Based on material from the Ukrainian Herald (Ukrainsky visniyk)
Nos. 1-3 (January-October 1970) [1] issued in Ukrainian [2]
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9 ITEMS
The first issue of Ukrainian Herald was briefly annotated in CCE 13.9 (17).
The Herald‘s aim is to inform the public about cases of violation of human rights in the Ukraine, about cases of chauvinism and ukrainophobia. Some of the Herald‘s material will be familiar to readers of the Chronicle, and this, generally speaking, is not given in the present survey.
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ARRESTS & TRIALS (1-8)
[1]
On 4 July 1969 Vasily Stepanovich RYVAK, a board member of the Society for Cultural Relations with Ukrainians Abroad, was arrested in Lvov.
A native of Galicia, Ryvak once served a term of imprisonment in a Polish prison. In 1943 he emigrated to the West. In 1957 he returned home.
According to certain information he was released in early January 1970.
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[2]
SPH
In September 1969 Lyubov Nastusenko, a nurse, was arrested for “nationalist agitation” in Kolomyya (Ivano-Frankovsk Region, West UkSSR).
According to unconfirmed reports she has been sent for compulsory treatment to a special psychiatric hospital. In the opinion of the Herald the judging of Nastusenko to be of unsound mind is the first case of its kind in the Ukraine.
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[3]
TRIAL
In September 1969 Andrei Koroban (b. 1930) was arrested in Kiev.
At his trial on 27-31 May 1970 he was sentenced by the Kiev Region Court to six years of strict-regime corrective-labour camps under Article 62 (UkSSR Criminal Code = Article 70, RSFSR Code). He was accused of writing a number of works, which have not been circulating in samizdat. It is known that the works are written from a Marxist position.
A. Koroban has already served a term of imprisonment, from 1950 to 1956. On his return he worked as a teacher and was an external student at the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute.
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[4]
At the beginning of June 1970 Ivan Stepanovich SUK (Cand.Sc., Medicine), a lecturer at the Donetsk Medical Institute, was arrested in Donetsk, east Ukraine, on a charge under Article 62 (UkSSR Criminal Code = Article 70, RSFSR Code).
The Herald has published letters in his defence.
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[5]
TRIAL
In 1969 Leonid Gorokhovsky and Mikhail Simonchuk were each sentenced in Ternopol (West Ukraine) ito four years of corrective-labour camps. The Herald states that they were both convicted of “malicious hooliganism” (Article 209, UkSSR Criminal Code), but that the actual grounds for prosecution were political, circulating samizdat material.
(According to materials in the possession of the Chronicle, Gorokhovsky is in the Mordovian camps for political prisoners. This casts doubt on the reliability of the information about the article under which he was charged.)
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[6]
POKUTNIKI
Members of the “pokutniki” (i.e., penitents), a religious sect of the “Graeco-Catholic Church” close to the Uniates, are being held in criminal prisons of the Ukraine. As a rule, they are charged with parasitism.
The ideas of the “pokutniki” are not only religious, but are also of a national-oppositional nature.
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[7]
KARAVANSKY
The Herald throws considerable light on the case of Svyatoslav Karavansky [3].
UH No. 1 includes a letter from former political prisoners (Ivan Hel, Mikhaylo Osadchy, Viacheslav Chornovil and others) demanding a ban on so-called ‘cell’ or ‘camp’ trials, and the release of prisoners serving 25-Year terms on the expiry of the sentences prescribed by current legislation for their offences, etc.
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UH No. 2 describes Karavansky’s trial (CCE 13.7).
The accused used only his native language, the interpreter being “the wife of an investigator or prison guard”, “a native of Poltava”, “who spoke and understood very little Ukrainian”.
Information about the trial is accompanied by Karavansky’s petition of 19 March 1967 to the chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet (written in the Yavas camp zone) with his draft of a law on “The conferment on citizens of the USSR of their usurped human rights”.
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Nina Strokata (1926-1998)
The next issue of the Herald reports on the persecution of Nina Strokatova, Karavansky’s wife, a micro-biologist who works at the Odessa Medical Institute.
After sentencing Karavansky, the Vladimir Region Court delivered a separate decision on Strokatova’s conduct during investigations and at the trial (at which she was a witness). The decision was sent to her place of work.
Nina Strokata [4] was allowed to remain at the Institute on condition that her conduct improved.
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[8]
MOROZ
Nos. 2 and 3 of the Ukrainian Herald dwell in detail on the persecution of Valentyn Moroz. The last of the issues under review appeared before Moroz’s trial (CCE 17.2).
The published material includes: a letter from residents of Kosmach village; a statement by persons at whose homes searches were carried out in connection with the Moroz case; letters from Ivan Dziuba and others to Oles Honchar, a prominent Ukrainian writer; a protest by nine persons; and a letter by Moroz’s wife Raissa.
Each issue of the Herald prints a list of Ukrainians imprisoned on political grounds.
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[9]
SAMIZDAT
The Herald devotes much space to samizdat material, both publicistic and literary. It reports in detail on the literary life of the Ukraine, and so on.
No. 3 of the Herald included the following important announcement:
“A document entitled ‘Programme of the Democrats of Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic’ [5] has been circulating in Russia in samizdat and abroad.
“The Ukrainian Herald states authoritatively that Ukrainian democratic circles were not a party to the compilation or adoption of this document, which claims to contain their programme. Either the words ‘Ukraine’ were inserted in the title for reasons of expediency, or else it shows that Russian or russified circles in the Ukraine were associated with the document.”
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NOTES
- Nos. 1 and 2 of the Herald appeared as a book, Ukrainsky visnyk. Vypusk I-II, jointly published by PIUF (Paris) and Smoloskyp publishers (Baltimore), 1971.
↩︎ - Editors of the English edition of the Chronicle later explained (CCE 27.15):
“Starting with CCE 18 changes were made by the translators in their system of transliterating Ukrainian and Baltic names. Previously these were transliterated direct from the Russian forms.
“From the March 1971 issue of the Chronicle onwards, the names of nationally-minded Ukrainians have been transliterated from their Ukrainian forms, and Baltic names have been rendered in what were known (or judged) to be their original Latin-alphabet forms.”
↩︎ - On Karavansky, see CCE 11.3, CCE 13.7, CCE 15.4 [3] and Name Index.
↩︎ - Correctly, the surname is rendered Strokata in the original Ukrainian.
↩︎ - The text was published abroad by the Herzen Foundation (Amsterdam) in 1970 as Programma Demokraticheskogo Dvizheniya Sovetskogo Soyuza (CCE 11.16).
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