Irina RATUSHINSKAYA: “When I learned that Marchuk is being criticized for his past I could not remain silent”

I heard the incredible story about the release of female prisoner of conscience Irina Ratushinskaya not at one of Marchuk's campaign headquarters or from my editor as my next journalist assignment. It was related to me many years ago, strictly off the record, by the poet's relatives. This fall, acting on my own, I got her phone number in Moscow to ask for some details. But then I learned that she had written an article and sent it to Kyiv. The Day carried her story, rather, an eyewitness account called “A Nonstandard KGB General,” September 21. In fact, her manuscript was published without a single editorial correction or abridgment. No one had asked her to do it. Besides, it would have been ridiculous to try to “reason” with a former political prisoner who remained unbroken.

All the accusations made against Yevhen Marchuk boil down to pointing an accusing finger at his past as a KGB general and that supposedly everybody who worked for that clandestine agency was without exception a torturer. But why do some point their fingers precisely at Marchuk, a man who turned out more decent than so many others “in the field”? Why is no one else accused of one's Party, Komsomol nomenklatura, or KGB past? There are plenty of such characters and many are currently prominent politicians. Those who lash out at Yevhen Marchuk never mention them. Now consider this: not a single former political prisoner has as yet raised an accusing voice, saying Marchuk? Why, I know the man. He sent me to the camps. And these people are known to fear little if anything after what they have already gone through. We should also recall how Yevhen Marchuk was appointed head of the Sluzhba Bezpeky (Security Service) of the newly independent Ukraine. A special parliamentary committee had been set up, made up of quite a few well-known dissidents. They spent a lot of time studying the archives and found nothing in Marchuk's record that would have made people with their keen sense of justice and decency wince. Former prison inmates Levko Lukyanenko, Yuri Shukhevych, and Ivan Hnatiuk (this author holds them in particular esteem for their steadfastness) now campaign for Yevhen Marchuk, independent Ukraine's first SBU head. A paradox? Perhaps, but only for those in the habit of judging fellow humans indiscriminately, using “categories,” in Irina Ratushinskaya's own words.

This author has his own accounts to square with the KGB. Those few that know or remember me will recall that this formidable agency could not make me shut my mouth or otherwise bully me into subservience in the 1970s and eighties, so there is an even smaller likelihood of buying me at the end of the 1990s. If I say today that yes, I do trust this former KGB general, it is because I have long followed his conduct most closely and censoriously. I can describe it using a word seldom applied in politics: decent. And so does Irina Ratushinskaya. Incidentally, I think that decency was the actual reason why Leonid Kuchma stripped him of premiership in 1996, and not for “building up his own image.” Even then decent people were a thorn in the side of the President's team.

Meanwhile my phone calls and correspondence with Irina Ratushinskaya continued, resulting in this PERSONA feature.