1987: A LOOK BACK

Human rights and glasnost in USSR

The year 1987 was by all descriptions the year that "glasnost" and "perestroika," the Russian words for openness and restructuring, exploded into world consciousness as well as into our daily vocabulary. As the centerpiece in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign to revitalize a stagnating society and economy, glasnost and perestroika also served to rejuvenate human and national rights activity in the USSR and stirred up the human rights community in the West, much to the general secretary's distaste.

In 1987 we witnessed glasnost in action, both in its implementation as a policy facing internal conservative opposition and as an effective propaganda tool abroad.

Among the biggest news this year was the fate of the some 650 known prisoners of conscience that were incarcerated in Soviet penal institutions in the beginning of 1987.

In early and mid-February, the Soviets announced two limited amnesties by two separate decrees of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on February 2 and 9, respectively, that were to free a total of 280 political and religious prisoners.

The prisoners affected were mainly those sentenced for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, and most of them had to draft or sign some kind of statement promising to refrain from further "anti-Soviet" activity.

Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov announced on February 10 that the pardons were issued as part of a review of the Criminal Code that was being carried out "so that we may have fewer people behind bars and behind barbed wire."

The group release, which in reality resembled a figure of less than half of the 280 releases promised, was nevertheless the largest since 1953, when, after the death of Joseph Stalin, Nikita S. Khrushchev freed hundreds of thousands of political prisoners.

Many of those freed under the two amnesties, the rights activists of the 1970s and early 1980s, emerged as major figures in the news, as they either emigrated to the West or became leaders in a renewed movement for human and national rights in the new era of glasnost in the Soviet Union.

Among the 130 or so released as a result of the pardons in February were such well-known figures as Iosif Begun, a leader in the Jewish emigration movement, and dissident psychiatrist Dr. Anatoly Koryagin, who emigrated with his family to Switzerland in late April.

Also freed were Sergei Khodorovich of the Russian Social Fund to Aid Soviet Political Prisoners and their Families, who also emigrated in April, and Moscow Helsinki Monitors Ivan Kovalyov and Tatiana Osipova, who left the USSR, also in April, for a new life in the West.

Moscow literary critic Sergei Grigoryants and journalist Lev Timofeyev were both released in February and later emerged in the forefront of a movement set up by themselves and dissidents from all parts of the Soviet Union to test the limits of glasnost.

A Russian Orthodox priest, the Rev. Gleb Yakunin, was treed from exile and was, to the surprise of many, fully reinstated on May 12 as a priest by the Russian Orthodox Church, after 21 years without the right to serve in that capacity. He, too, has re-emerged in the forefront of the struggle for religious rights in the Soviet Union, as has another religious activist and dissident, Alexander Ogorodnikov, freed in February, who in July began publishing an unofficial journal of religious dissent in Moscow.

The Ukrainians freed under the two limited amnesties in February were: Ukrainian Catholic lay activist Yosyp Terelia, Ukrainian nationalist Zorian Popadiuk, Pentecostals Vasyl and Halyna Barats, Ukrainian Helsinki monitor Myroslav Marynovych, onetime editor of the samvydav Ukrainian Herald Oleksander Shevchenko, another Herald editor Vitaliy Shevchenko, Ukrainian rights activist Stepan Khmara, Vasyl Fedorenko, Mykola Ihnatenko, Valeriy Ostrenko, Vasyl Ploskonis, Valentin Pohorily, Roman Catholic activist Sofia Belyak and Baptist activist Ulyana Germaniuk, who died of cancer on July 3.

Several Ukrainian political prisoners were released before their terms expired by individual pardon, including Mykola and Raisa Rudenko, who were freed from exile in the Gorno-Altayskaya autonomous region in mid-May. A poet, co-founder and leader of the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group, Mr. Rudenko and his spouse, Raisa, were serving terms for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

Only two political prisoners, including one Ukrainian, of the 19 who were serving harsh sentences in the notorious special-regimen labor camp No. 36-1 at Perm were released before completing their terms.

Mykhailo Horyn, a Ukrainian national rights advocate from the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, was freed on July 3, two weeks after the June 25 release of Moscow dissident Leonid Borodin from Camp 36-1 at Kuchino in the Perm region.

Lithuanian literary historian Viktoras Petkus, a member of the Lithuanian and Ukrainian Helsinki groups, was transferred into exile after completing his labor camp term at Perm camp No. 36-1 in August.

Ukrainian Helsinki Group founding member Lev Lukianenko was due to be sent into exile when his labor camp term expired on December 12, but the dissident attorney's current whereabouts are unknown. He also was incarcerated in Perm camp No. 36-1 for 10 years.

There are 16 prisoners left in that death camp, 10 are Ukrainian.

Three Ukrainian dissidents completed exile terms in 1987 and either returned to their homes in Ukraine or emigrated. Danylo Shumuk finished his five-year exile term in Karatobe in the Kazakh SSR on January 12. A veteran political prisoner, Mr. Shumuk spent some 40 years in German, Polish and Soviet incarceration for political activity.

Ukrainian national rights activist Ivan Hel completed an exile term in the Komi ASSR in mid-January and returned to his hometown of Lviv. The dissident spent the last 15 years in labor camp and exile for disseminating samvydav literature.

Ukrainian Helsinki monitor Oksana Popovych was freed after completing a five-year exile term in the Tomsk region and returned to her home in Ivano-Frankivske in western Ukraine.

The Soviet government in mid-June declared another limited amnesty, this time to mark the 70th anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution, which in a six-month period was to have affected half of the some 580 political prisoners known to have been incarcerated in June.

The Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on June 18 published a decree, which listed categories of political prisoners set to be released or their sentences reduced.

In reality the amnesty has affected over 100 lesser-known political prisoners. The latest total figure of known political prisoners was published in the November 15 issue of USSR News Brief, which listed over 450 names.

A number of former Soviet political prisoners and famous Jewish refuseniks were permitted to emigrate during 1987.

The 72-year-old Mr. Shumuk, freed in January, emigrated to Canada on May 23, when he was reunited with his nephew, Ivan Shumuk of Vernon, B.C., whose decade-old effort to free his uncle and bring him to Canada finally succeeded.

The 44-year-old Mr. Terelia, founder of the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Believers and the Church in Ukraine who was freed in February, also emigrated from his former hometown of Dovhe, in Transcarpathia, to Canada with his wife, Olena, and three small children on September 30.

The Rudenkos arrived on December 13 in West Germany for medical treatment with intentions of remaining in the West.

Ukrainian Baptist dissident Mykhaylo Kopot, 26, emigrated from Lviv to the United States with his parents on October 2. The family has settled in Chicago.

Leading Jewish activist Ida Nudel was permitted to emigrate to Israel in October, as was Jewish refusenik Vladimir Slepak.

The 21-year-old former leader of the Latvian Helsinki '86 group. Rolands Silaraups, was expelled from Latvia on July 25 and has settled in the United States. Two other Baltic activists, Tiit Madisson, 37, and Vytautas Skuodis, 58, were expelled from Estonia and Lithuania, respectively, in September. All three Balts had served sentences for national rights activity.

Glasnost both stirred up and revealed unprecedented mass demonstrations of nationalist sentiment, beginning actually in December 1986 with youth riots in Alma-Ata, in the Kazakh SSR, upon the replacement of the Kazakh party chief with a Russian supporter of Mr. Gorbachev's policies.

The need on the part of the Soviet government to take a serious look at the nationalities issue was demonstrated in 1987 by mass protests in Alma-Ata, Moscow and the Baltic states, by the formation of numerous unofficial groups throughout the country concerned with national culture and by calls for reform in the nationalities policy by well-known writers and educators in Ukraine and Byelorussia.

A new wave of protests by the Crimean Tatars calling for restoration of their ancestral homeland began in April when the Crimean Tatars in exile chose representatives for negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The high point of the protests was demonstrations in Red Square in Moscow that attracted some 500 protesters in mid-July. These protests were supported by several well-known Soviet writers, among them Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Dudintsev and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

The authorities entered into negotiations with representatives of the Crimean Tatars several times, trying to persuade them to stop the demonstrations and leave Moscow. In a meeting with Soviet president Andrei Gromyko, the Tatars were informed of the creation of a State Commission for Solving the Crimean Tatar Question, headed by Mr. Gromyko. In its first report, issued on October 15, the commission urged improved cultural life for Crimean Tatars, but rejected claims that they have a right to live in their former Crimean homeland.

Nationalism in the Baltic republics, particularly in Latvia, was manifested in massive demonstrations and protests throughout 1987.

A group of Latvian national rights activists formed a new Helsinki watch group, called Helsinki '86, in the city of Liepaja in July 1986, it was learned in January. Two of the group's founders, Linards Grantins and Raimonds Bitenieks, were arrested in August 1986 for their activity.

Mass protests, however, began in December 1986, when some 300 Latvian youths held a demonstration on December 27 in front of the Latvian Monument to Freedom, shouting slogans such as, "Down with Soviet Russia! Freedom in a Free Latvia!"

An open-air art festival in Riga on Easter Sunday, April 19, turned into a major demonstration when nearly 500 Latvian youths surrounded a militia car and forced the release of two youths who had been arrested, and later took their protest into the streets.

Some 3,000 people gathered at the Latvian Monument of Freedom on June 14 to honor the Baltic victims of Soviet mass deportations, and to protest Russification policies and the continued incarceration of Baltic dissidents. The peaceful ceremony, organized by Helsinki '86, attracted leading Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian nationalists and former political prisoners.

In mass public demonstrations in the Baltic capitals, Riga, Latvia, Vilnius, Lithuania, and Tallinn, Estonia, over 6,000 Balts protested the 1939 Nazi-Soviet agreement that led to the Soviet takeover of the Baltic republics in 1940. About a dozen activists were detained during the protest, which attracted worldwide media attention.

The last protest in 1987 occurred in two Latvian cities, Riga and Liepaja, on November 18, once more protesting the Soviet occupation of Latvia and the other Baltic republics.

The last three demonstrations were believed to have been the largest unsanctioned rallies since the three countries were absorbed into the Soviet Union.

Glasnost also afforded intellectuals, mainly writers and educators, in Ukraine and Byelorussia the opportunity to shed light on the "catastrophic" situation for their respective native languages in their republics. While much talking was done about the problem of Russian language domination in the educational systems and, in general, the life of the republics, no real change or action was put forth by the republics' party leaders to make real the recommendations made by the intellectuals.

A number of unofficial self-published publications popped up all over the USSR in 1987, addressing a variety of social, economic, political, cultural and ecological issues and aiming to test the limits of glasnost.

The first and best-known samizdat publication arose in Moscow in early June, when the first issue of Glasnost appeared. Sergei Grigoryants, a 46-year-old Moscow literary critic, became editor and was joined by Lev Timofeyev and Larysa Bogoraz, the widow of Anatoly Marchenko. The first four issues of Glasnost have been translated into English by the Center for Democracy in New York.

In July, Messrs. Grigoryants and Timofeyev also formed a new discussion group, based in Moscow, called Press Club Glasnost, consisting of former political prisoners and representatives of numerous independent groups from all parts of the USSR.

At a press conference of the Press Club Glasnost on September 8 the decision to re-launch a Ukrainian samvydav publication, the Ukrainian Herald, with Ukrainian journalist and former political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil as it editor, was announced. The first issue of the Ukrainian Herald, a journal published by Mr. Chornovil in the early 1970s before his arrest, appeared as Issue No. 7 in October. The Herald, which is published in Lviv, is meant to serve as a mouthpiece for independent Ukrainian thought in Ukraine.

The 51-year-old Mr. Chornovil and four other former political prisoners and national rights activists in Ukraine also formed an Initiative Group for the Release of Ukrainian Prisoners of Conscience in Ukraine on October 3. The founding members, which include Vasyl Barladianu, Ivan Hel, Mykhailo Horyn and Zorian Popadiuk, asserted in their October 3 statement that the continued incarceration of prisoners of conscience in the USSR contradicted "those democratic changes that have been initiated in the country."

The new group was the first such organization set up in Ukraine since the decimation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, to which Mr. Chornovil belonged, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

On August 6, however, an inaugural meeting of a new group, the Ukrainian Culturological Club, was held in Kiev. Created as an informal discussion club for nationally minded citizens, the club organized several public meetings this fall on questions connected with Ukrainian history and culture.

The main organizers of the club also appeared to be former political prisoners and included: Serhiy Naboka, Leonid Milyavsky and his wife, Larysa Lokhvytska, Oleksander Shevchenko and Olha Matusevych.

It was also learned late this fall that another unofficial group of independent-minded members of the Ukrainian creative intelligentsia was formed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Association of Independent Creative Intelligentsia (UANTI) was created to promote the development of Ukrainian culture outside Ukraine's official cultural structure. This second informal group to have been formed in Ukraine by Ukrainian dissidents concerned with injecting glasnost into Ukraine's cultural and public life, was apparently founded sometime in early October.

The membership includes former political prisoners: poet Ihor Kalynets, writer and poet Mykhailo Osadchy, poet Mykola Rudenko (now in the West), literary critic Yevhen Sverstiuk, literary critic Ivan Svitlychny, poet Iryna Senyk and Mr. Chornovil. Others include: art historian Vasyl Barladianu, psychologist Mr. Horyn artist Panas Zalyvakha, poet Iryna Kalynets, literary critic Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, journalist Pavlo Skochok and artist Stefaniya Shabatura.

In order to test the intentions of the Soviet authorities to host an unofficial Helsinki conference on humanitarian affairs next year, as they proposed before the Vienna Helsinki review conference still in session, the leaders of Press Club Glasnost hosted an informal international seminar on humanitarian affairs in Moscow, beginning on Human Rights Day, December 10. The seminar managed to draw 400 participants, including representatives of human rights watch groups in the West, despite official harassment and threats. Bozhena Olshaniwsky, president of Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine, attended the seminar.

Other Ukrainian would-be participants and organizers of the planned session on nationalities were not so fortunate, however. Messrs. Chornovil, Horyn and Hel, and an Armenian dissident, Paruir Airikian, were detained on alleged drug charges en route to the seminar on December 8. They were later freed, but forbidden to leave Lviv, while Mr. Airikian was put on a flight back to Armenia.

It appears that the newly formed discussion groups and publications that arose as a result of glasnost have managed to take it to its limits. In the past several months attacks have appeared in the official press against the editors of Glasnost, the Ukrainian Herald, and the organizers of the Ukrainian Culturological Club and the human rights seminar in Moscow. Far worse have been the incidents of harassment, including the detention of the four men in Lviv on December 8 and the detention of the editors of Glasnost earlier this fall. Others have been harassed by local authorities, as well.

If these incidents are any clue, perhaps we have reached the limits of glasnost and perestroika, and can only wait and see if the achievements reached by the renewed human and national rights movements in Ukraine, and in the USSR in general, will be permanent or will disintegrate again as happened in the early 1980s.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 27, 1987, No. 52, Vol. LV

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