Ukrainian media and Internet editions highlighted the case of Maria MATIOS, a noted Ukrainian writer, Shevchenko Prize winner, when she made it clear that Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies were intimidating her. On January 12, she sent an open letter to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka and Interior Minister Anatolii Mohyliov, asking why she was sought at Lviv’s Publishing House Piramida, and why the Ukrainian police interviewed her neighbors at the apartment house in Kyiv where she had rented an apartment. The reason behind all this appears to be her book Pages Torn from Autobiography, in which she describes the Obelisk to the Unknown Soldier in Kyiv as a phallic symbol that outraged veterans of the “Great Patriotic War.”
Arsenii Yatseniuk, leader of the Front of Change, and Viacheslav Kyrylenko, MP (Party For Ukraine), have responded to this arbitrary practice by urging the law enforcement agencies to stop persecuting Maria Matios. Yatseniuk said: “We are witness to our country being transformed into a disgusting dictatorship, where literary and other individual creative activities and views will be closely watched by the government machine. Those currently in power are reinstating Stalinist methods with maniacal consistence, even parroting Stalinist trials dating back seventy years… Today, as back then, researchers and creative figures are handpicked [by the ruling party], what with their internationally recognized achievements.” Kyrylenko declared: “By attempting to destroy Ukrainian historical memory, the current government has launched an offensive against contemporary Ukrainian culture. The fact that an internationally acclaimed author is being persecuted by the authorities is proof of the current government’s caveman’s mentality; I would recommend that the current ranking bureaucrats learn more from Ukrainian writers; that they read the original text rather than NKVD/KGB informants’ reports.” The Day asked Maria MATIOS for comment.
Matios: “I learned about the reasons behind the abovementioned events The Day before yesterday [Den carried this article on Jan. 14, 2011 – Ed.], from a statement made by Kyiv militia. From what I know, the communist Petro Tsybenko contacted the Prosecutor General’s Office demanding legal assessment of my statements in the book [i.e., Pages Torn from Autobiography]. He further demanded a public trial and that all copies of this book be impounded. Afterward, law enforcement agencies sent their men to Piramida Publishers in Lviv and to the apartment house where I’d rented an apartment in Kyiv eight years back. Kyiv’s militia command ordered all territorial units to check out the addresses mentioned in my book. I wonder when and how they will get to my home village, considering that the place is under a heavy layer of snow. The absurdity of the situation is clear. I haven’t been approached by a single official, although locating me is anything but a problem in Kyiv (and elsewhere in Ukraine, for that matter). Lviv cops have visited Piramida. They wanted to know who had visited previously, acting on their behalf. Apparently someone had and claimed to act on Kyiv’s authority. My question is: Does this mean that all crimes have been solved in Kyiv? I would never dream of living long enough to see the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine busy themselves with investigating several phrases in my book, with Ukraine being independent for 20 years, in order to throw me behind bars. I am not a criminal, I’m of sound mind and I know what I’m doing, although I don’t understand the reasons behind the Ukrainian police’s and General Prosecutor’s actions against me.
“I have received lots of messages in support of my civic stand from Ukraine and seven other countries. They ask what they can do to help me. I would like to thank Den/The Day for their support.”
COMMENTARY
Aleksandr PODRABINEK, Russian human rights champion, journalist, public figure, former prisoner of conscience, author of the article “From an Anti-Sovietist to Another Anti-Sovietist,” published in 2009 [http://www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=9467], which led him to be persecuted by Russia’s Youth Democratic Anti-Fascist Movement “Nashi,” who accused him of offending “Great Patriotic War” veterans:
“I really can’t understand what made the Ukrainian communists offended by [Matios’] reference to a phallic symbol. Perhaps they are suffering from [an inferiority] complex? In that case they should hire shrinks. Jokes aside, people who are oriented toward the past of Ukraine and Russia, who want to reinstate the Soviet system, who believe that the Soviet symbols relating to the ‘Great Patriotic War’ should live forever, were brainwashed and they believe that communism will live for hundreds of years; that Lenin’s ‘Great Cause’ is everlasting. I think that this case will be resolved with the passage of time; that the number of outright communists is diminishing, that they will gradually constitute a statistical minority, with most others showing common sense, particularly in Ukraine. Then the remaining communist adherents will be lost in the crowd with their symbols and inferiority complex. This, of course, doesn’t mean that decent communal members should twiddle their thumbs watching these characters have their idiotic way.
“There is the struggle between past and current realities; there are historical cataclysms. This spells losses, though hopefully not in terms of human lives. In the case of my persecution, previously, or that of Maria Matios currently, one must accept the reality as something unavoidable. One must make sacrifices for bringing forth the truth. One can only hope that such efforts, painful as they are, won’t be in vain.”
