Vyacheslav Chornovil, Mustafa Dzhemilev (1990s). Source: The Sixties Museum in Kyiv, used with permission.

By Radomir Mokrik

This story is part of a series of essays written by Ukrainian artists entitled “Regained Culture: Ukrainian voices curate Ukrainian culture.” This series is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Association/Rozstaje.art, thanks to co-financing by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through a grant by the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. It has been translated from Ukrainian by Iryna Tiper and Filip Noubel.

In his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Czech writer Václav Havel once explained why the term “dissident” annoyed him. He said it gave the impression of being a “professional member of the opposition,” although in reality those who were called “dissidents” were, first and foremost, people with their own professions, families, and fears. The dissident movement within the Soviet bloc (1922–1991) took shape in different ways. In Czechoslovakia, it was in the musical underground; in Poland, in factories; and in Ukraine at literary evenings. However, in 1975, it gained a common denominator in the form of the Helsinki Accords and the human rights movement.

In Czechoslovakia, local dissidents created the  “Charter 77,” in Poland, they founded the Movement for the Protection of Human and Citizen Rights (ROPCiO), and in the USSR, Helsinki groups (human rights watchdogs) began to emerge — in Moscow, Yerevan, Tbilisi, Vilnius, and Kyiv. In Ukraine, national movements fighting the Soviet empire were intertwined with attempts to protect human rights. Former political prisoners of the Soviet regime, such as Mustafa Dzhemilev, Yosyf Zisels, and Miroslav Marynovych, share their experiences of fighting against the empire, then and now.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Group: ‘I refuse to be afraid’

Yosyf Zisels, a Ukrainian Jew, as he calls himself, describes the significance of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG). He spent a total of six years in labor camps in the late 1970s for participating in the human rights movement.

Human rights, this was the new essence of the dissident movement. With this, Ukrainian dissidents entered the space of international human rights protection. The fact that the UHG aligned itself with international human rights standards was extremely important; it meant that Ukrainians subordinated their aspirations to the general aspirations of Europe and the world. It was a story about democratization, about human rights. It was a symbolic, but important step.

Zisels adds that the desire to demonstrate the falsehood of the Soviet system was also important, so that the West would have no illusions that discussing the USSR could ever be done in a truly legal context. “This is somewhat reminiscent of the illusions that can still often be found in Europe regarding Russia.”

The UHG was founded in 1976 by just 10 brave people who understood that this initiative would land them in prison. Regardless, they decided to move forward in pursuit of personal, national, and pan-European interests.

Joining the European logic of human rights protection meant that Ukrainian human rights defenders had to ask a hard question: was their struggle primarily for universal human rights, or also for the national rights of the Ukrainian people? After all, many people were pushed to join the dissidence precisely because of  Moscow's policy that marginalized Ukrainian culture and grossly discriminated against the Ukrainian language.

Philosopher and religious scholar Myroslav Marynovych recalls how he joined the UHG in November 1976. He felt the burden of national discrimination; thus, when a specific initiative arose, he decided to act, saying, “This ubiquitous falsehood and lie of the system was disgusting to me. I refused to be afraid.”

Marynovich’s name appeared alongside nine others — people who openly declared that they were legally founding a human rights group. For Marynovich, the combination of the national and the universal was quite organic:

Of the five groups that existed in the USSR, only the Moscow group was wholly ‘democratic.’ It raised questions exclusively about civil liberties. But all the other groups in other Soviet republics also fought for their national rights. The Moscow dissidents did not like this. That is, they did not block documents from us, but they scowled, saying: ‘Why are you doing this? You are mixing it all up… Focus on civil rights.’ The dual nature of the Soviet system — as a totalitarian regime and a Russian empire —  was rejected in Moscow even in these dissident circles.

Solidarity of the enslaved 

Mustafa Dzhemilev has served as a leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement for many decades. He was born in Crimea in November 1943, but six months later, he — like the entire Crimean Tatar nation — was forcibly deported from Crimea to Central Asia by Soviet authorities. Dzhemilev uses the word “genocide” several times during our conversation, and this is not a metaphor.

The Crimean Tatars survived the horrors of the occupation, but their experience of living under the Soviet regime was not much better either:

Of course, during the Nazi occupation, people saw horrors — the killing of Jews, mass executions, and violence. There can be no illusions, both Nazism and communism are evil. And the Crimean Tatars have a different fate: their deportation of the Crimean Tatars was in no way connected with their behavior or actions. It was part of Russia's overall strategy towards Crimea and the Crimean Tatars in particular. Crimea was to become a completely Russian place. This ‘relocation’ became genocide for us. Everything related to the Tatars was destroyed — mosques, cemeteries, settlements were renamed. The goal was to destroy the people.

Dzhemilev’s life became a constant struggle for the right to return home, which soon became the root of his dissidence. But he emphasizes that he quickly moved from the national to the universal.

The Crimean Tatar movement of the 1960s was “radicalized” by a Ukrainian, Petro Hryhorenko. “It was Hryhorenko who explained that we should not ask, but demand. No Tatar has done as much for our national cause as Petro Hryhorenko,” recalls Dzhemilev.

Dissidents — whether Ukrainians, Jews, or Crimean Tatars — defended their own culture, but this did not prevent mutual support; in fact, it rather strengthened it.

It was in the camps that the “internationalism” declared by the Soviet Communist Party took on real shape. “The support from people from the Baltics and the Caucasus was self-evident; we were on the same wavelength. But the strongest was the union of the Trident and the Star of David,” said Dzhemilev.

Myroslav Marynovych went on to explain the Ukrainian-Jewish solidarity: “The Jews who ended up in the camps usually already supported the national state of Israel. They were people with a national conscience, so for them, the position of the Ukrainians was understandable. Because both simply loved their people.”

Josyf Zisels agreed and emphasized how beneficial the influence of the Ukrainian national movement was for him personally:

I am a Jew. My whole family is Jewish. This is my culture and my identity. But both my dissidence and my general development later led me to more universal, democratic things. And Ukrainian dissidents told me indirectly but implicetly that you cannot bypass this path and ignore your ethnic and religious trace. You must live through them. You can then go further, reach the universal level. But you cannot pretend that this does not exist. That is why I then took a step back […] created the first specifically Jewish organization after my second term.

Myroslav Marynovich’s remark that Russian dissidents did not like it when the question of national identity was discussed should not be perceived as a retrospective rewriting of history. Without in any way belittling the role of Moscow dissidents, and of figures such as Andrey Sakharov, the question of national identity was not something that bothered them. After all, Russians were not the object of daily discrimination simply because they spoke their own language; they were not affected by latent anti-Semitism, and the impetus of their dissidence was not the desire to return to any “stolen homeland.”

Collapse, disintegration, decolonization?

The number one issue today in Ukraine is undoubtedly Russia’s defeat in the war. What will it look like — disintegration, collapse, decolonization? Decolonization is a common idea in Ukraine that some researchers are trying to popularize in the West.

The Ukrainian former political prisoners are rather cautious optimists.

Joseph Zisels says that he is in touch with a handful of old acquaintances in Russia:

Of course, I sympathize with them, but I also tell them that with such a history, within such borders, Russia cannot become a democratic country. At one time, I wanted the collapse of the USSR, because I understood that a democratic USSR simply could not exist. But they are still building it there.

Zisels is convinced that what is changing is only the geopolitical context, but not Russia's imperial identity, and the West should understand this.

For Mustafa Dzhemilev, the issue of Russia's defeat is also the issue of the possibility of finally returning home, because as long as the Russian Federation exists in its current form, Crimea remains in the grip of the occupiers. Marynovych has a similar view:

In March 2022, I said ‘I sense the stench of a dying empire. Russia will not be able to swallow Ukraine — it will choke on it.’ I said that I am happy because I smell the cadaverous smell of the Russian Empire. And I still smell it. It will not swallow Ukraine; it will choke on it. I have no doubt about this, but the question is when and how? The same questions were raised about the Soviet Union when I was in the camps. Nobody knew when, but they knew that it would definitely collapse.