IN MEMORIAM: Nadia Oleksiivna Svitlychna, 1936-2006 (08/27/06)

IN MEMORIAM: Nadia Oleksiivna Svitlychna, 1936-2006

by Christina Isajiw

Nadia Svitlychna died on August 7, three months shy of her 70th birthday. We lost a colleague, a spokesman for a just society, an untiring transmitter of the values of honor and human dignity. We lost a dear friend.

Much of Ms. Svitlychna's life was synonymous with the dissident movement in Ukraine. As a young philologist in the early 1960s, she joined the club of creative youth (Kliub Tvorchoyi Molodi) where she met and became friends with many writers and artists, the intellectual Ukrainian elite that was to become the dissident movement - the "Shestydesiatnyky."

Later, her involvement in protesting the events of 1967 brought about serious surveillance of her by the KGB, and in 1968 she was fired from her job at the Pedagogical Institute in Kyiv. It was Ms. Svitlychna and Yevhen Sverstiuk who found the murdered body of her friend Alla Horska, and Ms. Svitlychna organized the funeral and memorial for Ms. Horska.

The relentless KGB harassment continued, where almost daily Ms. Svitlychna was summoned for interrogation and daily she would have to say good-bye to her 2-year-old son, Yarema. Then one day they told her to write an order as to whom she entrusts with the upbringing of her small child and she was arrested on May 18, 1972.

She spent almost a year in isolation at the KGB Volodymyrska prison and sentenced to four years of imprisonment under Article 62 - "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Young Yarema was initially placed in a state-run orphanage and only after great efforts by Ms. Svitlychna's family, especially her sister-in-law, Leonida, were they able to rescue him and place him with his grandmother in Luhansk.

Ms. Svitlychna served her term in Mordovia and, along with other women prisoners, took part in numerous protests and hunger strikes. The regime was severe, as she described it in various articles, but they found like-minded camaraderie fortifying and that made it bearable to be away from their loved ones, especially their small children.

At night, after hours of hard labor in the prison, Ms. Svitlychna would compose poems and stories for little Yarema, which she lovingly put down on pieces of cloth she tore off her undergarments. These little booklets were gifts she would surreptitiously forward to little Yarema, whenever it was possible to have visitors who would undertake such delivery.

After serving her sentence, what followed was "a phenomenon of the time," as Vasyl Stus wrote in a work of his that describes the repressive policies aimed at annihilating Ukrainian intellectual elites. Ms. Svitlychna was denied a "propyska," the paper that gave official USSR validity to each human being and, therefore, she was denied work, but was then repeatedly warned that "parasitism" was also punishable by imprisonment. She lived with her sister-in-law because without the "propyska" she was not allowed permission for living quarters, and they both were regularly fined for "violating the passport regime."

In the fall of 1976, in the face of the severe persecution and long prison sentences meted out to Levko Lukianenko, Gen. Petro Grigorenko, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus, Stefania Shabatura and others, Ms. Svitlychna wrote a declaration to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR, stating that she renounces her citizenship. This also was a brave move, because such an act was punishable by seven years of imprisonment plus five years of exile.

Ms. Svitlychna explained that: "It is beneath my dignity to be a citizen of the largest in the world, the most powerful and the most perfect concentration camp." She continued to suffer repression; one of the memoranda issued by the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was titled: "About the Fate of Nadia Svitlychna." She continued doing what she thought was needed to register the injustices suffered by her Ukrainian colleagues.

Through all this, Ms. Svitlychna married Pavlo Stokotelny and, in May 1978, as she stated: "Not having violated administrative surveillance (under which she was placed and not allowed to go anywhere without permission), I gave birth to Kozak Ivan, on my own chair." This terse statement described the enormity of the whole situation without pathos or bitterness. That was Nadiyka, as I knew her, smiling and seemingly transcending personal needs and tribulations.

On November 8, 1978 (her birthday), she came to the United States and eight years later she was stripped of her USSR citizenship. Here, Ms. Svitlychna worked tirelessly on behalf of her dissident colleagues in Ukraine. She was our main source of information about the events in Ukraine and she was ever ready to testify and to make the world aware of the repression taking place under the Soviet regime. She was the one we called for verification of facts or for more detailed explanation of new events.

As an active member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, she compiled and edited much of the group's publications in the West. From 1983 to 1994 Ms. Svitlychna worked in the Ukrainian branch of the RFE/RL. I often met her in New York, during or after her hard day at work. Her head was throbbing, but she was happy to have done her transmission and was taking a heavy load of material home to prepare for the following day. Still, she found energy to decipher copious letters and reports, surreptitiously sent to her from the gulag prison camps, and she found time to compile them into brochures and articles made ready for publication.

We owe her gratitude for preparing such publications as "Palimpsesty" by Vasyl Stus, Yaroslav Lesiv's "Myt'," Mykola Rudenko's "Za Gratamy," Serhii Snehirov's "Tvory" and many other works by Mykola Horbal, Yurii Lytvyn and others. After the death of her brother, Ivan Svitlychny, Nadia published a book of his letters from prison, his poetry in a book called "U Mene - Tilky Slovo" (For Me - There's Only the Word), and a book of his memoirs that was published in 1998.

Ms. Svitlychna amassed a very large archive, which she so very much wanted to put in order and prepare for more publications. In the last two years she had made plans to return to Kyiv and continue this work. She also raised funds for a headstone for fellow Helsinki monitor Oksana Meshko and her mother and for the Shestydesiatnyky museum in Kyiv.

On July 20 I received her last letter to me. She was very weak, Nadiyka wrote, but during the short lucid moments her thoughts went to her unfinished work. "It is then that I reminisce and dream of still writing a little about what I remember. I see so many, who have left us, taking with them all their memories and experience and in those moments I feel such a keen need to leave at least a few bits of remnants, the slivers of my life. Perhaps someone, sometime will become interested in these very odd persons, who put honor and dignity above their own lives."

May Nadiyka's life and work be a constant reminder of the inhumane cruelty and abuse of human dignity that was the daily reality of the Soviet rule, lest we forget.

Dear Nadiyka, rest assured that there is already keen interest, both here and in Ukraine, in the lives and work of all the admirable individuals, the dissidents who sacrificed their personal peace and happiness for the ideals that would help to forge a different destiny for their country.

Those of us who knew Nadia Svitlychna will always remember and be grateful for the legacy she leaves behind. "Vichna yiyi Pamiat!"

Christina Isajiw is the former head of the Human Rights Commission of the Ukrainian World Congress.

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