Symon HLUZMAN: “It’s a process of convalescence that can’t be speeded up or slowed down”

Former political prisoners have one thing in common; they are loath to remember their prison camp past. Symon Hluzman is an especially vivid example. His ideals of the 1960s are personified by Ivan Svitlychny, Levko Lukyanenko, and Petro Hryhorenko. He believes that when he was young it was much easier to campaign against the Soviet regime; he was single and had a vague idea about what he was faced with, preparing independent expert findings in the case of General Hryhorenko [known in the West as Grigorenko]. Fellow inmates at the prison camp, with more life experience, knew what they were doing. What kept them going was a firm belief in a happier future for their country. Time would tell. Names painstakingly erased from public memory under the Soviets would be reinstated. But does the current Ukrainian regime always act in accordance with all those aspirations for freedom, driving all those people? What does Ukraine look like in the eleventh year of independence? These and many other subjects were broached in the following interview with Symon Hluzman, human rights champion, former dissident, prisoner of conscience, currently a prominent psychiatrist, member of numerous international professional associations, executive secretary of the Ukrainian Association of Psychiatrists, cochairman of the Ukrainian Public Council for Human Rights, and director of the Ukrainian-US Human Rights Bureau.

Some believe that Ukrainians refute the classics and that our development does not follow a spiral pattern but moves in circles. Perhaps because we make some typical mistakes?

I don’t think so. I believe that we are following the spiral pattern, except that this spiral is rather gently sloping. In fact, we live in a country that became independent by sheer chance. The Ukrainian people didn’t fight for it, they were not prepared for freedom, unlike the Uzbeks or Turkmen, for example. Simultaneously, serving my long term in the prison camp, I and my friends saw no dissidents from White Russia or Central Asia among the inmates. There was no resistance ferment in those Soviet republics. Of course, it is simplified sociology, but it has a right to exist. People that never fought for a different way of life don’t know how to live differently. It’s a process of convalescence that can’t be sped up or slowed down. A country is convalescing, knowing nothing about private ownership, freedom of speech, and morals. We all know that there were two kinds of morals in the USSR: general human and Soviet.

Many consider that, given today’s abundant information and tremendous strain on people, this process of convalescence could quicken, owing to the educational shock; we live in an age of progressive technologies, the Internet, and so on. In other words, access to information and education doesn’t play a decisive role and everything depends on the generations to come.

I have a friend in Britain, he has a Ph.D. and specializes in Ukraine. He told me that we’ll need some 200 years to get there. I’m no expert to support or refute his opinion. And I find arguments like the development of the Internet and suchlike ridiculous. That’s a technological bludgeon wielded by a savage. What’s happening in the Ukrainian countryside is worlds apart from the Internet and Europe, so I have a feeling that changing something will take a couple of generations.

But we have started moving toward recovery, haven’t we?

I’m one of those best described as well-informed pessimists. I think that we have no right to say that things are getting worse. Ukrainians are now free to leave their country, they have free elections. Even if our elections have more practical distortions than anywhere in Europe, this doesn’t prevent the people from expressing their will. Very many in this country don’t like the current regime, but our president and parliament were elected by the Ukrainian people. Another important thing is that we no longer have political prisoners. And this considering that some of our former “Soviet brothers” have people of the opposition behind bars. Now I live in a country which is much better than the one I lived in previously. It’s just that most people living in Ukraine, after receiving a lot of opportunities, couldn’t adjust to them; they didn’t know the right way to use them.

How is this to be considered, using what system of coordinates? Of course, it’s bad when a country has political prisoners. On the other hand, is it good for a nation to face an immoral choice?

Indeed, our tragedy is that we don’t have an opposition as such. A close look at what we have shows that they’re no different from the rest. At present, most important decisions aren’t made in parliament but in the street. Public initiatives are appearing but very slowly. It’s good that there are differences between those in power and those who wan it; even if it’s not what we actually need as yet, it’s just that what we need is still to appear.

Dr. Hluzman, what do you think has happened to our dissidents? They seem to have lost their bearings in our society and they could have formed the moral basis of the opposition. We seem to have no moral authorities in society.

If there are, say, two hundred such moral authorities, it doesn’t mean that 49 million of the population will show a higher moral standard. Now we must discuss the kind of country we would like to see in the immediate future. I, for one, would like to see Ukraine as dull as Denmark (I have often visited that country) and as comfortable a home for its citizens. I don’t care if it has its own astronaut or an ultrasonic plane. I see Ukraine’s future as dull and peaceful. Well, those that don’t like the prospect have a choice, they can settle in Russia, for example. That country’s future will be anything but dull.

Talking of Russia, how do you feel about recent events there? Until recently a lot of Ukrainians cast envious glances eastward.

I have a special attitude toward Russia. Inwardly I bade her farewell a long time ago. I’ve always been scared by it. Russia means a special destiny and I pity all those living there very much. It’s the last empire that stubbornly refuses to part with its past, meaning that it has sad prospects.

Remember what happened in our parliament? Vyacheslav Chornovil ran up to the podium as Boris Yeltsin stood there and told the Russian president, “Do you know that you came to Ukraine when political purges started here?” He meant the resonant Stepan Khmara case. Now that we are in the eleventh year of independence, a group of politicians greeted Vladimir Putin in Zaporizhzhia and asked him not to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart. What is it?

It’s a sign of democracy: some support the regime, others oppose it.

How about our learning to make decisions without relying on help from outside?

Yes, we must work out a rating scale of our own. This should be done not by political analysts but by civil society, and I don’t mean the kind of stuff registered with the Ministry of Justice. That’s our problem. We don’t have a civil — rather than bureaucratic — initiative. There were few Russian dissidents in prison camps, compared to Ukrainians, simply because Moscow was more humane. Russian dissidents were either expelled from the Soviet Union or tried on milder charges. A friend of mine, a noted Ukrainian politician, found his criminal case in the archives and discovered correspondence between Kyiv and Moscow. Kyiv asked permission to arrest him again and Moscow replied they didn’t consider it expedient and that preventive measures would do under the circumstances. But my friend was arrested anyway.

Why?

At the time it was normal conduct on the part of the Ukrainian cattle wielding power. They wanted Moscow to appreciate their zeal, yet arguments like Comrade A constituting a greater threat to the state than Comrade B were never used. Who were all those Ukrainian dissidents? About 50% were people outraged by the persecution of their mother tongue and national culture. It was their emotional response to [Moscow’s] attitude toward their people. Russian dissidents were mostly graduates of technical higher schools, they knew foreign languages and European values, and defended human rights. At the time there were no political parties or other serious organizations, just people responding to the situation in the Soviet Union, proceeding from their individual persuasions. I never campaigned for Ukrainian independence and against the Soviet regime. I knew that my favorite occupation, psychiatry, was being abused for political purposes. When I was in camp I discovered that fellow inmates, among them people serving 25- year terms for involvement with the UPA [Ukrainian Insurgent Army], were close to me.

What do you think of the absence of a unanimous view on UPA in Ukrainian society?

It’s bad, but I can understand it. I can’t make others love someone I do. There must be tolerance in society. I learned this in prison camp. I spent seven years with fellow inmates serving terms on UPA charges, so my attitude toward them is sincere. True, some of them would then serve with an SS division, but we have no right to condemn them. I remember an inmate, he was around 55, we all knew him as Uncle Misha. I also knew that he had been a German infantryman during the Warsaw uprising and had then fought the Germans with the Soviet army. But I didn’t know how it all had begun. Once we sat in the boiler room and he told me about how he and others got surrounded and that every day more and more carloads of dead bodies would be driven from behind barbed wire. Then people wearing SS uniforms had come and asked if anyone wanted to serve the great FЯhrer. Uncle Misha had taken five steps forward. The recruiters looked at him and said that the FЯhrer didn’t need a soldier like that, but he was accepted in the end, for few others had volunteered. The man ended his story, saying, “I received a letter today, I have a granddaughter.” I saw the expression on his face and thought that here was a man that had deceived both Stalin and Hitler.

Therefore, I think it isn’t proper to talk about ideals in a country where its own government shed the blood of millions of its people. Now we have what we have. What is happening in Ukraine depends not only on the powers that be, but also on what we all received when emancipated from slavery. Ukraine received cultural bondage. Unless we learn to speak the truth, we will live in a country no different from what they have on the other side of the Ural Mountains. Still, I don’t think it will happen.

From what you have said follows that previously people were frightened primarily by the state. How do they feel now? How do you think people should treat the state?

Warily, never completely trusting it. I think that every law-abiding citizen in the West treats the state precisely that way. It’s normal, for the hare must know about the wolf being somewhere in the woods. Now the kind of fear experienced by society is different from what it was like under Stalin or Brezhnev. Yet it is still there and will disappear only when the people feeling it die. People remembering social horrors cannot become totally free.

You of all people know what

being in prison is all about. You must also understand better than anyone else the meaning of the freedom of speech and its absence. What do you think of the current freedom-of-speech campaign?

I think that there is a difference between Soviet censorship and what you call it today. Do we have the kind of freedom of speech they have in the English-speaking world? No, we don’t. Nor do we have what they have in Germany. Yet what is happening to the Ukrainian media isn’t censorship in its classical sense... They talk about techniques meaning that what we have now is a hangover. The current problem is the culture of the people and that of those in power. If someone invests in a television channel or a newspaper only to hear and read eulogies about oneself, one can afford it, being a rich man in an underdeveloped country... I’ve dealt with the owners of certain channels and thought they were perfect cynics who could not care less about the effect of their programs on the public. Today’s Ukrainian television lowers its audiences to the level of a perfect idiot. I watched television in America, and it was also a lamentable sight, but I never saw such vulgar stuff as we watch on our screens in Ukraine.

It looks as though our television products were the result of the Ukrainian elite pulling out of the process of state and social construction. After all, the people has to be treated like a vegetable garden, you must water it, earth it, and weed it. In other words, it takes a great deal of creative work.

Yes, but if everything is allowed and if we make money for the sake of money —

When they broadcast the Moscow hostage situation, they’d often show the concert hall with dead Chechens. Of course, they were enemies, but when they put a bottle of cognac next to a dead enemy without even taking off its cap — what is it from the psychiatric point of view?

Psychiatry doesn’t deal with such problems. It’s a biologically oriented science, dealing with mental disorders. What you’ve just mentioned is most likely immorality. Regrettably, I don’t think that what happened in Moscow will have any effect on the Ukrainian population. Why, regrettably? Because it won’t have a sobering effect... Thank God, we have no Chechnya, but we have other problems. What I mean by sobering is that people should realize: problems mustn’t be solved that way. As in Russia, we have a lot of so- called experts telling us from our screens what will happen and how, without being actually familiar with the situation. People take advantage of situations. After the Lviv tragedy, people started pestering the Soros Foundation, claiming they knew exactly how the populace should be assisted.

We in our newspaper don’t use the expression “grant-eaters,” but apparently a problem exists in Ukraine, considering that all such foundations were made responsible for the construction of a civil society here. On the other hand, wasn’t this the reason for the appearance of all those “professionals”?

That’s a normal response. When money appears out of nowhere and starts being handed out left and right, there are always people willing to take it. We in Ukraine shouldn’t be blamed for this. Our scientists can’t scrape up funds for research projects, so how can you expect them to say no when offered material support? Another thing is the way such funds/foundations operate. In my opinion, all some of these donors have achieved in ten years is a higher corruption rate in Ukraine, although most had anti-corruption programs. The objective of any fund/foundation is to help create a serious, nationally important intellectual product, something the domestic system cannot afford at present. Such donor aid, among other things, makes it possible to enlist people from all those administrations and ministries that can and will work.

Is there any chance of such funds helping crystallize a civil society here?

I’ve never believed it. Mr. Soros could invest all his money in this country, we could build everything our physically handicapped citizens need, so they would easily board buses and so on — but we can’t change the population’s mentality. A civil society is born like an infant; first, there is conception and finally labor. The time of delivery — I mean public efforts — is when such funds should step in and support them. We have less funds than Russia does; they are also well represented in Ukraine but prove far less effective. I have been involved with the Soros Foundation over the past several years (here it is known as Renaissance or Vidrodzhennia). I used to believe that it showed a better performance, but I quit not so long ago, as a member of the board. Together with two colleagues, I tried to upgrade the performance. We weren’t understood. I don’t mean that we spotted corruption at the Vidrodzhennia. The thing is that, with seven million dollars a year — rather big money for the development of an intellectual product — the foundation could have been considerably more effective. I strongly object to the kind of professional ethics practiced by Vidrodzhennia, it is graphic evidence of the inability to build an open society, with the members of the board acting as figureheads. And so we three members of the board wrote a letter to Mr. Soros, advising him of severing our board membership. Actually, I feel warmly about the man, I have dealt with him personally and realized that he is sincerely trying to help the post-Soviet states.

You are perplexed by the lack of public initiative, but we don’t receive Western grants on anyone’s instructions, do we?

We receive them as they give them to us.

And as we can receive them. It is just possible that people manning offices of the Soros Foundation across the ocean do not have a clear idea about what is actually happening here. Here its branches are manned by former Soviet citizens doing everything the way they were taught and can.

George Soros’s tragedy is that of a man trying to help a country he knows practically nothing about. He relies on very bad advisers. A government-run fund/foundation is necessarily a bureaucratic structure that can hardly be changed. And Soros is tired of us Ukrainians. At one time he wanted to close the Ukrainian office, because there were flagrant fiscal transgressions. I wasn’t a board member and every time we met at some social functions George Soros would anxiously ask about the foundation in Ukraine.

Ukraine isn’t likely to develop a civil society before long, as

we have practically no funds of our own.

Several years ago I was conferred a prize worth $20,000 for [a meritorious contribution in] the construction of civil society. I was free to use the money the way I pleased. I donated it for the construction of a mental asylum. A friend of mine, also a psychiatrist, told me I was nuts. Now I am really sorry I did. Look at how the fathers of Kyiv spend millions and on what. Meaning they could have easily produced $20,000 to repair a building where people would receive inexpensive and effective psychiatric aid. I would have spent that money on something the priorities couldn’t afford.

Volunteer medical organizations recently formed a uniform structure. Do you think they will be able to drag Ukrainian health care out of what you describe as immorality and inefficiency? If so, what kind of strategy should they adopt?

Can you pull your hair and drag yourself out of a swamp? Of course not. The same with health care. Its reform is the prerogative of the economy and finance ministries, the Accounting Chamber, and the Institute of Strategic Studies. This means that the people at these institutions will wake up one day and tell themselves and everybody else, “That’s it! We can’t live like that any longer. We can’t spend money on ineffective medicine. Medical schools teach to treat and cure people, not the system. The medical reform must involve not only medical personnel, but also patients, the consumers of medical services. These people must unite in volunteer organizations, if need be demand court action and even have physicians jailed. Who are our physicians? Experts? They are people taking orders from the Ministry of Health. Who do they inspect? People working in the ministry’s framework. So who would risk his job by telling the truth? Some of our physicians should be janitors. We proudly declared once that we ranked first in the world in the number of doctors per capita. In reality we have lots of medical doctors who don’t know how to go about examining a patient. Is it normal for a former urologist or sex therapist to be in charge of psychiatric aid all over Ukraine? The Ukrainian health protection system is in a shambles while many believe that all it needs is adequate funding. Untrue. You can’t invest in a swamp. Once subsidies appear they will be either stolen or wasted. The problem of funding can appear only when the minister or head of a medical chair is a person with proper training, professional experience, and intellect.

Do our patients have any rights and is it possible to protect them in any way?

Some of them do, others don’t. If I am sufficiently informed as a patient, I have such rights. Actually, nothing is done in Ukraine about protecting the patient’s rights... The problem is that we don’t have adequate medical certification procedures. No ministry of health in any civilized country would have allow characters like Kashpirovsky, along with thousands of those telepaths. I keep asking please show me an instrument capable of detecting extrasensory abilities...

How effective is Ukrainian psychiatry? It seems at a standstill, compared to revolutionizing discoveries in other medical fields.

Psychiatrists work in a field where guidelines are developed by scientists, not physicians. No cardinal changes have taken place in neuroscience of late. Yet the problem can’t be regarded unequivocally, that there must be a breakthrough in psychiatry. Specialists in the West, for example, convince their patients that they are no worse than other people, that they have all their rights, that it’s just a temporary problem they have, that every effort will be made to solve it. If not, they will teach the patient to live with it. This practice is not popular in Ukraine, just as few show an interest in health care problems. We have produced a serious document, a book titled Strategic Guidelines in the Development of Health Care. Among the authors are demographers, physicians, and economists... I have sent copies to all political parties and factions. The only response came from Viktor Medvedchuk. We held a round table and had all our initiatives carried by media. And then word spread that I had sold myself to Medvedchuk.

There is a lot of talk about Ukrainian medicine; should it be free or payable, or based on insurance plans. What do you think?

The impression is that people discussing insurance and payable medicine do not understand the definitions. Payable medicine is when a patient can afford the most expensive kind of treatment. Who is lobbying for insurance medicine most actively? Insurance companies. They don’t understand that there will be nothing in it for them. Of course, insurance medicine is a way out of the crisis, but I just can’t see it instituted now that we have 60% of the economy in the shadow.