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.