Turning the pages back... February 1973 (04/04/99)

Turning the pages back...

February 1973

Twenty-six years ago, in February 1973, Vyacheslav Chornovil was sentenced for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" for his role as editor of The Ukrainian Herald, an underground dissident publication (samvydav) that chronicled Soviet repressions in Ukraine.

Following are excerpts from The Ukrainian Weekly's March 17, 1973, story reporting on Mr. Chornovil's trial.

* * *

Vyacheslav Chornovil, the 35-year-old Ukrainian journalist who had first exposed the KGB witch hunts and kangaroo trials in Ukraine, has been sentenced to seven years at hard labor and five years of exile [later it was learned the sentence was six years' imprisonment and three years' exile] by a Soviet court in Lviv last month, said the Smoloskyp Ukrainian Information Service, citing dissident sources that passed on the news through Helsinki, Finland.

Chornovil, whose account of the 1965-1966 trials in Ukraine was published in the West under the title of "The Chornovil Papers" and has been widely utilized for documentation of the violation of human and constitutional rights in the Soviet Union, refused to recant at the trial, said the sources, and declined to testify against other Ukrainian dissidents kept in Soviet prisons since January of last year.

Chornovil, like most of the arrested Ukrainians, was tried under Article 62 of the Ukrainian SSR Penal Code which makes it a crime to spread "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

The sources said that Valentyn Moroz, 36-year-old Ukrainian historian who is serving a nine-year term of imprisonment, was brought to Lviv and asked to testify against Chornovil. Moroz refused, as did other witnesses called by the prosecution, claiming that the trial of Chornovil is invalid because, contrary to Soviet law, the accused was kept under investigation for more than a year. ...

Like the recent trial of Leonid Plyushch and other Ukrainian intellectuals, that of Chornovil was held behind closed doors. Neither friends nor relatives of the accused were allowed to sit in on the proceedings. In the case of Plyushch, who was confined to a mental institution for an indefinite period of time, the accused himself was barred from the trial.

Chornovil, who was born in Cherkasy region of Ukraine in 1937, graduated from Kyiv University and worked with the state-operated television in Lviv. As a journalist, he covered the 1965-1966 trials of Ukrainian dissidents and then published the detailed accounts of the trials which showed crass violations of constitutional and human rights. The work was eventually smuggled to the West and published under the title "The Chornovil Papers" in English and several other languages.

He was arrested by the Soviet secret police in 1966 and then again in 1967. Sentenced to three years at hard labor, Chornovil was released after 18 months, but deprived of his job with Lviv television. For a while he worked as a railroad mechanic. ...

He was arrested in January of 1972 along with hundreds of other Ukrainian dissidents. Some of them have already been tried and sentenced to unusually long terms of imprisonment and exile. Some are still awaiting trial, among them Ivan Dzyuba, Ivan Svitlychny and his sister, Nadia, Yevhen Sverstiuk.

Dissident sources confirmed that arrests and trials are continuing in Ukraine.

Source: "Chornovil sentenced to seven years at hard labor," The Ukrainian Weekly, March 17, 1973; Svoboda Vol. LXXX, No. 50.

| Home Page |