Finally, on July 11, 1978, they transferred me to the residential zone of notorious Camp 36, a strict regime camp. It is impossible to convey my feelings as I crossed the entry gate from the ShIZO barrack where I had been quarantined into the camp.

I remember it vividly: this was not the beginning of a new chapter of my life but rather the beginning of a new life altogether. No doubt that's how Neil Armstrong must have felt when he first stepped on the surface of the moon. Even though I was well aware that this place was a valley of new suffering, my soul was filled with joy and hope, anticipating the people I would soon meet; today, I would say this was hope in God's grace. A dark ironic metaphor for this feeling is captured in an excerpt from the letter that I sent to my family on February 12, 1979:

When I was brought in, most prisoners were at work in the labor zone. This gave me an opportunity to arrange my meager belongings and prepare myself to meet them. I was assigned to a barrack where a cot and a small cupboard had been allocated to me. Soon enough, all the prisoners returned from the work zone. A group of “disobedient” prisoners (i.e., the dissidents) greeted me warmly and enthusiastically, and I later found out that there was a unique ritual for new arrivals:

Camp Food

Food was prepared by a special team of prisoner-cooks assigned to this work duty. I am certain that our cooks, like the Lithuanian Antanas Terlackas, did everything possible to prepare meals that were more or less edible, given the ingredients they had access to. Obviously, that was not an easy task. Luckily, the Chronicle of Current Events recorded some notes that provide a good overall picture. Here are just three illustrations:

There is a humorous story associated with the aforementioned worms: having discovered them in our bowls, we summoned Captain Rak, who was on duty that day. He lifted the spoon containing the worms that we had collected as “material evidence,” popped them into his mouth and chewed them up, and announced: “Those are not worms, that's porridge!” He destroyed our “libelous evidence.” The whole zone had a lot of fun with that.

This chapter could have easily been incorporated into the previous one, which deals mostly with religion. In my case, all aspects of my camp life were clearly rooted in my religious experiences. I am turning this into a separate chapter only because I suspect many of my readers will find some of my conclusions more acceptable without any references to religion. The reader should also be aware that this chapter has the greatest number of quotes from my letters. There is no point paraphrasing some of the thoughts I expressed at the time because I doubt I will be able to express them any better. Furthermore, those quotes are valuable because of their authenticity. After more than thirty years, they are not just quotations: they are also testimonies.

Formation of My Worldview

In camp, one's worldview develops the same way as it does in the free world: through the tension of an intense spiritual field that emerges between two diametrically opposing poles. These poles create a field of coordinates within which a person calibrates his own position, taking into consideration his doubts, revelations, torments, and exultations. The only difference is that in camp, the intensity of those torments and exultations is stronger.

From practically the first days of my incarceration—and to be honest, until today—I have grappled with the same dilemma I described in great detail in a letter sent to my family on May 16, 1982, referencing a poem that had been sent to me by one of my cousins, Olenka Tashuta. The gist of it is simple:

On June 9, 1978, I was taken from my SIZO cell and sent off to camp. My first impressions of this transfer were extremely intense. That day, before the prisoners were dispatched, we were all taken to a remote spot on the periphery of the Kyiv train station. Since this was an open area, we were all told to crouch down, and the whole group was surrounded by soldiers with guard dogs. I was just on the edge of the crowd, where I could see the dogs growling angrily right next to my face—an indelible memory.

Finally, they took us to the Stolypin wagon, and since I was considered an “especially dangerous state criminal,” I was locked in an isolation cage. Ordinary criminals were put in large holding pens with cots. There were so many of them that they could hardly fit. Next to me there was a small cage for women, with two of them in there. One of the women was probably a first-time convict, as she was crying the whole time. But the other one looked more at home. When the criminal inmates spotted the women, they immediately began hitting on them, telling dirty jokes, and asking them to sing “Daisy White” (Rus. Romashka belaia), a prison song with lascivious lyrics that was popular at the time. When the women did not comply, the criminals started singing it themselves, relishing the effect it had on the women. After each bout of dirty jokes, the frightened woman in the neighboring cage cried even more.

The guards paced up and down the corridors, peering through the wire mesh. They wearily exchanged the usual expletives with the prisoners. As the train started moving, one of the guards cracked open a window to let in some fresh air—right next to me, luckily enough. I climbed up to the top bunk and soaked in Kyiv's hills and the bell towers of the city's churches as they glided past me. Once the train crossed the rail bridge, with a deep sense of longing I bade an extended farewell to the Dnipro River and to my beloved Kyiv.

When I began writing this section, I thought about dividing it into two parts: one describing our various forms of resistance to the authorities and the other covering the punishment we received in return. But it proved impossible to separate the two because one flowed from the other. In other words, the struggle itself, and then the ensuing punishments, were inseparable elements that penetrated all aspects of camp life for every prisoner.

As I have previously mentioned, everyone in camp already knew about the Helsinki Group activities and that some of their members had been arrested. My status, as a person who had spoken up in defense of the prisoners and their rights, was very high. At the same time, this made me accountable to them: I couldn't make any mistakes or show any fear. This was why I immediately got involved in the camp struggle. Beyond the punishment that would inevitably result from it, my elevated status also brought me some unexpected difficulties. Early on, Yevhen Proniuk stunned me with a solemn pronouncement: I should immediately start readying myself for future political activity. It was as if a sort of noblesse oblige required me to do so. I remember my surprisingly categorical answer: “No way!” Somehow, I never envisioned myself in politics.

Political engagement is one thing, but working to protect human dignity and my rights, which in our Soviet reality had a clear political dimension, was another matter. In this respect, I had no other choice: I simply had to defend my status as a political prisoner and dissident. Today, I am aware that a number of former Ukrainian political prisoners refrain from calling themselves “dissidents,” calling themselves “fighters for the Resistance Movement” (Ukr. Bortsi Rukhu oporu) instead. I accept this designation and agree that the term “dissident” might be semantically deceptive (as Ihor Kalynets and Ivan Hel claim) when applied to committed national freedom fighters. I do not agree, however, with retrograde and anachronistic attempts to denigrate the label as immature or unworthy. In my memory, in Zone 36, this term was considered both mature and honorable. To illustrate this, I would like to quote Ihor Kalynets's declaration of February 28, 1978, protesting against Levko Lukianenko's arrest: “It seems to me that it is high time to see sense and cease the harassment of dissident Ukrainian patriots.”

In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was false, and the word itself became falsehood, dissolving in a black stain on the pure parchment of the human soul.

In the dwelling where Jehovah reigned, there settled betrayal and scorn, anger and deception.

And the word became flesh, and dwelled among us, filled with malevolence and contempt, and we saw its glory and we luxuriated in the exquisite fruits of this glory.

The word became a blade, which cuts up a heart sooner than Cain's knife, and it sprouted intoxicating weeds in sacred life, and became suspended in the air in a myriad of viruses, malignant and hostile.

And evil, begotten with the first foul word, became the Law of Life. And people began to curse with the word, no longer understanding that it is God.

❧

I am a holy fool.

My lineage begins with Moses, and the rocks which the angered Hebrews hurled at him are my undeniable, bitter, exclusive heritage.

When my Lord rests, I—His most loyal guardian—go against the treacherous servants of God, for whom the seventh day is a time for blasphemy and ridicule.

I am he who wants to see those who are distant as my neighbors, though to my neighbors I am infinitely distant.

Not knowing with how many fingers I should cross myself, I paint the Crucifixion in my mind and try it on myself.

I am the Knight of the Absurd, because in every monster I see Goliath. Encased in prison like the brain in a skull, I hover over the pain-racked world with unfettered thoughts.

I see the stigma of death on the face of my planet and I beg God that even when the worst happens, He will send Earth the fate of the resurrected Lazarus.

I am the clown at the fair. I insult people with my noisy insolence, while in my heart I create the Gospel of Forgiveness.

In the moldy prison walls I feel the current of universal pain, and so I laugh like a buffoon, so that the prison guard does not see that I hurt, too.

Forging a Place for Myself under the Kazakh Sun

Saralzhin, the village where I was sent to spend my internal exile, is a Kazakh word for a type of small, thorny bush that miraculously survives in the sandy soil. These bushes are sturdy: you can't just yank them out of the ground. No wonder the whole village was also named after this bush: the village had also entrenched itself firmly in the sand, barely peeking out above it. When I finally jumped off the milk wagon, wearing a jacket and a small backpack, I got the sense that I had landed on a beach.

Bathing (or, rather, splashing myself with water) in a small stream called the Uil, which flowed near the village, truly saved my life that first unbearably hot summer. Saralzhin was fortunate to have this little stream, which doesn't flow into any other river, it just dries up. I was surrounded by the endless desert, which made one of the rules of my internal exile absurd: I was permitted to wander off only in a radius of thirty kilometers from the village. But where could I go? Except for some scattered farms, the nearest town was the regional center, Uil, around fifty kilometers away. Obviously, I needed the permission of the authorities to go there.

The distance from the village to the nearest city, Aktiubinsk, was about two hundred kilometers, but the transport connections were adequate. You could get there by taking two or three regularly scheduled buses, but the route was a dirt road that was frequently washed out during big rainstorms. These transport connections would also frequently be disrupted by summer sandstorms and winter blizzards, which were common in this area.

The time difference with Moscow was the same two hours that I had gotten used to in the Ural region. The only difference was that now I was south of that mountain range. The village of Saralzhin was rather small, anchored by a state-owned animal farm that mainly raised cattle. In addition to the village administration building, there was also a school, a post office, a building materials depot, a grocery and hardware store, a bakery, a cinema, and a small library with mostly Kazakh literature (it only had a few dozen Russianlanguage books in its collection). The public baths were open on weekends. Several sheep farms surrounded the village.

It's Not Easy to Be a Vagabond

At that time, the Ukrainian national self-defense front in Kyiv had been totally devastated, fragmented, and practically demoralized by endless defeats. The Khrushchev thaw had ended, and Leonid Brezhnev was in charge in Moscow. Petro Shelest, the Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, was accused of “Ukrainian nationalism” and dismissed. In 1972, Ivan Dziuba, the author of the revolutionary Internationalism or Russification? was arrested and ousted from the Writers’ Union of Ukraine. The new regime left its mark through the strong-arm tactics of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the new party boss in Ukraine, who was hell-bent on “establishing order.” That dark year, 1972, witnessed mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, and this resulted in despondency and hopelessness. A new wave of Russification was underway. Ukrainophobes rejoiced. As the arrested dissident Zynovy Antoniuk, a major distributor of samizdat, was told by his interrogator, “After this, we’ll have about ten years of peace.”

Then we got word that Ivan Dziuba had signed a statement of repentance and was subsequently released from prison. I remember discussing this with Mykola Matusevych while strolling down Khreshchatyk Boulevard in the center of Kyiv. We felt as if our flag had fallen. We were young and not particularly interested in knowing the circumstances that led Dziuba to take this step. Our verdict was unequivocal. We certainly understood that when the army unit's banner falls, its spirit goes with it. As Dziuba's fellow dissident Svitlana Kyrychenko later put it, “It wasn't just yourself that you shot, Ivan.”

I felt the consequences of all this personally as early as 1975. When I spoke Ukrainian, it shocked people in the personnel departments that I frequented in an attempt to find work and provoked aggression in public locations. Informants were everywhere, my friends were intimidated by the KGB, and absurd charges were leveled at them. Members of the newly disbanded Homin choir, including my good friend Anna Koval, had been accused by a party boss of performing “an anti-Soviet dance,” for dancing a traditional Hutsul dance.

All we could do in the face of all of this was cry—or laugh. Mykola and I chose the latter.

The Price of Growing Up in Freedom

Well into her seventies, my mother still liked to tell a funny story about the time when, as a young student, I came home from my Lviv dorm and handed her a bundle of my dirty laundry. To get out of an uncomfortable situation, as I handed her this lovely “gift,” I sang the first few lines from the popular song “Two Colors” (Dva kol’ory):

Today, as I finish my memoirs, I am reminded of those words. My life has indeed bounced me around the dissident paths of distant camps, and what did I bring back home? What kind of life is embroidered on that timeworn cloth?

As I look back, all I see is the unending crescendo of my incompatibility with the Soviet system. For me, Moscow's “enforced love” resulted only in a series of punishments because I refused to become a stool pigeon: difficulties in finding employment, then losing my job; having trouble obtaining housing; secret and overt surveillance; and provocations and persecutions from the KGB. Then came my arrest on April 23, 1977, followed by interrogations, an unlawful trial, continuous transfers by armored trains between various prisons, an extended deprivation of freedom in a strict regime labor camp in the Ural Mountains, hunger strikes and labor strikes, extreme cold and food deprivation in numerous isolation cells, searches, and confiscations, and then, starting in April 1984, a three-year internal exile in Kazakhstan. Even if you don't count the extrajudicial persecution before my arrest, it spanned a full ten years. I was arrested when I was twenty-eight and returned to Ukraine as a thirty-eight-year-old.

At that time, many people considered this to be a disproportionate price to pay in the struggle for human rights. Some of my friends, however, paid far more: they lost their lives in the struggle. Even then, I opposed the idea that I had sacrificed too much, and I haven't changed my mind. I remember Mephistopheles's allegation in Goethe's monumental Faust: “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

In my lifetime I have lived several lives, and they are separated from each other either by painful dramas or by radical transformations. And thus, the trunk of the tree of my life, as befits any tree, contains distinct rings. Two of those rings—the dissident and the inmate—are special, truly granted by God. It is a great blessing to have been instrumental in the demise of, as Yevhen Sverstiuk put it, an “empire of bent backs, humbly devoted faces, and raised arms.” For such a life, full of strife and challenges, you can only be grateful to Providence.

For the longest time I have had the feeling that every person is just one musical note on the heavenly keyboard, and once in a while that note is pressed by the finger of the Divine Pianist. It is a miracle indeed when you are the note that is required in His melody. But God will not hold his finger on your note forever. Inevitably there comes a time for you to humbly acknowledge that other notes are resonating nearby: your fervor declines, various health complaints begin to emerge, and then all grandiose plans go topsy-turvy.

Still, if one believes Ecclesiastes, both of these times have great meaning. My description of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, as indeed everything that I write in these memoirs, is obviously subjective. Will my account, however, be faithful to the truth? After all, so many years have gone by… . Sometimes I catch myself thinking that some basic things might have fallen from my memory. Some mistakes may well be inevitable.

But I assure you that there are no deliberate fabrications. Once you begin to write something, it's important to do so with a sense of civic responsibility. My memoirs might differ from those of others. After all, each participant in those events carries with them their own mental recording of those turbulent years and their own “hologram” of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

It was during my mother's stay in Saralzhin in February 1987 that a whole delegation came to visit me: a Kazakh procurator from Aktiubinsk, another procurator from Lviv, and two KGB agents, also from Lviv. They told me that things were moving in the direction of democratization in Ukraine, and they needed to settle the issue of political dissidents. Additionally, they had gotten very positive evaluations about me from my workplace and from the local police, as well as from the Aktiubinsk, Kyiv, and Lviv KGB. “We are authorized to tell you that if you write a letter of repentance for everything that happened, you will be free within a month.” They were insistent that I do this, coming up with new arguments against each of my objections. My position was unchanging: “Listen here, good people, you are being totally irrational. I spent seven years in prison camps and three years in internal exile, and now, practically at the end of my term, you want me to repent, something that I refused to do from the very beginning. Since I did not do it then and have served practically my whole term, I certainly will not do it now.” At that time, I had not yet read Yevhen Sverstiuk's words, which would have been apropos, but their essence was certainly on my mind: “Political prisoners do not beg for forgiveness—that is the whole point of their resistance in the first place.”

Finally, after a long debate, they asked me if I would be willing to write a statement saying that I refused to ask for forgiveness. I agreed and wrote on a piece of paper that I do not consider myself guilty and will never repent because I acted appropriately. Eventually, I learned that this KGB meeting was not a new or unique tactic. This is how Patriarch Josyf Slipyj recounted it: “The Commander told me to write something asking for my release. They were convinced that because I was in such a hopeless and desperate situation, I might write God knows what. Instead, I wrote about all the abuse and violations that I had endured. Most likely, they were planning to stage my release, based on my appeals.”