Survivors of Soviet-era repression face present-day hardships (12/03/00)

Survivors of Soviet-era repression face present-day hardships

by Lily Hyde
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - Once, the state thought they were important enough to devote pages and pages of files to their activities. It monitored their movements, deprived them of freedom and methodically destroyed their families. And then came the worst indignity of all: it forgot them.

The survivors of Soviet repression in Ukraine number in the thousands. They share a past of unimaginable suffering, but their present is dogged by the more commonplace hardships of ill-health, poverty and neglect. Many of these people suffered for upholding the language or culture of Ukraine, but now that they have their own nation it can't afford to look after them.

Nina Rubik was sentenced to 10 years in labor camps in the 1930s simply for teaching Ukrainian language and literature. Now 91, this frail but still elegant old lady has written articles for many publications charting her own fate and those of her loved ones. Life on a $10-a-month pension is hard, but she is still proud of the nation she waited so long to see.

"I want the best for Ukraine," she says. "Of course it could do more for me, but I know what state Ukraine is in. I'm still waiting for the day when life here will be better for everyone."

Official post-Soviet statistics put the number of people repressed and killed under the Soviet system at around 4.5 million. Nearly a third of those were Ukrainian. However, that only covers the period between 1930 and 1953.

According to Gen. Volodymyr Pristaiko of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Soviet repression started in 1917 and continued in Ukraine until 1986, when the last individual was sentenced for "anti-Soviet propaganda." During that period "there is no family in Ukraine that didn't suffer," says Gen. Pristaiko.

He should know. A KGB officer since 1971, Pristaiko co-authored the 1992 Ukrainian law on rehabilitation of the victims of Soviet repression.

Now he spends much of his time researching and publishing select secret service archives. Among his works are documentation of repression of Poles and of Jewish members of the Communist Party, and a massive purge of the former leaders of the "special service" he himself now heads.

Gen. Pristaiko is perhaps most proud of the rehabilitation law, which, despite amounting to an apology for an "anti-humanitarian and anti-democratic" regime, was passed by a 71 percent Communist Parliament in 1992. Under the law, all survivors of repression, or their relatives, are automatically rehabilitated and can receive copies of their original sentence.

"You can't believe what's written in my file," says Ivan Shakhiv. He spent years in prison camps for "anti-Soviet activity" during the war, when he was captured by the Germans. "I wasn't sentenced under real law, like English or international, but Soviet law," he notes.

After independence a committee was set up to support former political prisoners. Those without decent accommodation were granted flats, and regional groups were set up to represent their interests. But it has not been enough to cover their medical and social needs. Many suffer illness as a result of the physical hardship they suffered in labor camps. But they also have psychological difficulties after years of keeping silent about their past, and many have been left without family.

"Many people spent many years in camps and prisons, and not all managed to form a good family, and many are alone," says Marina Tkachenko, a social worker from the Medical Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Wars and Totalitarian Regimes.

"And those who do have children and grandchildren often can't tell them everything. Their children and grandchildren may support them, and they still fear they can spoil their children's careers or their children will blame them for something if they know the truth. There is no KGB anymore to be afraid of, but it's understandable, they are used to living that way. They are still scared to speak about their past," she explains.

The Kyiv rehabilitation center, the only one of its kind in the country, was set up by former political prisoner Semyon Gluzman. Unfortunately, it faces closure soon if it cannot find a new source of funding. Here survivors of Soviet repression can get free medical and psychological treatment, but perhaps most important is the link it provides to society. Here former prisoners can talk about their experiences with sympathetic doctors and social workers. The center staff also wants to set up a social group where clients can meet each other, as the most common complaint among all of them is loneliness.

"I've got a good apartment now," says Mr. Shakhiv, "but what use is that? What use are four walls when I have no family, when I'm all alone?" Mr. Shakhiv lost 25 years of life with his wife, his childhood sweetheart. He wrote to her from Siberia telling her she was free to marry another while he was away - which she did. When Mr. Shahkiv was finally freed in 1976 he once again wrote to her, and she divorced her second husband and came to join him in Brovary, a town just outside Kyiv. She died two years ago. They never had a chance to have children together.

The five, 10, 25 missing years are remembered by some as a nightmare of suffering.

Andrei Andreiovych, who did not want to give his last name, was sentenced in the 1930s for belonging to a Baptist group. He spent five years in a Siberian gold mine, where he remembers poor food, terrible hard labor and killing frosts. "We started dying of hunger, of cold, of epidemics," he recalls. "All my ill health stems from there. I'm an invalid of Stalin's repression."

Nina remembers her 10 years in central Asian camps more positively. She learned how to drive a tractor, and founded a choir for the doctors, artists and intellectuals in the camp. Yet Nina's family was decimated by the purges. Her father was arrested and shot; her husband was sent to a camp where he met a woman he married when he was eventually freed.

When Nina was released she was not given permission to live in the same town as her sister and her son. She was reunited with her son only after Ukrainian independence, when she finally got an apartment large enough for them to live in together. However, the arrangement did not work out after a lifetime apart, she recounts with sadness. Her son moved into a different apartment and died soon afterwards.

Independence in Ukraine has been a disappointment to many of these survivors, but despite today's hardships they don't look back on the Soviet era with the nostalgia many Ukrainians show for the lost security of communism.

"Now I say what I think and do what I want," says Mr. Shakhiv. "We've got our real Ukraine. The Communists were responsible for such a terrible famine, there was such repression. A car would come and you'd wonder who it had come for. For me? For my father? For my brother? It was no life. And most people lived in those conditions."

Unlike the Eastern bloc countries of Poland, the Czech Republic and East Germany, Ukraine has not rejected its communist past out of hand, trying to purge the new regimes of communist collaborators. Other than the files on repressed people, secret police archives in Ukraine remain closed, and even the information on political prisoners is available only to the people directly involved.

According to Gen. Pristaiko, that saves a lot of pain because the Soviet system forced many to become informers and such facts are better never uncovered. "There are people still alive who are not guilty before anyone or anything, but it could cast a cloud on them that their father or grandfather was whatever," he says. "I wouldn't want to sentence them. People were in an extreme situation."

As Gen. Pristaiko himself acknowledges, keeping the records secret has allowed him to keep his post. "I've been told, and more than once, that because I'm a colonel of the KGB I'm guilty of something," he says candidly. "In some countries the personal affairs of officers is open to everyone. But Ukrainian people look at the past and past events calmly, without extremism."

His point of view is shared by the founder of the rehabilitation center, Dr. Gluzman, one of Ukraine's youngest prison-camp survivors. He was sentenced in the 1970s for questioning the use of psychiatry by the state to get rid of dissidents. Gluzman the dissident and Pristaiko the KGB general now share one of those unlikely friendships that characterize post-Communist societies.

Dr. Gluzman, too, is against the kind of purges which in the former Eastern bloc have banned anyone associated with the Communist secret services from holding civil posts. He describes the process, called "lustration," as a "meat grinder." His attitude and his association with Gen. Pristaiko have raised some eyebrows among other former dissidents in Ukraine.

But Gen. Pristaiko, with the publication of selected secret service files (for which Dr. Gluzman helps find funding), could be said to be doing more than the newly independent state of Ukraine is doing for the prison camp survivors. As Dr. Gluzman's center offers them practical and social help, Gen. Pristaiko's books honor them by remembering their suffering.

"These people were sentenced for their ideals," says Dr. Gluzman. "They didn't end up there accidentally. Yes, it was a machine that scooped up everyone, just because they were wives or children of dissidents. But these are people who actively fought for Ukraine and spent all their youth in the gulags. Now their lives aren't all in order, but they still dream of a better life. They want everyone to live well, and young people to have a future; no war, no repetition of the nightmare that happened to them. Their main dream is a free Ukraine. They just want to live to see that time, to see what it would be like."

Lily Hyde is a freelance journalist and an RFE/RL correspondent based in Ukraine.

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