Once in the Kuchino special regime camp in the Urals, rightly nicknamed the death camp, Mykhailo Horyn showed me a photograph depicting a high-browed man with an enlightened look in his sunken eyes on a refined intelligent face. – “Who is this?”. – I did not recognise him. – “And what can you say about this person? – “This appearance glows with kindness and intellect... But this is Lytvyn!
Later, this photograph came to me as a fellow countryman along with some belongings of the deceased, and I delivered them to his mother, Nadiia Antonivna Parubchenko, with whom I saw the same one. Subsequently, Oksana Yakivna Meshko claimed that it was she who around 1978 insisted that Lytvyn have his photo taken. Now that photograph is best known as his “canonical” portrait.
Yes, this was truly a person who valued kindness above all in the world. Goodness, Love, Freedom – his favourite topics of conversation. “Nowadays throw a stick and you’ll hit a smart person, but kindness is a rarity. If I were told to choose between a kind and a smart person – I would choose the kind one, for intellect can also be evil,” – Lytvyn repeated more than once. Already around the third day of acquaintance with him – and it happened under special circumstances, at the transit prison of Lukyanivka prison in Kyiv – I felt a need to express to this man the secret pains and anxieties of my soul. “Many people tell me their most secret thoughts, although I make no effort to achieve that,” Lytvyn said. It was about Ivan Svitlychnyi that Vasyl Stus once said: “In his presence, the utter fool spoke wise things”. In Lytvyn’s presence, it seems to me, bitterness, baseness, and meanness faded away. When I listened to him, it sometimes seemed that I saw a radiance above his brow. Of the people I knew, a similar impression was made on me perhaps only by Stus.
So on September 5, 1980, I, a “criminal prisoner”, was moved in a prisoner transport from Vilniansk in Zaporizhzhia region (where I had already been suffering punishment for a year and a half for allegedly torn buttons from a policeman's raincoat) to Zhytomyr, where, I believed, I was to be put in the same dock with Dmytro Mazur for so-called “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for another 15 years. Understandably, I felt miserable at heart. And so with a group of criminal prisoners I am led into a large transit cell of the Catherine block, where there were already about 20 men. On both sides along the wall – two-tier bunk beds, in the middle – a built-in table and benches. There are no free places, so I stand somewhere aside, observing and listening, where have I ended up. The crowd habitually settles down, someone gets ready to brew tea near the slop bucket. My accidental fellow traveller Volodymyr Yurchenko, returning from the Vilniansk psychiatric hospital to a camp in Korosten, leads me to a long unshaven, skinny man with a chest badge “Lytvyn Yu.T.”. My “passport” is also visible – and we gladly shook hands, not showing much emotion so that we wouldn't be quickly separated into different cells. However, our fears were in vain, as the warders notice “lawless ones” [bezpredelshchiki] more than grey “muzhiks” like us, who don't even swear. Until now I had only heard Lytvyn's name, but did not know that half a year after me, namely on August 6, 1979, a new “criminal” case was fabricated against him. Given the lack of imagination in KGB heads – similar to mine: resistance to police officers with the use of violence, Article 188-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. Only I “resisted” two policemen and one KGB officer, while Lytvyn – as many as five policemen. And this – after two surgeries undergone within a year...
I fear that in my story about Lytvyn's life before my meeting with him some mistakes may occur, so let me be forgiven. We know so little about Lytvyn that even the smallest details need to be told.
Lytvyn has a novella “Madman” [Bezumets], written in Russian, but, according to the author, with Ukrainian inclusions: characters sometimes speak Ukrainian. The main character of this novella, Pynchuk, was born the second twin child, completely unexpected, therefore after birth he was deprived of attention. The first child, for whom all available benefits were prepared, died at one month of age. Therefore they went to Pynchuk-the-second as if illegally. This fate of substitution, inadequate perception, misunderstanding weighs upon the hero throughout his suffering life, in which he constantly had to be not himself.
Yuriy's parents, Nadiia Antonivna Parubchenko and Tymon Lytvyn, taught in the 30s in the Vasylkiv region near Kyiv – in Ksaverivka, Kodaky, Marianivka (from where Ivan Kozlovskyi originates), in Barakhty. About 1933 Nadiia Antonivna, who to this day lives in poverty in a leaning hut under a hill on Prominska Street, (Born October 14, 1914. Reposed in the Lord on October 26, 1997. In 1992 the Drohobych district organization of “Memorial” headed by Myron Buchatskyi built a new house for her, it was consecrated with the participation of many guests on November 26 by Fr. Yuriy Boiko, UAOC. The same day in the village club a tribute to Yu. Lytvyn took place, where SBU colonel V.I. Prystaiko handed the mother documents about the rehabilitation of her son. A museum room for Yu. Lytvyn has been created in the Barakhty school), narrates with trembling soul: “I taught primary classes. Out of 24 children, I had only four left. We, teachers, were not paid salaries for three months, and by God’s grace we also did not die...” It was in Ksaverivka on November 26, 1934, that the Lord sent them twins, the second of whom was destined to walk the arduous paths of seeking truth and lay down his life on the altar of Ukraine.
From 1937 the parents taught in the village of Vysoke, near Stavyshche in Brusyliv district, Zhytomyr region. Just before the war the father entered military service, and the family moved to Zhytomyr. Tymon Lytvyn fought at the front, and then was a partisan with Kovpak, and died of wounds in a hospital on April 24, 1944, buried in Proskuriv (Khmelnytskyi) in a mass grave.
Under German occupation the boy nearly perished: a German accused him and neighbour Ivanko of stealing cigarettes and had already lined them up against a wall to shoot, but the mother, intertwining a few German words, pleaded for them. Once, the mother recalls, he said to a German: “Why did you come to our land? Is yours not enough for you?” Yuriy himself recalled his childhood games of those times: he was always appointed to be the “German” and, of course, was beaten every time, although in his soul he was such a Soviet patriot that it couldn't be more. And all for trying to play the real, as imagined, enemy: terrible and cruel. Until his last days Yuriy Lytvyn kept with him a yellowed photograph of his father in uniform, as well as a wartime group photo depicting his uncle on his mother's side, Mykola, who was lucky to survive, and later rise to the rank of colonel. This uncle Mykola, receiving a tearful letter from his sister Nadiia in the hungry year of 1946 that she could not feed the child, told her to sell her fabric for a suit and send Yurko to him. The mother took the boy as far as Kharkiv, bought him a ticket and a loaf of bread for the journey with her last money, said goodbye and with a broken heart returned home, clinging somewhere to a steam locomotive. And Yurko cried: “How will you, mother, get there without money?”
The 12-year-old Yurko found himself in the Caucasus, somewhere near Lake Ritsa. The environment, understandably, was Russian-speaking, which marked his later paradoxical literary destiny. There, Yuriy got into a car accident: the vehicle caught fire, a tire burst – and he was thrown into hawthorn bushes. They only remembered the boy about two hours later... He spent several months in hospital, even blindfolded for some time. From this he was left with reminders: a burned body, partly his face too, a barely noticeable stutter which manifested more sharply when he was agitated, and an exposed sensitivity to human misfortune. There, in the hospital, while blindfolded, he began composing poems. He returned to his mother. After the 7th grade, completed in Barakhty, Yuriy went to a mining-industrial school in the city of Shakhty, worked in the Donbas, but his legs began to fail him and he returned to his mother in Barakhty again. He was, as he imagined himself, a sincere Komsomol member, even the secretary of the Komsomol organisation while at school, but could not tolerate any injustice. His mother preserved the following document:
REFERENCE
For VLKSM member since 1949, ticket No. 30183874
Lytvyn Yuriy Tymonovych
Born in 1934, education
7 classes, Ukrainian, pupil
of the 7-year school in the village of Barakhty.
At the end of 1949, VLKSM member comr. Lytvyn Yuriy Tymonovych was elected secretary of the student Komsomol organisation of the 7-year school in the village of Barakhty. Being secretary of the Komsomol organisation until the present time, comr. Lytvyn Yu.T. proved himself a good public activist, a responsive comrade, managed to rally Komsomol members and non-union youth around him, mobilising and directing them to fulfil the tasks facing the Komsomol organisation. The Komsomol organisation led by comr. Lytvyn Yu.T. in practice serves as an assistant to the school, the party organisation of the col. farm, and the board of the collective farm. Comr. Lytvyn carried out repeated assignments of the District Committee of the Komsomol. He systematically works on raising his ideological and political level. Morally stable, ideologically consistent. Devoted to the party of LENIN – STALIN.
Secretary of Vasylkiv
DC LKSMU
(V. Dmytruk)
(Original spelling preserved).
In 1953, village boys decided to break free from collective farm serfdom, to go somewhere else for work. But the chairman would not give a certificate allowing them to leave. Where can you go without a passport? So they – naive children! – protested in an unusual way: they caught a collective farm calf and tied it up in a shelterbelt. When Yurko found out about this, he persuaded the boys to go to the chairman, went with them himself and said: “If you treat the youth so unjustly, they will commit all sorts of crimes”. Of course, the collective farm chairman Nikolaienko sued the boys, and the court with a generous hand dealt them 10 years each, and Yurko 12, so that he wouldn't be so clever. They were arrested on June 24, 1953, and tried under Art. 4 of the Decree of 4.VI.1947 “On criminal liability for theft of state and public property”. At the trial Yuriy showed his mother his beaten hands...
Yuriy was transported to the construction of the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Power Station. Meanwhile, his mother strove for her son's release, and succeeded: Sydir Artemovych Kovpak, famous in his time as a partisan, then already Deputy Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, remembered his comrade-in-arms Tymon Lytvyn, and by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR of January 13, 1955, Yuriy was released on February 1. But as soon as he arrived at his uncle Mykola's in Leningrad, a search was conducted there on April 14 and Yuriy was arrested: allegedly while in captivity, in the Kuneyevsk correctional labour camp, at that very hydroelectric power station construction, together with friends he created the “Brotherhood of Free Ukraine”, which set as its goal “struggle for the separation of Ukraine from the USSR, struggle against communist ideas, creation of an 'independent Ukraine'”. Of course, only its enemies can fight for an “independent Ukraine”, so on September 5–10, 1955, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Kuybyshev Regional Court under the chairmanship of Buzanov sentenced 16 Ukrainian boys under Art. 58-10, p. 2, and Art. 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“Betrayal of the motherland”). Although no materials proving the group's activity were found, it was “established” that they had an oath signed in blood on a sheet with an image of the tryzub [trident], and passwords, “threes”, “tens”, with an “older brother” at the head of each. Lytvyn (pseudonym “Kremin”) allegedly composed two appeals to Ukrainian prisoners urging them to join the nationalist organisation, developed the statute and composed the text of the oath, wrote and distributed a number of poems. He was the factual leader of the organisation, and with the creation of the headquarters was elected head of the political department of the BFU. Those released were supposed to create cells.
To “stitch together” such a case, the investigation worked for 11 months. Up to 40 people were “drawn” into the organisation (by members or the investigation?). The three leaders, including Lytvyn, faced 25 years each, but the court considered that the BFU had conducted no practical work other than organisational. Lytvyn, as the organiser of the brotherhood, along with five others, received 10 years of imprisonment and 3 years of “loss of rights”.
For half a year Yuriy was kept in the Medyn camp, then in Vykhorivka (this is “Ozerlag” of the Irkutsk region), then in Mordovian camps, among political prisoners. Probably those times became the period of Yuriy Lytvyn's civic maturation. Broad communication with the most diverse people levelled his national consciousness. In conversation with me, Lytvyn mentioned Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka, who was perhaps the brightest personality among Ukrainians in the camps for a whole quarter of a century. It is very necessary, Lytvyn said, to collect a book of memories about him. (Now such a book exists: Lesia Bondaruk. Mykhailo Soroka. Drohobych: Vidrodzhennia, – 2001. – 296 p.). He mentioned Dr. Volodymyr Horbovyi, who defended Stepan Bandera at the trial in 1936, Pavlo Duzhyi, Danylo Shumuk, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj and many other Ukrainians and foreigners with whom he had the opportunity to communicate. He spoke with special love about Rostyslav Dotsenko (he passed through the “BFU case” as a witness). He carried this friendly love in purity through his whole life, for many years having no opportunity to communicate with him. Not for nothing did he name his son, born in 1968, Rostyslav and chose Dotsenko as godfather for his son.
From childhood years he wrote poems, in his native language and in Russian. And yet it was easier for Lytvyn to write in Russian. Basically there, in imprisonment, until 1965, he compiled a book of poems “The Tragic Gallery” – about the fate of his generation, about the victims of terror. The author later dedicated this book to the prominent fighter for Ukraine's rights Levko Lukianenko. I myself heard Lytvyn telling Levko about this through a small window in the Kuchino camp in the Urals – somewhere at the beginning of the 80s. The fate of this book is heavy. The author did not want to publish poems in Russian, so he turned to Mykola Lukash to translate them. Lukash undertook it, but then something hindered him. Meanwhile, almost all copies of the book as a result of searches eventually ended up in KGB safes. But Lytvyn had a phenomenal memory: he carried the entire collection with him in his head, reading quite a lot from it to me. But I, sinful one, did not remember a single poem from his lips. The language barrier played a significant role in this too. “Why don't you write in Ukrainian?” – I asked him. “Well, I write in Ukrainian too, only it comes out worse. Because I fear the Ukrainian language. It seems I don't feel it in all its depth,” – said Lytvyn. This is another moment of that paradoxical, “not his own” fate. Not without reason did Lytvyn ponder deeply on the fate of Gogol, who could neither renounce Ukrainianism nor adhere to Russia. However, Gogol's confusion was alien to Lytvyn, for not everyone so clearly realized himself as a Ukrainian as he did.
Foreign-language creativity of significant cultural figures in the Middle Ages was not a marvel, but a norm. The era of the formation of national cultures on a vernacular basis scattered everyone far and wide for a long time – only now are we beginning to gather what is ours by spirit and blood, and not just by language.
The tragic figure of Gogol is the first in a line of those whom we perceive as not quite ours, precisely because of his foreign language. But if all Latin American literature is written in “not its own” language, then Gogol is a phenomenon of Ukrainian culture. Translate Gogol's works into French or Chinese – and nothing Russian will remain in them. Only the critical view of a Ukrainian on Russian society will be laid bare. Gogol was the last representative of the multilingual Ukrainian Middle Ages. But if only he had been born not before, but after Shevchenko... And Shevchenko himself did not separate Gogol from Ukrainianism at all, as we do, basing ourselves only on the language of works, not on their spirit.
There will be difficulties in perceiving Yuriy Lytvyn's creativity too. In 1989 the author of these lines asked Lytvyn's mother for permission to publish works in the original language on condition that a competition for their best translation would be announced simultaneously. It has already been possible to find the main part of the book “The Tragic Gallery”. The small collection (or selection) of Ukrainian poems which was published abroad, according to the author himself, did not represent his true creative face. (We know only the small book: Yuriy Lytvyn (Portraits of Contemporaries). Compiled by Nadiia Svitlychna. Publication of the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. New York, 1980. 32 p. But there are no poems there).
I remember Lytvyn reading me a beautiful poem about Ivan Mazepa in Ukrainian, other poems.
It must be said that Lytvyn was unlucky: he had the talent to write, but sometimes lacked the knack to bring what was written to fruition. Such people need care... “Maybe 10 percent of what I wrote achieved the goal, and the rest is in KGB safes,” said Lytvyn. “But even if only one percent saw the light – it was still worth writing”.
Lytvyn has prose books “The Workers' Cause” and “Madman”. Obviously, this is dense refined philosophical prose. There is “Poem about Snowdrops”, there is somewhere a selection of Ukrainian poems, which we do not lose hope of finding even apart from KGB safes.
It is difficult for me to characterise Lytvyn's worldview at that time, for this one would need to have at least some of his works. And one must also bear in mind that in recent years he was deprived of the opportunity to write. But even in our cell conversations of 1980 something of Ukrainian freedom-loving spirit, spontaneous rebellion and, I would say, anarcho-syndicalism broke through in him, which Lytvyn did not deny. He considered the state an unconditional evil which needs to be ousted, freeing up more and more space for public self-government.
Once later, in Kuchino, the talk was about the Ukrainian state which failed to establish itself in 1917 – 1920, perhaps because it was... too democratic, that it did not find its own dictator. “And thank God, – said Lytvyn, – that we didn't find our own Stalin or Hitler. For totalitarianism is contrary to the spirit and character of our people. Our defeated people had to endure a foreign yoke – our own yoke would have been a hundred times more shameful”.
Lytvyn painfully and slowly peeled away from Marxism – but carried from there a clear understanding of the interests of the working and exploited people by the new ruling class. The tragedy of socialist doctrine in the practice of the Russian state Lytvyn took so close to heart as to say later that Marx put forward a false idea of a proletarian state. After all, history has given no positive example of such a state. And this manifested itself especially vividly in the Polish events of 1980: the “proletarian state” declared war on the proletariat by introducing martial law. Ultimately, here this state actually lasted constantly from 1917: the state was in a constant state of war with the people. In no so-called proletarian state did the ruling “proletarian” parties dare to surrender to the will of free elections. Lytvyn recalled in this regard the well-known warning of Ivan Franko that people who supposedly with good intentions to make all people happy, but having seized power by violent methods, would concentrate in their hands such unlimited power, uncontrolled by society, that they would never want to voluntarily give it up, whilst society would be so paralysed that it would be unable to fight the usurpers, as a result of which social progress would cease. So Franko predicted bloody Stalinism and the infamous “stagnation” back in 1905... (See his work “What is Progress”).
But let us return to the account of Lytvyn's biographical data. Having been released on June 14, 1965, he went to Moscow, where he managed to break into the Canadian embassy – though leaving his jacket in the hands of a policeman – and told about the situation of political prisoners in concentration camps. Not to risk the text, he memorised it. And he had a phenomenal memory. Embassy staff took him out in a car and enabled him to jump out on the move. He went to his mother in Barakhty. He married Vira Melnychenko. Although family life did not work out, Yuriy greatly cherished his son Rostyslav. But soon he had to separate from his family. He worked, you see, in Vasylkiv at a refrigerator factory, at a pipe factory. He was elected to the trade union leadership, so he argued to the workers that the trade union is not a “drive belt of the party”, but an instrument for protecting the economic interests of the workers. Certainly, this was not the only sin: authorities threatened that if he didn't leave Ukraine, they would imprison him. He had to go to Siberia, to Krasnoyarsk, to the Sayans. When he returned from exile, he found a son already quite grown up, who just couldn't dare to call him dad. Said once: “Father...”. But that's how it went. The father pinned great hopes on Rostyslav, but the fate of political prisoners' children is not easy. The teacher reproached: “You'll be where your father is”. “I will. Shevchenko was there, and Lenin, and many others,” said the boy. The “guardians of order” promised that as soon as he turned 18, they would imprison him. And it happened as promised... Another broken destiny. (Rostyslav Lytvyn, born 19.06.1968, died 6.01.2004 from a stroke at the age of 35.5).
Lytvyn did not live long in Ukraine. On November 14, 1974, he was arrested by the KGB organs and on March 13, 1975, the Kyiv Regional Court chaired by A.F. Tkachova sentenced him under the then popular Article 187-1 (“Slanderous fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system”) to three years of strict regime camps. They incriminated, in particular, literary works, dozens of which are listed in the verdict, as well as “Theses on the State”, “Anarcho-Syndicalist Manifesto”, “Worker's Notes”, where, of course, he slandered Soviet democracy, defamed the internal and foreign policy of the Soviet state, the Soviet working class, and especially the international policy of the CPSU in connection with the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968. At the trial, Lytvyn did not plead guilty and gave no testimony.
He was transported to the Verkhniy Chov camp in the Komi ASSR. At the distribution of “labour force”, the boss asked about his speciality. “Poet,” – answered Lytvyn. – “Poet? I don't need poets. I need concrete workers. Ha-ha-ha! You'll go carry concrete”. In that camp, most prisoners were the same “slanderers” as Lytvyn, or tried under other articles but for political reasons. The regime there was harsh, harsher than in Mordovia, prisoners were deprived of any legal protection. Warders walked with rubber truncheons and used them at their discretion. There Lytvyn fell ill with a stomach ulcer, underwent a serious operation, during which he nearly died. A surgeon saved him, securing permission for his mother to stay near her son for several days. The vision of death – an advancing white glacier, and mother's voice: “You will live... You will live...” – these impressions formed the basis of “Ballad of Death”.
Having been released on November 14, 1977, he settled again in Barakhty, with his mother in the village of Barakhty, in a hut under the hill on Prominska Street. He lived there for only a year and a half, and even then under administrative surveillance, i.e. without the right to appear anywhere outside the village, and had to stay at home from 9 pm to 7 am. He worked as a homeworker – gluing some small boxes for some Vasylkiv factory.
That year a new wave of arrests rose in Ukraine – already against the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. Soon after release, Oksana Yakivna Meshko came to Lytvyn in Barakhty and started a cautious conversation: there is no one to work in the Group. Mykola Rudenko, Oleksa Tykhyi, Mykola Matusevych, Myroslav Marynovych, Levko Lukianenko are arrested... “What is this talk about, Oksana Yakivna?” – and Lytvyn rushed into a new fight... By the way, he always spoke about Oksana Meshko with love: “This is our Joan of Arc”. He kept dreaming, when we would gather as a small family at our Cossack mother's at 16 Verbolozna Street... Now we could gather, but many are missing from the count. For the mistress of the house herself left us on January 2, 1991.
Later, in the Urals, Vasyl Stus related that the founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, General Petro Hryhorenko, highly valued the materials written by Lytvyn. Primarily, probably, his article “Human Rights Movement in Ukraine. Its principles and perspectives”, dated April 1979. (See: Ukrainian Helsinki Group. 1978—1982. Toronto-Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1983.— Pp. 369-378; Yuriy Lytvyn. I love – means I live. Journalism. Compiled by Anatoliy Rusnachenko. – Kyiv: Publishing house “KM Academia”, 1999, pp. 56–62; Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords: Documents and materials. In 4 volumes. Compiled by Y.Yu. Zakharov, V.V. Ovsienko. Kharkiv Human Rights Group. – Kharkiv: Folio, 2001, vol. 3, pp. 177–182 and other publications).
Lytvyn tried to place the Ukrainian human rights movement on a serious national ideological basis, sought its origins in the natural love for freedom of the Ukrainian people, in the prolonged national liberation struggle, in the unique phenomenon – the Cossack republic, which arose even earlier than the French one and produced its constitution of 1710 long before the American one. Lytvyn considered Taras Shevchenko the greatest defender of human and national rights. “For where there is no sacred will – There will never be good for us, Why fool oneself,” – Lytvyn repeated after him. Shevchenko, being still a living bearer of folk morality, having assimilated the Christian worldview and Ukrainian book learning, folk historical memory and Cossack historiography, summed up historical Ukraine-Little Russia and gave birth to our nation anew, set a new rhythm for it, gave it a new ideological basis and set a clear goal: national statehood in the circle of free nations of the world, where alone every person can become free.
He revealed new and new facets of Shevchenko to me. For example, in one of his last poems, “Lykera”, Lytvyn discovered Shevchenko's view consonant with his own on marriage as a union of two equal parties, sanctified by mutual love, and not by society, especially when not by a native, but by the Russian church. (“People will lie, And the Byzantine Sabaoth will deceive. God will not deceive, He will not punish and pardon: We are not His slaves – we are people!”).
During those year and a half of limited freedom Lytvyn underwent two more operations – on the same suffering stomach – and an operation for varicose veins. So he barely shuffled his feet through the world. On June 19, exactly on his son's birthday, he went to the Stuhna river with a relative and an acquaintance. They had a bottle of wine. Here a car with five policemen arrived (Hurskyi Vitalii Antonovych, Tkach Oleksandr Ivanovych, Ustiuzhanyn Valerii Ivanovych, Polihanov Volodymyr Borysovych, Kerner Volodymyr Mykolaiovych. Some of the “victims” still work in Vasylkiv in law enforcement bodies, made a career!). They asked who Lytvyn was, shoved him into the car, not letting him even dress, socks, shoes and clothes flew after him. They brought him, it turns out, to the district department for the extension of the surveillance regime, but threw him into the drunk tank. They demanded he undress for a search. Lytvyn refused. Then they twisted his arm. He called one a fascist. They tied him to a bunk.
– So what, I'm a fascist?
– And a stupid fascist at that.
Blow to the face.
– You're a fool squared.
Blow to the head.
– A fool cubed.
Blow to the stomach.
He couldn't call him a fool to the fourth power, because he lost consciousness. They extorted a 15 ruble fine and released him home. But on August 6, under the sanction of the prosecutor of Vasylkiv district Tverdokhlib, Lytvyn was arrested, accused of committing violent resistance to police officers (as many as five!).
Mother, Nadiia Antonivna, said at the trial: “My son is kind: he would forgive you. But people will not forgive you”.
The “Last Word”, delivered in court, Lytvyn managed to convey, having written it down, to freedom from the Bucha concentration camp near Kyiv; Vasyl Stus and Oksana Meshko passed it abroad, and it is published in the massive tome “Ukrainian Helsinki Group. 1978 – 1982. Documents and Materials”, compiled by Osyp Zinkevych and published by the V. Symonenko Ukrainian Publishing House “Smoloskyp” in Toronto – Baltimore in 1983, pp. 379–395 (As well as in the publications mentioned above).
The reason for the arrest – no doubt – was that Lytvyn did not remain silent about the incident: Radio “Svoboda” told about it, meanwhile Lytvyn was declared a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and such people have no place at liberty. So that there would be fewer of those “political prisoners”, they recalled a pretext and fabricated a “case” about violent resistance to police officers, Art. 188-1, p. 2. Judge A.A. Vasilyeva (how many foreigners in Vasylkiv!) on December 17, 1979, composed a verdict of two pages.
The defender was the currently famous V.V. Medvedchuk – head of the Union of Advocates of Ukraine. (This lawyer, having earned his first million, probably, on the defence of Yuriy Lytvyn and Vasyl Stus (See numerous publications on this by Y. Sverstiuk and D. Chobot), has now become the Head of the Presidential Administration and is not averse to becoming president himself of the people he robbed. Therefore I consider it appropriate to quote here from Yuriy Lytvyn's “Last Word”: ”The provocation committed against me is a conscious crime committed by the organs of the so-called Soviet power not only against me as a person, as a writer, as a member of the Ukrainian Public Group “Helsinki”, but also against all those for whom the ideals of democracy, freedom and humanism are dear and close. The prosecutor built his accusations against Lytvyn not on the ground of objective facts (which did not exist), but on the shaky background of falsifications and direct false testimonies of “victims”, who shamelessly lied in court under the guardianship of “Power” and “Law”. And this is one more proof that the court and prosecutor's office were directly interested parties, i.e. participants in the provocation committed against me. The passivity of my lawyer Medvedchuk in defence is conditioned not by his professional incompetence, but by those instructions he received from above, and subordination: he dares not reveal the mechanism of the provocation committed against me. Lawyers' participation in such cases is reduced to zero – this is one more evidence of the absence of the institution of advocacy in the USSR when considering political cases where “dissident” people are imprisoned. As for the victims, they said more and better about themselves than anyone. Some 60 years ago Dzerzhinsky (M.I. Kalinin. – V.O.) called the militia the mirror of Soviet power. Truly, that is true. Here is the mirror of Vasylkiv for you. The mirror of our power. Shame on everyone present in this hall. This court is one of the most shameful pages in its history of judicial proceedings in Vasylkiv, and it will weigh not only on the conscience of those who judged me but also on your conscience, my fellow citizens.)
“Lytvyn offered active resistance to police officers, involving violence, grabbed Poliganov and Tkach by their clothes, threatened them with reprisals, thereby hindering the fulfilment of their duties in maintaining public order”, “grabbed Poliganov and Tkach by shoulder straps”, “used obscene language”. This is something very autobiographical for Soviet policemen, but completely uncharacteristic of Lytvyn. Similar formulations are in my 1979 verdict. And just as the court did not take into account the testimony of the defence. And the punishment is the same: three years of strict regime camps.
And here he is before me – a thin little man, glowing from within with love and kindness, openly worshipping freedom, boldly entering into polemics with criminal prisoners, with warders, turning back dirty streams of swearing with only his righteousness and sincere surprise that people do not know such obvious things. “And where do you know all this from?” – they ask. – “This is not written on labels of bottles in vodka shops. And the bottle neck is too narrow a window into the world. Don't drink a certain number of bottles of vodka – buy a receiver, listen to Radio ‘Svoboda’ – and you will know too”. – “Well, okay, you are such a humanist, but if you came to power, what would you do with us, criminal prisoners?” – “I will never come to power. I am not a politician, I am a human rights defender, and under any power my most probable place is in prison. For any state is violence against a person, and I will always fight against violence. I do not love politics and politicians”. – “But still, if you were appointed prison warden?” – “Then I would release all prisoners, drive a car of explosives into the prison, blow it up into the air and thereupon resign my powers”. – “So you wouldn't punish even for obvious crimes? You say you are a believer, but even God punishes for sins”. – “The criminal punishes himself, taking sin upon his soul. And God has never beaten anyone with a stick by his own hand. Besides, I don't recognise God as the warden of a prison called hell. It was Moses to whom God whispered in one ear, Satan in the other, and the third he invented himself and mixed it all together. The New Testament is clean of the idea of violence, I worship it. You say you are an unbeliever. But do you believe in Good? Do you believe in Freedom? Do you believe in Love? So, you are also a believer, for God is Goodness, Love, Freedom”.
So for 10 whole days we enjoyed “gifts from the MVD” – our meeting, albeit not in the best conditions, but very timely. For they are taking me to Zhytomyr prison for investigation in the case of my countryman Dmytro Mazur, and Lytvyn, it turns out, is being returned to the camp in Bucha, from where he was taken to Kherson region for the time of the Olympic Games in Kyiv. So that he wouldn't disrupt them. No wonder they didn't take me for transport all summer... In Ukraine an “Olympic cleansing” is underway. Stalin and Kaganovich in their time set out to make Ukraine an “exemplary socialist republic”, but its population did not suit this. So it was decided to exterminate it, replacing it with newly bred homo sovieticus.
Already in closer times Brezhnev and Grishin (First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU) conceived to turn Moscow into an “exemplary communist city”. Shcherbytskyi, aping the trendsetters, promised to do the same with Kyiv (“The Ukrainian intellectual cannot do without a Moscow conductor. He is used to aping, repeating the rear”. Something like this Mykola Khvylovyi wrote in 1928. Sorry that I put Shcherbytskyi among intellectuals...) So the “master” began clearing Kyiv and all Ukraine of “tramps” (homeless), prostitutes, petty thieves and... dissidents. Especially since the 1980 Olympics were approaching, and part of the games was to be in Kyiv. Dmytro Mazur, Petro and Vasyl Sichko, Yaroslav Lesiv, Vasyl Stus, Vasyl Striltsiv fell under this “Olympic” mowing. Those due for release were “spun” into new terms in captivity, without being given a breath; Olha Heiko took only two steps in freedom – from the zone gate to the prisoner van. Mykola
Horbal was arrested anew on the last day of his term. Vyacheslav Chornovil had a “case” fabricated in exile in Yakutia, and I – in a colony in Korosten... There are tales here in Lukyanivka about one of the victims of the “Olympic recruitment”. A warder, shaming a messy female prisoner, sets as an example to her Oksana Yakivna Meshko, then 76, who was kept here for some time in a new block built for women and minors in Brezhnev's times. There are three blocks here: “Katerynka”, “Stolypin” and “Brezhnevka”. “He raised a monument to himself,” – Lytvyn ironicises with Pushkin's words. – “This monument is more lasting than the one in Dniprodzerzhynsk. For whole centuries”. (Shortly before that L.I. Brezhnev, as multiple Hero of the Soviet Union and Socialist Labour, unveiled a monument to himself in his homeland).
While still sitting in Bucha, near Kyiv, Lytvyn rewrote a sizeable essay begun back in Barakhty, the title of which he took from Dostoevsky: “If there is no God – everything is permitted”. The author imaginatively takes “our dear Leonid Ilyich” by the hand and leads him through arrest, investigation, transfers, through camps, prisons, “rooster coops” [cells for the lowest caste of prisoners], punishment cells, called to direct the prisoner “on the path of correction”... They don't correct, but cripple people completely here, drown them in a swamp of swearing, violence, rape, total corruption! Lytvyn said he sent that work by secret ways to freedom, but does not know if it reached the goal. “However, it's not so important,” – he believed. – “The main thing is that I fulfilled my moral duty to this absolutely rightless, suffering stratum of our people – the prisoners”. One version of the beginning of this essay did reach the goal and was published in the volume “Ukrainian Helsinki Group”, pp. 396–404 (as well as in the editions mentioned above).
Lytvyn and I wrote statements in Lukyanivka regarding “Olympic arrests” and regarding the fact that the leader of French communists Georges Marchais, having returned from Moscow, set about organising a Helsinki group in France under his wise leadership. Obviously, in Moscow he was taught to compromise the Helsinki movement, which had already become international, in this way. Lytvyn believed that this human rights movement in no case can be political, that no member of any political party can be a member of any Helsinki group, for he will conduct his party policy in it.
Lytvyn was a dreamer. He imagined the Ukrainian human rights movement as a worthy link of the world one, and it should be represented by the most honest, worthy, simply morally impeccable people. The intellectual level of the movement must be high. Every declared member of the Group must be an attractive star, a model for the surroundings. Under a totalitarian regime, when a declared member of the Group could not last in freedom even for a few months, one should not strive for large numbers. On the surface it is enough to have a small group, but which would rely on a wide circle of human rights defenders and freethinkers. “Dissidence” in reality does not boil down among us to “wretched renegades”. “Dissidents” make up the vast majority of the population among us, for whomever you speak to – almost everyone is dissatisfied with these or those actions of the ruling apparatus. It would be more correct to say that the ideological apparatus are “dissidents”, for they are in the minority.
By the way, it was Lytvyn who first clearly said that I was accepted as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group “retroactively”. From November 18, when O.Y. Meshko and Olha Babych came to me in the village. (In O.Y. Meshko's postcard there was only a hint: “You are in our circle.”).
Having heard Lytvyn's views on what a human rights defender should be, I, remembering that I had done almost nothing for human rights, failed even to protect myself from calamity, felt as if I had jumped up, grabbed the rung where human rights defence begins, and hang there, unable to pull myself higher. But since such honour fell to me, I must be worthy. Although I had a firm intention not to participate in Mazur's “case”, nor in my new one, Lytvyn, thanks to him, greatly supported my spirit. I moved to the new contest in high spirits, with a clear head and without fear. However, everyone is afraid, and who is not afraid, let him not lie... Courage consists in how you can overcome your fear. I thank God that this time He sent me Lytvyn and through him gave me strength to endure to the end and save my soul from deceitful repentance, as happened to me during the 1973 investigation, when KGB investigator of the Ukrainian SSR Mykola Pavlovych Tsimokh began to blackmail me with a psychiatric hospital and I had to give in bit by bit and even “pleaded guilty” in court. Have I atoned for that sin in 13.5 years of imprisonment? I don't know, maybe I'm due another million years of purgatory for it...
At that time Polish events were brewing, and Lytvyn diligently fished out meagre information about them from accidental newspapers. He admired “Solidarity”. Trade unions free from party and state dictate showed the world a model of constructive struggle for workers' interests, and most importantly – they finally debunked the false idea of a “proletarian state” under the leadership of a totalitarian party. Lytvyn dreamed of times when our Ukrainian proletariat would become as highly conscious as the Polish one. “Alas,” – I noted. – “Progressive ideas in conditions of totalitarianism, although they can originate in bright heads of representatives of subject nations, their implementation must begin precisely from the metropolis – we shouldn't even think about primacy”. But time, as we see now, showed that this is not always so: the Baltic countries led in the collapse of the “evil empire”, and it suffered final collapse when Ukraine proclaimed independence and confirmed this by referendum on December 1, 1991. True, this happened in conditions of Gorbachev's liberalisation, not Brezhnev's totalitarianism.
Lytvyn had an original view for that time on the origins of European totalitarianism of the first half of the 20th century. He considered the Bolshevik party the first totalitarian type party: the emergence and coming to power of similar parties in Western Europe was a reaction to Russian totalitarianism. Hitler would not have won the 1933 elections if Germans hadn't seen in Russia's example what could be expected from communists. (Later I read the same in “Novyi Mir”, 1, 1981 p. 205).
I already mentioned Lytvyn's phenomenal memory. Indeed, which poet did he not read to me in those 10 days: Shakespeare, Shevchenko, Hugo, Tagore, Franko, Blok, Vinhranovskyi... A whole encyclopedia of world poetry fit in his head, at which I marvelled. “It's not difficult,” – said Lytvyn, – one just needs to often 'scroll' poems in one's head, rather than thinking about trifles. Believe me, it's easier to live in the world with such baggage”. He read me several excerpts from Lina Kostenko's then fresh novel “Marusia Churai”, and I learned them too. Lytvyn considered this work worthy of the Nobel Prize and cherished the thought that the Helsinki Group should nominate it. But at that time we were all in prison, who hadn't gone abroad.
Misfortune helped keep us together in the transit cell for 10 whole days: they gave some rotten fish, prisoners got poisoned, so a “Quarantine” sign was hung on the cell and no one was taken from there for transport. But everything comes to an end: they bundled me off further, to Zhytomyr, and Lytvyn – to Bucha near Kyiv.
We met again a year and a half later, in the Urals, in the strict regime camp VS-389/36, in the village of Kuchino, Chusovoy district, Perm region. I arrived there on December 2, 1981, and Lytvyn around May 1982. Like all decent people, we brought a fresh “tenner” of imprisonment term and a “fiver” of exile, and were titled “especially dangerous state criminals”, “especially dangerous recidivists”. So they dressed us in the latest fashion – in stripes. I say “latest fashion”, because after it there is only perhaps a “wooden coat” [coffin].
My new term absorbed 8 months of unserved “three-year term”, while Lytvyn's absorbed only 1 month and 12 days, because his new term was counted from the day of trial – June 24, 1982. The last word, according to his mother, he was not allowed to say, so he wrote it.
So Lytvyn was supposed to be here until June 24, 1992, plus in exile – until 1997. It turns out, in total he was sentenced to 43 years of imprisonment, not counting a year and a half of administrative surveillance. He served 20, and lived only 49. What a terrible criminal one must be to deserve such punishment! Yet Lytvyn sat and died for literary works full of preaching non-violence and humanism, for human rights activities, for a critical way of thinking... Wonderland! Land of unlimited possibilities...
Lytvyn told little about his “case”, but it was clear anyway that all involved in the Helsinki movement must be here. From the verdict we now know that these were his “anti-Soviet” and “slanderous” works: a letter written in 1968 “To fighters for freedom and independence of Czechoslovakia” and two “Open letters...” written 10 years later, “Word about repentant sinners” (regarding repentant statements of I. Dziuba, V. Zakharchenko, H. Snehiriov), “Obituary”, letter to Mrs Carter, several versions of the work “Soviet State and Soviet Working Class” and the most important – “Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, its Principles and Perspectives”, which was published in the journal “Suchasnist” No. 10, 1979, broadcast on Radio “Svoboda”. Lytvyn was irrepressible in captivity too: he tried to transmit from criminal zones “Second Open Letter to members of AFL-CIO and all workers of USA”, greetings to Polish “Solidarity”, treatise “If there is no God – everything is permitted”. These things were “handed over” by inmates whom he asked to take them to freedom and pass to O.Y. Meshko or someone else. However, the beginning of the text “If there is no God...” did slip out to freedom.
They also incriminated oral statements witnessed by criminal prisoners, with all sorts of distortions and conjectures fabricated by investigators. I remember Lytvyn recalling a conversation with investigators about a poem dedicated to the American people, whose sons were first to step on the Moon. Roughly so: “Through barbed wire and bars I give you my hand, working America”. – “So you shake hands with our enemies?” – “Yes, I give a hand to working America, and whom do you kiss?” (Just recently, on June 18, 1979, Brezhnev smacked a kiss with Carter, signing the treaty on strategic arms limitation – SALT-2).
They blackmailed Lytvyn during the investigation with psychiatric hospitals, took him to the infamous 13th department of Kyiv's “Pavlivka”, run by Natalka Maksymivna Vynarska. The expertise was conducted by psychiatrist, doctor of medicine Lifshits, known to all criminal Ukraine. He interrogated Lytvyn: “Why do you blame everything on the party? What does the party have to do with it, if in the next ward lies a man who, excuse me, raped a goat?” – “And where did he do it, on Red Square?” – “No, in a shed. And even locked himself in. Children saw”. – “So, he was ashamed before people? And if he were a believer, and knew that God is all-seeing, would he have done such a thing? So tell me, who threw crosses down from churches, wasn't it your party?”
I happened to be with Lytvyn in Kuchino in one cell for several months – from May 1982 to February 1983. I remember, they took me from him shortly before the Shevchenko holiday, which I greatly regretted, because Yuriy Lytvyn, Mykhailo Horyn, Ivan Kandyba, Vasyl Kurylo and Volodymyr Ostapenko held extremely interesting Shevchenko readings in their 17th “house”, which they remembered for a long time afterwards. (Oleksa Tykhyi, Akper Kerimov and Borys Tytarenko were also with us in that cell for some time).
“New thinking” is now on everyone's lips, but Lytvyn thought in a new way back in those dark times when Andropov put the whole world on the brink of nuclear war, not realizing that the force concentrated in the atomic bomb had become absurd: it cannot be used, because you yourself will perish.
Lytvyn admired the activities of the Club of Rome and saw in it sprouts of a new consciousness of mankind, built on non-violence, on love, mutual tolerance. He found ideas consonant with his soul in Christianity, in Buddhism, in our humanitarian human rights defence. So when the Moscow Helsinki Group disbanded itself (MHG created 12.05 1976, monitored observance in USSR of humanitarian articles of CSCE Final Act. Leader Yuriy Orlov, Group members Alexander Turchin, Petro Hryhorenko, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Vladimir Bukovsky, Malva Landa, Tatyana Velikanova etc. In September 1982 Elena Bonner announced cessation of Group's work. Restored 28.07.1989, head – L. Alexeyeva), and all members of the Ukrainian one were imprisoned and the question of the very existence of our Group arose, Lytvyn desperately campaigned against self-dissolution, although, strictly speaking, none of us thought of doing so. On the contrary, precisely in connection with this Estonian Mart Niklus and Lithuanian Viktoras Petkus joined us then. KGB officers threatened Lytvyn and Mykhailo Horyn with a new “case”: allegedly they are orally developing a new programme of the Helsinki Group.
I believe that Mykhailo Horyn, with whom Lytvyn formed a great friendship of like-minded people, will tell about this period of Yuriy Lytvyn's life much better than I. There, in captivity, Mykhailo wrote brilliant psychological essays about Yuriy Lytvyn, Oleksa Tykhyi and Valerii Marchenko. having read pieces of them, I was amazed how deeply this man can penetrate into the world of other people: I also sat in the same cell with Yuriy and Oleksa, but did not notice what Horyn did. Of course, all Horyn's writings were confiscated during searches and destroyed. How many times I reminded him already in freedom to try to write anew, for who will testify about these people if not we, – no, he says, I won't write like that anymore: forgotten details, don't have time and won't wind up the spring of my emotions like that again. My heart won't stand it... After a heart attack I'm even afraid to approach Horyn with this. (And here's a joy: Mykhailo Horyn did find among his surviving notebooks pieces of the sketch about Yu. Lytvyn and published them in the newspaper of the Ukrainian Republican Party “Samostiyna Ukraina” No. 23, June 18 – 24, 1994. It will also be published in M. Horyn's book, which I am helping him prepare).
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