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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

The First Dissident 

26 June, 1999 - 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.

 

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