Ukrainian Helsinki Group observes 25th anniversary of its founding

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group - its members persecuted for many years by the Soviet Union for their key role in exposing Soviet human rights irregularities in the 1970s-1980s, while being heralded by much of the rest of the globe for its principled stance - celebrated the silver jubilee of its inception on November 9. The members of the now-defunct organization, many of whom spent as much time in Soviet prison camps as they did in freedom, gathered again to recall those days and recount the difficulties as well as the successes during a day dedicated to remembering the historic role the group had played.

The commemorations included a daylong seminar at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, followed by an evening program at which the surviving members were acknowledged for their commitment and achievements with "Prisoner of Conscience" medals from Amnesty International and Radio Liberty, and separate awards from the international charitable organization Smoloskyp. The next day, survivors and supporters held prayer services at the burial sites of members who had died in the struggle for Ukrainian independence: Yurii Lytvyn, Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhyi, who are interred at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv, and Valerii Marchenko, who is buried in his home village just outside the capital city.

Underscoring the negligible public acknowledgment and official acclaim the members have received over the last decade for their role in helping to cast off Soviet hegemony and the suffering they endured while working to force the dictatorial regime to abide by the human rights agreement it had signed in Helsinki, Finland, in May 1975, Vasyl Ovsienko, a former member, who spent a total of 13 and a half years in the Soviet concentration camps, told The Weekly the group members had to organize the 25th anniversary ceremonies themselves.

"We set ourselves a goal to remind the world about this event, which was one of the most important moments in Ukrainian history," explained Mr. Ovsienko.

Historians generally acknowledge that the group and its members, most of whom were dedicated anti-Soviet "agitators" committed to the fight for an independent Ukraine and had served several terms in the Soviet prison camps even before the Helsinki Monitoring Group was formed on November 9, 1976, were one of the central driving forces that led to the dissolution of the Soviet empire and to Ukraine's independence.

Just over a dozen or so of the 29 surviving members, - there were a total of 41 members during the organization's 12 years of existence - took part in the commemorations.

Mykola Rudenko, 81, a founder of the group, while blind and ailing today nevertheless sat on the dais and gave the seminar's first presentation on the group and its activities between its founding in the autumn of 1976 and its transformation into a political entity as the Soviet Union began its demise in 1988.

In the crowd were his elderly cohorts Iryna Senyk, Petro Sichko, Petro Rozumnyi and Vasyl Striltsiv, all slightly younger but no less frail.

Also in attendance were the "kids" of the group, today older but still vibrant, including 52-year-old Mr. Ovsienko, a primary organizer of the jubilee, who was all of 23 years old when first arrested by Soviet authorities in 1973. Joining him were members Myroslav Marynovych, 52, who today is associated with the Lviv Theological Academy, and Josyf Zissels, 55, who heads the Ukrainian Association of Jewish Organizations, as well as such stalwart figures of the Helsinki Group as Lev Lukianenko and Yevhen Sverstiuk.

Mr. Rudenko said the group's essence rests in its radical decision to test the international legal framework laid when the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accord, which was done in an effort to expose the human rights situation in colonial Ukraine at the time - in effect to attempt to let the world see the persecution being suffered by the Ukrainian nation.

As Mr. Rudenko explained, it was the first time dissidents within the Soviet state had decided to do their work openly.

"We decided we would no longer hide in the underground, but would expose our faces to let the world hear from us," said the founder of the group.

Their declarations and actions affected not only Soviet Cold War relations with the West, but also the lives of many young Ukrainians, explained Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Ombudsman Inna Karpachova, another speaker at the seminar who was a university student at Kyiv State University in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

"For those of us who were younger, these were the people who gave us the notion of human rights," said Ms. Karpachova.

She explained that she and her fellow students first began to openly discuss notions such as freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in the former USSR only after the Helsinki Monitoring Groups of Moscow and Kyiv were formed.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group was not the first organization of its kind established in the Soviet Union - the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group was formed five months earlier, on May 12, 1976, by Yuri Orlov, Andrei Sakharov and Petro Grigorenko, the latter a Ukrainian. But, as Ms. Karpachova observed, it was the Ukrainian group that suffered the brunt of the Soviet regime's wrath.

The story of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group for the most part is a tale of courage, devotion and suffering for the idea of an independent Ukraine. Of the 41 members who entered its ranks, 39 spent a grand total of 550 years in the concentration camps of the gulag or in psychiatric wards. Four - Messrs. Stus, Marchenko, Lytvyn and Tykhyi - died while serving their sentences, while one individual, Mykhailo Melnyk, committed suicide before succumbing to the persecution the camps meted out.

Among the survivors of the harsh reality of Soviet incarceration who were members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group were individuals who spent more time behind bars than in freedom, people such as Danylo Shumuk, who spent a total of 42 and a half years in Polish, German and Soviet prisons; Yurii Shukhevych, who was first arrested when he was 12 years old because he was the son of Gen. Roman Shukhevych of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and spent 30 years deprived of freedom; and Iryna Senyk, who spent 34 years behind bars.

This group of disaffected Ukrainian patriots began to come together beginning November 9, 1976, when Mr. Rudenko, a writer, philosopher and decorated World War II veteran of the Red Army who had become disillusioned with the tyranny of the Soviet empire and had become increasingly active in the Ukrainian dissident movement, along with four fellow dissidents released Memorandum No. 1 announcing the establishment of an organization to "aid" Soviet authorities in monitoring the implementation of the Helsinki Accord.

Mr. Rudenko had heeded insistent advice by Gen. Grigorenko, a co-founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a retired general and World War II hero of the Red Army as well, who had become equally disenchanted with the Soviet system.

The two groups were to take advantage of certain stipulations in the Helsinki Accord, which was signed in the Finnish capital by the Soviet Union and all the countries of Europe (except Albania) as well as the United States and Canada. The West agreed to recognize the borders of the Warsaw pact countries as established after World War II in return for a pledge by the Soviet Union to uphold the requirements of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A Ukrainian group of five founders met in Moscow in the home of Alexander Ginzburg, another original member of the Moscow group, on the evening of November 9 and drew up Memorandum No. 1, the historical document proclaiming the establishment of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote Implementation of the Helsinki Accord.

Present were Mr. Rudenko, Mr. Grigorenko, Olena Meshko, the oldest member and generally acknowledged as the "mother" of the group, as well as Oles Berdnyk and Mr. Lukianenko, who had just returned from a prison camp in Mordovia after serving 15 years of what had been a death sentence before it was commuted.

Mr. Rudenko explained that the Ukrainians decided to form a separate group to draw attention to the unique plight of their nation.

"This was to be the voice of Ukraine," he explained. "It was the first time that many in the world had heard of Ukraine." Until then many considered the country a part of Russia."

Mr. Rudenko said that in a 30-page document the five founders explained the current situation in Ukraine, which they described as "genocidal."

Upon reading the memorandum, five more dissidents decided to add their signatures and join the group: Nina Strokata-Karavanska, Mr. Marynovych, Mykola Matusevych, Mr. Tykhyi and Ivan Kandyba.

After its release to the West, the international response to the memorandum was immediate, said Mr. Rudenko. Thousands of letters from around the world arrived at the various Gulag prison camps deploring the system and demanding the release of prisoners of conscience. In the United States a support group was formed.

"The people in America were excited by what we had done," said Mr. Rudenko.

Even though their voices had been heard, Mr. Rudenko and his colleagues understood well that they had embarked on a high-risk venture and that many of them would be arrested. Less than three months later, on February 5, the incarcerations began, with Mr. Rudenko and Mr. Tykhyi going first.

In April Messrs. Matusevych and Marynovych were arrested. Petro Vins and Mr. Lukianenko were taken in December. Most of the rest came after.

The group continued to survive and function, however, because its members had decided early on that they would not induce all their friends and colleagues to join, but would ask many to hold back membership to replenish the group's rank as the initial members were imprisoned.

Thus, Olha Heiko-Matusevych joined in May 1977; Leonid Pliusch came aboard soon after and only months after he had been released from imprisonment in a psychiatric ward; then Vasyl Striltsiv in October 1977; and the two Sichkos - son Vasyl and father Petro in February and April 1978, respectively. People were still joining in 1983, when all the original members had already been arrested.

While the group's achievements are indisputable, some uncertainties linger today as to whether the members did not expect and give too much of themselves and their comrades. That thought was voiced in a stirring presentation by Mr. Sverstiuk, a writer who was intimately involved in the formation of the dissident movement in Ukraine in the early and mid-1960s. Mr. Sverstiuk questioned whether the group realized at the time what it was expecting of friends and neighbors, whom they often verbally pressured to sign their memorandums.

"It was one thing for me to sign, and another for that geographer whose book was soon to be published or was soon to defend his dissertation. What did we do to those people?" he rhetorically queried. At another moment he asked, "Did we have the right to put the mothers, wives and children through the terror they lived through?"

Mr. Sverstiuk also referred to the most renowned member of the group, the talented poet Vasyl Stus, who died in 1985 while incarcerated. His death is ascribed to the harsh treatment he received during his term of imprisonment - his second round of incarceration. Mr. Sverstiuk pondered aloud whether the group had had the right to pressure the best writer from among them to join the group.

"I believe that it hangs on my conscience even today. But I must add that I don't mean to say that someone could have saved Stus. He was fully aware of his situation and the consequences," explained Mr. Sverstiuk in a very intimate moment.

Mr. Sverstiuk added that given the poet's open determination and dedication to see a Ukraine free of colonial masters, few could argue that he would have chosen a different fate.

Other survivors offered similar convictions about their own experiences. As Mr. Rudenko explained, for all his suffering and pain he had no regrets and was proud of his achievements.

"I lived through the camps and through emigrations, but this was my time under the sun," said Mr. Rudenko of those first exhilarating days of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

The achievements of the group and its members are unsurpassable. Mr. Rudenko and Mr. Stus, along with the 39 other members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group, were part and parcel of the generation that took part in the final fight for an independent Ukraine. Sadly, some - like Mr. Stus - did not live to see the victory.

Mr. Ovsienko most succinctly explained the group's contribution to Ukrainian history. "Without the Helsinki Group there would have been no independent Ukraine. U.S. military, economic and political pressure came in response to light shed by the Helsinki groups. We helped to destroy the Soviet Union."

Photos in this series by Vasyl Ovsienko and and Petro Romko.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 25, 2001, No. 47, Vol. LXIX

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