Danylo Shumuk: a prisoner for 42 years (10/19/97)

Danylo Shumuk: a prisoner for 42 years

Danylo Shumuk was born in Boremschyna, Volodymyr Volynskyi county, Volyn, on December 30, 1914. In 1933, he was arrested by Polish police four times and held for short terms, the longest being two months. On January 19, 1934, he was arrested by Polish authorities and held in jail in Kovel until he was sentenced on May 25, 1935, to eight years' imprisonment for his role in the underground Communist Party of Western Ukraine and taken to a prison in Lomzha.

Under an amnesty for political prisoners proclaimed by the Polish government in 1938, Mr. Shumuk's sentence was reduced by a third. In the spring of the following year, he was transferred to a jail in Bialystok, and on May 24, 1939, he was released.

Mr. Shumuk was conscripted into a Red Army penal battalion in May 1941, then captured by the German invading force soon after and spent several months in a concentration camp for Soviet prisoners of war, in Khorol, near Poltava.

Managing to escape, Mr. Shumuk returned to Volyn and joined the anti-Soviet, anti-Nazi Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1943.

On February 23, 1945, he was captured by MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry) troops in the village of Rozkopantsi, near Bohuslav in the Kyiv Oblast, brought to Rivne and sentenced to death by a secret military court on April 16. After 47 nights on death row, his sentence was commuted to 20 years' imprisonment in the hard labor camps in Norilsk, Kalarhoni, Taishet, Bratsk and other Siberian locales. After participating in a camp uprising in 1953, he was taken to the notorious Vladimir Prison near Moscow, interrogated and held there for a year and a half.

As a result of the Khrushchev thaw, his case was reviewed, and on August 17, 1956, Mr. Shumuk was freed before completing his term. He returned to Ukraine, however, he was rearrested on November 21, 1957, in Slavianka, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, for refusing to become a KGB informer. He was charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and on May 5, 1958, sentenced to 10 years in labor camps in Siberia.

The veteran zek served his second Soviet term in Vorkuta, then in various locations in the Irkutsk Oblast, then in Mordovian camps No. 7, 1 and 11.

Thanks to campaigns on his behalf by Amnesty International and Ukrainian associations in the West, he was released on November 21, 1967. Mr. Shumuk returned to Ukraine and lived in Bohuslav and Kyiv.

On January 12, 1972, at the outset of the Brezhnev regime's so-called "second wave" of arrests, he was arrested for writing his memoirs, and on July 7, having been taken to Lviv, was sentenced to 10 years in strict-regime camps in the Mordovia and Perm oblasts, followed by five years' exile in Kazakstan.

As his latest term began, Mr. Shumuk renounced his Soviet citizenship and demanded that he be recognized as a political prisoner. He also participated in various prisoners' strikes and other political protests. In 1979, he co-founded a Helsinki monitoring group in the Perm camp and joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1982, he began his exile in the village of Karatobe, Ural Oblast, in Kazakhstan.

Throughout these years, Mr. Shumuk demanded the right to join his relatives in Canada. Thanks to international campaigns on his behalf and to appeals made by the Canadian government to the Kremlin, Mr. Shumuk was finally allowed to emigrate in April 1987 after the completion of his term of exile.

Mr. Shumuk arrived in Calgary, Alberta, accompanied by Canada's ambassador to the USSR, on May 23, 1987.

Arithmetic of repression

Danylo Shumuk was imprisoned by Polish authorities for a total of five years, six months. He was held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis for at least two months. Mr. Shumuk was then incarcerated by the Soviets for 36 years, five months and 25 days. All told, he spent 42 years, one month and 25 days of his life in prisons, concentration camps or exile.

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