Thirty years ago, on December 10, 1989, nearly 10,000 people gathered for a commemoration of International Human Rights Day in Lviv to mark the first ever officially sanctioned meeting of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union (UHU).
Led by Lviv UHU Vice-President Volodymyr Yavorsky, the meeting was addressed by a number of speakers, representing mostly informal public organizations, including Rukh (the Popular Movement of Ukraine for Perebudova), the Ukrainian Association of Independent Creative Intelligentsia, the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the Association of Independent Ukrainian Youth as well as a Georgia unofficial group.
Bohdan Horyn, head of the Lviv UHU branch, explained how every Soviet leader since Stalin, including current Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had committed human rights violations. Mr. Horyn asserted that Mr. Gorbachev was ultimately responsible for Soviet violence from riot police against demonstrators in Georgia, Armenia and Ukraine.
Mr. Horyn read aloud a fragment of an interview with a special riot police member who detailed the violent dispersal of a public gathering in Lviv on October 1, 1989. People in the crowd reacted with shock at the policeman’s testimony that revealed the deliberate nature of the violence against the demonstrators.
A union-wide two-hour strike was planned for December 11, 1989, and organizers Viktor Furmanov and Andrei Sakharov urged those at the gathering to join. The strike was aimed at pressuring the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, which was to convene on December 12, to include in its agenda a discussion of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution – the statute giving the Communist Party a dominant role in society.
On November 19 of that year, thousands came out for the burial funerals of late political prisoners Vasyl Stus, Oleksiy Tykhy and Yuriy Lytvyn at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv after the bodies of the three Ukrainian Helsinki Group members were transferred from a cemetery near the former Perm Camp 36-1.
A literary prize in honor of Vasyl Stus, selected by the Ukrainian Association of Independent Creative Intelligentsia, was awarded that year to Tykhy, as well as Lytvyn and Valeriy Marchenko, all intellectuals who died in a Soviet labor camp.
Vyacheslav Chornovil, editor of the Ukrainian Herald newspaper, reminded the crowd of the importance of the upcoming March 4 elections in 1990, in which Ukrainians had a choice for a new representative Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR.
International Human Rights Day honors the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The establishment of Human Rights Day was set on December 4, 1950, by the General Assembly. Traditionally, the U.N. Prize in the Field of Human Rights and the Nobel Peace Prize are also awarded on December 10.
Source: “First sanctioned UHU meeting commemorates Human Rights Day,” The Ukrainian Weekly, December 17, 1989.