On Nov. 9 the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) marked its 30 th anniversary. The jubilee conference dedicated to this event gathered not only the legendary participants of this organization but also a number of individuals who care about the Ukrainian human rights movement. There turned out to be quite a few of them, because the conference room of Smoloskyp Publishers was full.
This should not come as any surprise. It’s a rare occasion to find yourself seated next to someone who made history. The historic significance of what the members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group accomplished under hard circumstances cannot be overestimated. The political situation in those days was very difficult, a former member of the group, Vasyl Ovsienko, explained during his speech. The ideological confrontation between the USSR and the West, especially in the second half of the 20 th century, could at any time have escalated into the Third World War. The danger of using nuclear weapons in the new war might have resulted in a catastrophe for mankind.
This threat made the leaders of the politically hostile sides look constantly for ways to establish peaceful coexistence. It brought 33 nations of Europe (except Albania), the US, and Canada to Helsinki, Finland, where they signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) on Aug. 1, 1975.
At the time, the signing of the Helsinki agreement was viewed as an unquestionable success of Soviet diplomacy. The agreement not only legally established the borders that had emerged after the Second World War, but secured most favored nation status for the USSR. In exchange for this, the Soviet Union promised to honor the conditions of the so-called ‘third basket’ of the Final Act — to observe human rights.
In signing the Helsinki Act, the Soviet leadership had no intentions of implementing all its clauses in full. But since this agreement was equal to national legislation, its signing provided organizations that until this time had been illegal with a formal pretext to fight for human rights legally. Soviet human rights advocates decided to take advantage of this.
At first, the Moscow Group to Assist the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement (MHG) was formed on May 12 on the initiative of Yurii Orlov, a Moscow professor, who was close to Academician Andrei Sakharov. On Nov. 9, 1976, a similar group was formed in Ukraine. It was founded by Mykola Rudenko, a writer and a philosopher; Petro Hryhorenko, a Moscow-based general who had fallen into disfavor; the public activist Oksana Meshko; the science fiction writer Oles Berdnyk, and the lawyer Levko Lukianenko.
Among its founding members were Nina Strokata-Karavanska, a microbiologist, Myroslav Marynovych, an engineer, Mykola Matusevych, a historian, Oleksa Tykhy, a teacher, and Ivan Kandyba, a lawyer. There were 41 members in the group. Despite the similarity of goals uniting the Russian and Ukrainian groups, the difference between them was immense.
Ivan Hel, a human rights activist from Lviv, explained that the problem of democratization in Russia was extremely important for Sakharov’s Moscow-based human rights group “but only within the framework of the Jewish movement, which was aimed chiefly at enabling Jews to immigrate to Israel without any obstacles or creating complete autonomy for them as a part of the USSR.” In discussing the Russian wing of the dissident movement, Hel said that despite Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of communism, the writer failed to overcome his Russian great-power chauvinism.
Since the members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group “from the very outset had as their goal not only the defense of human rights but also the restoration of Ukrainian statehood” (Raisa Rudenko), this caused a stormy negative reaction from the members of the Moscow Helsinki Group. A former Ukrainian political prisoner recalled in the conference lobby that even in their discussions in prison with their Ukrainian “colleagues” Russian political prisoners expressed their utmost readiness to destroy the Ukrainian “separatist” movement within 24 hours. This once again confirms the thesis that Russian democracy ends where the Ukrainian question begins.
The Ukrainian Helsinki Group members, understanding that the Ukrainian SSR’s nominal statehood was absolutely fictional, kept reminding the world about the existence of enslaved Ukraine. They asked the world community to recognize the independent status of the Ukrainian delegation. “To place Ukrainian national interest on an international legal foundation” by capitalizing on the conflicts existing in the relations between the West and the USSR was the “brilliant idea” (Vasyl Ovsienko), that filled the myth about Ukraine with real content. Fifteen years later it became an independent state. Although, according to Rudenko’s widow Raisa, “our state is not completely independent yet, the fact of proclaiming this independence gives us a chance to restore it in full.”
According to a number of speakers (Hryhorii Prykhodko, Mykhailo Horyn, and others) to do so it is necessary to complete what is unfinished. Characterizing the situation in Ukraine today, the speakers noted that the roots of discord among Ukrainian democrats are to be found in the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the very moment when the Soviet system was collapsing, the government managed to disorient the dissidents. For example, some of them deserted to the Soviet government. The Communist Party leaders succeeded in gaining support from Western nations and convincing Soviet society that they were irreplaceable in the matter of building a democratic Ukrainian state. Thanks to this, they could keep total control over the democratic movement. This enabled them not only to neutralize the most radical of the dissidents, but also to remain in power by means of new legislation. The law on rehabilitation is a vivid example.
The disoriented human rights advocates could not maintain their initiative and did not insist on investigating the activities of former Ukrainian KGB officers. Some highly respected democrats spoke in favor of forgiving, which enabled the former CP leaders to launch a counterattack.
Is it possible to heal the dissident movement in Ukraine today? Most of the conference participants answered this question affirmatively. They are positive that in the conditions of free public activities the following principle must be formulated: an unpunished criminal in power remains the bearer of governmental evil. At the same time the speakers emphasized that prosecution of former high-ranking Soviet criminals is not advocated out of vengeance. Forgiveness should be a question of morals, not juridical matters. In the conditions of the totalitarian revanche, the government’s legal impunity will have especially devastating results. That’s why the task of raising a new generation of human rights advocates is vitally important.
So that young human rights activists do not repeat their predecessors’ mistakes, they should be aware of all the mechanisms for suppressing an individual’s will. This educational mission should be carried out by the dissidents’ “old guard” — veterans who acquired their political experience in the period when human rights activists had no illusions that the government would let them champion human rights freely. They understood only too well that they were risking not only their freedom but their very lives.
It was not by chance that Yevhen Sverstiuk, the distinguished philosopher and dissident, coined the phrase “knights of the absurd” during his speech at the conference. Indeed, is it easy to be a hero, when you know that you will be this hero? But 30 years ago, when Mykola Rudenko was reminding the world of Ukraine’s existence, he was hardly thinking about heroism. A human rights activist is not a profession. A human rights activist is a spiritual state that does not permit such a person to remain indifferent to someone else’s grief. And if you respond to the call of your soul, you must be ready to make a sacrifice. According to Myroslav Marynovych, this is the very essence of the Heavenly Foundation Grant, which, unlike the grants received from international human rights organizations, brings you not money but suffering.
