Turning the pages back... June 13, 1982 (06/13/04)

Turning the pages back...

June 13, 1982

Twenty-two years ago to the day, The Ukrainian Weekly reported on an extraordinary event that took place in Washington on the initiative of President Ronald Reagan. Following are excerpts from that story.

During his May 11 luncheon for eight Soviet émigrés and exiles, the president was visibly moved by the tragic stories recalled by some of his guests, reported syndicated columnists Evans and Novak.

According to their report, Gen. Petro Grigorenko, a founding member of the Kiev and Moscow groups to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords on human rights who was exiled to the West in 1978, struggled to suppress tears as he described Ukrainian resistance to Soviet dominance in the days after World War II. Ukrainian nationalists, he said, served long years in jail for offenses against the Soviet state, then were "dragged out and shot" as the jail sentences neared their end.

Aishe Seitmuratova, a Crimean Tatar and the only Moslem at the table, told Mr. Reagan how her family, accused by Stalin of collaborating with the Germans, was put on a train in 1944 and dumped in the deserts of Kazakstan, several thousand miles to the east. She was 6 years old. The railroad car, she told the president, had dead bodies in it that remained there throughout the journey into exile.

According to Evans and Novak, "the president kept letting his emotions show as he heard the personal histories, one by one, of his guests." ... At one point, he commented that "everything (in the Soviet Union) is as it was under a system of power and economy created by Stalin."

In addition to Gen. Grigorenko and Ms. Seitmuratova, the 75-minute luncheon was attended by former political prisoner Pavel Litvinov; Ludmilla Alekseeva, 55, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group as well as Mark Azbel, Valeriy Chalidze, Andrei Siniavsky and the Rev. Georgi Vins Soviet Baptist leader. ...

Source: "Reagan lunches with ex-dissidents," The Ukrainian Weekly, June 13, 1982, Vol. L, No. 24.

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