1981: an overview: Dissent in Ukraine (12/27/81)

1981: an overview

Dissent in Ukraine

November 9, 1981, was the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords in Kiev by 10 Ukrainian human-rights activists in response to the previous year's signing of the Helsinki Accords.

And just as the Kiev group's Memorandum No. 1 made clear - "The struggle for human rights will not cease until these rights become the everyday standard in social life" - rights activists continued to speak out in 1981. And the Soviets responded with their usual severity, perhaps for fear that the Polish contagion would spread to neighboring Ukraine.

Perhaps most poignant was the recently reported story of four Kiev residents in their 20s who were arrested and sentenced in late June for nothing more then posting leaflets urging their countrymen to observe January 12 as the Day of Solidarity with Ukrainian Political Prisoners. The four - Serhiy Naboka, Leonid Miliavsky, Inna Cherniavska and Larysa Lokhvytska - were sentenced to three years each in Soviet prison camps for what Soviet justice calls "slander of the Soviet state." Among the other charges brought against them were: writing "slanderous" articles and poetry, orally praising the Solidarity trade union, holding a negative opinion of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and disseminating various writings.

Events in Poland did appear to have an affect on Ukraine.

Several workers' strikes - in protest to wages and working conditions - were reported at manufacturing plants in Ukraine, including a motorcycle plant and a concrete factory. The consumers also made their displeasure known, according to recent reports of disturbances prompted by food and consumer-goods shortages in the Ivano-Frankivske and Prypiat areas.

And a Ukrainian worker from Kiev imprisoned for the ever-popular crime of "slander," in a November 4, 1980, letter that reached the West in the summer of 1981, actually urged the establishment of independent labor unions in the USSR, while pointing to the Polish experience.

Repressions of Ukrainians continued across the board and in various forms. Among the more prominent cases were the following:

Seventy-six-year-old Oksana Meshko, the acting chairman of the already decimated Ukrainian Helsinki Group was sentenced on January 6 to six-months' imprisonment and five years' exile on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

Twenty-year-old former student (he had been expelled from the university because of his father Petro's and brother Vasyl's rights activities) Volodymyr Sichko was sentenced on January 9 to three years' imprisonment. His father and brother, both Kiev group members, were already serving three-year terms.

The father of Volodymyr Ivasiuk, the young Ukrainian composer who was found murdered in 1979, was assaulted in the spring by the usual "unknown hooligans as he attempted to visit his son's grave.

Ivan Kandyba, who was the only Ukrainian Helsinki Group member remaining free, was sentenced on July 24 to 10 years of imprisonment and five years of exile.

Dr. Mykola Plakhotniuk, a longtime rights activist, was assaulted by hooligans and later arrested by authorities on September 6.

On September 11, Raisa Rudenko, wife of the imprisoned founding member and first chairman of the Kiev group Mykola Rudenko, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and five years' exile for "disseminating anti-Soviet materials." She had been reported missing since April 15, and it was not until July 30 that it was learned that she had in fact been arrested on April 15.

Yuriy Shukhevych, the eternal prisoner, is now going into his 30th year as a Soviet political prisoner. His crime: refusing to renounce his father Roman Shukhevych (Taras Chuprynka), commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

Meanwhile, in the United States, on February 3, the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe nominated four Soviet political prisoners for the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize: Ukrainian Mykola Rudenko, Russian Yuriy Orlov, Jew Anatoly Shcharansky and Lithuanian Victoras Petkus.

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