Dissident profile: Yuriy Shukhevych: the eternal prisoner (12/26/82)

Dissident profile

Yuriy Shukhevych: the eternal prisoner

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - On September 12, 1972, Yuriy Shukhevych, then 38 years old, was sentenced to 10 years in a prison and labor camps and five years' internal exile. Incredibly, it was the third 10-year term in 24 years for Mr. Shukhevych, whose father, the late Gen. Roman Shukhevych, was the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Of all the members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, which Mr. Shukhevych joined in 1979, only Yuriy Lytvyn has been sentenced more times (five), but his terms were shorter (a total of 23 years at the expiration of his latest sentence.) If and when Mr. Shukhevych, who is reported to be 99 percent blind, completes his full term, he will have served a mind boggling 35 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and exile. And he will be but 53 years old.

In a sense, Yuriy Shukhevych is the eternal prisoner, the embodiment of Ukraine's struggle against Soviet oppression. Born in Ukraine on March 28, 1934, he was sentenced in 1948 - when he was just 14 years of age - to 10 years at hard labor merely for being the son of a Ukrainian nationalist leader.

In the spring of 1956 he was amnestied after serving eight years, primarily because he had been imprisoned while still a minor. But later that year, Roman A. Rudenko, the notorious prosecutor-general of the USSR, repealed the release, arguing that Mr. Shukhevych was dangerous because he was the son of Gen. Shukhevych, who had been killed in battle in 1949.

As a result, Mr. Shukhevych was forced to serve the remaining two years of his sentence.

While serving the term, he was approached by agents of the KGB who demanded that he publicly denounce his father. Mr. Shukhevych refused. On the day of his release, August 21, 1958, he was re-arrested and charged with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." He was accused of agitation among the prisoners in Vladimir Prison.

At a closed trail in Lviv, two former cellmates imprisoned for criminal activities testified against Mr. Shukhevych in exchange for special privileges. As a result, Mr. Shukhevych was sentenced to a second 10-year term at hard labor.

After the trial, the defendant was approached by an officer of the KGB, Klementiy Halsky, who proposed that Mr. Shukhevych write an article denouncing Ukrainian nationalism and the activities of his father. He was told that if he cooperated, the sentence would not be enforced. Again, Mr. Shukhevych refused to go along. As a result, he was sent to a labor camp in the Mordovian ASSR.

In 1967, one year before his term was due to expire, Mr. Shukhevych wrote a declaration to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR protesting illegalities in his case, particularly the refusal of the court to call 12 witnesses who would have testified on his behalf.

In the declaration, he also foresaw his fate. "I turn to you," he wrote, "because it may happen that a new crime will be perpetrated against me. They will again fabricate a new case to get me sentenced for a third time."

For a while, it looked like Mr. Shukhevych's fears were groundless. Released in 1968, Mr. Shukhevych was forbidden to return to Ukraine. Sent to the Caucasus, he married Valentyna Trotsenko and found job as an electrician. The couple had two children.

But in 1972, with a massive crackdown on Ukrainian intellectuals and activists under way in Ukraine, the fears that he had expressed to the Supreme Soviet were realized.

Arrested in march, he was sentenced six months later to a third 10-year term - five years in prison and five years in a labor camp - to be followed by five years' internal exile. The charge was "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" based on a copy of his memoirs that had previously been confiscated during a search of his home.

In 1979, Mr. Shukhevych joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group while in Chistopol Prison.

This summer, letters from Ukraine by persons close to Mr. Shukhevych revealed that he was nearly blind following eye surgery in a prison hospital. Former Soviet political prisoners Sviatoslav Karavansky and Nina Strokata insist that Mr. Shukhevych was intentionally blinded by authorities.

The sickening torment of Mr. Shukhevych by Soviet authorities is unquestionably one of the starkest examples of inhumanity in modern times. They continue to brutalize and torture Mr. Shukhevych because they cannot forgive him his courage in refusing to renounce the principle of an independent Ukraine and the memory of a father whom he barely knew, but who shared those principles. It is clear that they fear this determined heroism more than anything else.

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