Against the Soviet Grain
GROSE, PETER
WRITERS (^WRITING Against the Soviet Grain By Peter Grose Calmly, he set the scene. "Nothing seemed to disturb the ordinary rhythm of life in Ukraine in the days of August and September 1965."...
...To this day, there has been no official acknowledgement that a court of law sent over a dozen intellectuals to hard labor camps...
...In violation of both the Russian and the Ukrainian constitutions, legal proceedings became secret...
...Their "crimes" included possession of pre-Revolutionary Ukrainian history books or copies of speeches by Pope Paul VI and President Eisenhower...
...relatives of those charged were given no notification...
...Yaroslav Hevrych...
...He brusquely refused to be subpoenaed as a witness in one ot the closed trials, claiming that it was being held illegally...
...The tactical Fascism espoused at home by some branches of the nationalists while Hitler and the Reich Commissariat flourished had its counterpart in the strong component of genuine and ideological Fascism adopted by the Ukrainian leaders in exile...
...This episode became even more ominous in retrospect after a second fire broke out in Kiev in November 1968...
...Then, suddenly, the open trials ceased...
...Chornovil's account carries on a certain stream of nationalist thought, but it must also be viewed in the newer context of active and deliberate dissent against the bureaucratic rigidity of Communist party rule across the Soviet Union...
...My guess is that both resulted from a decision at the highest level to give the kgb a certain license, and this may well have been part of the bargain that produced the consensus to overthrow Khrushchev the year before...
...failed to return from their vacations...
...In the meantime, for some reason, the literary critic, Ivan Svitlychny, the scientist-psychologist, Mykhaylo Horyn, the teacher, Mykhaylo Ozerny, and the student...
...In this...
...The first few trials were "open" in the sense that the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial was open: Carefully selected representatives of the "public" could attend and react to the proceedings with appropriate discipline...
...the engineers from Kiev, Olexandr Martynenko and Ivan Rusyn, failed for unexplained reasons to show up at work...
...Thus we learn, belatedly but authoritatively, of one of the most cynical and benighted campaigns for intellectual suppression in the era called, for chronological reasons, post-Stalin...
...In any case, to call the Ukrainian intellectuals of today "Banderists," as the kcb prosecutors did, is about as relevant as a Right-wing attempt to blacken the militant American student Left with the crushing epithet "New Dealers...
...sentences were passed in camera...
...There is no evidence that they were particularly organized or even self-conscious as an intellectual movement...
...The research worker of the Lviv Museum of Ukrainian Art, Bohdan Horyn, the lecturers of Lviv University, Mykhaylo Osadchy and Mykhaylo Kosiv...
...But thanks to the anger and idealism of a young Communist radio newsman, we have an extraordinary "reporter's notebook" of facts and impressions to recount the blight that hit the Ukraine in August 1965...
...As thoroughly distasteful as Soviet Communism is in the context of the Western democratic tradition, I have my doubts about whether the opposed beliefs of the prominent Ukrainian nationalists would have been much better had they triumphed...
...it was, however, the hypocrisy of the Soviet prosecutors, the clumsiness of the secret police and the blatant illegality of the "legal" officers that stirred him to his protest...
...destroying the historic manuscripts that had escaped the first time...
...The Right and the Wrong, was being performed and the audience applauded the fearless hero who defeated the insincere members of the nkvd with but a single word of truth...
...when other well-known and would-be literary figures were threatened and harassed, the world knew about it...
...Then there is the still mysterious fire at the Ukrainian Academy of Science in 1964, in which archives of the Ukrainian past were destroyed in an admitted case of arson...
...Where Chornovil produced a documentary notebook of what actually happened, Dzyuba wrote a philosophical essay published in Britain last June under the title Internationalism or Russification...
...Gradually the news spread that some thirty lecturers, artists and scientists were suddenly transferred from their classrooms, desks and laboratories to quarters with double bars on the windows...
...That was the breaking point for Chornovil...
...But, fully two years had to pass before the drama in the Ukraine that took place at the same time was revealed to the world at large...
...What happened was that a whole circle of young intellectuals, most of them no older than 30, was decimated by arrest and star-chamber trials...
...Most significantly, there is the writing of Ivan Dzyuba, a young but already prominent Ukrainian literary critic who was also moved to disgust by the events of 1965...
...Pavel Litvinov, and even Andrei Sakharov, who raise their voices against all forms of totalitarianism...
...This work is as central to the Soviet nationality debate as Milovan Djilas' The New Class is to the problem of the Communist party's evolution in Marxist-Leninist society...
...Not only did it fail but as the decades went on and nationalist agitators rose and fell, the unseemly side of the movement became too apparent...
...It is natural, but only partially accurate, to look at the saga related by Chornovil in the context of Ukrainian nationalism...
...For this defiance, he himself was arrested, tried in secret late in 1967 and sentenced to hard labor...
...His release, after serving an 18-month sentence, was leported unofficially last February...
...Vyacheslav Chornovil was 27 years old when the arrests began...
...In 20th-century Europe, the nationalism-Manque of the Ukraine is a discomforting story, a movement that could have been stirring but somehow just missed...
...A discussion of Mykhaylo Kosiv's review continued in periodicals...
...Documentation is now becoming available on the "Lawyers' Affair," the so-called "Lukyanenko Group" of 1961, in which seven Ukrainians were tried for treason, in secret, and sentenced to 10-15 years at hard labor...
...There were no official announcements, and the names of those arrested continued for a while, owing to inertia, to be mentioned publicly as if nothing had happened...
...Chornovil should be considered in the same category as Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, Alexandr Ginzburg...
...What unites the drive for national self-assertion in the Soviet Union with that of literary dissent is the resentment of official hypocrisy and arbitrariness, the pressures for supremacy of thought as well as of power...
...Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in his Foreword to the present volume that "the combination of literary ferment and national self-assertion will be a most potent one" in the coming years and decades of Soviet development...
...Chornovil writes as a loyal Communist, with no interest in the bourgeois restoration or any other such bogey of yesteryear...
...Reports of the trials he actually saw, biographies of the obscure individuals involved, witty and ironic commentaries against the Soviet police and bureaucracy—these began appearing a few pages at a time in Western Europe, and gradually the full dossier was pieced together...
...none had the slightest following in the bourgeois West...
...The international press was full of reports on the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in Moscow...
...While some of those arrested in the Ukraine may have wished for secession from the Soviet Union—a right theoretically granted by the Soviet Constitution?there is little evidence in the mass of documentation which has come out following Chornovil's manuscript that any of the dissidents are calling for the overthrow of Socialism...
...Before disappearing into the star chamber, Chornovil had hurriedly written out the manuscripts now bound together as The Chornovil Papers (McGraw-Hill, 246 pp., $6.95...
...All this was unknown to the authors of the articles and the heroes of the filmstrips, for they were isolated from the outside world by thick stone walls...
...A loyal member of the Komsomol, he was apparently acquainted with one or two of the subsequent defendants, but had no particular involvement in their intellectual meanderings...
...The actions of Simon Petliura, of Andrei Melnyk and, above all, of Stepan Bandera seem not only a national-\sm-manque, but a heroism-manque...
...Ukrainian national pride is not altogether absent from his writing...
...In the Ivan Franko theater in Kiev, M. Stelmakh's play...
...wrote Vyacheslav Chornovil...
...We have yet to learn of the high-level political process by which these apparently aimless, rather fey thinkers came to be regarded by the kgb as enemies of the Soviet state...
...Yet the Kremlin reacts as if the entire 50 years of Soviet development is in danger of being annulled...
...The Ukrainians are bound to be a continuing center of nationalist aspirations, even without the organizational framework of the past...
...a Pravda editorial called for the strengthening of friendship among nations and warned that the Party would permit no interference with that aim...
...The coincidence in time of the Sinyavsky-Daniel arrests and the start of the Ukrainian crackdown is too close to have come about by chance...
...Chornovil was assigned by the Lviv television station to cover them...
...The kgb and, ultimately, the top leadership only make things worse by their evident overreaction...
...To Western analysts such as Brzezinski, the national aspirations of Soviet republics need only be anti-Soviet or indeed anti-Communist, if the Kremlin leadership forces them in that direction...
...The KGB, at any rate, seems to view the two streams of dissent together...
...In the village clubs they still screened newsreels showing Mykhaylo Horyn at work in the laboratory of the Lviv Truck Factory...
...Newspapers carried stories about the successive victories on the labor front...
...The disgust that grew in him on seeing Soviet justice at work is documented in his notebook...
...The newspaper, Literaturna Ukrainia, published Mykhaylo Masyutko's article about the distortion of geographical names...
...Few had written anything to attract more than routine attention...
Vol. 52 • April 1969 • No. 8
