A spirit that breaks shackles

Opening a new, hitherto unknown, page in our present-day or past existence is always a sizable gain in the work of a journalist. Those who make the newspaper Den can be proud that this publication is the first to have told people the truth about a very striking event. On May 15, 2009, we published an article, “Who Ruined Stalinism,” by our respected Russian friend Igor Chubais about Yevhen Hrytsiak, his heroic life, and the struggle of his friends. During the Den celebrations in Ivano-Frankivsk, the editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna met Mr. Hrytsiak and his grandson Taras, who had arrived there on our invitation. His reminiscences can also be found on the newspaper’s website. Yet we should broach this subject over and over again because many of our compatriots still do not know the truth about those who fought for a free Ukraine and were prepared to give their lives for it in prison camps and battlefields rather than in cozy office rooms – a truth that was under a severe ban for almost six decades.

The tragedy of an enchained nation is not only in the physical genocide that foreign colonizers wreak on it (repressions, terror by famine, ethnic cleansings, and wars of extermination) but also in that the highest upsurge of human spirit – for as long as a nation is alive it always tries to break the shackles, – the heroic aspiration of the nation’s best people for freedom, seems to have been eternally “immured” with the granite slabs of occupation-related oblivion. The occupiers of all times – from Ancient Romans, Spaniards, Tamerlane to the creators of a “new order” and “new world” in the 20th century – tried, above all, to paralyze the yearning of an oppressed people for struggle, for they knew only too well that the grandeur of a nation is in the nation’s concrete deeds in the past and, what is more, today. All one has to do to this end is deprive a society of its historical memory and convince people that there have never been and, naturally, there will never be heroes in this country.

So, with this in view, all who cherish Ukraine’s freedom and independence must take a resolute action (although very much time has been wasted, there is still hope) and tell people the truth about our compatriots’ sacrificial struggle for human honor and dignity, for the liberation of our native land. For there still is a stereotype in mass consciousness that independence was not won at the price of tens and hundreds of thousands of victims bur “dropped out of the blue,” “was taken without an effort,” “came by sheer historical luck,” etc. The story of the Norilsk 1953 uprising, a revolt of proud and invincible people, in which Ukrainians, former UPA fighters, played the key role, is the best denial of these cynical lies.

Telling about this striking event, we are going to use a unique document – the memoirs of Yevhen Hrytsiak, not just an eyewitness but the main organizer and the very life and soul of the uprising. This man has a really dramatic destiny. He was born in 1926 in the village of Stetseva near Sniatyn, now Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. When World War Two broke out, he was a high school pupil in Sniatyn and, during the German occupation, a secondary commerce school student. At that very time Hrytsiak joined the ranks of a nationalist youth organization that trained young people to fight the Hitlerite occupiers. When the Red Army won back the Carpathian region in 1944, Hrytsiak, who did not consider himself guilty of anything and chose to stay behind in his homeland, was immediately mobilized and saw service on the 4th Ukrainian Front. He was wounded in action and decorated. But in 1949 the NKVD unearthed Hrytsiak’s past (collaboration with young nationalists). The 23-year-old youth was arrested and soon given a death sentence which was commuted, “as an exception,” to 25 years’ imprisonment. Hrytsiak served his term in jails and prison camps together with Yurii Shukhevych, Dr. Volodymyr Horbov, Mykhailo Soroka, Danylo Shumuk, and other well-known political prisoners. What can best characterize Hrytsiak as a personality are the words of Shumuk: “He was a selfless, honest, clever, and alert individual. In everyday life, Yevhen Hrytsiak was a very honest person; you could entrust him the biggest treasures and he, even if dying of hunger, would not have taken even a penny. What was impossible for others was quite possible for Yevhen. He could rise from the ashes and be a man full of dignity again.”

1952. Yevhen Hrytsiak “resides” at a USSR State Security Ministry sand-quarry prison camp in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. It is at that time that many prisoners hit upon the idea of a general political strike that could in the course of time embrace all GULAG camps. Hrytsiak recalls that he at first considered this intention as a utopia “because of our impenetrable isolation.” “Besides,” Hrytsiak adds, “we had to overcome our own subjective obstacles, such as the all-pervading fear that ran, not without good reason, through all the prisoners, traditional inertia, and never-ending internal squabbles.”

Yet the obstacles were surmounted despite the brutalization of prisoners (in addition to endless beatings, they also periodically suffered from police dogs and those who were worse than dogs, i.e., criminal inmates, the bulwark of the camp’s regime. Hrytsiak writes that “overseers always and everywhere acted against us together with hardcore jailbirds”). In spite of fear, tiredness and despair, the prisoners were prepared for am action, a strike, but there was nobody to assume the ultimate responsibility. “It was a lesson for us all,” Hrytsiak sums up. For the attempt to organize a hunger strike with political demands, some former UPA fighters, including Hrytsiak, and a group of Lithuanians were transferred to transit prison 5 (where they had to go through a literally life-and-death confrontation with Nikolai Vorobiov’s gang armed with knives and fully supported by overseers) along the route Petropavlovsk—Krasnoyarsk—Minusinsk transit prison—Norilsk (“Gorlag”), the so-called “road of death.”

Hrytsiak recalls: “It was not a usual transfer caused by some economic factors. It was a death train. We were about to be subjugated and done away with. Who could say then what was in store for us at the new place?” The prisoners were deported to the Norilsk Gorlag in early March 1953. This was one of the severest Gulag camps, which could perhaps be only rivaled by Kolyma camps in terms of “extermination power.” To quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it was a “metastatic branch” of the Solovki prison camps.

Then Stalin died. However, the news of the almighty one’s death in no way eased the prisoner’s condition: on the contrary, the camp administration only increased the crackdown on political prisoners. Hatred, disgust and contempt for jailers reached the peak: it seemed that just a spark, an instant flare-up, was enough to immediately kindle the flame of resistance in those who had long been used to risking their lives and did not wish to eke out a slavish existence. The main events began on May 25, 1953.

Hrytsiak says: “Norilsk camps were considered the most severe in the USSR – and rightly so. Polar circle frosts and brutal arbitrary rule of the camp administration held sway there. Prisoners were building a copper mill with almost bare hands, working in the mine and putting up a city. We saw there was so strict a discipline here that workers were afraid of their foremen, also prisoners, and we did not like this. We began to offer resistance ignoring these rules.” Prisoners of different ethnicities – Ukrainians, who were in a very large number, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Caucasians – unanimously decided (here is true, not false, internationalism!) to mercilessly, albeit secretly, put to death those who “snitched” in the camp, raped political women prisoners without impunity, stabbed and beat up men debilitated with illnesses and hunger. Lawless executions, tortures, and dirty provocations continued because the administration was desperately afraid “to show weakness.” People could not stand it any more.

On May 25 the prisoners came out to work, as they did every day. Suddenly a submachine-gun burst rang out in Camp 5, which meant there were new innocent victims. The people spontaneously stopped working. We came to know “on bush telegraph” that one man was arbitrarily killed and six wounded. The prisoners went on strike and put forward their demands: inviting a high-level commission from Moscow to look into the terrible facts of the brutalization of defenseless people and investigate into the killings; removing bars and locks from camp barracks and number plates from the prison uniform; lifting restrictions on corresponding with relatives; offering at least minimal medical care; reducing the working day to 8 hours; revising the dossiers of all prisoners; and immediately stopping tortures. The administration shied away. The attempts to use force (with the help of criminal inmates) only showed that the jailers were powerless: the prisoners’ cohesion was getting the upper hand.

The inmates in fact took power in their own hands. The overseers were disarmed.

The political prisoners organized their own security system and divided the camp into separate sectors. Hrytsiak assumed responsibility for the fourth sector. The UPA fighters set up an “aid committee” and were in charge of maintaining order. They ensured what can be called exemplary discipline. The imprisoned fighters would write leaflets and send them by means of makeshift “kites” to the “free” territory in order to tell people the truth about the uprising. They staged Shevchenko’s play Nazar Stodolia which had a resounding success – not only among the Ukrainian but also among the Lithuanian, Russian, Estonian, Armenian, and other inmates. The unfairly convicted people of different ethnic origin understood the main thing: their power is in unity; by rallying together, they are capable of breaking the shackles by the force of spirit and willpower rather than by the force of weapons. It should be added that such a well-known “Ukrainian nationalist” as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentioned more than once in The Gulag Archipelago the exceptional role of OUN Ukrainians in the 1954—1954 Gulag camp uprisings in Norilsk, Karaganda, Kengir, and Vorkuta.

A top-level State Security Ministry commission with Kuznetsov at the head arrived in Norilsk 11 days later. The Moscow security officers promised the rebels to meet all their demands, and prisoners began to come back to work little by little. But once the authorities saw that the rebels had somewhat eased their resistance, they immediately launched a clampdown. Of special barbarity were mass-scale shootings in Camp 5, carried out by the regular troops urgently sent to the camps: in one day alone, on July 1, 1953, they massacred 27 people. The punitive squads would surround barrack after barrack and take them by storm. Hrytsiak recalls that while the security police submachine-gunners were attacking, the prisoners were singing the Anthem of Ukraine. The song flew up into the northern sky to the accompaniment of machine-gun bursts that were thawing the permafrost with blood.

The rebels held out for 61 days on end (!), with the last pockets of resistance being neutralized as late as August 4, 1953. It is still difficult to find out the death toll (a good job for historians), but, clearly, it is a question of hundreds and thousands of people. Among those who covered themselves with eternal glory are strike committee members Yevhen Hrytsiak, Danylo Shumuk, Stepan Semeniuk, and Roman Zahoruiko. The uprising was drowned in blood, but the authorities were just forced to grudgingly make more and more concessions after a number of further uprisings, especially the one in Kengir, which Solzhenitsyn described so brilliantly, and the one in Vorkuta, when prisoners got hold of firearms and went to the mountains, threatening to form viable guerrilla units. As soon as in early August 1953 Norilsk prisoners were at last allowed to send letters to and see their relatives. This was a breakthrough. The Norilsk uprising dealt the first, so much desired and powerful, blow to what seemed to be the eternal GULAG system.

Yevhen Hrytsiak’s personal destiny was equally dramatic. The 4th sector defenders with Hrytsiak at the head were captured by the assaulters. With death a hair’s breadth away, Hrytsiak still behaved in an absolutely self-possessed manner. There were new prisons and camps in the life of this person in Norilsk, Vladimir, Taishet, Irkutsk, and Mordovia. “We will not forgive you Norilsk until you die,” KGB guards and overseers would say more than once to Hrytsiak. He was not set free (if the word is right) until 1964.

This remarkable person was the first to tell people the truth about the Norilsk uprising. This occurred in 1977, when Mr. Hrytsiak was interviewed by a correspondent of the US newspaper The Chicago Tribune. Later, in 1980, Smoloskyp published Hrytsiak’s memoirs, which, naturally, touch off a new wave of KGB’s scathing reprisals against the author. He was threatened with an immediate long-term arrest if he refused to emigrate from Ukraine, but the unbreakable Ukrainian managed to hold on. He even overcame a terrible disease that had always been considered incurable (thanks to Yoga therapy methods). Mr. Hrytsiak saw a cruel state, which used to destroy almost every individual vested with a free spirit, sink into oblivion.

His astonishing memory still keeps a lot of scenes, conversations, actions, and details worthy of the pen of a prominent writer. In his memoirs, Hrytsiak also told the world about his Lithuanian friend, prison camp doctor Juozas Kozlauskas, who would save the wounded inmates of various ethnic origins, putting his own life at risk. Here is a really impressive dialogue with a punitive expedition’s captain: “Captain: ‘You, bloody fascists! Did you really want to topple Soviet power?’ Kozlauskas: ‘We are fighting to eliminate all prisons and camps and you are out to keep them intact. So who do you think are fascists – we or you?’ Captain: ‘Are you aware of what you are saying? Do you know what there would be if all prisons and camps were disbanded? This would put an end to Soviet power!’”

Hrytsiak also wrote about the Gulag “doctor” Bezpalova who said cynically: “I am first a state security officer first and only then a doctor.” And about Col. Artiushin’s drunken submachine-gunners who broke into the camp and opened indiscriminate fire all around (in the 3rd sector alone about a hundred people were killed and 170 were wounded). And about an unbreakable spirit: “Nobody’s spirits fell. People would tell me how they were shot at, beaten up and crushed. They said this without sadness, fear or even anger – only with good humor. Prison cells were full of not only the crackling of broken bones and moans of the wounded but also of cheerfulness. Nobody wept or was sad.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote: “What is surprising is not that there were no mutinies and uprisings in prison camps but that there were some. Like all undesirable things in our history, i.e., three fourths of what really happened, those mutinies were so neatly cut out, sewn over and licked up; their participants were destroyed, old-time eyewitnesses were forgotten, the suppressors’ reports were burned or so well hidden behind the twenty walls of safes that these uprisings are already turning into a myth, when some of them occurred 15 and others only 10 years ago. When this stops worrying anybody of those who live, historians will be given access to the remaining papers, archeologists will dig with their spade somewhere and burn something in the laboratory – and this will clear up the dates, places and outlines of those uprisings and their ringleaders’ names.” Yet the Norilsk uprising of gallant patriots will hardly ever turn into a myth. The names of Yevhen Hrytsiak and his companions will never sink in the River of Memory.