In the Prisons and Camps, October 1976 (42.4-3)

<<No 42 : 8 October 1976>>

4-1 A Visit to Mustafa Dzhemilev; Vladimir Prison; Mordovian Camps
4-2 Perm Camps; Diary of Camp 35. Camps for Common Criminals
4-3 Political Prisoners Letters & Declarations. In Defence of Political Prisoners
4-4 Releases

6. Letters and Declarations from Political Prisoners

[1]

Miroslav Simchich

to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

In 1949 Miroslav Vasilevich SIMCHICH (b. 1923) was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment by a military tribunal in Ivano-Frankovsk, for being a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The aim of Simchich’s declaration is to obtain cancellation of the supplementary sentence (10 years) which he got in the Magadan camps in 1953.

Simchich (Ukr. Symchych) describes the appalling conditions of the prisoner transports and camps, which he survived by a miracle. The authorities in his camp led with the help of a gang of criminals. In defence of his life, Simchich had dared to get into a fight with thieves, and was helped by his friends, but the official Vorontsov, who had himself provoked the fight, initiated a criminal charge against the ‘nationalist group’. All eight of them got 10-year sentences. Further on, Simchich writes:

“In 1956 a commission from the USSR Supreme Soviet commuted my term of imprisonment to 10 years. But after four years outside the camps somebody felt I had not been inside for long enough and I was arrested again (on so-called newly discovered evidence) …

“I therefore consider unjust the addition of another camp sentence to my first sentence, so that my term of imprisonment was increased to 30 years. The commission exculpated all seven of my co-defendants in the camp trial … And after all, a 30-year sentence does not exist on the statutes.

“I ask you to inform me … if my sentence will come to an end after the 30 years I have now been condemned to, or if there will be a Special Board session, as in the 1930s, which will give me another supplementary sentence.“

[2]

Dmitry Verkholyak

to the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet (June 1976).

‘For many years I have been earnestly trying to obtain registration of my marriage to my wife, to whom I have been married de facto since 1953. Article 10 of the Basic Law on Marriage and the Family in the USSR and the Union Republics does not forbid the registration of a prisoner’s marriage. In this connection, I ask you to clarify whether the administrative regulation forbidding prisoners to register their marriages, an order of the MVD, is legal.’

VALERY MARCHENKO (3-4)

[3]

Valery Marchenko

to the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet (July 1976).

“Taking into account the principle in Article 16 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (‘Each person, wherever he lives, has the right to be regarded as a person before the law’), which came into effect on 23 March 1976, I ask you to pronounce on the legality of the continued use of Article 8 of the Basic Principles of the Corrective Labour Law of the USSR and the Union republics, which limit by law the right of prisoners to be regarded as persons before the law in the USSR …“

[4]

Valery Marchenko

Open letter to Walter Heinowski and Gerhard Scheumann, journalists from the German Democratic Republic (June 1976).

‘I am writing to you for the second time, hoping that this time fate will look kindly on me and my letter will reach its addressee … I know that you have devoted not only your pen, but also your movie camera, to depicting the many sufferings of Chile. You describe… the torments of prisoners in concentration camps with fiery emotion, skilfully. It was this that really moved me to sit down and write you a letter…

‘But why don’t you see for yourself the living conditions of Soviet political prisoners? … Indeed, why should you not travel to the USSR, interview General Gromov, a man well remembered by many of my fellow-prisoners since their first meeting, when he greeted a transport of new arrivals, while at his feet, dripping blood, lay a prisoner (the seventh) who had been personally shot by General Gromov? … The fifty-year history of Soviet concentration camps has no precedent for visits by foreigners … Nevertheless, I hope to meet you. In the meantime, so that our conversation will be objective, I shall put a few questions to you … [Q 1]

[2] Name another country where women are imprisoned for 25 years. Which countries now keep women political prisoners in concentration camps anyway? … [Q 3]

[4] The so-called system of re-education in Soviet concentration camps is wholly and completely based on torture through hunger and cold. Name another country where the monthly, legally established, sum spent on a political prisoner’s food is equivalent to 12 Soviet roubles… The numbers who perished in the concentration camps of fascist Germany are widely known. Ask your class comrades in Moscow to tell you the numbers they have exterminated in their corrective labour institutions …’

[5]

Ivan Shovkovoi

Open letter to the editor of Izvestiya about the article ‘A Well of Foul Water’, published in that paper on 18 June 1976 (see CCE 42.4-2).

“I am well acquainted with the regime conditions in the camp where Dudenas is being held [in Izvestiya he was called Dudinas, Chronicle], as I am also imprisoned there…

“However, Dudenas is right to some extent: things are relatively good for him in the camp, certainly he lives better than I do, he’s a ’bitch’, after all. But there are people who are even better off than Dudenas. The operations staff look after their informers generously, some people get food to the value of 50 roubles a month (compare this with the law) … I can tell you how the present torturer. Ensign Ali Atayev, takes honey (which I am forbidden) to the former torturer Grigory Sinyatinsky … or what price is paid by the spiritually degraded Usatyuk for his unlimited number of visits (while others are constantly being deprived of visits). I … can tell you how the philosopher Pronyuk, eaten up by tuberculosis, is deprived of the miserable five roubles he should have once a month …” [for the ‘camp shop’, Chronicle].

[6]

S. Mamchur

to Canon Raymond Goor, a Belgian member of the secretariat of the International Committee on European Security and Co-operation.

“Respected Father! Having been in Soviet concentration camps since 1957, I have not yet been able to avail myself of the right our Lord has given everyone, the right to read the Word of God. For all this time I have had the Bible taken away from me, as well as sections I had copied out from it, which were burned… I beg you. Father Canon, to influence the authorities of the Soviet Union to allow me to have a Bible with me in the camp. This natural longing of mine is a sacred human right, sanctified by God.“

ROMANYUK (6-7)

[6]

Vasyl Romanyuk

to the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet (see also his letters: CCE 37.14 [5], CCE 39.2-2 [9]).

In his letter the priest Vasily Romanyuk renounces his Soviet citizenship:

‘… for I consider that it is an offence before God and man to bear the title of a citizen of the country where so many crimes have been committed against peace and humanity, where now, in the last quarter of the 20th century, a man is shut up for years in concentration camps and psychiatric hospitals merely for expressing his opinions and thoughts to someone else.’

V. Romanyuk writes that he is appealing to the American people and government to make him a citizen of the USA, and asks for the help of the World Council of Churches in obtaining this.

‘I am a native of Western Ukraine and until I was 19 years old, I had not lived under your protection, or studied in your schools or served in your army.

‘In 1944, when Soviet forces took over our Region and mobilization was proclaimed, I went to the Military Commissariat together with my father. There, because of slanderous denunciations by the local communists, I was arrested and sentenced to 10 years, so that the first Soviet ’passport’ which officially included me among the citizens of the Soviet Union, was the sentence passed by the Stanislav military tribunal.

‘In 1972 you declared me to be an especially dangerous recidivist, a State criminal, and gave me, in my old age, another ‘passport’ of the same kind I received in my youth. This time the sentence may be indefinite, however, as my health will hardly be able to endure your ’special-regime colonies’.’

[7]

Vasyl Romanyuk

to the National Council of Christian Churches of the USA. A letter similar to the preceding one.

[8]

Yu. Mashkov

to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (1 August 1976).

‘The first anniversary of the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe has shown that the Soviet government signed it out of demagogic motives … It is not difficult to understand that a country with a totalitarian regime, hidden away behind an iron curtain, could not be a peaceful neighbour to the free countries of Western Europe. As a protest against the non-fulfilment of the democratic requirements of the Final Act by the Soviet government… I declare myself on hunger-strike on 1 August 1976 …’

[9]

N. Motryuk: a letter to his son.

‘I am now serving a term of punishment as a ’State criminal’, because my friend and I met together and discussed the present situation in Ukraine, the reasons for the cultural and spiritual depression there, as well as the low standard of living. [Nikolai Motryuk is a member of the Union of Ukrainian Youth in Galicia, CCE 33.6-3 [18]. He was arrested on 15 March 1973. His sentence comes to an end on 15 March 1977.]

‘What awaits me in my homeland? Constant surveillance, all kinds of provocation, persecution, and, in the end, a prison or concentration camp again. There will be no life for me here. So I have renounced Soviet citizenship and have asked the French ambassador to grant me French citizenship. If I manage to emigrate, it will be by God’s grace …’

[10]

Vitold Abankin: Declaration (25 March 1976).

Abankin describes in detail the circumstances of his life, which led him to try to leave the USSR in 1966: on 4 August that year he was detained by East German border guards; in October 1968 he got a 12-year sentence. He describes how the investigator tried to force him to give the confession necessary to the investigation and how the trial was conducted. Abankin confirms his renunciation of his citizenship (CCE 32.12).

In conclusion he writes:

“I did not admit during the investigation or the trial that I was a traitor to the Motherland, as I have not betrayed the Motherland, but the authorities. The authorities are not the Motherland. Authorities change. The Motherland remains for ever. They did not pay any attention to this, but I declare once more; I am a Russian and will remain a Russian, whatever happens, and my Motherland is Russia.“

[11]

Sergei Kovalyov, Yevhen Sverstyuk:

‘To the Don Quixotes who cannot come to terms with the incarnation of the evil of the world, with violence and lies, to those who constantly hear the voice of the earth and the voice of conscience, those who are upheld by their active love of the truth, those who knock at locked doors, who write letters which never arrive, who help those dear to us, who shelter the hunted and persecuted, those people, with names and without, to whom we owe a debt, our thanks and a brotherly shake of the hand!’

7. In Defence of Political Prisoners

[1]

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Mikhail Bernstam, Tatyana Velikanova, Alexander Ginzburg, Malva Landa

“A day of remembrance for the victims of the Red Terror” (5 September 1976).

“For some years now the political prisoners in the camps of the Urals and Mordovia and in Vladimir Prison have observed 5 September as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Red Terror. Political prisoners of various opinions, faiths and nationalities gather together on that day, reflect on our history and remember those who perished without trace, their persecuted relations and friends… Upholding the initiative and traditions of political prisoners in the Soviet Union … we repeal again: freedom for the political prisoners of the Soviet Union! End the Terror!“

[2]

Malva Landa

“To artists. To people of good will. To Amnesty International. To the U N Commission on Human Rights” (October 1976) [¹]

‘The artist Stefania Shabatura has been officially informed that all her creative works, book-marks and drawings, are to be burnt.

‘Stefania Shabatura is a well-known Ukrainian artist; her tapestries have been shown more than once at Regional, Republican, all-Union and international exhibitions.

‘Until 1974 Stefania Shabatura was given practically no opportunity to draw, to do what was most important and valuable to her.

‘In 1974 she was given a sketching book, paints, brushes, crayons and paper. All this was brought to S. Shabatura by Shumeiko himself, a representative of the Lvov KGB. It was precisely because of this that the camp administration did not deprive S. Shabatura of the paints, which are included among objects forbidden in places of imprisonment…

‘At the end of 1975 Stefania Shabatura was taken to Lvov (where she had lived before her arrest) for ‘re-education’. However, even in Lvov prison Stefania Shabatura remained herself. On Human Rights Day, 10 December 1975, she went on hunger-strike, as she had done in the earlier years of her imprisonment, in protest at the crude violation of human rights in the USSR. She did not change her mind about the hunger-strike, did not end it even after insistent warnings from Shumeiko, the representative of the Lvov KGB … Shumeiko threatened Stefania Shabatura, saying she would ‘come to regret’ her stubbornness.

‘Immediately after her return to the camp, in the guardhouse itself, a document was read to Stefania Shabatura: all the drawings confiscated from her before her departure had been assigned to be burnt, because they were ‘abstract’ and depicted the camp …

‘Stefania Shabatura has not committed any crime or offence ‘against the State’. It is a crime to terrorize, persecute and mock her, to cripple her physically and attempt to destroy her spiritually. It is a crime to burn her work. These crimes are committed in the land of victorious socialism, under the cover of socialist legality.

“I hope that this will not prevent artists, ‘left-wing’, ‘right-wing’ and others, the creative intelligentsia, and everyone who values man and his highest aspirations, from speaking out in defence of Stefania Shabatura and her work” [See also CCE 39.2-1, CCE 40.9-2, CCE 41.6-1].

[3]

Stefania Simutiene (mother of Liudas Simutis),

to the Medical Service of the MVD (10 August 1976).

In connection with the cancellation of L. Simutis’s invalid status (CCE 41.6-1), his mother asks that her son be examined by experts in bone tuberculosis and that he be given the treatment he needs.

[4]

Igor Melchuk

“To my Colleagues” (August 1976).

The linguist Melchuk (CCE 40.13) asks the scientists and academics of the world to remember the fate of the biologist Sergei Kovalyov.

‘We cannot put the world right immediately, but we can help to save one man. Anyone can do that…

‘Write letters of encouragement to Kovalyov. Write letters of protest to the Soviet authorities …

‘Do not forget that letters from well-known and unknown Westerners, addressed to the USSR Minister for Internal Affairs, Shchelokov, and to the administration of camp VS-389/36 can bring this or that repression to an end…’

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NOTES