Turning the pages back...

November 9, 1976

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords, known simply as the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. It was on November 9, 1976, that 10 dissidents gathered in Kyiv to form this group dedicated to monitoring human rights violations in their country.

Five years ago in an editorial titled "Unsung heroes," The Ukrainian Weekly marked the group's 20th anniversary, recalling that in 1976 it was a great act of courage to challenge the authority of the Communist state. The act was "doubly courageous" in Ukraine, "for here the repression of national rights was harsher than in any other republic of the Soviet Union. Between 60 and 70 percent of all political prisoners in the Soviet gulag were Ukrainians, persecuted for their national and religious beliefs. The fearless UHG's program focused on the Ukrainian national question as an integral component of human rights issues. They were charged with keeping the spirit of the Ukrainian national movement alive at a time when there appeared to be little hope for the Ukrainian cause."

Despite the fact that the human rights activists formed "an open association dedicated to the non-violent struggle for the human rights commitments voluntarily undertaken by the USSR through various international covenants, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the newly concluded Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe," the crackdown on the Ukrainian Helsinki Group began almost immediately, with the first arrests coming just three months after the group's establishment, in the winter of 1977.

Many of the 37 members who joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in the late 1970s and suffered for this act of conscience have lived to see independent Ukraine. Others did not survive Soviet persecution. Twenty-five years after the UHG's founding, it is important to recall that its members were one of the grassroots movements that kept the Ukrainian spirit alive during decades of Soviet Communist rule.

The Helsinki monitors are now a part of history. Some continue to be the voice of dignity and justice in Ukraine today, but many have been forgotten and remain unacknow-ledged by the government of Ukraine for their courage and extreme sacrifices.

"Unsung heroes," editorial, The Weekly, November 10, 1996, Vol. LXIV, No. 45.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 4, 2001, No. 44, Vol. LXIX

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