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Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Inc.

203 SECOND AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10003

TEL: (212) 228-6840, 6841

STATUS REPORT: A POSITION PAPER

SUMMARY

National and human rights violations by the Soviet regime in Ukraine are manifest in a) the continued destruction of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, b) the suppression of religious life and c) Soviet ethnocidal, genocidal and linguicidal policies in Ukraine.

All but two of the original members of the Ukrainian Public Group to promote Implementation of the Helsinki Accords, founded in Kiev in 1976, have been arrested. Six are presently serving prison terms; while two are now in exile. Despite the severity of the conditions, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group persists as witnessed by the fact that twenty new members have recently joined, many of them responding from prison cells and labor camps. Several of these new members have been recently arrested and sentenced, or are awaiting trial.

Soviet church policy vacillates between atheism and attempts to "Sovietize" institutional religion, churches and clergy with the intent of furthering Soviet political goals. Religion in Ukraine, however, has received especially harsh treatment. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was abolished in the 1930's and the Ukrainian Catholic Church, now "underground" in the Soviet Union, was nearly destroyed in 1945-46. Although freedom of religion is officially guaranteed, the Soviet regime systematically destroys churches, monasteries and convents. example of this is the case of the Pecherska Lavra Monastery, which has been a center of Christian faith, culture, education and learning since the XIth Century.

One

Russian imperialism and colonialism towards Ukraine dates back to the Czarist policies of russification. The ideal Soviet is a man essentially Russian in language, culture, habits and mentality. Thus, the defense of Ukrainian language and culture in general, as taken up by Ukrainian intellectuals ("dissidents") in the 1960's and 70's is considered anti-Soviet. Soviet language policy encourages the use of Russian, as evidenced by a resolution proposed in a 1979 conference that Russian be introduced in the first grade in all non-Russian schools in Ukraine and the other republics.

Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Inc.

203 SECOND AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10003

TEL: (212) 228-6840, 6841

INTRODUCTION

In connection with the forthcoming review conference on compliances with the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) by various state-signatories, to be held in the summer of 1980 in Madrid, Spain, we take this opportunity to bring to your attention the continued and unbridled violation of national and human rights in 1979 by the Soviet government in Ukraine, which though allegedly a sovereign. republic and a charter member of the United Nations since 1945, was excluded from the Helsinki Conference. The Ukrainian nation of 50 million people is not only burdened by foreign oppression, but it is deprived also of the opportunity to appear at an international gathering and air its grievances and to seek redress for its enslavement.

Yet, basic human rights and fundamental freedoms have long been recognized as having valid universal significance and are presently becoming a pressing international concern. A series of international agreements and covenants have been in force for a number of years that tend to safeguard human rights throughout the world, and especially among the statesignatories. These instruments include the U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention Against Discrimination in Education and others.

Both the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR are signatories to all these international covenants, but neither has lived up to its commitments as spelled out in these important international agreements.

The destruction of human and national rights in Ukraine is not a novel feature of Soviet Russian policies in Ukraine. In a Memorandum dated Summer, 1979, and sent to the U.N. General Assembly, eighteen Ukrainian political prisoners in the USSR, among them six founding members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in Kiev (1976) sent a petition describing the tragic persecution in Ukraine and demanding that the colonial status of Ukraine be placed on the agenda of the U.N. General Assembly and that the "Committee of 24 on Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples" implement this U.N. resolution with respect to Ukraine.

In the lengthy document, these brave Ukrainian patriots stated, among other things:

...

Ukraine became a constituent part of Russia
not of the free will of the Ukrainian people but
as a consequence of the armed victory of Russia
over Ukraine, i.e., the aggressive physical destruction
of the nationally conscious intelligentsia, of all
Ukrainian political parties and of the more prosperous
segments of the population. All Ukrainian state organs ·
were destroyed step by step and in their place an
administration of occupation was organized.

By this

means, all of Ukraine's national existence became sub-
ordinated to Russia ...

Parallel to the bold and aggressive Soviet foreign policy, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet government intensified its repressions and Russification course in Ukraine. These measures include new arrests, trials, sentencing, expulsions from work and schools, blackmail, overt and covert terror of the KGB, influx of ethnic Russians into Ukraine, and the "administrative exodus" of Ukrainians into other parts of the USSR. Russians are brought to the southern areas of Ukraine for the construction of various hydro-electric plants and installations, while thousands of Ukrainians are being "encouraged" to seek employment outside Ukraine, induced by special awards, financing of private homes, and so forth.

At the same time the Soviet government strengthens its oppression in Ukraine through the following "projects:"

a)

the systematic destruction of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group: b) the continued suppression of religious life, ard c) a virulent policy of ethnocide and genocide in Ukraine.

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The Ukrainian

Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords, or more simply, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, was founded on November 9, 1976 in Kiev, capital of Ukraine. Its overall purpose was to monitor compliance of the Soviet Union with the provisions of the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords.

The original founding members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group included the following: Mykola Rudenko (head of the Group), Oles Berdnyk, Gen. Petro Grigorenko, Ivan Kandyba, Levko Lukyanenko, Oksana Meshko, Mykola Matusevych, Myroslav Marynovych, Nina Strokata Karavansky and Oleksiy Tykhy.

Of the group, only two members are "free," Oksana Meshko and Ivan Kandyba, and two were allowed to emigrate Gen. Petro

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Grigorendo was deprived of Soviet citizenship while on a
visit for medical treatment in the United States, and Mrs. Nina
Strokata Karavansky is also now in the United States. The
remaining six members have been given stiff jail sentences
and are now languishing in prison.

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But despite systematic repressions and cruel and exorbitant penalties, a total of twenty new members have joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in recent months many of them responding from prison cells and labor camps: Vyacheslav Chornovil, Vitaliy Kalynychenko, Zinoviy Krasivsky, Yaroslav Lesiv, Yuriy Lytvyn, Volodymyr Malynkovych, Oksana Popovych, Bohdan Rebryk, Rev. Vasyl Romanyuk, Petro Rozumny, Iryna Senyk, Stefania Shabatura, Yuriy Shukhevych, Danylo Shumuk, Vasyl Sichko, Petro Sichko, Ivan Sokulsky, Vasyl Striltsiv, Vasyl Stus and Petro Vins (now in the U.S.).

In the last few months of 1979 several new members of the Ukrainian Group were arrested and sentenced or are awaiting trial. Petro Rozumny was arrested on October 19, Vasyl Striltsiv on October 25, Yaroslav Lesiv on November 15, Vitaliy Kalynychenko on November 25. In December, 1979, a series of trials of Ukrainian dissidents took place in Ukraine: On December 21, Oles Berdnyk, science fiction writer and head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment and five years of internal exile. On the same day, Yuriy Badzyo, Ukrainian philologist, was given the same sentence. Likewise, in December, a sentence of three years was imposed on Yuriy Lytvyn and on Petro and Vasyl Sichko (father and son), and most recently, on January 21, 1980, Mykola Horbal, a Ukrainian musicologist, was sentenced to five years at hard labor.

At the end of 1979 the Soviet government ousted from the USSR three members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group: Nina Strokata Karavansky and her husband, Svyatoslav Karavansky, and Volodymyr Malynkových.

The new results of KGB operations and repressions in Ukraine are humanly disastrous and catastrophic: 23 members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group are imprisoned or in exile, about 10 are in the West, and about the same number are "free" in the Soviet Union, that is, they are under the constant surveillance and pressure of the KGB.

Assassinations of Prominent Ukrainians by the KGB

There are cases of outright killings or causing the death of prominent Ukrainian dissidents by the KGB. A 51-year-old Ukrainian poet, Heliy Snehiriv, died in a KGB hospital in Kiev, according to a Reuters report of January 3, 1979. Heliy Snehiriv died on Decmeber 28, 1978 in KGB custody at a hospital, where he

had been placed several months earlier. Following his arrest in September, 1977, Snehiriv was subjected to intense KGB torture and was isolated from the outside world. On July 27, 1978, Flora Lewis reported in The New York Times that Snehiriv had renounced his Soviet citizenship, saying, "I don't want to remain a citizen of a state that has destroyed the elite of my Ukrainian people, the best part of the peasantry and the intelligentsia, that has distorted and slandered our past and humiliated our present."

Mykhailo Melnyk, a 35-year-old Ukrainian professor, activist and participant in the Ukrainian human and national rights movement, was found dead in the village of Pohreby, near Kiev. The Reuters news service from Moscow reported that Melnyk allegedly committed suicide by poisoning himself on March 6, 1979, after the KGB raided his home.

Volodymyr Ivasiuk, the 30-year-old Ukrainian composer of "Chervona Ruta" and "Vodohray" and other Ukrainian modern songs that became very popular not only in Ukraine, but among Ukrainians around the world as well, was found dead in a forest some 10 klms. northwest of Lviv on May 18, 1979. The official autopsy stated that Ivasiuk "committed suicide," but friend of the family contend that he was murdered by the KGB,

His compositions enjoyed immense popularity among Ukrainians around the world, indlucing the United States and Canada. He is especially known for his folk songs. According to accounts of his friends, Ivasiuk left his parents' home on April 23, 1979, bound for the conservatory at 5 Boyko Street in Lviv, carrying some music with him. Upon leaving the conservatory, he was picked up by a car, which had been waiting for him. It was the last time Ivasiuk was seen alive. His body, badly beaten, with eyes gouged, was found in a forest on May 18. A five-man team of doctors none of them Ukrainian declared that he had committed suicide. His friends said that suicide was unlikely because there were no rope burns on his neck nor any other sign of suicide. They also reported that Ivasiuk had been shadowed in the last few months by KGB agents and that the car which picked him up was a KGB vehicle (cf. "New Crackdown on Activists in Soviet Union," by Petro Grigorenko in The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 1979, and the "Chronicle of Current Events" "In Captive Ukraine" column in The Ukrainian Quarterly, Nos. 1 and 3, 1979).

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Although political persecution in Ukraine has been part and parcel of the Soviet rule in Ukraine, there had been hope in the West that with Soviet adherence to the Helsinki Accords there might come some relaxation of the totalitarian domination of Moscow over Ukraine.

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