Dissident profile

Vitaliy Shevchenko: scored Stalin's famine

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - When Ukrainian political prisoner Vitaliy Shevchenko was arrested in Kiev almost three years ago, he was charged with, among other offenses, expressing unorthodox opinions in the margins of books by Lenin.

In addition to his marginal jottings in two volumes of Lenin's works, Mr. Shevchenko was forced to account for certain critical remarks made in the 1950s about the 1930s famine in Ukraine resulting from Stalin's forced collectivization of farming and his attempt to break the national consciousness of the peasantry.

Mr. Shevchenko, a 50-year-old graduate of the University of Kiev journalism school, was fired from his job on Soviet Ukrainian radio, it is believed, because of his Ukrainian nationalist sentiments. He wrote for the dissident Ukrainian Herald, an underground newspaper publicizing Ukrainian human-rights issues, which has been suppressed by authorities since its inception in 1970.

Mr. Shevchenko was arrested in the Ukrainian capital on April 14, 1980, for circulating samvydav, privately circulated underground publications. Shortly before his arrest, he had written an article on Czechoslovak politics as seen through Ukrainian eyes. His apartment had been searched a month earlier, and materials were confiscated.

Mr. Shevchenko and another writer, Stepan Khmara, were tried and sentenced in December 1980 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" under Article 62 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code. Oleksander Shevchenko (no relation), a journalist also arrested in mid-April, was tried for "slandering the soviet state," under Article 187-1 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code.

Vitaliy Shevchenko and Mr. Khmara were each sentenced to seven years in a corrective labor camp to be followed by four years' internal exile, a form of enforced residence. Mr. Shevchenko is currently being held in Camp 36 of the Perm complex in the Russian SFSR, along with the other Mr. Shevchenko and such well-known Ukrainian dissidents as Mykola Rudenko, Vasyl Stus, Oles Berdnyk, Ivan Kandyba, Lev Lukianenko, Oleksiy Tykhy, Myroslav Marynovych and Vasyl Ovsienko.

Although conditions at all Soviet labor camps are characterized by chronic hunger, overwork, inadequate medical treatment and arbitrary deprivation of limited rights to correspondence and family visits, the Perm camps are reported to be among the harshest. Recently, several dissidents in Camp 36, among them Oleksander Shevchenko and Messrs. Rudenko and Marynovych, wrote an open letter to President Ronald Reagan describing the brutal treatment at the camp. They noted that prisoners have been put in detention cells for celebrating Easter, and that others have been denied family visits and letters from abroad.

According to Amnesty International, which has adopted Vitaliy Shevchenko as a prisoner of conscience, little information has been available about his current condition and letters addressed directly to him have gone unanswered.

The worldwide human-rights agency has been running a campaign for letters on behalf of Mr. Shevchenko's release to be sent to Soviet officials in Moscow as well as to Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to the United States.

Mr. Shevchenko, who is married and has three children, is scheduled to complete his labor-camp sentence in 1987. After that, he will be exiled until 1991.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 20, 1983, No. 12, Vol. LI

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