The Price of Growing Up in Freedom

Well into her seventies, my mother still liked to tell a funny story about the time when, as a young student, I came home from my Lviv dorm and handed her a bundle of my dirty laundry. To get out of an uncomfortable situation, as I handed her this lovely “gift,” I sang the first few lines from the popular song “Two Colors” (Dva kol’ory):

Today, as I finish my memoirs, I am reminded of those words. My life has indeed bounced me around the dissident paths of distant camps, and what did I bring back home? What kind of life is embroidered on that timeworn cloth?

As I look back, all I see is the unending crescendo of my incompatibility with the Soviet system. For me, Moscow's “enforced love” resulted only in a series of punishments because I refused to become a stool pigeon: difficulties in finding employment, then losing my job; having trouble obtaining housing; secret and overt surveillance; and provocations and persecutions from the KGB. Then came my arrest on April 23, 1977, followed by interrogations, an unlawful trial, continuous transfers by armored trains between various prisons, an extended deprivation of freedom in a strict regime labor camp in the Ural Mountains, hunger strikes and labor strikes, extreme cold and food deprivation in numerous isolation cells, searches, and confiscations, and then, starting in April 1984, a three-year internal exile in Kazakhstan. Even if you don't count the extrajudicial persecution before my arrest, it spanned a full ten years. I was arrested when I was twenty-eight and returned to Ukraine as a thirty-eight-year-old.

At that time, many people considered this to be a disproportionate price to pay in the struggle for human rights. Some of my friends, however, paid far more: they lost their lives in the struggle. Even then, I opposed the idea that I had sacrificed too much, and I haven't changed my mind. I remember Mephistopheles's allegation in Goethe's monumental Faust: “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”