn-Pärnu-Tartu). This was an international conference that took place on April 23-27, 1991; its theme was “Human Rights and the Legal Basis of Democracy.” This conference was very representative; all official international human rights structures were represented there. I gave a presentation and participated in the discussions. The main theme of both the presentation and my participation in the discussions was the problem of the relationship between individual rights and the rights of nations. I insisted that calling Estonians in Estonia a “national minority” within the state of the USSR, rather than a nation (ethnos-nation), was an unacceptable position, as it meant refusing to recognize the right of Estonians to political self-determination in the form of an independent state. I delivered the report in Russian, but even the Russian text I had prepared had to be significantly shortened due to time constraints. Below I present the text that was delivered (in reprinting, I have omitted the crossed-out parts of the manuscript text, which were evidently not spoken).

“Ladies and gentlemen!

The question of the relationship between individual rights and the rights of nations today, in the region of the planet known as the Soviet Union, has transformed from a theoretical issue into a practical one. If the common usage is such that the expression ‘human rights’ predominantly denotes the rights of the individual, then the human rights movement in modern Europe, capable of uniting the Eastern and Western parts of Europe, should be designated as a movement for human rights and the rights of nations. Such usage brings clarity by placing emphasis on the realization of two groups of rights—personal freedoms and the freedom of peoples. If we wish to see a united Europe in the future (which does not exclude the unity of all peoples on the planet), then this unity must be built on respect for two fundamental values—the inalienable rights of the individual and the rights of nations.

If the question concerned only the way the expression ‘human rights’ is used, then agreement on the mode of usage would resolve the problem. However, we have something more: we have different approaches to the relationship between the two groups of rights—the rights of the individual and the rights of nations. Jack Donnelly, in his interesting and in many ways useful book—Donnelly, Jack. ‘Universal Human Rights in Theory & Practice.’—Ithaca and London, 1989—tries to prove that the expression ‘rights of nations’ leads to conceptual confusion: from his point of view, the realization of collective rights, including the rights of nations, automatically follows from the realization of individual rights. This concept is widespread not only in the West but is also shared by some human rights activists in the Soviet Union.

As is known, there are two ways of using the word ‘nation’: (1) as a designation for a community integrated politically (such usage of this word is common mainly in the West); this concept can be designated by the expression ‘nation-state’ (2) as an expression denoting a community integrated on the basis of cultural commonality, primarily on the basis of ethnoculture (this usage is common mainly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union); this concept can be designated by the expression nation-ethnos. The first understanding of nation is unacceptable in the conditions of the Soviet Union—otherwise, we return to Brezhnev’s doctrine about the existence or, at least, the formation of some ‘Soviet nation.’

Moreover, the question of realizing the rights of nations arises sharply precisely in the case when nations are part of a supranational political entity and try to use the right of nations to political self-determination. One might object that interpreting the right of nations to self-determination as the right of nation-ethnoses is dangerous in that any separatist movements based on ethnic differences are also subject to legitimization. In my opinion, such a counterargument violates a certain sense of proportion: the transformation of provinces into independent states in France or states in the USA is completely different from independent republics in the Soviet Union. I agree with Alvin Toffler when he says in the ‘Crack-up of Nations’ section of his book ‘The Third Wave’ that solving the problem of separatism requires a different type of democracy—in particular, the expansion of so-called direct democracy in post-industrial society. But I do not agree with him when he speaks of the disappearance of nations in post-industrial society on the grounds that he connects the existence of nations with the existence of nation-states. By the way, based on the concept of a nation as a nation-state, in his list of nation-states, he places the Soviet Union and the USA in the same row. Thus, it is important to clarify and distinguish the concepts of nation, ethnic group, and national minority.

My conclusions.

1. It is necessary to develop a common approach in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as in the West, in which the emphasis on individual rights is accompanied by the same emphasis on the rights of nations. I do not deny that individual rights are more fundamental, and in many cases, the rights of nations follow from the realization of these rights. However, this is far from always the case. One example: the introduction of republican citizenship by one or another republic in the Soviet Union comes into conflict with Article 13 of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ on the free choice of residence if the Soviet Union is considered a single state.

It is known how the attempt of the Baltic republics to participate in the Paris Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended: protests against their brazen expulsion from the meeting hall followed only from some countries of Northern Europe.

(2) It is necessary to realize the importance of emphasizing the implementation of the rights of nations, especially concerning the Soviet Union and, probably, Yugoslavia. The fact is that the situation in the Soviet Union is special: here, it is rather the lack of awareness of the rights of nations, the lack of respect for such a universal human value as the freedom of peoples, that is the main factor leading to the violation of individual rights. The center is trying to use the slogan ‘human rights’ in order to prevent the realization of the rights of nations.

Here, the UN can play a more significant role, which, unfortunately, in its modern form should be called the Organization of United States, not Nations. If only such unofficial organizations as the ‘Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations’ or the ‘Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization’ take upon themselves the defense of the rights of nations, this will testify to an unhealthy situation with the protection of the rights of nations. Thank you for your attention.”

I present here the last paragraph of my text, crossed out in the manuscript, and thus, probably, not delivered:

“For example, there are corresponding international standards that protect the cultural identity of peoples. However, the Soviet Union in the past was criticized, as a rule, for violating individual rights, but not for the policy of cultural genocide—i.e., the policy of Russification. As far as I know, in international law, cultural genocide is not classified as a specific type of crime at all. At the end of May and the beginning of June, a conference on the official level of the Helsinki process on the protection of cultural heritage is to take place in Krakow.”

* * *

Conference in Italy. The last of the international human rights conferences in which I took part was a conference in Venice on May 23-25. Its theme was broadly defined: “The Common European Home, Human Rights, European Civil Society,” and it was organized by a government body of Venice—the Department for Civil Rights Policies and Promotion (Dipartamento per le politiche e la promozione dei diritti civili). Besides me, “Helsinki-90” was represented by Natalia Belitser. The topic of my short report (about 20 minutes), which I delivered in English (its text has not survived), was about the same problem—the right of nations to self-determination. I was glad when a representative of a German human rights organization enthusiastically supported my position.

* * *

In addition to participating in international human rights conferences during 1989-1991, I also took part in the activities of the RAU (Republican Association of Ukrainianists). At one of the conferences, we discussed the concept of the newly launched multi-volume “History of Ukrainian Culture.” From the Institute of Philosophy, Valeriia Nichyk and I took part in the discussion of the concept. The conclusion of most speakers was that no concept had been proposed. And some of the participants of the meeting were generally inclined to think that writing a fundamental multi-volume edition was premature, because before that, in their opinion, narrower studies on specific areas of culture and specific periods of the history of Ukrainian culture should be carried out.

I took part in the First World Congress of Ukrainian Political Prisoners, which was held on June 22-23, 1991, where I delivered a report “Rehabilitation: The Moral and Legal Aspect” (reprinted in the collection of my articles “Culture—Ideology—Politics” (K., 1997).

As I have already mentioned, in the 90s, I decided, not without some hesitation, to give up political activity, believing that politics was not my “true vocation.” I would engage in philosophy, and my participation in political life should be limited to providing intellectual assistance to public organizations and parties by participating in various kinds of seminars, conferences, and congresses. My activities related to “Helsinki-90,” although they were useful in some moments for my study of philosophy, took up time and effort. Physically, I could not combine this activity of mine with the workload associated with my professional work in the field of philosophy. And the late 80s and the first half of the 90s were a period for me of making up for losses: working through the literature on 20th-century philosophy, which was becoming more and more accessible. So, after the first two or three years of my activity in “Helsinki-90,” I withdrew from activities in this organization. Instead, I took part in round tables, and individual congresses and conferences of various public organizations.

Partially published in the journal “Suchasnist”:

No. 5 (505), 2003.—pp. 127–145;

No. 6 (506), 2003.—pp. 112–124;

No. 10 (510), 2003.—pp. 95–117;

No. 1 (513), 2004.—pp. 98–119;

No. 4 (516), 2004.—pp. 123–138;

No. 11 (523), 2004.—pp. 143–151;

No. 12 (524), 2004.—pp. 127–140.

Chapter 11. In Post-Imperial Ukraine

Preliminary Remark. I wrote this last chapter of my Memoirs occasionally during 2011–2012. Given the difficulties I encountered in finalizing these fragments, particularly related to my health, I was inclined to conclude my Memoirs with the previous chapter. But reviewing the written fragments persuaded me that they might be of some interest or informative value to my readers, especially because some fragments relate to public discussions about Ukraine’s path to the future. And on this issue, my position, although it coincides with the position of some Ukrainian humanitarians and publicists, is, in my opinion, formulated more expressively and clearly than what I read in the contemporary press or hear on various talk shows.

* * *

So, by the director’s order of January 25, 1990, I was enrolled as a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy. I have been working in this department ever since. Thus, I returned to my “true vocation,” to my “native home.” For it was primarily among the staff of the institute that I found understanding for my intellectual interests and had friends who continued to work there before my imprisonment. The leadership of the institute had not changed either: the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine had limited itself to reprimanding the leading officials. The director of the institute, Volodymyr Shynkaruk, also remained in his post, and Valeriia Nichyk headed the aforementioned department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy.

For 20 years, about which I write here, I made my way to my “place of work” from the metro station on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, walking up Kostelna Lane to Trokhsviatytelska Street. The building where the Institute of Philosophy is now located was once a monastery: signs of this were still evident during my student life in the dormitory that was housed in this building. Now the interior space has been radically rebuilt: divided into rooms, adapted for the needs of scholarly activity. The location of the Institute of Philosophy in a “sacred space,” surrounded by Christian holy sites, involuntarily prompted reflection on the relationship between religious and philosophical worldviews. The discussion of this topic is one of the important themes in the research work of any historian of philosophy. In the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy, this problem periodically became the subject of discussions, which I will mention later.

But at the center of intellectual and public discussions, inevitably, were problems related to the collapse of the USSR and the answer to the most important questions: in what way can the newly emerged independent Ukraine establish itself as a national, democratic, European state, and how can it avoid the worst prospect—disappearing as a separate nation and turning into a part of a restored empire?

* * *

1. At the Institute of Philosophy

Critique of the university program. I am far from underestimating the achievements of philosophers in the USSR in familiarizing themselves with the state of Western philosophy of the 20th century, even if it involved compromises, and quite often these compromises nullified the efforts spent. A historian of Ukrainian philosophy who would like to find compromise textbooks on philosophy written before the collapse of the USSR can take as an example the book “Philosophy. A Course of Lectures,” published by “Lybid” in 1991. This course of lectures was recommended by the Ministry of Higher Education of Ukraine as a textbook for students of higher educational institutions. It was written by a team of authors (I. V. Bychko, Yu. V. Osichnyuk, V. H. Tabachkovskyi, A. K. Bychko, M. L. Zlotina, and others). The reviewers were the Department of Philosophy of Donetsk State University, and V. S. Horskyi wrote an individual review. Since this is one of the better texts, written from the perspective of a humanistic and creative approach to Marxism, instead of a review of the Program discussed below, it would have been better for me to write a detailed review of this course of lectures. This way, it would be possible to establish when the revision of official Marxism was due to conscious compromises, and when we are dealing with thinking trapped in inherited dogmas. In addition, I could have had a discussion about this with the head of the author team, Ihor Bychko, and the text’s reviewer, Vilen Horskyi.

The publication of the “Program in Marxist-Leninist Philosophy for the Faculty of Philosophy of Kyiv University,” approved by the Academic Council of the KSU Faculty of Philosophy in 1989 (published in the journal “Philosophical and Sociological Thought” for 1989, No. 7), came as a surprise to me. A surprise because it was done at the end of “perestroika.” It is very likely that this Program was not so much a result of the inherited thought stereotypes of its authors as a conscious precautionary measure—a disbelief that the processes initiated by “perestroika” would lead to the collapse of totalitarianism. I was forced to write a very critical review, which was published in “Philosophical and Sociological Thought,” but with a long delay—not until May 1991. In a conversation with Volodymyr Zhmyr, I did not want to pry into the real reasons for this delay. The good thing is that my review was published after all.

In the preface to its publication, written by V. Zhmyr, it was stated thus: “Offering these polemical notes to the readers’ attention, we would like to note that V. S. Lisovyi’s manuscript was received by the editors at the beginning of 1990, i.e., shortly after the publication of the curriculum he analyzed in our journal. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons beyond the editors’ control, we were unable to publish it during 1990. The program itself lived out its life during this time—as it turns out, a short one: as we have learned, the Faculty of Philosophy of KSU is about to approve a new curriculum. Its authors claim that it is radically different from the current one. The editors are ready to print this new program as well and to continue the discussion of topical problems of university-level philosophy teaching. We hope that our university colleagues will not be offended by V. S. Lisovyi’s critical pathos. Unfortunately, such is the fate of pioneers: it is difficult not only to be the first to go through; it is perhaps even more difficult to agree with those who claim that one could have gone further and faster. However, the first step was taken precisely at the Faculty of Philosophy of KSU, and it is a priori useful—if only because it was taken. Now, as we move forward, let us try to learn a lesson…”

Still, criticism is one thing, and proposing a text as an introduction to philosophy or the "fundamentals of philosophy" for educational purposes is quite another. Rereading the published review later, I discovered obvious flaws. For instance, psychology, sociology (alongside social philosophy), and political science (instead of political philosophy) were included in the list of main sections. Since these sciences had already separated from philosophy in the 20th century, I considered their inclusion in the list of philosophical disciplines to be a mistake. Admittedly, sociology in Ukraine emerged under the "wing" of philosophy: in the late 1960s, a department of sociology was established at the Institute of Philosophy, and in the 1970s, a division of sociology was created (a division, unlike a department, is a larger administrative unit, as it can be subdivided into departments). I found some other inaccuracies in the review as well.

* * *

The older generation of philosophers. Here I will express, at least briefly, some remarks concerning the older generation of philosophers at the Institute of Philosophy, to which I belong. More information can be found in my article "Ukrainian Philosophical Thought of the 1960s–1980s." I consider the older generation to include Volodymyr Shynkaruk, Valeriia Nichyk, Myroslav Popovych, Serhii Krymskyi, Vilen Horskyi, Petro Yolon, Mykhailo Bulatov, Serhii Vasyliev, Anatolii Kolodnyi, and Fedir Kanak. With the exception of the eldest—Shynkaruk and Nichyk, born in 1928—all the others were born in the 1930s. Of them, as of 2011, when I write these lines, Shynkaruk, Nichyk, Krymskyi, Vasyliev, and Kanak have passed into eternity.

I have already mentioned Volodymyr Shynkaruk and Myroslav Popovych earlier. But I want to add here that over the course of 20 years, Myroslav Popovych further solidified his image as an intellectual who not only clarifies the fundamental problems of philosophy but also demonstrates, through his publications, an impressive erudition in various fields of the humanities. This thesis is confirmed by his publications, "The History of Ukrainian Culture" and "The Red Century."

Communication. First, I will note that for twenty years, communication at the institute was not only intellectually beneficial for me, but it was also a real source of comfort. This was likely facilitated by the fact that, with a few exceptions, I managed to reach an understanding with my interlocutors. The ability of most of my conversational partners not to let intellectual misunderstandings or disagreements cast a shadow over our interpersonal relationships was also important. And indeed, relationships marked by alienation or antipathy were rare exceptions during the twenty years of my work at the institute. In my view, the source of delight in communication, both ordinary and intellectual, is the ability of the participants to create a bright aura, colored with humor, especially in cases where the complexity of the issue under discussion becomes a source of an endless series of arguments and counterarguments.

Changing department names. The disappearance of ideological control over intellectual activity ended the period when every critically-minded person and every intellectual had to choose between an undesirable compromise and the risk of repression. If philosophers tried to undermine the dogmas of ideologized official philosophy, they did so only by resorting to various kinds of hidden subtexts. After the collapse of the USSR, the Institute of Philosophy had to remove the signs of the former official ideology from its structure. The most important formal indicators were the names of the departments. Ultimately, by a decision of the Academic Council of the institute on November 26, 1991, the corresponding changes were approved. Most members of the Academic Council agreed that such changes were necessary. In some cases, it was necessary to establish fundamentally new departments on the basis of existing ones; in others, to make partial changes or just to give them more accurate names. The nature of these changes can be judged by reviewing the "Comparative Table of Changes" (Protocol No. 19). Petro Yolon remarked in a conversation with me that he had to persuade Shynkaruk to dare to make more radical changes.

The most radical change was the liquidation of the department of dialectical materialism and the establishment of the department of philosophical anthropology in its place. The question of why the department of philosophical anthropology was created on the basis of the department of dialectical materialism is entirely relevant. The answer is well known to the older generation of the institute's staff, as Shynkaruk was the proponent of the dialectical way of thinking at the institute and sought to "humanize" dialectics. In his 1990s publication "The 'Khrushchev Thaw' and New Trends in Research at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1960s," he emphasized that, unlike Kopnin, he focused not on Hegel's "Science of Logic" but on the relationship between the "Phenomenology of Spirit" and the "Science of Logic." And he goes on to note: "The 'Phenomenology of Spirit' led me directly to the philosophical problems of upbringing, education, culture, the individual and society, and man as a self-subsistent being."

I should note that the official name of the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy during the Soviet period was the "department of the history of philosophy in [on] Ukraine." Today it has been renamed the "department of the history of philosophy in Ukraine." The prepositions "на" (on) or "в" (in) formerly (in the USSR) carried a derogatory ideological connotation: what kind of "Ukrainian philosophy" could there be in contrast to "Russian philosophy"?! And indeed, in Russia, the expression "Russian philosophy" was predominantly used (see E. Radlov, "Essay on the History of Russian Philosophy," Petersburg, 1920; N. O. Lossky, "History of Russian Philosophy," Moscow, 1991, etc.). But if we leave aside the clumsy phrase "philosophy in [on] Ukraine," the expressions "philosophy in Ukraine" and "Ukrainian philosophy" can today be used as having slightly different semantic nuances. For instance, when we say "the history of Ukrainian philosophy," the expression "Ukrainian philosophy" predominantly carries the semantic nuance of emphasizing the national peculiarities of Ukrainian culture and the worldview associated with it, and thus, its philosophy.

It is true that philosophy, unlike the natural sciences, is sensitive to its national cultural context. Thus, there is a basis for speaking of American, German, French, and Ukrainian philosophy. Each of these philosophies is represented by eminent philosophers, despite the dialogue between different trends within each and the presence of mutual influences between them. However, the expression "philosophy in Ukraine" in some of its uses may not contain a pejorative semantic nuance. It is obviously quite justified to speak of the state of research on Hegel's philosophy in Ukraine, especially when a Ukrainian historian of philosophy aims to clarify the interpretation of Hegel's ideas in Western or German philosophy, rather than the reception of these ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual space. This remark of mine is intended to prevent us from falling into another extreme under the influence of the aforementioned pejorative connotation. And this applies to other situations where the shadows of the past retain their power over us, albeit in a negative way.

* * *

Reinstatement at the Institute of Philosophy of those repressed in 1972. In the first half of the 1990s, most of those dismissed in accordance with the resolution of the Bureau of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR of July 31, 1972, which I have already mentioned, were reinstated to their positions at the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. This resolution, with great delay, was annulled by a Resolution of the Bureau of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1994, signed by B. E. Paton. Fedir Kanak, Volodymyr Zhmyr, Vasyl Byshovets, and Serhii Kudra returned to work at the Institute of Philosophy. Viktoriia Tsymbal declined to be reinstated to her former position. Of those reinstated, Serhii Kudra and Vasyl Byshovets began working in the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy. In 1993, Yurii Badzo, who was dismissed from the Institute of Literature in 1965, also became a member of our department. By 1964, he had managed to write his Ph.D. dissertation in literary studies, which he did not defend: for his participation in protests against the arrests of 1965, he was dismissed from the Institute of Literature. He later shifted the focus of his intellectual interests to the problems of political philosophy, with a focus on Ukrainian issues. Until his arrest, he worked on the book "The Right to Live," which was published with the support of the "Vidrodzhennia" Foundation during his time at the Institute of Philosophy. After his release from imprisonment (1979–1988), he was involved in public and political activities. In 1990, he was elected chairman of the Democratic Party of Ukraine, but at the party's second congress (1992), he declined to run for this position and devoted himself to intellectual work. Of those dismissed, Yevhen Proniuk (who immersed himself in public and political activity) and Mykola Rozhenko did not return to the institute.

The delay in Rozhenko's reinstatement caused his conflict with Shynkaruk. In the newspaper "Holos Ukrainy" (Voice of Ukraine, April 8, 1992), he published an article titled "Mimicry" with a very negative assessment of Shynkaruk as a philosopher. I believed that the categorical nature of his assessments was caused by a sense of offense related to the delay in his reinstatement. He was not reinstated to his former position even after the adoption of the aforementioned 1994 Resolution, despite numerous appeals from public and state institutions. I am referring, in particular, to the decision of the Human Rights Commission of the Verkhovna Rada, sent to the Vice-President of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, P. Tolochko, by the commission's chairman, V. Butkevych.

* * *

Echoes of an old dispute. In the 1990s, the dispute between the "logicians" and the "dialecticians"—a peculiar "echo" of the former polemic—still continued at the Institute of Philosophy. In modern terms, it was more of an opposition between those influenced by analytical philosophy and proponents of the dialectical way of thinking. It had now lost its sharpness as a result of a better awareness of certain simplifications or, let's say, misunderstandings that the former dispute contained. Still, there was an awareness that the ways of philosophical thinking of Myroslav Popovych, Serhii Vasyliev, and myself were formed under the predominant influence of the "analytical" school, not the dialectical tradition. The latter, in a renewed form, was most clearly represented by Volodymyr Shynkaruk and Vitalii Tabachkovskyi.

Throughout the twenty years of my work at the institute, I emphasized that the object of my criticism was speculative dialectics as the basis of official Marxist philosophy, and I asserted that such dialectics was prone to malignant variants of essentialism, to a naive ontology in which a phenomenon is understood from the point of view of the essence hidden beneath it. Therefore, this way of thinking, perhaps unconsciously, relied on imagination and was not inclined to accustom people to clarifying the meaning of what was said. This way of thinking and speaking was cultivated by the official philosophy of "Marxism-Leninism" to provide ideological rhetoric with the means of manipulating mass consciousness. The official version of dialectical materialism combined, at first glance, incompatible approaches: first, the claim to be scientific and, second, dialectical rhetoric, a kind of poetics that referred to hidden essences—historical laws, class interests, and so on. Dialectical poetics allowed for the creation of label-words—that is, words whose meaning remained beyond analysis. For 20 years now, not only in mass thinking but also in the thinking of many Ukrainian intellectuals, even philosophers, we have repeatedly encountered a defective essentialism, where the meanings of words are conceived as ultimate "essences" hidden behind these words, which are more imagined than argued for. Behind this lies a speculative ontology borrowed from Hegel.

The fact that the shadow of the old dispute between "logicians" and "dialecticians" was revived in the 1990s is evidenced by the emotional reactions of Mykhailo Bulatov to being perceived as a spokesman for dialectics in its official version of dialectical materialism. As I can judge from some of his statements, in his imagination, I also fell into their number. I was glad that I did manage to reach an understanding with Mykhailo shortly before he left his work at the Institute of Philosophy. So our old dispute ended in reconciliation.

However, it received an unexpected continuation in occasional discussions with Volodymyr Bilodid, a colleague in our department. He has consistently maintained and still maintains today that the main flaw in my way of philosophical thinking is the failure to learn the "lessons of dialectics," particularly in its Marxist interpretation. These disputes do not affect our interpersonal relationship, although I did try to convince Mr. Bilodid that I do not reject the fruitfulness of the dialectical way of thinking and speaking, if we are talking about "critical dialectics." I hoped that a better understanding of the essence of our discussion would be useful for his own way of thinking. But I was not able to convince him.

* * *

Philosophical Anthropology. I enthusiastically welcomed the opening of the department of philosophical anthropology. Until his death, this department was headed by Vitalii Tabachkovskyi. Our relationship was friendly, but it unexpectedly deteriorated. This happened because I considered it unjustified to speak of a "Kyiv school of philosophy" or a "Kyiv worldview-anthropological school," the founder of which Tabachkovskyi considered to be V. Shynkaruk. In my opinion, this characterization is unjustified if the word "school" is used in its academic sense.

I had no desire to enter into this discussion, as he took my reservations too sensitively, but I still agreed to express my thoughts in the journal "Krytyka"—in a short article titled "Rhetoric Instead of Argumentation" (March 2004). In an occasional conversation with Tabachkovskyi after this publication, I understood that he did not consider my critical remarks to be justified. I will add that I had nothing against using the word "school" in its broad (non-academic) sense, for example, to designate a circle of people from KSU and the Institute of Philosophy, united by communication, teaching, and research. The fewer mandatory criteria we associate with the meaning of the word "school," the less reason there is for a dispute about the existence of a "school," and this is a general procedure that applies to the use of many other terms.

* * *

Social and Practical Philosophy. The department of social philosophy was headed by Anatoliy Yermolenko. An important contribution of his to the "modernization" of Ukrainian philosophy was the study of the philosophy of K. Apel, J. Habermas, and others who are grouped together when speaking of German communicative philosophy. This refers to an approach from the perspective of practical philosophy, since in this case any communication is considered from the point of view of communicative actions, with attention to the motives of such actions and the prerequisites on which the productivity of communication depends. In 1999, A. Yermolenko published the textbook "Communicative Practical Philosophy" with an appendix of translations of original texts by K. Apel, J. Habermas, and V. Hösle. He not only translates the works of contemporary German philosophers into Ukrainian; thanks to his efforts, the department maintains regular contact with them. I regard him with affection not only as a person; our occasional intellectual conversations are also important and useful to me.

For the broader circle of my readers, I will note that the expression "practical philosophy" does not denote a separate branch of philosophy, but an approach to the problems of any branch of philosophy—to the extent that philosophical problems are considered from the point of view of human activity, taking into account not only the methods but also the motives of actions. This, ultimately, prompts the posing of ultimate questions—how a person should live, behave, and act. At the center of attention, therefore, is the problem of choosing better life prospects—by individuals, societies, nations, and humanity as a whole. But this at the same time gives a certain subject-matter "shift" in the use of the expression "practical philosophy," because this approach, despite its universality, concerns primarily those branches of philosophy in which the motives of actions and the value beliefs that stand behind them are of paramount importance. These are primarily such branches of philosophy as ethics, philosophy of law, political philosophy, philosophy of technology, philosophy of religion, philosophical questions of ecology, etc. But given that the focus of practical philosophy is not only the choice of methods of action, but also the motives of action, the philosophy of values and metaethics form the core of "practical philosophy."

Among the younger members of the Institute of Philosophy, Anatoliy Ishmuratov also deals with the problems of practical philosophy. I believe that my "turn" before my arrest from linguistic philosophy to the logic of practical reasoning was further developed in his publications. Of course, I am not implying the influence of my publications on him; it is a matter of his approach to actions from the perspective of the logic of practical reasoning. In 1987, he published a study, "The Logical Analysis of Practical Reasoning." Before my arrest, I did not manage to publish anything on this topic. In the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, Ishmuratov expanded his approach towards clarifying the motives of actions and goal-setting, the logic of collective actions, and conflictology. Thus, occasional conversations with Anatoliy were interesting and useful for me.

An important event in Ukrainian intellectual life was the establishment in 1999 of the journal "Practical Philosophy" by the charitable organization "Center for Practical Philosophy" and the Institute of Philosophy. I published an article in it, "Practical Philosophy" (2002, No. 1). Clarifying the principles and procedures whose observance ensures the productivity of communication remains important in the Ukrainian situation after the collapse of the USSR. The phrase "important event in Ukrainian intellectual life" I have used here immediately prompts me to self-critical reflection. Have we risen, even now, twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, to such a level of intellectual communication that the appearance of noteworthy journals or books has become an event?

* * *

Professional Self-Determination. As for the subject matter of research, the place of the Institute of Philosophy, as an institution within the structure of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, among research and educational institutions is clear: it should concentrate highly professional scholars who deal with the most fundamental problems in various fields of human activity. The list of branches of philosophy indicates this thematic comprehensiveness of philosophical cognition: the philosophy of man (philosophical anthropology), philosophy of culture, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophies of science (natural and humanistic), ethics and moral philosophy, social philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of art, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and so on. To cover such a wide range of problems, it is necessary to have a large team of highly professional scholars. I will not delve here into the problem of reforming the research institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in the direction of concentrating all research, including philosophical research, in universities. Today's universities in Ukraine, due to the burden of teaching, the lack of appropriate infrastructure, and other problems, are not yet ready to fully replace the research work in the Institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Such a reform remains a long-term project.

The collapse of the communist regime had the most important positive consequence for intellectual activity—the disappearance of ideological control, fear of repression, and, accordingly, the negative influence of self-censorship. But another, more serious part of the work remained—to extricate oneself from the stereotypes of thinking cultivated by "dialectical materialism"—the basis of "Marxist-Leninist" philosophy, which was supposed to be one of the means of manipulating mass consciousness. It was easier to escape the captivity of established thought patterns for those who had been in conflict with official philosophy for years.

Since I became a member of the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy, this already defined the limits of my professional self-determination. But the history of philosophy, even Ukrainian philosophy, is too broad a field of intellectual activity. It requires the processing of a large range of philosophical sources. Even choosing one of the historical periods in the development of philosophical thought requires working through such a quantity of texts that it is beyond the capacity of one person. An example can be the study of the manuscript heritage of the professors of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, especially considering that most of these texts are today represented in Latin manuscripts, of which there are about a hundred, and which, with few exceptions, have not yet been deciphered. In addition, the history of philosophy requires taking into account various kinds of contexts, in particular the context of the Western philosophical tradition, to which Ukrainian intellectual culture historically belongs. In short, research work on the history of philosophy requires a high level of erudition.

To ease my situation in the early 1990s, V. Shynkaruk advised me to work on the problems of the philosophy of language in the written heritage of Oleksandr Potebnia. This corresponded to my intellectual interests before my imprisonment and narrowed the number of sources that needed to be processed. But I refused this easier option, choosing a more difficult one. I decided that the focus of my attention should be the current state of philosophical thought in Ukraine from the point of view of its "modernization"—in the sense of bringing it up to date. And this meant overcoming the consequences of ideological control and isolation from 20th-century Western philosophy. It is clear that overcoming such consequences is too large-scale a project. Its implementation requires collective efforts: translating texts into Ukrainian and interpreting them, maintaining communication with intellectuals of different nations, educating students in Western universities, and so on.

I had to find my own area of work in this collective cause. I conditionally designated my first goal, the most ambitious one, as the clarification of the fundamental concepts of philosophy. I called this work on a Philosophical Lexicon. This corresponded to my inclination towards the analytical trend in philosophy, as it was a matter of clarifying the meanings of the most important terms. To a large extent, I was prompted to do this by the distortion of the meanings of philosophical terms in the intellectual "culture" inherited from "official" Soviet philosophy. This was not only about the thinking of most Ukrainian philosophers and humanists, but also about the ideas, feelings, and value beliefs inherited in the mass mentality from the totalitarian communist empire. Teaching the fundamentals of philosophy to students was also an important impetus for working on the "Lexicon."

The lexicon of political philosophy came to the center of my attention: the concepts of politics and the state, ideology, political ideologies, civil society, the nation and the nation-state, nationalism and its varieties, etc. To discuss political problems at the proper level, I had to make an effort to study some topics in political philosophy.

Contemporary Western philosophy, that is, the philosophy of the 20th century, also became a subject of my special intellectual interests. Behind this was the recognition that Ukrainian philosophical thought belongs to the European philosophical tradition, and therefore any isolation from the European intellectual tradition inevitably leads to backwardness for Ukrainian intellectual culture. The level of this isolation in the USSR, especially from the philosophy of the 20th century, was so significant that I considered overcoming this backwardness an important task, while being aware, as I have already mentioned, that collective efforts are needed here. I began to denote this direction of intellectual activity with the words "contemporization" and "modernization."

My interest in Ukrainian philosophy from the early 1960s to the first decades of the 21st century also falls within the framework of the aforementioned "modernization" of philosophical thought. I sought to select the work of individuals in whose publications I found signs of modernization. This direction also includes my studies of the work of some Ukrainian intellectuals in the 20th-century diaspora—Dmytro Chyzhevsky, Ivan Lypynsky-Rudnytsky, Volodymyr Starosolsky, Yevhen Lashchyk, and others. I believed that these articles of mine should be useful for students studying the history of Ukrainian philosophy.

I also paid considerable attention to educational needs: the impetus for this was my teaching of philosophy as a general education discipline. I worked on the text of a textbook titled "Foundations of Modern Philosophy." The immediate impetus for writing the text was my participation in the implementation of the all-Ukrainian program "Transformation of Humanitarian Education," initiated in 1994 by the "Vidrodzhennia" Foundation.

Throughout my work at the Institute of Philosophy, until 2009, I had to combine the intellectual activities mentioned here with organizational efforts. I am referring to the performance of administrative duties in the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy. Initially, from 1992, the duties of the head of a research group, and then, from 1997 to 2009, the duties of the head of the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy. I will mention below some of the problems associated with this activity.

* * *

"Making up for losses": Taras Zakydalsky. If I had some success in "making up for losses" in the 1990s, it was only thanks to the help of friends and acquaintances. The first place, not only chronologically, belongs to Taras Zakydalsky. I have already mentioned him: he persistently tried to help me and my family in some way even during my imprisonment. At the turn of the 1980s and 90s, still with some precautions, he would come to Kyiv and visit us in our apartment. At that time, he gave me a whole series of books on philosophy—textbooks and encyclopedias—to familiarize myself with the state of philosophy teaching in Western universities.

Even earlier, Taras had given me Karl Popper's book "The Poverty of Historicism." I considered the publication of a Ukrainian translation of this book useful, given the naive understanding of "historical laws" inherited from official historical materialism. For the twenty years I am writing about here, I believed that the problems of the philosophy of history were little known in the Ukrainian space of intellectual communication. Meanwhile, familiarity with these problems is of practical importance, particularly in view of the discussions regarding the assessment of historical events in Ukrainian-Russian and Ukrainian-Polish relations, including recent discussions with Russian historians on the writing of a so-called "common history."

In 1991, Taras Zakydalsky drew my attention to the fact that the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies offers scholarships for research and that I could apply. Earlier in our conversations, Mr. Taras had expressed a wish for the main works of Dmytro Chyzhevsky to be published in Ukraine, despite his critical reservations about some of his works and even his work in general. So he thought I could use the scholarship to realize this plan. At the same time, I felt a keen lack of sources for writing the preface to my translation of Karl Popper's "The Poverty of Historicism."

I sent the relevant documents, indicating that I intended to collect Chyzhevsky's texts for the publication of his works. I am grateful to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies for the positive response to my application: I received notification of this, dated July 8, 1991, signed by the director of the Institute, Dr. Frank Sysyn. The notice stated that I would be supervised by Taras Zakydalsky and that I would be working at the University of Toronto. Although my stay in Toronto was set for a term of two months, my visa was extended at my request in connection with my trip to the USA. I returned to Kyiv on December 31, 1991.

Taras Zakydalsky offered me a place to live in their two-story house, on the second floor, in a separate spacious room. I met the Zakydalsky family—Taras's mother, Mrs. Natalia, his wife Oksana, and their sons, the elder Danylo and the younger Orest. The life of Taras's mother would be worthy of a separate story, both in her younger years and during her time in displaced persons camps. She retained many impressions in her memory, and I regret that I did not buy a tape recorder and insist that she at least orally recall the most important events of her life. Mrs. Natalia regularly sent letters and postcards to Vira. I keep some photographs she gave me—in particular, a recorded meeting of Andrei Sheptytsky with a large group of Plastuny [Ukrainian scouts], among whom, of course, was Mrs. Natalia. I also keep what is perhaps the first edition of Andrei Sheptytsky's "Letters to a Mother" that she sent.

I felt calm and comfortable in the circle of Taras's family. Taras worked at the University of Toronto. We would drive there in his car, and I would go to work in the library. Taras had a limit on free photocopies, which I took advantage of. It was in this way that I made copies of texts important for writing the preface to K. Popper's "The Poverty of Historicism."

* * *

New York. I decided to take the opportunity to visit New York. I had arranged in advance with Nadiika Svitlychna that I would visit her. From New York, I got to Nadiika by bus. On December 1 in New York, I took part in the referendum to confirm the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, approved by the resolution of the Verkhovna Rada on August 24, 1991.

To see this city was my dream: I imagined it as the embodiment of the possibilities of the construction industry and the greatness of architecture, striving to the sky with its skyscrapers. I truly experienced this impression along with the feeling of the smallness of people, lost at the feet of these concrete giants. And every time I see these giant buildings, I get a feeling of anxiety about the safety of people—given the various factors, natural and human, that can cause mass death. I wandered the streets of New York, visited the UN building and was inside (a tour of the interior of the UN is allowed for tourists). I fulfilled another dream—I visited the Museum of Modern Art.

But the main purpose of my trip to the USA was to visit the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and talk with Hryhorii Hrabovych about the preparation and publication of Dmytro Chyzhevsky's works. For some reason, Hrabovych at that time refused to join this publishing project. I will later mention his proposal in 2003 or 2004 to hand over the more or less prepared texts of Chyzhevsky for the publication of his works by the "Krytyka" publishing house. I later regretted not agreeing to do this, which I will mention later.

At the invitation of Roman Szporluk, I visited him at his home. He and his wife received me very graciously. Our conversation took place at a table in the large hall on the first floor of their two-story house. Throughout our conversation, I had a feeling of a certain "orphanhood" or "abandonment" of these two people in this large house. I do not remember the details of our conversation, but I think it concerned the common theme of our intellectual interests—the formation of the Ukrainian nation and the role of the ideology of nationalism in this formation. Mr. Roman gave me his article concerning Russian imperial nationalism.

I also had a meeting with Alla Hlazman and her husband, Serhii Kan. The meeting took place when they were on their way to a Jewish religious holiday, and they invited me as well. About two dozen people gathered in a rather spacious room. I was offered a kippah, so I became a participant in the ritual. This became an opportunity for some interesting observations. The clear predominance of symbolic content in Jewish religious rituals struck me.

Serhii Kan was engaged in anthropology, which, in the American usage of the word, was dominated by the study of primitive societies. In a conversation with Serhii, I expressed a request that he, when he had the opportunity, give me some book that would relate more to general, particularly methodological, questions of anthropology. He did not forget this request of mine and later gave me a very useful book, "The Philosophical Roots of Anthropology" by William Y. Adams (Stanford, 1998).

* * *

Bohdan Wytwycky. During my stay in the US, at a small party, I met Bohdan Wytwycky and Yevhen Lashchyk. Bohdan initially specialized in philosophy, but due to a lack of work, he later changed his profession, obtaining a law degree. I have already mentioned his article published in the journal "Suchasnist" in 1984 (No. 7–8, No. 9) with a review of the journal "Filosofska Dumka" for the years 1970–1979. In this review, he also mentions my publications in that journal. In the first half of the 1990s, Bohdan sent me English-language books on philosophy that, in his opinion, could be useful to me in my work. I am grateful to him for this kindness, but I eventually asked him not to do it, because I tried to choose for myself only those books in English and German that were in line with my intellectual interests. For this, I needed to review the book myself beforehand. I later had several meetings with Bohdan in Kyiv, including in recent years.

* * *

Norway: University of Bergen, 1997 (Oct. 3–Dec. 23). From the point of view of familiarizing myself with philosophical sources, which mainly concerned "contemporary" Western philosophy (late 19th–early 20th century), my three-month stay at the University of Bergen, at the Center for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, proved to be the most fruitful.

* * *

Managing research in the department. At the initiative of Valeriia Nichyk and with the support of Volodymyr Shynkaruk, in 1992 I headed the sector of classics of Ukrainian and world philosophy. The departments in the Institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine were then divided into "sectors"; later they came to be called "research groups." Today in our department there are two research groups specializing in two periods of the history of Ukrainian philosophy: the 10th–18th and the 19th–21st centuries. The name of the mentioned sector was initiated by me, but in the formulation "sector of monuments of Ukrainian and world philosophy." But the name is not the point. In fact, it was an ambitious plan, which consisted of combining the publication of some of the most important works from world and Ukrainian philosophy.

In 1997, at the initiative of V. Nichyk and with the support of V. Shynkaruk and the Academic Council of the institute, I became the head of the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy—then named "department of the history of philosophy in [on] Ukraine." Although the organization of research work does not require the volume of daily actions as in business management, it is nevertheless associated with solving complex problems. In addition, the authority of any scientific leader depends on his own intellectual achievements. An important and difficult problem to solve is also the renewal of the staff of scientists from a long-term perspective—ensuring the proper level of future research. This is not easy to achieve in Ukraine, where for twenty years of independence, a low appreciation of intellectual work has prevailed at the social and state levels.

In view of this, replenishment with young scientists is a decisive task. The very first requirement for a young scientist is the presence of a basic philosophical education. However, quite justified exceptions to this rule are possible, for example, when a person has a basic education in a certain special science and wants to deal with the philosophical problems of that science. It is best, of course, for a person to have also graduated from a philosophy faculty or at least taken individual courses at this faculty—in the history of philosophy, in general problems of philosophy, etc. But these are rather ideal requirements.

The source of the greatest difficulties that everyone who has organized scientific research in independent Ukraine has encountered is the loss of prestige of the scientist due to low salaries and the lack of any prospect of providing themselves with housing. This covers a wide layer of people with higher education—teachers, doctors, etc. Any young person, however enthusiastically they may feel about their calling to be a scientist, finds themselves in a situation where their choice in favor of intellectual work exposes them to serious difficulties in solving life's problems. In independent Ukraine, the position of scientists in the system of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and in higher educational institutions has even worsened compared to their position in the USSR in the 1960s–80s. This explains the transition of capable scientists into business, the "brain drain" to Western countries, etc. It is sometimes noted that true enthusiasts do not abandon their calling, but supporters of exploiting enthusiasm do not take into account that distractions by everyday worries inevitably reduce the effectiveness of research activities. For crying out loud, the government had gone so far as to launch a campaign to combat "grant-eaters" to deprive scientists of even the modest income offered by Western institutions. The general system of organizing scientific research, particularly in the NAS, also plays a role. It has not undergone fundamental changes since the collapse of the USSR. Much has been said about this, including at a popular level; it is enough to read the publications of Maksym Strikha on this topic in the newspaper "Den" (The Day).

Politicians capable of influencing the adoption of relevant decisions have consistently, over twenty years, declared and continue to declare the need to nurture the intellectual potential of Ukraine, but in practice, they have tried more to provide for themselves than to nurture that potential. In his interview with the newspaper "Den" on April 20, 2011, the president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Borys Paton, noted: "For science in our country to develop, proper support from the state and an understanding by society of the role of science are needed."

* * *

Translations. The disposition to consider Ukrainian philosophy in the context of the European, and more broadly, Western philosophical tradition, inclined me, in my "leading" positions in the department, to value in employees a knowledge of European languages—both ancient and modern, and their ability and desire to translate philosophical texts from Western languages and to carry out corresponding comparative studies. In this, I followed Valeriia Nichyk. I will not speak here about the direction of her intellectual interests and her methodological guidelines, referring the interested reader to my article in the collection of texts dedicated to her memory—"Ukraine of the 17th Century" ("Krytyka," Kyiv, 2005).

With Nichyk's assistance, Volodymyr Lytvynov (born 1936) from the older generation was already working in the department at the time of my return to the institute. He compiled a voluminous Latin-Ukrainian dictionary, including part of the Latin vocabulary used by the professors of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (K., 1998), translated texts by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Benedict Spinoza's "Theological-Political Treatise," and works by Cicero from Latin. Today he is working on an expanded Latin-Ukrainian dictionary, and may God give him the strength to complete this work. There are three "Latinists" in the department today: besides Lytvynov, there is Yaroslava Stratii and, from the fresh additions, Mykola Symchych. I am glad that this year the works of a professor of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Innokentiy Gizel, were published, translated from Latin by Yaroslava Stratii and Mykola Symchych, with a parallel presentation of the Latin text—a critical decipherment of the corresponding manuscript (I. Gizel. Selected Works. — Kyiv—Lviv: "Svichado," 2011. — Vol. II).

The limitation of intellectual resources in Ukraine as a whole became apparent in connection with our initiative to publish at least the most important dialogues of Plato in Ukrainian translation. I recall asking Tykholaz from the Kyiv-Mohylanka if he would translate Aristotle's "Metaphysics" into Ukrainian. He categorically refused, saying that it was too laborious a task. We also looked for someone in Ukraine who could take on the translation of Plato's dialogues. We turned to Yosyp Kobiv from Lviv. As an enthusiast of this cause, he agreed and also involved Yurii Mushak, also from Lviv and again from the "old guard." We could not find anyone among the young. At that time, the philosophy faculty of Kyiv University was not yet training specialists in the history of philosophy capable of reading and translating texts from Latin and Ancient Greek.

As for Ancient Greek, during my headship of the department, I was never able to find someone who knew Ancient Greek and, preferably, Old Bulgarian at the proper level to attest, at the level of textual research, to the influence of ancient philosophy in the period of Kyivan Rus and later. Attempts at such comparative studies had been made (for example, Dmytro Chyzhevsky's article "Plato in Old Rus'"), but it was now desirable to continue the exploration of this topic with more sources and at a better methodological level. The need to have such a person in our department is obvious, and not only for the study of the most ancient period of Ukraine's intellectual history: there is an obvious need for a professional assessment of current and future translations from Ancient Greek into Ukrainian.

So the matter of translating Plato's dialogues was clearly dragging on and seemed to be becoming hopeless. And then Oleksa Lohvynenko, who at that time headed the "Osnovy" publishing house, came to the rescue. He suggested that the publishing house take over the preparation of the publication. I gladly agreed. A corresponding decision was made, and eventually this modest book of translations was published in 1995 (second edition—1999).

As for translations from modern European languages, Nina Polishchuk translated a number of texts from English (for the anthologies "Conservatism," "Nationalism," "Liberalism") and edited individual texts for the "Osnovy" publishing house. Natalia Filipenko translated Alfred Tarski's book "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages" from English (K.: Stylos, 1998). Ihor Harnyk, who served as an editor in our department in the mid-90s (he later moved to a teaching position at the International Institute of Linguistics and Law), translated Brian Davies' small book "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion" from English—published in 1996 by "Osnovy" publishing house, but it did not cover the subject mentioned in the title at a contemporary level. But even today, at the beginning of 2011, as far as I know, no such introduction to the philosophy of religion has been published in Ukrainian translation that would cover all the most important topics and problems of this branch of philosophy. Yurii Badzo translated a number of texts from German, in particular for the anthologies mentioned above.

* * *

Ambitious Project. In the first half of the 1990s, the editorial board of "Philosophical and Sociological Thought" initiated the publication of works under the general title "Library of the journal 'Philosophical and Sociological Thought'" with two series—"Ukrainian Thinkers" and "Classics of World Socio-Political Thought." The establishment of these series was made possible thanks to the support of Yurii Pryliuk, who played a leading role in the publishing affairs at the Institute of Philosophy at that time and was involved, as far as I know, in the founding of the "Abrys" publishing house. The second enthusiast of these undertakings was Volodymyr Zhmyr. He agreed to be the editor-in-chief of both series. In the "Ukrainian Thinkers" series, selected works of P. Yurkevych and B. Kistiakivskyi were published, and in the second—my translation of K. Popper's book "The Poverty of Historicism" and T. Hobbes's book "Behemoth" in the translation of Lev Bilas.

I considered the publication of Karl Popper's "The Poverty of Historicism" important in the Ukrainian space of intellectual communication, as it undermined the naive notions of historical laws introduced by the official version of historical materialism. Today, the print run of this book has long been sold out, and I have not made the effort to persuade any publishing house to republish it in a higher quality format. "Abrys" had too limited financial capabilities to ensure high-quality printing.

* * *

Lev Bilas. I cannot help but mention the unfortunate incident that happened with the preparation for printing of the aforementioned book by Hobbes, "Behemoth," in Bilas's translation. The reader can learn about Bilas's intellectual interests from Yaroslav Isaievych's article "The Known and Unknown Lev Bilas," published in the journal "Suchasnist" in 2003, No. 5. This article interested me particularly because its author emphasized Bilas's interest in the philosophy and methodology of historical research. He also noted that the publication in Ukraine of a properly selected collection of Bilas's research could be useful from the point of view of raising the level of critical self-awareness among Ukrainian historians.

My communication with Bilas began in the early 1990s: during a visit to Kyiv, he and his wife stayed with us for several days. Vira and I were living in Pidirtsi from time to time then, so the couple could use our apartment. I asked Bilas if he would agree to read my translation of Karl Popper's "The Poverty of Historicism" and give his comments. He agreed and soon gave me the text with page-by-page remarks. Most of them were taken into account by me in the final version of the text. I mention this help from Lev with gratitude at the end of my preface to the book, published by "Abrys."

I don't remember the exact year, but around the mid-90s, Bilas offered his translation of the aforementioned book by Hobbes for publication. The text needed editing with regard to the standards of the Ukrainian literary language, but the editors exceeded their authority, not taking into account the historical context, as some words in Hobbes's language denote certain historical concepts and realities. That is, it was a matter of content, not language. I am to blame for not insisting that the text be reviewed again by Bilas after editing. When "Abrys" published the translation, Bilas, upon reading the published text, found a large number of errors caused by the literary editing. This failure depressed me, leaving me with a sense of guilt. In addition, the book was printed very economically, in a small format, and the pages fell apart when turned.

* * *

I spent a significant part of my time and energy on translation work. I translated mainly what I considered important in the Ukrainian intellectual space, such as texts on the methodology of the humanities. I hastily translated Peter Winch's small book "The Idea of a Social Science," but did not bring it to a state of readiness for publication. This indifference of mine was also influenced by the fact that I had a plan to prepare and publish an anthology of texts on general problems of the methodology of the humanities and at the same time believed that an anthology on hermeneutics should be published simultaneously. I thought that the English-language edition "The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur" (Edited by Gayle L. Ormiston and D. Scyrift. New York, 1990) could serve as a model for such an anthology. The creation of various kinds of anthologies and chrestomathies for educational needs is a common practice. The advantage of collections of texts by different authors is that they offer different approaches and discussions around individual problems, which promotes the development of critical and creative thinking in students. After all, a text written by one author is limited by the individual author's approach, and this impoverishes the presentation of problems considered from other points of view.

The most effort and time at the end of the 1990s was taken by the work on translations for the anthologies "Conservatism," "Nationalism," and "Liberalism," published by "Smoloskyp" publishing house. Again, it was a matter of preparing such collections of texts in which Ukrainian political philosophy would be "inscribed" into the Western tradition of political thought. The predominant part of the organizational work in preparing the anthologies was undertaken by Oleh Protsenko.

* * *

I was in charge of the department until September 2009, when, on my own initiative and with the support of the institute's director M. Popovych, I passed the baton to Serhii Yosypenko—a representative of the younger generation of scholars. In my choice, I was guided by several principles. The first—an elementary one—that the person have a fundamental philosophical education, having graduated from a philosophy faculty. The second—that the scholar who would head the department could "see" Ukrainian philosophy in the context of the Western intellectual tradition, to which it actually belongs. Serhii Yosypenko translates philosophical works from French into Ukrainian and actively maintains contacts with French philosophers. At the same time, he is engaged in the history of Ukrainian philosophy and is interested in the methodological problems of historical-philosophical research. The third important guideline was that the head of the department should understand the need for the "modernization" of philosophical thinking in Ukraine as an important, if not decisive, factor in the modernization of Ukrainian intellectual culture in general. Organizational skills are also important. After a year of Serhii Yosypenko's work as head of the department, I became convinced of his possession of such skills. I also became convinced of his tolerant attitude towards different ways of philosophical thinking, styles of philosophical writing, as well as his correct attitude towards his colleagues. So I consider my choice to be a successful one.

* * *

Teaching philosophy. My teaching of philosophy at the International Institute of Linguistics and Law (now Kyiv International University), located in Sviatoshyn, was consistent with my work on clarifying the "foundations" of philosophy. I taught philosophy at the faculty of linguistics from 1995 until the end of the 90s, and in 1998–1999, I also taught political science to philologists and journalists. I lectured to a large student audience (about a hundred students) and held seminars separately in each group. I liked lecturing to large audiences. Unlike teaching philosophy at Ternopil Medical Institute and then at Kyiv University, I no longer had to take ideological restrictions into account. I felt that the students understood my lectures and derived moral satisfaction from my work.

If we leave aside intellectual discussions in a narrow circle of intellectuals, my favorite style of public speaking is primarily the lecture. A favorable circumstance at the Institute of Linguistics and Law was that I could organize my course of lectures with the consideration that my listeners were starting the study of philosophy from a "clean slate." That is, I proceeded from the premise that I was lecturing to young people who were only beginning to become acquainted with the problems of philosophy through my lectures. As I became convinced during the seminars, in each group there were students—and to my surprise, more often female students—who evoked my admiration for their understanding of the content of the problems I clarified in the lectures. Reviewing the notes of one of the students, I was pleasantly impressed by the text, which testified to her understanding of my presentations. I still keep these notes of hers, which she gave me at my request. I asked her for the notes to use them in preparing "Foundations of Philosophy." I considered these lectures at the Institute of Linguistics and Law to be the pinnacle of my teaching of the foundations of philosophy.

Still, conducting seminars and administering exams at the institute took a lot of time. In addition, it was a long commute—from the "Chernihivska" metro station to "Sviatoshyn" (the two current end stations had not yet been built). So I decided to quit teaching, although I later regretted it. I missed the friendly reception of my lectures by the students and my friendly relations with them, which were an important source of my pedagogical enthusiasm.

At the end of the 1990s, Vilen Horskyi, who at that time headed the philosophy department at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, offered me to start teaching an introduction to analytical philosophy for philosophers at KMA from September 1999. This happened in a situation where Taras Zakydalsky (from Toronto), who had previously taught this course, had injured his leg and could not come to Kyiv. But, considering that the preparation of these lectures would require considerable effort from me, I refused. Horskyi considered my decision a mistake.

By that time, probably since 1988, I was already teaching courses on political ideologies and contemporary Western political theories at KMA for bachelor's and master's students. There was no translated book on contemporary Western political theories at that time. I took as a basis the English-language "A New Handbook of Political Science" (Ed. by Robert E. Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingeman. Oxford, 1996). It was the result of a discussion organized by the International Political Science Association. I made photocopies of individual chapters so that students could prepare for seminars. I took some texts from my book "Culture—Ideology—Politics," which had already been published by then.

At the end of the 1990s, I could already offer students translated texts from the anthologies of political ideologies, published together with Oleh Protsenko. The first edition of "Conservatism" was published in 1998, "Nationalism" in 2000, and "Liberalism" in 2002. I was more interested in political philosophy than in specific political theories. But since political philosophy is directly related to them, to the extent of my abilities, I was forced to familiarize myself with the state of political science ("politology"). On the other hand, I was not satisfied with the teaching of political science in higher educational institutions in isolation from political philosophy. It is clear that my interest in the latter was largely determined by the political situation in Ukraine.

But in the process of teaching political philosophy, political ideologies, and political theories at KMA, I felt that I was not achieving the desired result. In addition, I felt overloaded. This inclined me to the decision to give up teaching. Besides, in the group of students to whom I last lectured, I encountered opposition from some of the students to the importance of Ukrainian national consciousness in Ukrainian politics, particularly the Ukrainian language. It was about the correlation of ethno-national and civic factors in Ukrainian politics. Only a few students supported me, in particular, Oleksandr Palii. In the end, I announced that I was giving up teaching. In fact, this polemic was not the main reason for my decision—by that time I had already made it.

* * *

Over the course of twenty years, the issue has been about raising philosophical discussions to a higher level of quality—both in the discussion of the fundamental problems of philosophy and in the problems of each of the main branches of philosophy. An expression of this systematicity is the "unpacking" of philosophical problems into certain branches or, in other words, philosophical sciences. This facilitates specialization and the teaching of philosophy. Traditionally, the main branches of modern philosophy predominantly include epistemology, logic and philosophy of science, philosophy of language, metaphysics, the philosophical foundations of ethics, philosophy of law, social and political philosophy, philosophy of history, aesthetics and philosophy of art, and philosophy of religion. In addition to these branches, one can point to the philosophy of culture and the philosophical questions of ethnology, philosophical anthropology, and the philosophy of mind. In addition, over the past twenty years, I have considered it important (starting from the senior classes of secondary school, and especially at the level of general higher education) to master the elementary principles of semiotics. This corresponds to the process of transformation of industrial societies into post-industrial or, in other words, informational ones. But semiotics, although it was developed to a significant extent in the stream of philosophy, is rather an interdisciplinary science, as is the semantics associated with it, which Charles Morris justifiably considered a subdivision of semiotics.

As for the expression "practical philosophy," we use it to denote not a branch of philosophy, but the consideration of any kind of human activity from the point of view of the philosophy of action—the motives of action, its consequences, etc. And therefore, in contrast to theory, the basis of practical philosophy is the philosophy of values and ethics. Undoubtedly, the text of a philosopher, written or oral, which relates to the problems of any of the mentioned branches of philosophy, can be considered from the point of view of practical philosophy. But still, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics are more theoretical: the central problem in them is the problem of truth. In contrast, in ethics, philosophy of law, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and to a large extent also in the philosophy of history, the focus is on actions and modes of behavior, and accordingly, the value beliefs and ideals that motivate them. In other words, with the expression "practical philosophy," we denote rather a certain approach, a method—as we have in the case of certain philosophical trends: "dialectics," phenomenology, pragmatism, existentialism, hermeneutics, etc. Although the specialization of sciences—the transformation of branches into separate sub-sciences of a separate science—is often indeed connected with the appearance of new methods, the distinction between the subject and methodological aspects of a science is important.

* * *

Methodology of the history of philosophy. A special branch of philosophy is the history of philosophy. A feature of this branch is the comprehensiveness of historical-philosophical research, as it covers the clarification of both the fundamental problems of philosophy and the state of thought in each of the branches of philosophy. Hence my inclination to advise graduate students to choose a topic for historical-philosophical research with an orientation towards the problems of a certain branch of philosophy. This is a consequence of increased specialization—the branching of philosophy into philosophical sciences. For those who are interested in the fundamental problems of philosophy, the discussion of problems considered in metaphysics as the "first philosophy" is of primary importance. In this case, the general principles of "world pictures"—understandings of the world in which we live and of ourselves in this world—are at the center of attention. The task of metaphysics is to point to better-substantiated, "more reliable" worldviews.

I began to designate my understanding of the methodology of historical-philosophical research as a combination of contextualism and perspectivism. By the term "contextualism," I denote the explanation of a text in a spatially and temporally localized context. Explaining a historical event, the activity of a certain person, or any work by the historical circumstances of a certain time is an elementary requirement of historical research. The peculiarity of philosophy is that, being part of culture, it at the same time offers an interpretation of the peculiarities of the worldview of a certain society, civilization, epoch ("episteme" in M. Foucault, categories of medieval culture in A. Gurevich, collective psyche, as we have in W. Wundt, etc.). In a moderate version, they speak of a certain unity of diversity. And yet, philosophy does not passively reflect the existing collective mentality, but often contains elements of its criticism, and therefore is a factor aimed at changing the national mentality and is capable of being a source of radical changes. But here I do not mean to deny the presence of certain national peculiarities of intellectual culture, particularly philosophy.

In assessing the intellectual achievements of a certain historical period, in the case of the presence of a tradition or "progress" of intellectual life, we inevitably have a combination of retrospection with perspective.

The historian of philosophy must consider texts and intellectual discussions in their connection with intellectual traditions—large (Western, Chinese, Indian, etc.) and narrower—regional (Anglo-American, continental) and national. Consequently, he inevitably comes to recognize the importance of historical-comparative research, particularly in the broader context that is usually designated as the "dialogue of cultures." During the twenty years mentioned, I have been thinking in every way about the fruitfulness of this "contextualism" in the methodology of historical-philosophical research. Since it is a matter of understanding distant epochs in one's own culture or, even more so, in "foreign" cultures, the need to use hermeneutic approaches inevitably arises. Therefore, for me, the use of the hermeneutic concepts of J. Habermas, P. Ricoeur, and H. Gadamer in historical-philosophical research became important.

By the term "perspectivism," I denote not only the attempt of philosophers to give an answer to the practical problems of their time, but also the orientation of any written text to the future or even to "eternity" (according to the expression of Paul Ricoeur).

* * *

Political Philosophy. It cannot be said that synthetic studies of the spiritual history of Ukrainians were previously neglected by Ukrainian intellectuals. But today there is a need for research at a renewed methodological level and with an awareness of their acute relevance: after all, it is about the need for radical transformations of the mass mentality of Ukrainians as a guarantee of the successful establishment of a modern Ukrainian nation and national state.

From the above, it is clear why, over the twenty years about which I am writing here, the problems of political philosophy—ideology and mass mentality, civil society, the concept of the nation and the formation of the Ukrainian nation, the ideology of nationalism, etc.—were at the center of my attention, and not only mine. In addition, for me, the orientation to consider political philosophy not as an independent discipline, but as a branch of philosophy closely related to its other branches, remained important.

It is precisely within such broader approaches that it is possible to distinguish between external (geopolitical context) and internal causes, despite their interconnectedness and transition into one another. It is obvious that as a result of certain historical circumstances, the weight of some external factor may become decisive. For example, inclusion into the Russian Empire radically changed the course of Ukrainian history, which gave Taras Shevchenko grounds for a sharp condemnation of Bohdan Khmelnytsky's decision. This topic remains relevant, as evidenced by the publication by "Smoloskyp" of a collection of articles titled "The Consequences of the Pereiaslav Council of 1654" (2004). I believe that there are quite reasonable grounds to emphasize the importance of analyzing inherited beliefs, value convictions, and modes of behavior, formed by our recent past—the stay of Ukrainians within the communist totalitarian empire, as the combination of terror with ideological zombification was intended to create complexes at the level of the mass subconscious. And similarly, there are quite obvious grounds to take into account the influence on modern Ukraine of the neo-imperial strategies and tactics in the policy of modern Russia, as these practices are aimed at preserving inherited malignant stereotypes both in the mass mentality of ethnic Ukrainians (national nihilism) and ethnic Russians in Ukraine (chauvinism).

As for the internal inheritances in the spiritual history of Ukrainians, this should be the subject of various thematic historically oriented studies: ethnological, natio-logical, socio-psychological, religious, cultural, intellectual. Important research topics include, in particular, the most ancient inheritances, the adoption of Christianity, its national modification (Ukrainian Christianity), the influence of external political circumstances on Ukrainian spirituality, and the role of professional culture and science, which becomes leading in industrial societies. In the latter case, it is about the formation of the so-called modern mass consciousness in the context of the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation. But, regardless of the specifics, when it comes to the spiritual history of Ukrainians, the emphasis on the positive in the spiritual heritage of Ukrainians must inevitably be combined with a criticism of negative inheritances ("the spirit of ruin," etc.).

* * *

Intellectual Heritage. In the assessment of prominent Ukrainian intellectuals, the tendency to limit oneself to general positive characteristics prevails, and this disproportion is striking, at least at the popular level. And therefore, unlike, say, the assessment of Kant or Hegel, the specific contribution of a particular Ukrainian intellectual or philosopher to the treasury of Ukrainian intellectual culture remains unclear, because the intellectual achievements of each of the known European intellectuals are inseparable from significant limitations and even errors. These one-sidednesses, limitations, and errors not only make the profiles of these intellectuals more prominent, they make possible criticism and dialogue with them, which is one of the important impetuses for intellectual progress. It is true that outstanding philosophical works contain meanings "aimed at eternity," but we can reveal these meanings when we point to something that has lost its value.

* * *

Modernization and Mass Mentality. It is quite justified to consider the "contemporization" of philosophy and other humanities in the broader context of the transformations that are today denoted by the word "modernization." I will leave aside for now my thoughts on the meaning of this term, in particular on the common and different "paths" of modernization of different nations.

Today, "modernization" is a popular word. But, unfortunately, its use by politicians in Russia and Ukraine largely discredits this term, because in fact it has become a means of political rhetoric, which rather covers up an orientation towards securing the selfish interests of individuals and clans. And yet, the word "modernization" is a useful "marker": certain indicators of the maturity and effectiveness of various kinds of reforms are associated with it, in particular the standards, the implementation of which is a condition for Ukraine's accession to the EU. It is about the modernization of various areas of activity and the corresponding spheres of public life—the political and legal system, the economy and social structure, the education system, etc. It is clear that in this sense the term "modernization" is not thought of in terms of the opposition "modern-postmodern": on the contrary, taking into account some changes caused by the postmodern turn, as well as the criticism of negative social and intellectual trends generated by the postmodern turn, is considered a sign of modern thinking.

The assessment of progress towards modernization mainly concerns the activities of politicians. But it is obvious that the deepest prerequisite for the process of modernization is still the transformation at the level of the mass mentality.

It is true that the main responsibility for the state of the mass mentality lies with the Ukrainian intelligentsia—philosophers, humanists, journalists, school teachers, and university lecturers, as it is primarily they who must develop critical self-awareness in citizens as a guarantee of overcoming inherited beliefs, concepts, value convictions, ways of thinking, and behavior. But an awareness of the problem itself at the level of the individual citizen is important as an important impetus to develop critical self-awareness in oneself. After all, unlike feudal societies, in which aristocratic culture was largely isolated from the people, in democratic states, with varying degrees of maturity of democracy, the quality of the intellectual elite largely depends on the state of the mass mentality. This is a consequence of the democratization of education.

* * *

Religion and Philosophy. In monistic religions, God is the spiritual peak, and faith in God is the source of fundamental spiritual values, above all moral ones. The famous precept "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" is based on the conviction that faith is primarily the path to knowing the truth. In Christianity, the role of reason, intellectual intuition, imagination, and feeling is undeniable: all abilities given by God should not be neglected. But faith, relying on all these abilities, must rise above them. So, although faith must be reasonable, it goes beyond the limits of reason, rises above it. Christianity, like some other religions, contains a spatial metaphor—it directs a person's gaze upwards, from the earthly to the heavenly. And faith in God is a guarantee of the soul's ascent to the heights, to the higher truth. In contrast to religion, philosophy, since antiquity, began to follow the precept that any conviction, any faith (doxa) must pass through a mental check. The result of such a check should be a reliable confirmation of what has been said. Only a statement that has passed such a check can be considered true. From the point of view of philosophy, without such a check, any of our convictions can be based on illusions, that is, be false. Without verification, faith itself can be false, fanatical, capable of inciting one to commit evil. This is evidenced by religious experience, particularly in the history of Christianity, religious wars were the most telling examples. In this orientation of philosophy to check any convictions, including religious faith, they began to see a guarantee of recognizing "malignant," fanatical faith.

This difference between philosophy and religion is the source of tense relations between them. But at the same time, the emergence of theology also testifies to the inclusion of elements of philosophy in the religious worldview. And this is not only characteristic of Christianity. As the history of Eastern religions shows, religious and philosophical worldviews have interacted throughout world history. As for the questions related to the philosophy of religion, at the center of my reflections and discussions over the last twenty years were more specific questions. The most important of them concerned the peculiarities of Ukrainian religiosity, in particular Ukrainian Christianity.

The establishment of the authority of knowledge marks the intellectual history of the West. And even the criticism of such an appreciation, designated as criticism of scientism, has become only a correction to the exaggeration of the authority of knowledge, but has not undermined it. The appearance of existentialism with its emphasis on inner experience also does not deny the need to verify our convictions both by inner experience and by a way of life and the consequences of actions in a specific social environment.

The critical verification of any statements has made philosophers sensitive to the threats that intuitionism and irrationalism hide. Hence the critical attitude of many philosophers to "poetics"—ways of speaking designed to appeal to imagination and feeling. Such were the rhetorics that were usually designated by the term "ideologies," which became the most important impetus for committing mass crimes against humanity. Sometimes they are called religion-like formations, quasi-religions, because of the closeness of the semiotics with which they manipulated the mass consciousness. Therefore, philosophers saw and see their task in the development of critical self-awareness, to develop the ability to resist the influence of such manipulative technologies. This critical direction of philosophy, initiated by ancient Greek philosophers, became the source of dialogical, and even dramatic, relations between philosophy and religion. Nevertheless, as a result of the growing authority of ancient wisdom, the dismissive attitude towards it in early Christianity is replaced by attempts to combine religion and philosophy. The result of this is the appearance of theology.

The first methodological guideline that I followed was that the study of religious worldviews should be carried out in a historical context, taking into account the diversity of societies with their cultures and corresponding worldviews. Such an approach makes it possible to consider any religion, including Christianity, as a combination of the universal with the distinctive, conditioned by the socio-cultural environment. The influence of the socio-cultural environment is evident not only in the branching of Christianity into such religious trends as Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, but also in the presence of certain national peculiarities in each of these Christian religions.

The emergence of theology testifies to Christianity's recognition of the authority of philosophy. But at the same time, one of the first most prominent theologians, Thomas Aquinas, accepted the thesis of the superiority of God's wisdom over the wisdom of philosophers. Hence the thesis of the subordination of philosophy to theology and the thesis of the mutual complementarity of such human abilities as faith (conviction), feeling, imagination, and reason. From this follows the thesis not only of the possibility but also of the necessity of cooperation and dialogue between religions and theologies, on the one hand, and philosophy on the other. The question of how theology and philosophy relate and whether religious philosophy is possible and how it is possible became one of the discussion questions in the department of the history of Ukrainian philosophy during the time I am remembering here. But this is only one of those questions.

At the center of philosophical criticism was the clarification of which value beliefs are introduced by certain ways of speaking, in particular those calculated to appeal to imagination and feeling. And an indicator of the quality of these beliefs are those ways of human life, behavior, and relationships to which such beliefs incline one. So philosophers came to the conclusion that their task is to develop critical self-awareness, individual and collective—the ability to weigh the consequences of introducing any value beliefs, including religious ones. The psychology of religious beliefs, the study of religious experience in all its diversity, became important components of the philosophy of religion. William James's work "The Varieties of Religious Experience" is a case in point.

However, as a scientific supervisor, I had to develop more specific methodological guidelines regarding the peculiarities of the Ukrainian religious consciousness. It was these guidelines that were, and still are, the source of sharp discussions. In a simplified form, they can be reduced to the following: (a) it is impossible to adequately clarify the peculiarities of the Ukrainian Christian faith without taking into account pre-Christian religious ideas and beliefs (this principle was clearly formulated by I. Ohiienko); (b) it is necessary to recognize the influence of Catholicism on the Ukrainian religious consciousness, particularly through education (Ostroh Academy, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Lviv Jesuit College, later university); (c) there are grounds to recognize the influence of Protestantism on the Ukrainian religious consciousness as well (a striking example is the Christian philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda); (d) both of the mentioned influences can be considered as a source of ecumenism in Ukrainian Orthodoxy; (e) I believed and believe that there are no fundamental differences at the level of religious consciousness between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which recognizes the national peculiarities of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, and Greek Catholics; (f) cooperation between the philosophy of religion and theology is necessary, and this will be useful for both; (g) only the acquisition by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the status of a local church will enable it to take into account the national peculiarities of the Ukrainian religious consciousness in its practices; (h) I believed and believe that there are elements of malignant conservatism in the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate, the main source of which was the long-term subordination of the Ukrainian church to the Russian one. This directs us to overcome these features partly in theology, but more so in the practical activities of the UOC-KP. The positions expressed here are the positions of a philosopher, not a theologian. They are an impetus for dialogue and cooperation between philosophers, on the one hand, and Ukrainian priests and theologians, on the other.

* * *

Christianity and nations. Christianity became one of the sources of the formation of nations and maintains an emphasis on valuing the cultural distinctiveness of any of them. I believe that this thesis is not controversial and does not require proof. And yet, as regards Orthodoxy, I will quote here a passage from a sermon by Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and All Greece, delivered by him in connection with the celebration of the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ and published in Russian translation under the title "Call to Resurrection" ("Synopsis," an Orthodox journal. — 2001. — No. 4–5):

"In reality, what the masterminds of globalization are trying to achieve, which they themselves frankly declare, is the abolition of national peculiarities, the imposition on the world of not only a single economic model, but also a single language and a single culture.

It is easy to see that the disappearance of national peculiarities will turn Europe into a cemetery of cultures. In place of a multinational and multilingual garden, they want to build uniform boxes in which some indefinite population will have to live. As a result of this, only an insurmountable feeling of emptiness will remain in people's souls.

It is easy to see what awaits Greek culture, as well as the culture of any other Orthodox people, if the process of cultural universalization is left to its own devices, if the consciousness of all of us does not protest. Who among us will remain indifferent in the face of the direct threat of the barbarization of our youth, which is deprived of its roots, its memory, its language, and its faith?"

The emphasis on the national peculiarities of Ukrainian Orthodoxy in independent Ukraine, which is connected with the demand for a single Ukrainian local church, provoked opposition not only from the Russian state but also from the Russian Orthodox Church. This is not something unexpected, if one takes into account that the Russian Orthodox Church throughout its history has been not only a tool of Russian imperial policy but also its theological justification. The nationalization of supranational, universal elements in Orthodoxy became one of the ideological sources of Russian imperialism. In Russian communism, it received a secular reinterpretation in the form of Russia's world mission to liberate all peoples oppressed by capitalism. Here I am only reminding the reader of the interpretation of the nationalization of Russian Orthodoxy as one of the sources of Russian communism, which Berdyaev expressed in his work "The Origin of Russian Communism." After the collapse of the USSR, this ambitious world mission fell away, but the possibility remained to destroy the nationally-distinctive cultures of such "brotherly" peoples as the Belarusians and Ukrainians. All the visits to Ukraine by Patriarch Kirill and his preaching of the idea of the "Russian world" testify to the vitality of the tradition of using the Russian church as a tool of neo-imperial policy.

According to the plan, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is supposed to be an obstacle to the creation of a single local church in Ukraine and a carrier of the Orthodox unity of the two peoples on a Russian basis, that is, a means of Russification. And, as anyone can relatively easily verify, it successfully fulfills this role. Although the Primate of the UOC-MP, Volodymyr Sabodan, as a personality, commands respect from many, regardless of confessional affiliation, even if he wanted to, he is powerless to change the Ukrainophobic ideology of this church. It is determined in Moscow.

* * *

But the last of the theses formulated above provoked the most objections. In discussions outside the Institute of Philosophy, I encountered its emotional rejection. I regretted that misunderstandings arose with people whose position in fundamental moments coincided with mine. I mean the awareness of the threat to Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Greek Catholics from Russian imperial policy. In view of such a threat, even benevolent criticism of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyivan Patriarchate, aimed at strengthening its effectiveness and influence, is often considered undesirable, because it is believed that such criticism weakens the UOC-KP in this confrontation. The opposition to the threat became an impetus for the appearance of polemical literature. From my point of view, the most outstanding, in content and style, are the books and articles of Halyna Mohylnytska.

Outside the institute in the 1990s, I also had discussions with supporters of RUN-vira (the Native Ukrainian National Faith). I will leave aside here the disagreements and disputes among the "Native Believers" themselves, including those concerning the choice of a self-name for this religious movement. At the center of my discussions, and not only mine, was the assessment of the role of Christianity in Ukrainian history and culture, especially from the point of view of valuing and affirming Ukrainian cultural distinctiveness and, accordingly, the peculiarities of Ukrainian national self-awareness. My appreciation of the important mission of Christianity in Ukrainian history and culture often met with a sharp emotional reaction from the "Native Believers." But since I at the same time valued Ukrainian ethno-culture, this inclined the supporters of RUN-vira to the idea that it was worth talking to me. In response to the assertion that Christianity is a "foreign" religion created by Jews, I pointed to the fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism. I emphasized that Christianity is one of the world's religions and played an important role in the formation of European nations. I had occasional discussions on these issues with Bohdan Ostrovsky, a bandurist. I got to know him thanks to the fact that his wife was a student of my wife's at Kyiv's school No. 168.

I would not want to overburden my reader with some elements of the philosophy of history, but I will note that the term "necessity" in relation to history usually denotes a historical law that makes its way through the choices and actions of people. From this point of view, such a law necessarily determines revolutionary events and is capable of "giving birth" to outstanding individuals. Historical law, accordingly, is conceived as the most important prerequisite sine qua non—without which certain changes would not have occurred. But at the same time, it is usually believed that a historical law is always realized in the presence of certain favorable circumstances. (I will note in passing that the expression "historical necessity" is used not only in its well-known pretentious meaning but also in a simpler one, when it denotes a pressing and extreme need to carry out certain reforms aimed at realizing better life prospects. Such use of the expression does not cause objections and is not the subject of philosophical discussions. If we are talking about the USSR, for example, then the extreme necessity of realizing a better historical perspective—as an alternative to the communist dictatorship—existed in that state from the time of its inception.)

Such a philosophy of history is a consequence of the dominance of evolutionism in the 19th century—the idea of progress, the most famous example of which is the Marxist conception of history passing through socio-economic formations. In this case, historical law, or necessity, is conceived mostly essentialistically—as a force hidden behind phenomena. A description of favorable circumstances allows historians to explain why the collapse of the USSR and the appearance of an independent Ukrainian state happened in 1991. These circumstances are usually divided into external to Ukraine and internal. The external ones include the international situation (the signing of the Helsinki Accords), as well as political events in the top echelons of power in the USSR (the GKChP conspiracy, the decisive actions of Boris Yeltsin, etc.). The internal ones include the state of consciousness and will of Ukrainian citizens in the Ukrainian SSR on the eve of the collapse of the USSR.

In response, they say that it means Ukrainian independence “fell out of the sky” or was “gifted” to Ukrainians. But did Ukrainians not fight for their independent state? The answer is obvious: they did, and sacrificially so; the modern independent Ukrainian state is a consequence of this struggle. This struggle is a necessary precondition, without which an independent Ukrainian state would not have appeared. Such preconditions also include mass collective actions of citizens in Ukraine: the reburial of the remains of V. Stus, Y. Lytvyn, and O. Tykhyi, student hunger strikes, the emergence of Rukh and a multi-party system, the Chain of Unity, and so on. Mass protests against the GKChP on the streets and squares of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities became important support for Leonid Kravchuk’s position, including at the Belovezha meeting.

* * *

The philosophy of culture. Treating culture as something natural is an anachronism in the modern era, when culture acquires political and economic importance. The existence of a distinctive culture becomes the basis for the existence of a nation-state, and therefore the state should be interested in its cultivation and protection. Culture also gains economic importance (tourism, art, etc.): the loss of a unique culture means giving up (and this is already a conscious choice) an important source of one’s own well-being. The political and economic aspects of culture’s existence in industrial and post-industrial society create a tense field of competition surrounding cultures. The basis for these competitions is, above all, political and economic motives.

The realization that culture constitutes an artificially created life-world, the existence of which depends on the choice of each individual, signifies a break with an inert life within culture. The conservative attachment of a rural person to traditional culture becomes insufficient to protect it from the expansion of other cultures. Modern nations are able to protect their distinctive cultures only when individuals become aware of their belonging to the nation and of the dependence of their national culture’s existence on their own choice and contribution to its development. This is what is meant by the term “national consciousness.” The short-lived effect of the national upsurge associated with the collapse of the Russian Empire could not make the rural population nationally conscious—the seeds of this consciousness were later destroyed by the propaganda of so-called internationalism. A favorable circumstance for such propaganda was precisely the pre-modern mentality: an inert existence in culture as if in a natural environment. From this point of view, an urban person who justifies their indifference to the choice of language with that phrase, “but isn’t it all the same?” exhibits signs of a pre-modern mentality in their attitude toward culture. They exhibit the same signs in their attitude toward the state—a lack of civic consciousness and psyche. Both these aspects are manifestations of one and the same thing. Communism, as a type of totalitarian ideology, only reinforced the signs of a pre-modern mentality, parasitizing on the fact that national and civic consciousness could not form within the despotic Russian Empire.

Without an awareness of the value of its own distinctive culture, that is, without an appropriate ideology responsible for fostering national consciousness and will, a culture is threatened with destruction as a result of the expansion of another, more aggressive culture, whose bearers possess a relatively high level of national consciousness.

2. Some considerations regarding the future of Ukraine

I conceived my answer to the question of how Ukraine should move into the future primarily from the perspective of transformations in Ukrainian intellectual culture. At first glance, such an approach is too far from the practical problems—political, legal, economic, social—the acuteness of which became obvious not only in the first years of Ukraine's independence but also throughout its subsequent twenty-year history. But this is not entirely true. The implementation of qualitative transformations in intellectual culture, which is primarily the business of scholars, especially humanities scholars (philosophers in particular), will necessarily have an impact on other aspects of Ukrainian national life.

* * *

The Russian factor: a revival of empire? The USSR was a totalitarian empire that inherited traditional Russian imperialism in a modified and concealed form. The establishment of an independent Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR largely depended on the extent to which the modern Russian Federation retains the traditional historical paradigm in the form of neo-imperialism. Putin’s statement that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest “geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, his declarations about the formation of a Eurasian space, and a series of concrete steps in domestic and foreign policy indicate that Putin’s Russia is oriented toward a neo-imperial perspective. Although not all citizens of the modern Russian Federation belong to “Putin’s Russia,” the democratic opposition, even considering the recent pre-election protests, is weak. Lauren Goodrich concludes her article in the newspaper “The Day” (Nov. 3, 2011) titled “Russia: Rebuilding an Empire While It Can” (translation from English) with the following: “This means that the next several years are likely Russia’s moment, which will be marked by the country’s return to the world stage as a regional empire and another confrontation with its former adversary, the United States.” While accepting most of the author’s claims in this article, I think his following statement warrants a critical note: “The future Eurasian Union is not a resurrection of the Soviet Union. Putin understands the inherent weaknesses Russia would face in taking on the economic and strategic burden of caring for such a large population over approximately nine million square miles of territory. This was one of the Soviet Union’s most severe weaknesses: attempting to control too much directly. Instead, Putin is creating a union in which Moscow will have sway on foreign policy and security matters but will not be responsible for much of each country’s internal matters. Russia simply does not have the funds to support such an intense strategy.”

I will note that today’s Russia under Putin resorts to various forms of interference in the domestic policy of post-Soviet republics, including overt ones. The examples are well known (Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, etc.). Covert interference prevails, using a wide range of means—economic, financial, informational, human, and so on. In general, an orientation toward a neo-imperial political strategy will inevitably incline Russia to continue such interference in the domestic policy of post-Soviet states in the future.

At the end of his book “Imperial Ends: The Decline, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” (Ukrainian translation by “Krytyka,” 2009), Oleksandr Motyl examines the resources that the cores of fallen empires may possess for their revival. The general preconditions that facilitate the revival of the Russian empire include its historical longevity, territorial compactness, and the totalitarian nature of the final period of its existence. The latter is a particularly influential factor, as the totalitarian character of the state made civic and national movements, which could have become a reliable basis for independent democratic states, impossible. It is for these reasons that the dissident movement, even in Ukraine, was small in number.

Undoubtedly, the Russian Federation possesses significant resources—economic (primarily oil and gas), political-administrative, diplomatic, informational, intellectual, and mental—with which it can influence various spheres of social and political life in the post-Soviet independent states. Mental resources also include the tendency of ethnic Russians to prefer a strong, authoritarian state; they view a democratic state, with its pluralism, as weak. It is true that the protests in Russia related to Putin’s election as president are a new phenomenon, but this is only the beginning, so it is difficult to predict whether these protests will grow into a powerful democratic movement and when this might happen.

If we are to single out the most important reasons for the flaws of the Ukrainian independent state over its twenty-year history, then besides a low level of national consciousness, one can point to a low level of civic consciousness and will. This second characteristic, though not identical to the first, is closely related to it, as the will for national unity is important for ensuring civic solidarity, and this is the main precondition that enables effective control over the authorities by the people and the blocking of its “divide and conquer” technology. The third reason is the excessively high level of inherited legal nihilism (after all, the class-based understanding of law in the USSR is a continuation of the tradition that “the law is like a wagon tongue—it goes wherever you turn it”).

In a discussion about Russia's prospects in the newspaper “The Day” under the heading “Russia after Putin” (January 20–21, 2012), when asked, “what might ‘nation-state’ mean, the construction of which is now being discussed in Russia?” Oleksandr Motyl responded as follows: “There are three possible answers. The first—a ‘nation-state’ could mean a normal sovereign state that is perfectly content with its borders. This would be the liberal understanding of the term. The second—a ‘nation-state’ could mean a Russia that tries to cope with the ‘threat’ of Islam through methods of Russification. This would be the so-called intolerant understanding. The third—a ‘nation-state’ could mean a hyper-nationalist regime with an exaggerated vision of its place under the sun. This would be the authoritarian/fascist understanding.”

In the second case, we are dealing with an orientation toward destroying the cultural identity of other nations in the Russian state, which live more or less compactly on territory they consider their historical homeland. If the federal structure in modern Russia continues to serve as a cover for an imperial policy towards non-Russian nations in the RF, then we will have the old policy, inherited from the USSR. The liberal path—building a multinational state (federation) with broad autonomous powers—is, as the recent terror in Chechnya organized under Putin's leadership shows, a currently unlikely prospect. The third variant refers to Russia's aspiration to be the world's greatest power. And this has always prompted the Russian empire to subjugate neighboring peoples or at least turn them into dependents. Traditionally, Russian imperial policy has been a combination of the second and third ways of creating a “nation-state,” although in fact Russia has always been and remains today a multinational state.

* * *

In modern Ukraine, especially at the everyday level, one can hear Ukraine described as a multinational state because “many” national minorities live there. But since “many national minorities” live in all modern states, and their number is continuously increasing (due to migration processes), it follows that all modern states are multinational. And therefore, the division of states into multinational and national loses its meaning. For people with anti-Ukrainian attitudes, the adjective “multinational” in relation to Ukraine is attractive because it can replace the role of the former word “internationalism”: anyone who chooses the orientation of creating the Ukrainian state as a national one falls into the category of a “nationalist,” that is, an aggressive person with complexes of xenophobia and intolerance—this is precisely the meaning that was put into this word in the USSR.

To save the term “multinational state” in the aforementioned sense, some intellectuals argue that a state should be considered national or even “mono-ethnic” if the number of national minorities does not exceed 20% of the total population. But in that case, the specifics of these minorities are not taken into account. Are we talking about immigrant minorities whose historical homeland is located outside this state, or those who consider this very territory their historical homeland, and their vision is supported by the international community?

Using the method of ideal types and in solidarity with many other humanities scholars, I agreed with the definition that a typically multinational state is a state on whose territory more than one ethnic nation resides that considers its area of residence to be its historical homeland. Since the forces that unite people into one ethnic (cultural) nation significantly outweigh the ideology of purely statist patriotism, such states, as a rule, disintegrate, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example. And only the threat of disintegration makes the division into national and multinational states practically important and relevant. Classifying a state as national or multinational becomes relevant only when a culturally united community of people, which considers itself a nation and lives within the territorial borders of its historical homeland, raises the question of creating its own independent state.

From the perspective of the proposed distinction, the modern Russian Federation remains a typically multinational state. And the creation of a Russian nation-state within the borders of the Russian ethnic territory requires the immediate recognition of the right of compactly settled non-Russian nations to create independent states. This means a conscious agreement to the third, and final, collapse of the former Russian empire, and with it, the final liberation of ethnic Russians from the burden of the imperial past. It is understandable that the formation of a Russian nation-state within the borders of the historical homeland of ethnic Russians will inevitably encounter difficulties, primarily due to their scattered settlement across a large territory. But if certain ideologues and political forces in the modern Russian Federation believe that the creation of a Russian “nation-state” should occur through the cultural assimilation of non-Russian nations, this will mean the continuation of traditional imperial policy. This domestic policy will likely be supplemented by a neo-imperial foreign policy—for example, in the creation of a Eurasian space—and this is the most important geopolitical threat to Ukrainian independence.

When it is said that the Ukrainian independent state is more formally than really independent, it is primarily about the preservation of malignant types of its dependence on Russia. I say “malignant” because I am not referring to the general, fully justified thesis about the mutual dependence of independent states in the modern world. Instead, I am referring to attempts to limit Ukraine’s sovereignty, turning it into a dependent state. From this point of view, the most undesirable thing for Russia would be Ukraine’s rapprochement with the West—hence the opposition not only to Ukraine's entry into NATO but also into the EU.

* * *

Ukrainians, as an ethnic nation, must respect the cultural distinctiveness of national minorities, and national minorities, for their part, must respect the cultural distinctiveness of the Ukrainian ethnic nation and protect it from assimilation. This is about the action of a universal principle: the protection of any distinctive culture in the world from its destruction through assimilation is the duty of every person, regardless of their ethnic origin.

Adopting such an ethic would turn national minorities, especially ethnic Russians, into a force capable of solidarity with nationally conscious ethnic Ukrainians in their defense of Ukrainian distinctive culture and, in particular, the language as its most important feature. This is important because the division of Ukrainians along ethnic, particularly linguistic, lines is the most important tool that the authorities use to undermine civic unity and thereby ensure the success of the “divide and conquer” technology. Meanwhile, the vast majority of ethnic Russians, citizens of Ukraine, are captive to a stereotype formed by communist ideology: the one who divides is the one who defends their nationally distinctive culture, not the one who destroys it for the sake of Russian assimilation.

This emphasis of mine on nation-building has drawn criticism for the “old-fashionedness” of my political thinking (partly under the influence of European intellectuals and politicians, for whom the formation of their nations is mostly a thing of the past). In addition, some Ukrainian intellectuals and publicists saw a threat in my position related to the use of the term “political nation,” while others, on the contrary, saw in my position a gravitation toward a traditional way of political thinking.

* * *

Is Ukrainian independence a failure? Ukrainian intellectuals, with the help of their Western colleagues, provided Ukrainian society with an understanding of the socio-economic, political, and cultural processes that have taken place in it over the last twenty years. The word “oligarchization” is mostly used as the most general characteristic—in the sense of the illegal use of state power for the enrichment of individuals and clans. According to some researchers of Ukraine’s political history, the process of oligarchization was initiated during the presidency of Leonid Kravchuk but reached its “peak” during Leonid Kuchma’s two terms as president.

Oligarchization is in fact a derivative phenomenon: it appeared as a consequence of the people’s inability to form a government of appropriate quality and to control its actions. It is impossible to find another reason for this inability than the inherited mass mentality.

A high level of corruption is inevitably associated with oligarchization. Unfortunately, the hope that after the election of Viktor Yushchenko as president significant progress would be made in reducing corruption, as well as in investigating murders and various kinds of politically motivated repressions, ended in disappointment. The most important indicator of today’s politically motivated persecutions is the imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko, Yuriy Lutsenko, and others.

The state’s reluctance to develop small and medium-sized businesses is linked to oligarchization. This is understandable: a powerful middle class is a formidable political competitor to oligarchic clans because it is capable of significantly narrowing their influence on state power. A consequence of the weakness of the middle class was the sharp division of Ukrainian society into a small layer of the super-rich and a broad social layer of people with low incomes (“the poor”). Some are unable to meet their basic needs on their salary and pension, while others become millionaires and billionaires in a short time. This social contrast, though not the only one, is an important factor among those that divide Ukrainian citizens, for it reproduces a class society according to K. Marx: on one side, the proletarians, on the other, the super-rich.

So, if we set aside the exceptions, the core of the modern Ukrainian state is made up of people whose leading motive is personal and clan interests. With the Party of Regions coming to power, these features only intensified. The opposition is weak and divided, has little influence on legislation, and holds no influential positions in the executive branch. It is enough to recall the way voting is carried out in the parliament. The question arises, is such a state interested in asserting Ukrainian national-cultural identity, national self-awareness, and national dignity? In other words, can it believe that the formation of a Ukrainian political nation and national-civic solidarity should be the foundation of the Ukrainian state? After all, this would undermine the most important means by which oligarchic clans ensure their stay in power—the political technology of “divide and conquer.”

* * *

If we disregard intermediate options, all the positions of modern analysts, voiced and written, can be roughly “packaged” into three. The first can be described as more or less optimistic, the second as predominantly critical, skeptical, and in extreme cases—pessimistic, and the third as moderate. The last, moderate position, contains certain elements of criticism, points to important achievements, and emphasizes an optimistic perspective. Both the first and the second can be illustrated with quotes from many authors. I will leave aside the question of how well-founded this or that rhetoric is—based on an objective analysis of the existing historical situation.

Today, a critical, and even openly pessimistic, assessment of the twenty-year history of independent Ukraine prevails, even if it is often combined with faith in a distant positive perspective. An example of such optimism for the future is a good journalistic article by Vasyl Ovsiienko titled “Post-Genocidal Ukraine,” which was the result of a report delivered in 2003 (V. Ovsiienko. The Light of People. — Book II, 2007). An overtly optimistic position was recently expressed by Andriy Klymenko, head of the Tavria Institute for Regional Development (Yalta), in a newspaper article titled “Time to Figure It Out: With the Country and Yanukovych, the ‘Regionals’ and the Opposition...” (“The Day,” October 7–8, 2011). He said: “The general masochistic cry over the supposedly lost opportunities for Ukraine in the 20 years of independence in our media and expert community is a sign, pardon the frankness, of a primitive and superficial assessment of historical processes. Such a complex and multi-layered historical turn that Ukraine is making—(a) from socialism to capitalism; (b) from totalitarianism to democracy; (c) in parallel and for the first time—building a state from a clean slate; (d) creating a political nation and (e) laying the foundations of its own identity—is incomparably more difficult than in Poland or the Baltic countries. Ukraine is—by Ukrainian standards, rapidly—treading a path that the countries of old Europe walked for centuries, and during this time we have already come very close to the EU. The post-Soviet transit is mostly complete. Ukraine’s return to some iteration of the Russian empire will no longer happen—regardless of which party wins the elections.”

There is undoubtedly a grain of truth in what was said. But referencing a short history easily opens one up to a number of caveats. A comparison with those states in the world that were able to carry out reforms in a relatively short period of time, ensuring accelerated movement into a better future, immediately comes to mind. And when it comes to comparing with the Baltic countries or Poland, the question arises, which historical preconditions turned out to be the most important for ensuring success?

* * *

Was the Ukrainian people ready to gain state independence in 1991? At least at first glance, Andriy Klymenko is right: the short history of the independent Ukrainian state and the unpreparedness of the people for the corresponding changes are the main cause of the flaws we are talking about today. Therefore, it is justified to ask how ready the population of the former Ukrainian SSR was to gain state independence in 1991. When it is claimed that the independent Ukrainian state appeared as a result of a coincidence of random circumstances, it is assumed that the level of mass national and civic consciousness in the Ukrainian SSR at the end of the 1980s was too low, and therefore there was no mature collective will aimed at achieving an independent Ukrainian state. In his interview with the newspaper “The Day” (published November 30, 2011), Leonid Kravchuk said: “If I had decided in 1991 in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha that the people were not ready, and they really weren’t ready then, we would still be waiting. Decisions must be made when there is a chance.” And he is right. But the weakness of the mass national-civic movement would eventually make itself felt.

In the book by M. Mykhalchenko and V. Andrushchenko, “Belovezhie. L. Kravchuk. Ukraine: 1991–1995” (Kyiv, 1996), an attempt was made to cover both the external and internal circumstances that contributed to the emergence of the Ukrainian state in 1991. The authors note: “The Belovezha meeting and the agreement of the three leaders of the largest republics, which formed the basis and skeleton of the former USSR, is of historical significance. It was a step that only outstanding individuals could dare to take—political leaders capable of taking political responsibility upon themselves ” (pp. 95–96). That is, the role of outstanding individuals is attributed to the favorable circumstances in the collapse of the USSR. There is no reason to deny the importance of this factor—as opposed to the naive view that a ripe historical necessity will inevitably “give birth” to outstanding individuals.

The view that Boris Yeltsin's position was decisive for Ukraine in gaining state independence in 1991 was expressed by Boris Nemtsov in an interview with the newspaper “The Day” (under the title “The Thorny Path to Freedom,” August 31, 2011). He said this about it: “First of all, I am proud to have participated in those historical events and, together with Boris Yeltsin, ‘cleansed’ the White House of the GKChP. This was, on the one hand, a day of victory over the GKChP and communism, and on the other, the birthday of a free Russia. Now the Russian authorities are trying in every way to forget about those historic days. Because they are the successors of the GKChP members—they hate freedom, they are afraid when people take to the streets. And all the complexes, including the imperial one, which were characteristic of the GKChP members, are manifested to the highest degree in the current government. On the other hand, the victory of a free Russia allowed the countries that were part of the USSR to gain their independence rather bloodlessly. Therefore, I believe that today's holiday in Ukraine is in many ways connected with the events of August 19–22, 1991. In this regard, I have even proposed to all Ukrainian presidents that a monument to Yeltsin be erected in Ukraine. No one has done it. Although Ukraine gained independence completely peacefully thanks to Boris Yeltsin.

— Yes, but in Ukraine for many years there was its own struggle, in particular by dissidents, for independence.

— I believe that a free Russia and an independent Ukraine are the result of one common chain of events. Ukrainians fought for their independence for a very long time, but they only got it in August 1991.”

This brings us back to acknowledging the leading role of outstanding individuals in the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In the cited interview, Nemtsov does not hold the naive view that a certain historical situation necessarily causes the appearance of outstanding individuals. He has in mind the weakness in Ukraine of national and civic consciousness, the presence of which could have been a decisive factor in the emergence of an independent Ukrainian state. But it is obvious that even a very high level of national and civic consciousness throughout Ukraine at the end of the 1980s could have been a guarantee for the peaceful emergence of an independent Ukrainian state only in an indefinite future. Because it would have been necessary to wait for a fortunate opportunity—democratic transformations in Russia itself. And, judging by what is happening in the modern Russian Federation, this is a distant and uncertain historical prospect.

It is indisputable that the emergence of the independent Ukrainian state was facilitated by the activity of national-democratic forces, represented in Ukraine primarily by Rukh and the parties that began to form at the end of 1989 (see O. Haran’s book, “‘To Kill the Dragon.’ From the History of Rukh and the New Parties in Ukraine.” — K.: “Lybid,” 1993). But in any case, one has to admit that this activity could have caused the peaceful collapse of the USSR in 1991 only in combination with the crisis in its political elite.

* * *

The internal factor: the post-Soviet mentality. Reflecting on the study of inherited inertial formations in the consciousness of Ukrainians, I believed that the focus of attention not only of researchers but of the entire society should be primarily on the inherited varieties of nihilism—moral, civic, national, legal, and political.

It is precisely these stereotypes that have made the techniques of manipulating mass consciousness so effective. First among them is the use of words as labels. Even today, almost no one asks someone who speaks of the threat of “nationalism” which specific nationalism the speaker has in mind—aggressive, imperial nationalism, often called “chauvinism,” or defensive, liberal nationalism, as opposed to integral-totalitarian. One can give a long list of examples where corresponding words are used without appropriate qualifications or clarifications, and this is done consciously—counting on already formed stereotypes, that is, on naivete, the lack of elementary critical consciousness among citizens. I am not denying by what I’ve said that means of manipulating consciousness can also be used for good purposes, particularly for education. It all depends on what ways of thinking and value beliefs are formed in the process.

The formation of civic and national consciousness is rather a phenomenon of modern European history, even if this process was based on the inheritance of historical character. To me, it is naive to imagine that national self-awareness and the nation-state emerged in Europe as a result of the action of an “objective historical law.” Without changes at the level of collective consciousness and will, they would not have appeared. The European way of forming nations consists in one ethnic nation playing the role of a core for the formation of a political nation within the territory that this nation considers its historical homeland. One can also point to the immigrant way of forming nations, an example of which can be the American nation. The most famous explanation of this way of forming a nation was proposed by Anthony Smith in the book “National Identity” (the Ukrainian translation was published by “Osnova” in 1994). Where the ideology of nation-building did not become widespread, tribal formations did not merge into larger socio-cultural wholes, later called cultural or ethnic nations. This did not happen in many countries of the East, where, as we have in Africa, tribal formations have been preserved to this day.

The collapse of the Russian empire under the name USSR is an important world event that seemed to conclude the twentieth century—a century of the collapse of many empires. Almost every nation that achieved the formation of an independent state at that time faced difficulties and obstacles. But the difficulties faced by the post-Soviet independent states are largely due to the fact that they arose as a result of the collapse of a dictatorial, totalitarian empire. It also matters that the communist totalitarian empire was a continuation of the long-term existence of the Russian empire.

However, the weakened national and civic consciousness in the independent post-Soviet states is seen as a favorable circumstance by pro-imperial forces. Hence the support of Russian politicians for the so-called “interfronts” in the early 90s, and later the “protection” of ethnic Russians or even Russian-speakers in post-Soviet independent states. This is understandable: the more disunited the citizens are in an independent post-Soviet state, the easier it is to influence the choice of desired policy by playing on the confrontations within society. Russian politicians do not think about the fact that this will yield negative results for Russia itself in the historical perspective. The focus on reviving even a weakened version of the Russian empire narrows their thinking to the concrete present. Here they simply inherit the already familiar, though modified, paradigm of Russian political thought. Modern Russian politicians, with the exception of some opposition figures, are not yet capable of thinking according to the principle of “a world after empires.”

What has been said largely determined the West’s attitude toward the new wave of independent states emerging from the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. An important role was played by the circumstance that the issue of national self-awareness, the formation of a nation through the assertion of a nationally distinctive culture, was a past and partly even “forgotten” period in the history of the old European nations. Therefore, Western politicians mostly thought about the acquisition of Western civilizational traits by the new post-Soviet states from the perspective of certain value beliefs and standards—political, economic, and legal. Among these values, the formation of a nation as a cultural-national identity, and consequently, national self-awareness, was not considered something important.

To a large extent, the character of this attitude toward the new independent states was also influenced by factors such as the existence of supranational entities (like the EU), the transition from modern to “postmodern” information societies, the process of globalization, and such intellectual movements as postmodernism, the critique of meta-discourses, and of malignant versions of holism and fundamentalism. It would be inappropriate to go into a more detailed consideration of these issues here: they have been partly the subject of my consideration in the already mentioned article “The West and the Rights of Nations,” published in 1991, and in other publications. In some important points, my criticism of the West in the mentioned article coincided with the critical reproach expressed by Bohdan Hawrylyshyn in his report to the Club of Rome, published in 1990 in a Ukrainian translation under the title “Road Maps to the Future. Toward More Effective Societies.” In this book, the author points to the West’s disregard for the relevance of national problems in the post-Soviet states, the cause of which, in his opinion, is primarily that these problems have largely lost their relevance for modern Western societies. In reality, this loss of relevance is mostly a consequence of an intellectual fashion that has shifted the emphasis to diversity—as opposed to an emphasis on the unity of the diverse. Hence the policy of multiculturalism, and so on. Only now is the West faced with the extremes to which an indiscriminate orientation toward the implementation of such a policy leads.

However, what I have noted does not devalue the contribution of Western countries to the emergence of the Ukrainian independent state: support for the Ukrainian dissident and Helsinki movement, the 1991 recognition of the independent Ukrainian state, etc. I have mentioned here only those points that are still a source of discussion and misunderstanding between Western and Ukrainian intellectuals. I have in mind those Ukrainian intellectuals who point to the importance of national consciousness and national unity of Ukrainian citizens as a guarantee of successful reform implementation. For it is primarily the absence of national self-awareness and the minimally necessary foundations of national unity that is the main reason for the so-called “multi-vector” nature of modern Ukraine.

* * *

Criticism of the state or the inherited mass mentality? It is true that throughout the short history of independent Ukraine, the sting of criticism from intellectuals, opposition politicians, and “people on the street” has been predominantly directed against the Ukrainian state. Accordingly, improving the state is considered the decisive way to overcome oligarchization, corruption, and so on. Undoubtedly, the state must always be under the control of its citizens, and one of the most important means of this control is its criticism. But since even in such imperfect democracies as Ukraine’s, the people are still responsible for the quality of state power, the criticism of state power often ends with the phrase “we have the government we do because that's what the people are like.” The thesis “the people get the government they deserve” is only partially justified, because people, with some exceptions, strive to elect the best to positions of power, and this places an obligation on the elected to live up to the expectations of their voters. Ultimately, politicians and officials are also obliged to raise the level of the people’s political culture, not to justify their own ineffective actions by referring to the people's low political culture.

However, it is still undeniable that the real root cause of the mentioned flaws of the independent Ukrainian state is not oligarchization, because it is a derivative phenomenon, but the state of the inherited mass mentality. We are talking primarily about the mentality formed by the “recent past”—the communist totalitarian empire. This special mentality is called post-communist, post-genocidal, post-totalitarian, and so on. The focus on the recent, “Soviet” past is justified by the fact that it directly preceded the collapse of the USSR, and also by the fact that its duration was sufficient to “raise” a new generation of people of the “homo sovieticus” type. The short-lived existence of fascism cannot compare with this communist “experiment.” Moreover, the formation of the “Soviet man” was carried out by combining extreme cruelty (genocide) with ideological zombification and the removal from society of those who did not succumb to it.

Sociological research and ordinary observations indicate a low level of civic and national consciousness and will among the population of the Ukrainian SSR at the end of the 1980s. Although during the referendum on December 1, 1991, more than ninety percent of the population of the Ukrainian SSR voted for state independence, analysis shows that different social groups—peasants, workers, bureaucrats, members of the CPU—were guided in their choice by very different motives. This analysis is well known, and I will not detail it here. The motive of national consciousness was leading for probably no more, but rather less, than 30% of the entire population of the Ukrainian SSR. In view of this, even the majority of parties of a national-democratic orientation were initially forced to agree to support the Novo-Ogaryovo process, aimed at saving a “renewed,” and finally “honest,” Union.

Even the public release of information about the mass crimes against humanity of the communist regime, which confirm the affinity of the communist regime with fascism, did not lead to radical changes in the inherited mass mentality. In modern Ukraine, we have crude “traces” of a post-colonial consciousness—the preservation of street names, monuments, etc. The trial of the youths who destroyed the monument to Stalin (on charges of destroying “property” belonging to the CPU) is an indicative event in this sense. One can imagine what an uproar Ukrainian communists would have raised if, for example, people in Germany were tried for destroying a monument to Hitler. And the mentioned trial in Ukraine probably would not have happened if the trend of rehabilitating Stalin had not been initiated in modern Russia. In general, I agree with those who argue that the independent Ukrainian state appeared in 1991 thanks to a certain situation in the ruling elite of the USSR and as a result of a compromise between the national-democratic movement and the communist nomenclature. In Ukraine, national-democratic parties received less support in the elections to the Verkhovna Rada than the communists.

Before my eyes, I see the picture of President Clinton's speech on Government Square in Kyiv during his first visit to Ukraine. He quoted Shevchenko and called on the people who filled the square to value the Ukrainian language. I stood next to young people, probably students; they supported this guidance with applause and continued to speak in Russian, although, I am convinced, they also spoke Ukrainian. And this applies not only to language. Post-Soviet man is inclined to leave his way of thinking and behavior unchanged, although he may recognize other values at the same time.

In publications and oral statements over twenty years, I have emphasized the malignant inheritances of the totalitarian regime concerning (a) moral consciousness, (b) national consciousness and dignity, (c) civic consciousness and will, and (d) legal and political culture. I emphasized that in the mass mentality, an important role is played by inherited stereotypes of nihilism—moral, national, legal, and political. I also considered the stereotype of “etatism” to be a component of political nihilism—the view of the state as a force alienated from the people and placed above them, as opposed to the view of it as a common cause of citizens for which they are responsible.

From this follows the necessity of researching the inherited mass mentality and even “treating” it. And although it is often only a matter of achieving a proper level of self-criticism through “self-treatment,” its development needs to be supplemented by practices designed for the subconscious, using methods of deep social psychology. After all, certain fears, ideas, feelings, and value beliefs are largely rooted in the subconscious. This makes it possible to think of ways to “treat” it. And although such research will have some overlap with post-colonial studies in general, our case is special in view of Ukraine’s totalitarian past as part of the former USSR.

In these studies, it is worth taking into account an event like the Nuremberg trials of the crimes of fascism, which had not only value-worldview but also psychological consequences. I have in mind motivations not only at the level of consciousness but also at the level of feelings and imagination, which will help to re-experience, that is, to “see,” to “feel” the mass crimes committed by the communists.

The study of the Ukrainian mass mentality should not be limited only to the communist period. This broader approach is partly represented in Ukrainian intellectual culture. Of recent publications, O. Olzhych's article “The Spirit of Ruin” with an afterword by I. Dziuba is noteworthy. In this afterword, Dziuba also points to some earlier publications on this topic.

And yet my approach is more prospective than retrospective. It is necessary to answer first of all the question of how to change the existing mass mentality so that the people can form a relatively high-quality state power and be able to control it. The people can be strong when they are united.

* * *

The problem of civic unity. The thesis that Ukraine can be strong when it is united does not raise objections either among intellectuals, or politicians, or at the level of the mass consciousness of Ukrainian citizens. This primarily refers to unity while at the same time preserving useful pluralism within civil society. But immediately the most important question arises: what factors can unite the citizens of Ukraine and how can this be achieved? It is often asserted that the main factors capable of instilling a sense of pride in their country among Ukrainian citizens are successes in the economy, a social policy that contributes to the emergence of an economically powerful middle class, and the correspondence of the political and legal systems and practices to European standards, in particular, reducing corruption to the lowest possible level.

Hardly anyone would deny the importance of the factors listed. But the national factor is missing from it, if it is understood as the affirmation of the national-cultural characteristics of the civil society that is the basis of the state. This is a characteristic tendency of many discussions on the topic of civic unity—one sufficient to make the people capable of forming a quality political authority and controlling it. One recalls the thesis, opportunely expressed by Angela Merkel: “Culture follows the economy.”

However, the truth is hidden from citizens that the desired socio-economic transformations for the benefit of the people can only take place with a proper level of national consciousness and, accordingly, civic unity. Even obvious truths are not easily recognized at the level of mass consciousness. For example, it is obvious that the establishment of the Ukrainian language as the language of mass communication is economically beneficial to all citizens of Ukraine regardless of ethnic origin, because it is one of the factors that restrains uncontrolled migration in the context of “transparent borders” and gives Ukrainian citizens an advantage in the labor market. This is also related to the dominance of Ukrainian-language books on the book market, as this provides employment for many citizens of Ukraine who prefer Ukrainian-language books. This also applies to maintaining the distinctiveness of Ukrainian culture in all its areas.

Let's imagine that in some distant future, a democratic Ukraine, along with a democratic Russia, enters the Western civilizational space, having lost its national-cultural identity. In that case, the word “Ukraine,” if it survives at all, would designate only a certain territory. This is not a fantastic assumption. This prospect remains a real possibility for countries like Belarus or modern Ukraine. This is also facilitated by some global trends, particularly Europe’s reserved attitude to the thesis that the basis of civic unity in Ukraine should be the formation of a Ukrainian political nation based on Ukrainian cultural distinctiveness.

I am surprised when a certain part of Ukrainian intellectuals, speaking of “Ukraine’s movement towards Europe,” thinks of the signs of “Europeanness” exclusively from the perspective of observing universal “European standards.” Sometimes such a position is a consequence of individualistic liberalism, when the liberal naively thinks that the affirmation of human rights automatically ensures the preservation of the cultural distinctiveness of nations or the revival of the distinctive culture of some people. In Ukraine, such liberalism often serves as a cover for prejudice against Ukrainian national-cultural identity.

Europe is a unity of cultural diversity. Let us recall that the formation of the EU was accompanied by a discussion as to whether the nationally defined territories in the EU should become just regions, or whether it is about a commonwealth of homelands. When a Ukrainian crosses the border of any EU state, they first encounter a national language, which is different in each of the European states. Meanwhile, one who crosses the border of Ukraine, moving into the space of post-Soviet states (which can also be called Eurasian), finds themselves on the streets of Ukrainian cities in a cultural space dominated by the Russian language.

I have already noted in the previous section that an ethnic nation arises as a result of the merging of previous ethnic communities (ethnoi) into a larger cultural whole, as well as as a result of the combination of the action of cultural and political factors. In the political formation of a nation, the state plays an important role—a factor that stateless nations or those in which states arise temporarily (Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, etc.) are deprived of. Among cultural factors, professional culture becomes important in the process of creating a common literary language, the invention of printing, the development of education, etc. It was this cultural movement that played a leading role in the formation of the national consciousness of stateless nations, which, ultimately, led to the recognition of their existence, and hence their right to political self-determination—the creation of an independent state.

In the liberal version of the creation of a Ukrainian political nation on the basis of the Ukrainian ethnic nation, we are talking about a unity of diversity that is not oriented towards depriving national minorities of the rights and opportunities to preserve their cultural distinctiveness, including dialectal differences within the Ukrainian ethnic nation. This applies equally to the Hutsul, the Lemko, and other communities that represent these differences. If we are talking, for example, about the position of establishing Ukrainian as the state language, i.e., the language of general civic communication, then one must take into account the orientation of national minorities towards bilingualism. Every citizen of Ukraine, regardless of ethnic origin, must support the Ukrainian language as the language of general civic communication. But no one can deprive a national minority of the right to use its native language, to establish schools and other cultural or religious institutions for its own needs.

Ensuring civic unity on the basis of clear principles is important for the formation of a democratic state and its control by civil society. In addition to the language of general civic communication (the state language), the elements for ensuring such unity include, in particular, knowledge of a basic course in Ukrainian history and an idea of the peculiarities of its culture, the establishment of respect for state symbols and a sense of patriotism, and a readiness to defend the national interests and independence of the Ukrainian state. Any representative of a national minority should be interested in supporting such a minimally necessary unity, based on consideration of their own life interests. The main thing in persuasion should be the ability to show that the implementation of the strategy just outlined corresponds to the economic and political interests of national minorities. For example, the Russian national minority would in that case be able to block attempts to use it as a means of implementing the neo-imperial policy of the modern RF and become a force that affirms friendly, not hostile, relations with ethnic Ukrainians. On the other hand, the assertion of a distinctive culture and language will also have certain economic gains as its consequence.

If the current cultural policy continues, there is an undeniable threat of the disappearance of Ukrainian national-cultural distinctiveness, primarily at the level of mass culture. This can be seen in the fact that the use of the Ukrainian language as the language of general civic communication is intensively shrinking in cities in favor of Russian.

In modern Ukraine, conscious pro-imperial forces are modifying the hidden imperial stereotypes inherited from the USSR, or creating new ones that can work better under new conditions. In any case, referencing a hidden external inspiration for such rhetoric is powerless. What is decisive is the critique of the meanings they hide. This is important because, by grafting new rhetoric onto inherited stereotypes, conscious pro-imperial forces expect that this rhetoric will be perceived at the level of mass consciousness as something justified and obvious. Such an apparently obvious statement is that Ukraine is and should be a multinational state because many national minorities live there. This is also combined with practices of ensuring representation in the space of public discussions, especially on television, of intellectuals of an individualistic liberal orientation, even those who emphasize the “value of cultural membership,” to use a phrase from the Canadian liberal philosopher Will Kymlicka.

Indeed, even intellectuals who adhere to the principles of liberalism remain “scattered” across a wide range of liberal ideologies. This is not unique to Ukraine, but for us the issue is particularly acute.

This flaw or disease is also characteristic of opposition parties, even with a jointly declared national-democratic ideology. Now, as I write these lines, we have the same calls from party leaders for unification and the inability of parties, even with the same ideology, to carry out this call. I have explained and continue to explain this reluctance to form numerous, and consequently strong, influential, opposition parties by the inherited stereotype of “leaderism.” I mean relying on a leader, on his charisma, instead of focusing on ways of organizing the party.

The thesis of unity is repeated so often that it has become ritualistic. Even the American ambassador to Ukraine notes: “Let me remind you again, Ukraine is strong when it is united,” yet the question of how to do it remains unanswered. One gets the impression that most Ukrainian citizens would like to achieve civic unity, but in such a way that it does not affect their inherited value orientations, ideas, and feelings.

A minimally necessary level of civic solidarity will make it possible to successfully control state power, block its divisive technologies, and force it to conduct a forward-looking economic and social policy.