EDITORIAL: The Helsinki movement lives on (11/09/86)

10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE UKRAINIAN HELSINKI GROUP

EDITORIAL

The Helsinki movement lives on

Ten years ago on November 9, a group of 10 Ukrainians in Kiev announced the formation of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. The group was modeled on the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group established six months earlier, on May 12. Like the Moscow Group and other Helsinki groups that were to follow in other parts of Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was an open association dedicated to non-violent struggle for the human-rights commitments voluntarily undertaken by the USSR through various international covenants, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the newly concluded Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

All these groups attempted to function legally, that is, within the bounds of the Soviet Constitution. However, when the establishment of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was announced, the members of the Moscow Group stated that under the conditions then existing in Ukraine, the formation of the Ukrainian group was an act of great courage. In Ukraine the repression of national rights was harsher than in any other republic of the Soviet Union, and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group's program focused on the Ukrainian national question as an integral component of human-rights issues.

The Helsinki monitors in Ukraine represented a broad spectrum. They were lawyers and teachers, writers and a microbiologist, an engineer and a historian. They came from several generations of the Ukrainian national movement. Oksana Meshko and Oleksander Berdnyk were prisoners of the Stalinist camps, Ivan Kandyba and Lev Lukianenko had been active in the Ukrainian Peasants and Workers' Union of the late 1950s and early 1960s; Oleksiy Tykhy and Nina Strokata were involved in the intellectuals' movement of the 1960s. Mykola Rudenko was a member in the early 1970s of the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International, while Petro Grigorenko, a Red Army major-general, had been a founder of the Union of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism and had become a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Myroslav Marynovych and Mykola Matusevych were the neophytes - they were the only two who had not been imprisoned before joining the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

In its first documented report on conditions in Ukraine, Memorandum No. 1, the group spoke of the physical and spiritual genocide of the Ukrainian nation under the Soviet regime. The memorandum covered human-rights violations and the severity of the sentences handed down to rights activists in Ukraine; 75 political prisoners were listed according to their place of confinement. And yet, despite all the evidence pointing to the brutality of the Soviet system, the document exuded an optimism based on the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Accords "... our call is echoed in the Declaration of Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords, which were ratified also by the Soviet government," it noted. "And if the world community does not lessen its moral support, if the press and radio of Western countries focus more attention on the struggle for human rights in the USSR, then the coming decade will become a period of great democratic changes in our country."

New members joined the group in 1977 and, that same year, the Ukrainian Helsinki monitors boldly attempted to gain official government recognition of their group.

That was not to be, however. The crackdown on the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was swift and sure. Between 1977 and 1979, the leading members were arrested and sentenced to long terms. In 1980, on the eve of the Olympics in the USSR and the Madrid follow-up conference on the Helsinki Accords, nearly all the remaining members were dealt with. In 1981, Kandyba, the last free member of the group, also was arrested.

Meanwhile, in 1979, a new group of rights activists had joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. These were political prisoners and persons serving terms of internal exile. For them to join was like an act of suicide.

And beyond the borders of Ukraine, outside the Soviet Union, the group's External Representation was formed with authorization from the repressed parent body. Composed of Leonid Plyushch, a longtime political prisoner and rights activist, and Ukrainian Helsinki Group members who had been forced to emigrate, the External Representation carried on the work.

In the USSR, at the same time, many Helsinki monitors and other human rights activists were being subjected to a new modus operandi: additional sentences were tacked on to their terms even before they had completed the sentences they were serving. There appeared to be little hope for the Ukrainian cause.

Back in Ukraine, there were reports that new members had actually joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group but that their names were never made public because of certain reprisals.

The Ukrainian Helsinki movement, which was itself a continuation of the Ukrainian national movement, continues to this day. Its most recent manifestation is the Initiative Group for the Defense of the Rights of Believers and the Church, formed in 1982 by five Ukrainian Catholic activists, including Yosyp Terelia. In its documents, this group has referred to itself as a Helsinki monitoring group. Still other groups, operating clandestinely, have continued the tradition of Ukrainian resistance to the Soviet authorities. Among the ones known to us in the West are the Ukrainian National Front and the Ukrainian Patriotic Movement.

What all of the above demonstrates is that the Ukrainian national movement lives on. It may assume various forms at various times but it will persist because, as the Ukrainian Helsinki Group stated unequivocally in Memorandum No. 1: "...the struggle for human rights will not cease until these rights become the everyday standard in social life."

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