OBITUARIES: Danylo Shumuk, 89, rights activist, "the eternal prisoner" (07/04/04)

OBITUARIES

Danylo Shumuk, 89, rights activist, "the eternal prisoner"

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - Danylo Shumuk, who served 42 years in various prisons and camps of Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union for his political activity, died in Krasnoarmiisk, Ukraine, on May 21.

The veteran national and human rights activist was the longest serving Ukrainian prisoner of conscience and was known as "the eternal prisoner."

He was born on December 30, 1914, in the village of Boremschyna in the Volyn Oblast. He joined the Communist Party of Western Ukraine at age 17 and was arrested in 1934 at the age of 19 and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment by the Polish regime. Thanks to an amnesty, he was released in 1939 and returned home to Ukraine, which had become part of the USSR. He taught geography, but due to differences with Soviet authorities was relieved of his teaching job.

In 1941 he was arrested by the Soviets as an "enemy of the people." With the German invasion of the USSR, he was conscripted from prison into the Soviet army but was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped a German POW camp and in 1943 joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and was appointed a political instructor in an officer training school.

In 1944 he was the leader of an advance group of the UPA in the Zhytomyr region, which was soon disbanded. He was captured by the NKVD in December 1944 and was sentenced to death for treason. The sentence was commuted to 20 years of hard labor in Norilsk, where he was one of the leaders of the Norilsk prisoners' strike in 1953.

He was released in 1956 during the so-called "thaw" but was rearrested the following year, after he refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities by becoming an informer. He was sentenced to 10 years for "anti-Soviet agitation" and served the sentence in Vorkuta, Taishet and Mordovia.

After his release in 1967 Mr. Shumuk lived in Bohuslav, in the Kyiv Oblast. He became acquainted with some of the "Shestydesiatnyky," particularly Ivan Svitlychny, Nadia Svitlychna and Yevhen Sverstiuk.

He was swept up in the wave of arrests of dissidents in January 1972. His memoirs were confiscated, and he was sentenced to 10 years of strict-regime camp and five years' exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." He served his sentence in a Mordovian concentration camp and his exile in the Perm Oblast.

He wrote in October 1972 to the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, asking to be stripped of his Soviet citizenship. He argued that "It will be easier for me to die ... in harsh imprisonment beyond the borders of Ukraine if I am not a citizen of the USSR." He made similar statements renouncing his Soviet citizenship in 1973 and 1974.

He participated in numerous protest actions and hunger strikes even though he was in ill health, and in 1979, while still incarcerated, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

On November 3, 1978, the Parliament of Canada passed a resolution to ask the government of the USSR to release Mr. Shumuk and permit him to emigrate and join his nephew in Canada. While he was secretary of state for external affairs, Joe Clark made numerous requests to the Soviet government for permission for Mr. Shumuk to join his family in Canada, but Mr. Shumuk was allowed to leave only upon the completion of his sentence of 15 years.

He finished his five-year exile term in Karatobe in the Kazakh SSR on January 12, 1987. He emigrated to Canada on May 23, 1987, when he was reunited with his nephew, Ivan Shumuk of Vernon, British Columbia, whose decade-old effort to free his uncle and bring him to Canada finally succeeded. He lived in Vancouver and in Toronto and continued to be outspoken about human and national rights causes.

He testified before the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Commission) and appeared in August 1987 before the American Bar Association to protest its agreement of cooperation with the Association of Soviet Lawyers.

In a lengthy 1987 letter to the president of the ABA he wrote: "The rule of law... has never been the mark of the Soviet legal system, and it never will be. So long as the Soviet legal system is subordinated to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the party's dictates, and not the rule of law, will govern society."

He chronicled his life in several books: "Za Skhidnym Obriyem" (Beyond the Eastern Horizon, 1974) and "Perezhyte i Peredumane" (My Life and Thoughts in Retrospect, 1983), both published in the United States; as well as the English version of his memoirs, "Life Sentence" (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1984), and "Z Gulagu u Vilnyi Svit" (From the Gulag into the Free World, 1991).

In November 2002, at the age of 88 and ailing, he left for Ukraine with his daughter, Vera Kalach, who was unable to obtain an extension of her visa in order to stay in Canada. In need of constant care, he moved in with his daughter in Krasnoarmiisk.

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