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The First Dissident 

26 June, 00:00

Ludimila Alexeyeva in her comprehensive 1985 history of the dissident movement, Soviet Dissent, traced the beginning of the movement for human and national rights in the Soviet Union back to 1959 when Chernihiv-born lawyer Levko Lukyanenko organized in Lviv a small group, the Ukrainian Union of Workers and Peasants, to seek a legal way to exercise Soviet Ukraine's right, guaranteed by the treaty creating the USSR and each of its successive constitutions, to get out and become an independent socialist state. Of course, within a couple of years Mr. Lukyanenko and his Jurists' Group was discovered and arrested, beginning the first dissident's 25-year career as a prisoner of conscience. In various groups and in various ways he never stopped fighting for Ukraine. This issue's interview with the man who deserves to be considered the first Soviet dissident shows that he is not about to stop now.

What Levko Hryhorovych has to say makes disturbing reading. What it comes down to is that the country we are living in is not at all the Ukraine he fought for. It is merely a renamed and mutated Soviet Ukraine with basically the same people in the same sort of structures as when Mr. Lukyanenko was in the Gulag. What has happened is also clarified by the interview with Oleksandr Paskhaver, who describes how privatization has created not a competitive market economy with real owners but a sort of bastard bandit oligarchy based on parasitism where an utterly rotten state retains effective control over who can make money and who gets squeezed out. It already makes little sense to think in terms of crime and corruption because law has ceased to exist as a set of rules equally binding on all. When the law is such that virtually nobody can keep from breaking it, virtually everybody is guilty of something and in theory deserves punishment. Who gets punished then becomes a purely arbitrary decision, invoked for the political or economic convenience of those who can do so, and if there is no law, how can you have law-breaking, that is, crime?

Eternally optimistic Levko Lukyanenko is out to change things and believes that we can do it. I hope to God that he is right. If only Ukraine had more such courageous, intelligent, and above all optimistic people, the people really could change many things. But to change something, you have to first of all believe you can change it. He does. So do I.

Newspaper output №:

№24, (1999)

Section

Day After Day