<<No 25 : 20 May 1972>>

VERKHOLYAK

Dmytro Kuzmich VERKHOLYAK (b. 1928). From 1947 he was in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Arrested in 1955; a court in Ivano-Frankovsk sentenced him on 14 February 1956 to be shot, but this was changed to 25 years in the camps [¹].

In the camps Verkholyak is working as a doctor’s assistant. In June 1971 he was transferred from Camp 17 to Camp 19.

On 14 February 1956, his natural-law wife (since 1955), Kateryna Ivanovna YATSKIV, was sentenced by the same court to ten years’ deprivation of freedom. Until 1969 she was allowed conjugal visits to see Verkholyak; from 1969 on she has only been allowed general, i.e. short, visits.

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Vladimir Yurkiv (b. 1928) is in Camp 17; he has been a prisoner for 22 years [²].

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Nikolai Yakovlevich KURCHIK is in Camp 3. Kurchik has been a prisoner for about 26 years, but still has seven years left to serve.

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Bezugly is serving a a 25-year term.

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The brothers Pestov have arrived in Camp 3. They are two of those sentenced in Sverdlovsk in November 1971 [see CCE 24.11 (1) and later corrections].

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After a ten-day hunger-strike in December in Camp 10, Alexei Murzhenko (first Leningrad “hijack” trial, see CCE 17.6-1) was promised a conjugal visit of which he had earlier been illegally deprived (CCE 23.3).

The illegality of the deprivation of the visit was admitted by the Procurator of Saransk. Now he has again been refused visits for the same reason as in December – failure to fulfil the norm for two days running. Murzhenko’s wife Lyubov has received an explanation from the procurator that no permission had been given in December for a visit.

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In March, in the police department at Potma Railway Station, Butman’s wife Eva was beaten up after arriving to visit her husband Gilel. After this, Butman himself (CCE 20.1) was placed in a punishment cell for ten days, “because of his wife’s behaviour”.

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Recently both Solomon Dreizner (CCE 20.1), deprived of a general visit, and D. Chernoglaz (CCE 20.3), deprived of a regular conjugal visit, have been persecuted.

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NOTES

1. On Verkholyak, see Ukrainian Herald No. 4 and Uncensored Russia (1972).
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2. On Yurkiv, see Browne (ed), Ferment in the Ukraine (1971). ↩︎

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