National aspirations and the Kiev group (12/27/81)

National aspirations and the Kiev group

Reprinted by permission from the fall issue of Smoloskyp, of Washington-based quarterly dealing with human rights affairs in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Smoloskyp is published by the Helsinki Guarantees for Ukraine Committee and the Smoloskyp Ukrainian Information Service.

by Nadia Svitlychna

On November 9, 1976, the 10 founding members of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords announced the formation of the group and declared its aims and principles. In their first jointly produced document, their Declaration, they wrote:

"We Ukrainians live in Europe, which in the first half of the 20th century has twice been ravaged by horrible wars. These wars inundated the Ukrainian land with blood just as they did the land of other European countries. And that is why we consider illegal the fact that Ukraine, a full-fledged member of the United Nations, was not represented by a separate delegation at the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe."

This introductory paragraph stipulates the importance of the national aspect in the activities of the first national Helsinki group in the Soviet Union. There is no wonder then that of the four points in the Declaration that outline the goals of the group, two affirm exclusively national problems:

To demand that Ukraine, as a sovereign European state and a U.N. member, be represented by its own delegation at all international conferences at which the results of the implementation of the Helsinki Accords will be discussed;
For the sake of the free exchange of information and ideas, to demand the accreditation in Ukraine of representatives of the foreign press, the creation of independent news agencies, and the like.

A few days after the creation of the group, its leader, Mykola Rudenko, appealed in an open letter to people of good will and expressed his fears for the newborn "child of freedom." These fears are interwoven with the author's aching for his voiceless nation, which today chokes on chauvinist fumes. Mr. Rudenko writes:

"Before the war I served in an NKVD division assigned to protect the government. During the war I was a political officer in an army company in the blockaded city of Leningrad. I always believed in and continue to believe in the sincerity of the Russian people. But I do not believe the Russian chauvinists - it is they who turned the sacred treaty between Ukraine and Russia into a worthless piece of paper...

"The world has, no doubt, long since become convinced that the membership of Ukraine in the United Nations is a Stalinist tactic which was inherited by the new rulers of Russia. In the West, after all, our multinational country is still called Russia. And this entrenched tradition is grist for the mill of Russian chauvinists."

If you read the documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group carefully, you will notice the importance, among the different human rights, that the group attaches to the right to independence and sovereignty of the Ukrainian nation (and of other nations) within the USSR. In fact, nationality themes mark all of the documents issued throughout the five-year activity of the group - from the first Declaration to the final Information Bulletin of September 1980.

In a short survey there is no opportunity to do a wide-ranging analysis of the group's attention to the nationality issue, so a few examples will have to suffice.

In the document "Ukraine of the Summer of 1977," the group states:

"Though possessed of an enormous reservoir of love of freedom, wisdom creativity, of rare riches of the earth and the spirit, in a critical moment she (Ukraine) was unable to hold on to her statehood and became a colony of a cruel, merciless empire, whose will was diametrically opposed to the will of an enslaved Ukraine.

"Russia violated all of the fraternal treaties and trampled the word spoken in Pereyaslav. A people whose love of freedom Europe had enthused over became serfs, slaves, bondservants to alien ravagers. Hryhoriy Petrovsky speaking in the Duma, provided an excellent characterization of autocracy's criminal activity in Ukraine - degradation of cultural and spiritual life, merciless exploitation of natural resources, unceasing genocide."

The document further announces several thoroughly thought-out theses on the subject of statehood (for the Ukrainian people as well as for neighboring peoples), in particular: "the most radical demand of the spirit of the Ukrainian nation, for itself and for fraternal peoples, is for sovereignty of creative manifestation in all areas of spiritual and economic life."

On November 9, 1977, Oles Berdnyk, who was then the leader of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, issued a "Manifesto" in the name of the group, in which he tried to analyze the short but difficult road that the group had traveled in its first year of existence. In the "Manifesto," Mr. Berdnyk again outlines the criteria which motivated the members of the group and affirms the naturalness of human rights and man's primacy above the state. Outlining the situation of peoples that "have fallen into the trap of pseudolaw and pseudolegality," the author writes:

"A vivid illustration of this assertion are the trials of those people who, believing in the constitutional guarantees, raised the issue about the idea of Ukraine's secession from the USSR. For merely expressing the notion of 'secession,' which is guaranteed by law, people were sentenced to execution by firing squad."

A central place in this document is given to reflections on the Ukrainian situation.

"Bureaucrats see red when members of rights movements raise the issue of Ukraine: 'What the devil do you want? There never has been and there is no Ukrainian problem. Ukraine is a constituent and inseparable part of the union, free among the free, happy among the happy, a member of the United Nations, a sovereign state; in every corner its singers sing and its dancers dance, it produces such-and-such amounts of steel, pig iron, coal, meat, milk and grain per capita...'

"But for us, however strange it may seem, it is not enough to ruminate and burp with satiation, while applauding dancers in embellished Kozak cloaks and trousers. Our gaze encompasses the spiritual reality of modern times and rises with horror to the bright stars - the eyes of God - begging the Spirit of the Universe to answer the ominous question: 'God, where has Ukraine disappeared? What has happened to it?'"

Condemning the bureaucrats who have usurped the rights of people and their spirit of self-discovery and transformed society into a "giant biological cybernetic machine," Mr. Berdnyk affirms:

"In announcing our credo, we do not demean anyone, nor do we extol ourselves before anyone; rather we offer our sincere embrace to all nations of the world."

Further on he proposes:

"The time is ripe to summon an extraordinary convention of the republics in order to enhance the rights and sovereignty of nations and peoples belonging to the union. The role of the Russian language in the life of the country should be clearly defined, stressing at the same time that its use as a means of union among nations will not usurp the rights of other languages and will never become a means of their destruction and degradation."

In the numerous memoranda of the group we see an attempt to draw a general characteristic of the nationality situation in the USSR (for example, Memorandum No. 2, "Concerning the Participation of Ukraine in the Belgrade Conference, 1977," and Memorandum No. 1, "The Effect of the European Conference on the Development of Legal Consciousness in Ukraine," which deals with violations of the national rights of Ukraine within the USSR. Numerous illustrations are cited which confirm that "Ukraine has become an arena for genocide and ethnocide" (the destruction of millions of Ukrainians during the artifical famine and 'dekulakization,' the reprisals against the partisans in western Ukraine and their families, etc.).

Pointing out the savageness of court sentences, Memorandum No. 1 mentions the case of long-time political prisoner V. Fedorenko and states:

"We could cite dozens of examples where Ukrainian nationalism, real or imagined, leads to inhuman sentences. This clearly shows that it is not Soviet authority that conducts the trials (Soviet laws do not permit trials for nationalism protective of rights), but fanatical great-power chauvinists. Power, not law, sits in judgement."

Memorandum No. 1 includes a long list of political prisoners who are serving their sentences far from Ukraine (in Mordovia, the Urals, Siberia), in violation of Article 6 of the Corrective Labor Code of the Ukrainian SSR. "It is unclear what educational principles are involved here," writes the group. "One thing is known: in the past half century, more Ukrainians have died in Mordovia than Mordovians were born."

In Document No. 2, "New Repressions and a New Phase of the Human Rights Movement in the USSR," which is a ioint document of the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki groups, the authors protest the savage persecution of the human-rights movement in the USSR, mentioning in particular national movements (the Germans, Crimean Tatars, Jews), as well as the growing dissatisfaction over the Russification policy in Ukraine, the Baltic States and in the Caucasus.

Memorandum No. 18 is totally concerned with discrimination against Ukrainians in the area of emigration rights. Comparing the singular characteristics of the human-rights movement in Russia on the one hand and in Ukraine on the other, the group writes in this memorandum:

"In Russia it is directed against illegal restrictions on the democratic rights of citizens. In Ukraine it has the same goals plus our national problems. This plus is what makes the Ukrainian movement in defense of rights (and also the Baltic and Caucasian) so especially dangerous in the eyes of the bureaucrats with the chauvinist Great-Russian dispositions who are in power..."

A similar emphasis on the Ukrainian national problem and the importance of that issue in the human-rights movement is found in literally all the documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group - up to and including the last Information Bulletin.

In an appeal titled "From the Ukrainian Human Rights Group in the Case of Yu. Lytvyn" (Information Bulletin No. 2, March 1980) it states:

"The process of obliterating nations has gone much too far; it is being decided mainly on the territory of Ukraine. Ukrainian human-rights activists have had it the toughest, that is how it is now and how it will be in the future...

"The fate of all the other people of the USSR depends on whether or not Russian chauvinism wins its war with the Ukrainian national organism (which has already undergone some organic changes after several centuries in an imperialist environment)...

"We extend our hand to the human-rights activists of Russia and Armenia, Lithuania and Estonia, the self-defense movement in Poland and the supporters of the Czechoslovak Charter, to all the people of this earth who care about the defense of human rights in a world free of national borders, and say to them 'Let us unite our efforts today, before we are tossed into the abyss of world war, whose smoke is already beginning to rise above our planet.'"

1. Quoted from "Yuri Lytvyn (Portrety Suchasnykiv)" (Yuriy Lytvyn [Portraits of Contemporaries]). Compiled by Nadia Svitlychna. New York: External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 1980. All other quotes are from "The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine: Documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 1976-80)." Edited by Lesya Verba and Bohdan Yacen. Smoloskyp Publishers, 1980.

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