How I Became a “Homo Erectus”

My life as a dissident began in the office of a KGB officer. He was responsible for the so-called First Department of the Positron factory in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk. I had just returned from a business trip to Kyiv, where on May 22, 1973, I had been detained by the police, on KGB orders, for placing flowers at the Taras Shevchenko monument. For a provincial KGB functionary this was an extraordinary event, one that left him vulnerable to being reprimanded. After all, one of his charges had transgressed— and before the very eyes of the capital's KGB at that! So, he harshly chastised me. But when he saw that his paternalistic exhortations were not having the desired effect, he warned me sternly: “Keep in mind, if you’re not with us, you’re against us!” I replied calmly: “Fine, then I’m against you.”

I still marvel at how I found the courage to voice such a bold declaration. Today I would have been more cautious. At that time, however, I experienced an incredible sense of release—like a woman in childbirth, who upon hearing the baby's first cry understands that the prolonged agonies of labor have finally come to an end. Anyone who has ever experienced this sort of release from fear will understand how lucid the soul becomes when the burden of duplicity and doubt is finally shed. To be sure, to my dying days I won't be able to fully rid myself of all the characteristics of a homo sovieticus: this “birth trauma” stays with you forever. At the same time, I am grateful to God that on that momentous day, from within the ideological shell of a homo sovieticus, a dissident embarked on his conscious, active life.

My aforementioned visit to the Shevchenko monument was simultaneously an act of disobedience and the result of a compromise. After the wave of arrests of Ukrainian political dissidents in 1972–1973, the mass demonstrations at this monument that had been commonplace during the Khrushchev thaw were suddenly deemed objectionable. Even though there was no official prohibition against honoring Shevchenko, it was certainly not encouraged. With the doctrine of the “merging of nations,” the government expected its loyal citizens to willingly and enthusiastically abandon any rudimentary vestiges of nationalism.