“L’Ukraine enslaved”, such is the title that capped an article published in June 1980 in the daily The sun. At the time, as a young freelancer, I conducted an interview in Paris with the Ukrainian dissident Léonide Pliouchtch, spokesperson in Western Europe for the Ukrainian Monitoring Group for the application of the Helsinki Accords.
This trained mathematician had been expelled from the USSR in 1976; “sick of opinion”, he had just spent four years in Soviet psychiatric prisons. Pliouchtch had described the following year this prison experience in his autobiographical book In the carnival of history.
The main purpose of the published article was to publicize a nation and its people’s aspirations for freedom. It was divided into three parts: deportation, Russification and culture.
The deportation recalled in particular the struggle of the insurgent army of Ukraine during the Second World War and its fight against the Nazis and the Communists; its last supporters were not wiped out until the early fifties. Several hundred thousand Ukrainians from the Carpathians will be sent to Siberia for collaboration with the enemy.
Russification described the many policies of the Soviet central power to obliterate the Ukrainian language. The Russian language, “language of friendship of all peoples” had to become predominant by all means, even kindergartens were targeted! Already in 1876, the Tsar of all the Russias had, in an ukase, forbidden to write in Ukrainian.
As for culture, the mere fact of honoring ancestral customs, such as the Ivan Kupalo festival, the spring festival, made you suspect of nationalism, and the prosecution was not long in coming down on you. In literature, Russian censors did not even respect the works of TH Shevchenko (1814-1861), founder of Ukrainian literature; all passages considered nationalist were redacted.
Died in 2015, Léonide Pliouchtch had the chance to witness the implosion of the Soviet empire, the independence of Ukraine in 1991 and even the Maidan movement in 2013-2014. At a time when Putin denies the very existence of the Ukrainian nation and invades it with his armed forces, it is pertinent to note that Plyuchch saw no problem in reconciling the defense of Ukrainian culture with a reference to the Russian poet Lermontov (1814 -1841) at the conclusion of his book:
“Farewell badly washed Russia,
Country of slaves, country of lords,
Farewell to you, blue uniforms
Farewell to you, people who are subject to them…”