The Seventies: Soviet repressions and response (10/10/93)

ANNIVERSARY REVIEW

The Seventies: Soviet repressions and response

The 1970s opened with The Ukrainian Weekly still running as a Saturday four-page supplement, and it reflected a community whose reach and reserves were growing, and which was gaining both acceptance and a feeling of belonging throughout North America.

In January 1970, the lead stories concerned the appointment of the first Ukrainian as a direct representative of the Queen in Canada (Stephen Worobetz was made lieutenant governor of Saskatchewan), and UNA Supreme President John Lesawyer, acting as the vice-president of the United Ukrainian American Relief Commission (UUARC), who traveled to Banja Luka, Yugoslavia, to coordinate assistance being sent to an earthquake-stricken zone.

In a show of flexibility and resourcefulness, the Secretariat of the WCFU was proving that it truly was an international body by moving, first to New York, and then to Belgium, in the first few years of the decade.

In August 1970, the World Congress of Ukrainian Students (CeSUS) was held, about which The Weekly wrote: "a new type of Ukrainian student was emerging - one concerned more with the survival of Ukrainians as ethnic minorities in the countries in which they reside, than with the possibility of revolution in the Soviet Union."

Canada was facing fragmentation as a country, and to counterbalance increasing polarization along French/English lines, a policy of "multiculturalism" was gradually adopted by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, with its commitment to provide all ethnic groups in Canada an opportunity to attain the prominence afforded to the English- and French-speaking "founding nations."

Among those who crafted the policy was a Ukrainian, Sen. Paul Yuzyk of Saskatchewan, whose position papers on the topic appeared as columns and serials in The Weekly in 1970-1975.

The Weekly also provided a chronicle of the construction of the UNA building in Jersey City, which president Joseph Lesawyer referred to as "the largest Ukrainian edifice in the free world," as it rose on the western bank of the Hudson River.

At least equal in symbolic value as a barometer of Ukrainian presence in the U.S. and Canada, were the new academic institutions. On January 19, 1973, three chairs were officially established at Harvard University: one each in history, literature and language. Prof. Omeljan Pritsak assumed the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Chair in Ukrainian History. On June 18, 1976, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies was established at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, with Manoly Lupul serving as the institute's first director into the 1980s.

As a measure of growing Ukrainian influence in Canada, when Prime Minister Trudeau announced the formal adoption of multiculturalism as government policy, he did so at the 10th national conference of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee in Winnipeg, in October, 1971.

To be sure, Mr. Trudeau was seeking to allay outrage he aroused by comparing the dissidents in Ukraine to the separatist terrorists of the Front de Liberation du Quebec, and he initially refused to agree to bring up the suffering of Valentyn Moroz in his talks with Soviet officials.

As this anecdote suggests, despite the successes listed above, in the early 1970s, many of the pages of The Weekly could hardly have been more bleak. They were dominated by news of interrogations, intimidation, beatings, arrests, incarcerations, refused medical treatments, torture in psychiatric institutions, hunger strikes, lynchings of priests, more beatings, more arrests, extended terms, exile.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, members of The Weekly's editorial board translated samvydav (samizdat, self-published) documents. The Weekly provided excerpts from issues of the Chronicle of Current Events and the Ukrainian Herald, appeals to Soviet and Western government leaders, to U.N. officials from individual activists in the USSR and associations such as the Helsinki Monitoring Group, closing statements at trials, and details of matters ranging from the murder of Alla Horska and her father-in-law (September 1971) to the framing of Mykola Horbal with a false rape charge (August 1980).

The diaspora was drawn into the persecutions when Yaroslav Dobosh, a Ukrainian Youth Association (SUM) activist from Belgium was arrested by Soviet border guards in January 1972 and held for five months, during which a confession was extracted from him. Since he had met with members of the dissident movement and was carrying samvydav, his arrest was used as a pretext to launch what became known as "the 1972 wave" of repressions.

Without a doubt, however, the single most dominant story carried by The Weekly in the 1970s was the international effort to free Valentyn Moroz and Leonid Plyushch. As the headline to a Weekly-reprinted Montreal Gazette article put it: "Moroz: Soviet Political Captive No. 1."

Mr. Plyushch was plunged into hell when incarcerated at the Dnipropetrovske psychiatric institution in early 1973, but his wife Tatiana put him in the headlines and made the French Communist Party abandon its Stalinist line. Mr. Moroz announced a hunger strike on July 1, 1974. In the course of the next 145 days, thanks to his wife, a galvanized global student movement and Academician Andrei Sakharov, world attention was riveted on Vladimir Prison, where the historian "refused to voluntarily accept food."

Having faced down KGB Director Yuri Andropov and Dr. Snezhnevsky of the Serbsky Institute, respectively. Mr. Moroz was moved to a camp in Mordovia, and Mr. Pliushch arrived in Vienna to meet his wife and two sons. Leonid Pliushch had become the first Ukrainian political dissident to be released to the West since Patriarch Josyf Slipyj.

Things were not much more quiet on the religious front. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church suffered a great loss with the passing of Metropolitan John Theodorovych in June 1971. That year, Cardinal and Archbishop Major Josyf Slipyj was twice passed over by Pope Paul VI in appointments of Auxiliary Bishop John Stock and Bishop Basil Losten to the Philadelphia diocese. This provoked turbulent protests among the laity.

In October 1971, Cardinal Slipyj defiantly affirmed the rights of the Ukrainian Catholic Church as a particular (Pomisna) Church and held a synod with 19 bishops. That month, in a still bolder move, the Patriarch-designate dramatically denounced the Vatican's diplomatic attempts to conciliate with Moscow at the World Synod of Bishops in Rome.

The Vatican retaliated by forbidding banning the Cardinal from travel to Canada, claiming that the 1963 agreement securing his release included a clause requesting that he be restrained from "political activity."

On a positive note, in October 1975, the three Orthodox Churches of the Ukrainian diaspora united on the eve of the second WCFU congress, and Metropolitan Mstyslav Skrypnyk became the leader of Ukrainian Orthodox faithful in the diaspora.

Yet another Vatican travel ban was imposed on Cardinal Slipyj in the summer of 1976, preventing him from attending the World Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia, provoking demonstrations by the laity. In December 1976, Pope Paul VI bluntly refused to recognize the head of the Ukrainian Catholics as a patriarch because this would lead to "extended uneasiness of certain Ukrainian communities and their pastors." This effectively froze the issue until the accession of Pope John Paul II.

In the issue July 4, 1976 issue, The Weekly celebrated the Bicentennial of the U.S. by expanding to a 16-page tabloid format, and the price matched the skyrocketing inflation of the times by rising from 20 to 25 cents. In 1980, the newspaper's administrative autonomy, enjoyed in the 1930s-1940s, was restored. Once again, subscribers had to sign up for the Ukrainian daily Svoboda and the English-language Ukrainian Weekly separately.

In the later 1970s, the Soviet apparat grew tired of Valentyn Moroz in its camps, and published a provocation that said "if the foreign bourgeois nationalists still want him, they can have him." The flagging movement seeking Mr. Moroz's release was given a boost by The Weekly's campaign, driven by the slogan "Yes, we want him."

On April 27, 1979, UNA Supreme President John Flis received a fateful call from the U.S. State Department. Valentyn Moroz was to be released, along with Mark Dimshyts, Aleksandr Ginsburg, Edvard Kuznetsov and Baptist Pastor Georgi Vins. As recounted in a four-part series titled "11 Days with Valentyn Moroz," written by Mr. Flis, in the ensuing controversial weeks, Mr. Moroz made a controversial choice to join a particular political camp, bringing to the fore divisions that had been growing in the diaspora.

- Andrij Wynnyckyj

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