Svitliana Kyrychenko sentenced to three months' forced labor (12/28/80)

Svitliana Kyrychenko sentenced to three months' forced labor

NEW YORK - Recent unconfirmed reports from Ukraine indicate that Svitliana Kyrychenko, wife of imprisoned Ukrainian dissident Yuriy Badzio, had been ordered to serve a term of three months' forced labor, according to the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (abroad).

The sentence stems from an administrative (non-criminal) sanction leveled at Ms. Kyrychenko during her husband's trial last winter. It is unclear why she is being ordered to work off her punishment one year after the trial.

Ms. Kyrychenko, herself an active dissident, had her first serious brush with Soviet authorities in 1972 when she was dismissed from her job at the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Although the reason for the firing was attributed to a routine cutback of personnel, it was revealed that she was released because of a statement she issued on children's rights. In the statement, she referred to the son of dissident Nadia Svitlychna. Authorities used the statement to implicate Ms. Kyrychenko during the massive round-up of Ukrainian intellectuals that year.

Mr. Badzio, a philologist from the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine, was arrested in Kiev in April 1979 and sentenced in mid-December of that year to seven years' imprisonment and five years' exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

In an appeal to Amnesty International early this year, Ms. Kyrychenko charged that the evidence used against her husband was planted by the KGB. The evidence included copies of Ivan Dzyuba's "Internationalism or Russification" and Mykola Rudenko's "Economic Monologues." Mr. Rudenko, head of the Ukrainian Helsinki monitoring group was sentenced in 1977 to a total of 12 years' imprisonment and exile and is reported to be in poor health.

The 44 year-old Mr. Badzio, best known for his treatise "The Right to Live," an analysis of Ukraine's subjugation and Russification, is currently incarcerated in a Mordovian labor camp. The former doctoral candidate in Ukrainian literature was a participant, along with Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska and others, in the dramatic 1965 Ukraina Theater incident in Kiev, where, on a signal from Mr. Dzyuba, a group of Ukrainian intellectuals interrupted the screening and, standing on their chairs, protested the destruction of Ukrainian culture by the Soviet regime.

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