Nadia Svitlychna commemorated at sixth annual Grigorenko Readings (12/03/06)

Nadia Svitlychna commemorated at sixth annual Grigorenko Readings

by Adrianna Melnyk
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

NEW YORK - Her name in Ukrainian, "Nadia," meant hope. And, according to all who knew her, hope was something she lived by her whole life.

On October 10 the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University and the Gen. Petro Grigorenko Foundation celebrated the life of Nadia Svitlychna, one of Ukraine's most prominent dissidents, with a daylong session dedicated to the renowned human rights activist and former political prisoner.

The Sixth Annual Grigorenko Readings: "A Commemoration of the Life of Nadia Svitlychna, Heroine of the Soviet, Ukrainian and Russian Human Rights Movements" focused on human rights in both their historical and contemporary contexts. The first part of the day was a celebration and remembrance of Svitlychna's life, and included a panel discussion on "The Life and Work of Nadia Svitlychna," as well as a photo-essay and slideshow. The afternoon session's panel discussion, "The Contemporary Human Rights Situation in Ukraine and the post-Soviet Sphere," focused on the current state of human rights in the former Soviet Union.

Ms. Svitlychna, who died after a long illness on August 8, 2006, was one of the founders of the Grigorenko Readings, which were initiated in remembrance of Gen. Petro Grigorenko after his death. According to Andrew Grigorenko, Gen. Grigorenko's son and president of the Gen. Petro Grigorenko Foundation (http://www.grigorenko.org), "The readings have grown, from the initial memorial evenings we started with Nadia at the Shevchenko Scientific Society, into a broader forum for the discussion of history and current events in Ukraine and other post-Communist countries."

In his opening remarks, Prof. Mark Von Hagen of Columbia University dedicated the day's afternoon session to the life and memory of Anna Politkovskaya, an independent Russian journalist and outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, who had been brutally murdered days before in her Moscow apartment building. Her tragic death made this year's Grigorenko Readings all the more poignant, and served as a reminder that, despite the strides that have been made in the field of human rights, media and other basic freedoms are still under attack in the post-Soviet world.

The morning began with a biographical portrait of Ms. Svitlychna's life, given by Dr. Yuri Shevchuk of Columbia University. Ms. Svitlychna's life was portrayed by Dr. Shevchuk as one of hope in the face of a dangerous struggle for human rights, and one of endless commitment to her ideals. Among her many other achievements, Ms. Svitlychna is best remembered for her role as a human rights activist and former political prisoner, as an active member of the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and as editor and compiler of the "Visnyk Represii v Ukraini" (Bulletin of Repression in Ukraine).

Her long and tireless career of responding to her conscience began with a simple outrage: while working as a teacher in the Donbas in the late 1950s, she came to question why any student in Ukraine could refuse to study Ukrainian, and why even a dvoika, or failing grade, in Ukrainian language was sufficient to move a student up to the next class. After she settled in Kyiv in 1964, she began to visit the "Klub Tvorschoyi Molodi" (Club of Creative Young People) with her brother, the eminent poet, literary critic, human rights activist and political prisoner Ivan Svitlychny. It was there that she became acquainted with the Shestydesiatnyky and with many future dissidents.

As the activities of the dissidents grew, the struggle for human rights in 1960s Ukraine quickly led to arrests and imprisonments. After her brother Ivan was arrested in 1965, Ms. Svitlychna sent a telegram in his defense to the Presidium of the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She also sent a statement to the judicial body of the Shevchenkivskyi District in Kyiv, rejecting the services of a lawyer appointed to defend her brother, since it was known that the lawyer was forced to fulfill the role of the prosecutor's assistant.

In the years that followed, Ms. Svitlychna, along with her brother Ivan, Lina Kostenko, Ivan Dzyuba and others, worked to defend the rights of their colleagues who were being arrested and killed. When, in 1970, she found the body of her murdered friend, the artist Alla Horska, Ms. Svitlychna organized the funeral and arranged for a monument to be put on her grave.

Her defense and support of the dissidents, including, first and foremost, her brother, led to her questioning by the KGB on an almost daily basis, and to her own eventual arrest on May 18, 1972. But by that time, she had already come to embrace what she saw as an unquestionable solidarity with those closest to her. During her interrogation, she responded to the provocative questions of the investigator by saying, "I am simply a person whom life gave the good fortune of meeting with a wide range of creative people. Persecution against them, I perceive as persecution against me."

Her son, Yarema, then 2, was taken from her. "Thus, I became a political prisoner," she later wrote, "although I had considered the main concern of my life to be the upbringing of my son. In fact, I was deprived not only of freedom, but of motherhood as well."

Ms. Svitlychna spent a year in the KGB isolation cell on Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv and in May of 1973 was sentenced to four years in a Mordovian political labor camp. The charge: having held and distributed samvydav (samizdat) literature. While in prison, she actively participated in protests and hunger strikes. Upon her return to Kyiv in 1976, she was not able to get a job and was constantly threatened with more arrests.

That same year, in protest against the harsh punishment of Petro Grigorenko, Levko Lukianenko, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus, Stefania Shabatura and others, she rejected her citizenship, and sent a declaration to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, in which she stated "It would be below my dignity to remain a citizen of the world's biggest, most powerful and most developed concentration camp."

On October 12, 1978, Ms. Svitlychna left Ukraine for Rome, where she was given an audience by Pope Paul VI; in November she arrived in the United States. Eight years later she was stripped of her citizenship. She continued her work in exile in the United States, where she became actively involved in the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helskinki Group, and for whom she processed all information related to repression in Ukraine. She published the Visnyk Represii v Ukraini and worked for the Ukrainian division of Radio Liberty. She also published brochures and books out of materials smuggled from labor camps in Ukraine.

* * *

Following Prof. Shevchuk's biographical portrait, Irenaeus Yurchuk of Ipkit Associates and a close friend of Ms. Svitlychna's showed a stirring photo-essay "Shliakh Nadiyi" (Journey of Hope) which he had compiled in her memory. The slideshow depicted Ms. Svitlychna's life and times, from her childhood to her years as a dissident, to her life and work in the United States, to her beaming face on the maidan in Kyiv during the Orange Revolution. Mr. Yurchuk's photographs captured Ms. Svitlychna's generous spirit, boundless energy and loving nature, and showed the human and personal side of the woman whom Andrew Grigorenko called "a magnet who attracted people in need" and who "was always ready to lend a helping hand."

The remainder of the morning session included two talks, one by Prof. Anna Procyk of the City University of New York, the other by Pavel Litvinov of the Gen. Petro Grigorenko Foundation. Prof. Procyk's paper "Nadia Svitlychna through the Prism of Amnesty International" (published in The Ukrainian Weekly's November 5 issue) analyzed the significance of Ms. Svitlychna's life and work in the broader context of human rights groups, including Amnesty International. Following her talk, Prof. Procyk made a plea to Columbia University's Ukrainian Studies Program to undertake the project of archiving and publishing Ms. Svitlychna's letters and many other works. She underscored Ms. Svitlychna's and other dissidents' historical importance, saying, "What started with letter writing and care packages in the dark ages of the Soviet era, ended with nominations of prisoners for [Nobel] prizes and ultimately with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an effort which if pursued with persistence and responsibility produces results that are capable of being carried only on the shoulders of giants."

Prof. Procyk also warned of the continued marginalization of dissidents, which she says is rooted in two phenomena: first, the intentional smear campaign against dissidents, for example, President Leonid Kravchuk's branding of Chornovil and others as "ultranationalists," and second, the dramatic nature of events surrounding the fall of communism and the resulting tendency to overlook individuals who had created the pre-conditions and planted the roots for a civil society.

In his talk "Nadia and Ivan Svitlychny and Russian Dissidents," Mr. Litvinov, the Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident, described his personal experiences and friendship with Ms. Svitlychna, saying she "never complained about herself, was always hopeful and positive, and was the glue that kept people together and gave everyone hope and encouragement."

She "embodied the ideals which are integral to any human rights movement: compassion and strength to fight against the totalitarian state," Mr. Litvinov underscored.

* * *

The afternoon session of the Grigorenko Readings centered on a panel discussion "The Contemporary Human Rights Situation in Ukraine and the Post-Soviet Sphere," whose speakers included Nina Ognianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Myroslava Gongadze of the Gongadze Foundation, and Stephen Sestanovich of Columbia University. Each speaker assessed the human rights situation in the post-Soviet space in its contemporary context and with a particular focus on press freedom.

The first speaker, Ms. Ognianova, spoke on "The State of Press Freedom in Ukraine and Ukraine's Position among Post-Soviet Democracies" and said that "there has been a lot of positive movement if we put Ukraine in the context of other post-Soviet countries," but that "problems persist." Her organization, CPJ, recommends that in order to prevent regional attacks on journalists in Ukraine, regional associations should be formed and strengthened, because "Kyiv-based NGOs cannot adequately monitor and address all incidents that take place in the regions."

Ms. Gongadze also offered practical solutions to the problems that persist with media freedoms in the region, saying that, particularly after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, "an international mechanism needs to be created to investigate and prosecute crimes [against journalists]."

The final speaker, Prof. Sestanovich, spoke of the changing vocabulary in the discourse about human rights and about the contrast between democracy and human rights as a focus of policy-makers.

In his paper "U.S. Policy and Human Rights in Post-Soviet States," Prof. Sestanovich argued that the U.S. policy-making establishment finds it "easier to comment on human rights than on democracy" and that one of the main factors in this is the current ideological backslide on human rights in Russia. His paper covered contemporary topics related to the human rights and democracy discourse between nations: forms of leverage, including economic and institutional, that can be used by policy-makers; the importance of personal ties between leaders; legal mechanisms; and the meaning of free and fair elections.

* * *

The sixth annual Grigorenko Readings were a fitting tribute to the life of Ms. Svitlychna: they brought together people who dedicate some part of their lives or career to the continuing struggle for human rights. And they brought together the people who knew her best, who could say about her that it was in her nature to fight for human rights, that she did not, in the words of Vaclav Havel, "become a 'dissident' just because [she] decide[d] one day to take up this most unusual career," that it "began as an attempt to do [her] work well, and end[ed] with being branded an enemy of society." And in the end, the very system that made an enemy of Ms. Svitlychna crumbled largely because she and others like her existed, and had the courage to fight against it.

Nadia Svitlychna: Your memory will always be honored. "You were," as Leonid Plyusch once said about you, "and will be the best in Ukraine - her honor and goodness, selfless service to people, freedom and Ukrainian independence without bravado."

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