“Just being yourself…that was the main crime at that time,” Myroslav Marynovych said. He was speaking to a room full of people of all ages and nations gathered at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, a city in the western part of Ukraine. Those who are aware of Mr. Marynovych’s story, or perhaps read his book, The Universe Behind Barbed Wire: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Soviet Dissident, know that the Soviets calling it a crime did not stop Mr. Marynovich from being himself. As I sat there listening on the eve of July 4, I could not help but think that I was learning about real freedom.
Mr. Marynovych was a student in Ukraine during a period of confusion following the crackdown beginning in 1965 of the “Sixtiers,” a movement of artists and intellectuals who dissented from communist orthodoxy. In 1973, he was detained by the K.G.B. for “slandering” the national policy of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet intelligence agency sought to enlist him to report what his peers were saying.
Rather than hiding this effort from his friends, Mr. Marynovych openly told them not to speak about anything sensitive in his presence to preserve his ability to plead ignorance. His friends could not help but talk freely among themselves, creating within Mr. Marynovych something of the fear that the K.G.B. wanted to lodge inside him. “The ‘loop’ of lies became unbearable,” he said. Agents tried to bribe him with a lucrative position and posh accommodations, but he still refused.
He told us that they became angry with him and said to him, “Who is not with us is against us.” In response, Mr. Marynovych said: “O.K., then I will be against you.” As he told this story to all of us sitting in a packed classroom, on the hottest day we had so far this summer in Lviv, we were breathless watching him relive this pivotal moment again. “At that moment I was free…free from the doubts, free from the fears, free from all those feelings. That was the moment I had released myself from fear,” he said.
Isn’t it the same with all of us today? Each year at this time, near the Fourth of July, we contemplate freedom. This year, some Americans may dwell a bit longer on the hopes and ideals of those who worked for our own independence as a nation. But maybe we are also being called to do an extended examination of our own fears, to take a long hard look at the things that covertly try to enlist our own doubts into the “loop of lies” around us. Maybe the present moment is asking us to reawaken the ability to interrogate our own fears, and like Mr. Marynovych, to address those fears head on and say “O.K., then I will be against you.”
His convictions and his conscience led him to work with others who had made a similar commitment to freedom. He told us of his heroes: of Ivan Dziuba, who invoked Lenin’s own words to show where the regime had lost its way; of Vasyl Stus, who said “The eternal shame of this country [the Soviet Union] will be that we were crucified on the cross not for some radical civic position, but for our very desire to have a sense of self-respect, human and national dignity”; of Alla Horska, Iryna Senyk and Iryna Kalynets, and many other women whose courage became a benchmark for their colleagues.
In 1976, he became a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Like groups in other nations, it was formed to promote the implementation of the Helsinki agreement, signed just one year earlier by Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party. Included in this accord were three bundles: security relations, economic cooperation and (the part that was most important to the West), human rights. Various Helsinki groups emerged, knowing that this last plank was simply glossed over by the regime to achieve the ends of their first and second aims.
Mr. Marynovych was arrested and given the maximum sentence: seven years in a labor camp. There, prisoners were told that they would be punished if they prayed on Easter. But that did not stop them from gathering. They were able to smuggle out a letter telling this to Pope John Paul II, who himself offered a Mass for them. Yet, during that time, the prison camp guards continued a war of psychological aggression: “Who do you think you are? Why do you do this? No one remembers you,” Mr. Marynovych remembered them saying. These pernicious doubts and fears sown by his captors were dispelled when word came that the United States and Canada were supporting the Ukrainian dissidents’ cause to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
There is a difference between wanting accountability and wanting punishment for one’s enemies. Marynovych stressed that accountability is necessary for a practical reason:
Not one of our prosecutors (K.G.B., police, court judges) were held accountable for their actions—murder, brutality, imprisonment of the innocent. In people’s eyes, there is no accountability for those who commit atrocities. Unpunished and unredeemed crimes, like weed seeds left in the ground, produced new and terrifying shoots in the Putin regime.
He quoted Benjamin Franklin’s famous dictum about liberty—“Those who are ready to give up essential liberty to obtain a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”—then offered a paraphrase: “Those who are ready to give up essential values to obtain a temporary safety deserve neither values nor safety!” He reminded us that “tyrants are also afraid. Sometimes they are even more afraid.”
There was something palpable about his abiding freedom. One of those in the room with us asked him about this: “You tell us about these events, and yet you can still smile, you are still happy. How is this possible?” Mr. Marynovych answered him gently and slowly. “I have chosen my [own] way…so I don’t complain,” he said. “It was my way, my struggle. So I didn’t become bitter.” He told us that before he went off to prison, a friend asked him, “What will be your goal while you are there?” He said that his own answer surprised even himself. “Not to become angry, hateful or ill-natured.”
I can think of no better mark of real freedom.
