Trials of Recent Years: the UNF case, 1967 (17.7)

<<No 17 : 31 December 1970>>

Perhaps the Ukrainian KGB’s most important case in 1967 [note 1] was that of the “Ukrainian National Front” (UNF).

In July 1966 the Ivano-Frankovsk Region KGB arrested miner Nikolai Kachur from Donetsk on a charge of circulating the illegal journal Liberty and the Motherland (the UNF journal).

In March 1967 the following were arrested:

Dmitry Nikolayevich KVETSKO (b. 1935), a graduate of the History Faculty of Lvov University, he was a school-teacher of history;
Zinovy Mikhailovich KRASIVSKY (b. 1930), a writer, author of Baida, a historical novel about Dmitry Vishnevetsky, the 16th-century founder of the Zaporozhskaya Sech [a Cossack fortress-community on the River Dnieper]. The novel was prepared for the press under the editorship of Ukrainian writer M. Stelmakh, but did not appear owing to the arrest of its author.
In 1947, in one of the deportations, Krasivsky and his family were exiled from the Western Ukraine, but he escaped on his way to exile and then spent five years in a camp, after which he lived in Karaganda, where a subsidence in a mine made him a second-category invalid. Before his arrest he was living in the town of Morshin (Lvov Region);
Mikhail Dmitriyevich DYAK (b. 1935), police lieutenant and divisional police-chief of the Dolinsky district (Ivano-Frankovsk Region);
Vasily Ivanovich KULYNIN (b. 1943), after army service worked as a factory lathe operator in the town of Stary (Lvov Region);
Yaroslav Vasilevich LESIV (b. 1945), a school-teacher of physical culture in central Ukraine (Kirovograd Region);
Grigory Prokopovich, a history teacher;
Ivan Gubka, a Lvov engineer;
Miroslav Melen, a choir-director in Morshin. The latter three, and Kachur, are about 40. All four had been previously convicted for aiding the nationalist resistance movement.

The investigation was conducted by Lieutenant-Colonel Dolgikh, head of the Ivano-Frankovsk KGB investigations division.

TRIALS

In September 1967 the Lvov Region Court sentenced Prokopovich, Gubka and Melen to six years of corrective-labour camps plus five years’ exile under Article 62-1 (Ukraine SSR Criminal Code = Article 70 of RSFSR Code).

In October 1967 the Ivano-Frankovsk Region Court sentenced Kachur to five years of corrective-labour camps. In 1969, for his assistance in the investigation, he was released before the expiry of his sentence. All the accused were charged with the circulating of the journal Liberty and the Motherland and other UNF material.

FIVE RINGLEADERS ON TRIAL

In the second half of November 1967 an assizes session of the Ukrainian Supreme Court, under the chairmanship of Stolyarchuk, tried the five ring-leaders in Ivano-Frankovsk.

Chumak, Deputy Procurator of the Ivano-Frankovsk Region, led the prosecution on charges under Article 56 (“Betrayal of the Motherland” = Article 64 of RSFSR Code) and Article 64 (“Creation of an Organisation” = Article 72 of RSFSR Code).

The defence attorneys, selected by the investigating authorities, hardly disagreed with the prosecutor.

The accused were charged in connection with the journal Liberty and the Motherland, of which about fifteen issues appeared between 1964 and 1966; not all of them figured in the investigation.

The first issue of the journal included the programme “The demands of the UNF”. Issue No. 2 outlined “The tactics of the UNF”, in which all possible emphasis is laid on propaganda — there is not a word about terrorism or any seizure of power, armed or otherwise.

Three issues include verse by Krasivsky. The principle publicist and theoretician, of the journal and the group, was Dmitry Kvetsko.

Besides the journal the charges also included:

Open Letters;
a “Memorandum from the UNF to the 23rd CPSU Congress”, sent in March 1966 to the Party leaders and to the central Soviet press; and
a “Statement by the UNF” regarding the press-conference of summer or autumn 1966 [note 2] given in Kiev by S. Dzhugalo, a former member of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The statement was sent to Ukrainian Communist Party leaders Shelest, Kirichenko and others.

The accused were charged with circulating OUN pamphlets and leaflets dating from 1947-1949, about 7,000 copies of which Krasivsky had found in three crates in the Carpathian mountains. The most active and imaginative distributor was Mikhail Dyak.

SENTENCE

The court found three of the accused deserving of the “supreme penalty” [death penalty].

Taking various circumstances into account, it sentenced Kvetsko to fifteen years (five in prison) and five years’ exile; Krasivsky and Dyak to twelve years (five in prison) and five years’ exile; and Kulynin and Lesiv to six years of corrective-labour camps.

Kvetsko and Krasivsky are in Vladimir Prison; Dyak [note 3], Lesiv, Kulynin and Melen are in Dubrovlag (Mordovia) Camp 19; Prokopovich and Gubka are in Dubrovlag Camp 3.

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