Thread by @olgatokariuk

By going after human rights organisations, such as Memorial, Putin's Russia recreates the worst Soviet practices.
In 1970s, thousands of human rights defenders were jailed in the USSR. Here's a story of one of them: Mykola Matusevych, co-founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group🧵

He and nine other activists (only two are still alive) created the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) in 1976, a year after the USSR signed the Helsinki Final Act, committing to defend human rights.This was also the goal of the UHG. But there was more: to speak openly about Holodomor

Matusevych, born in 1946 in Kyiv region, listened to terrible accounts of Stalin's artificial famine, which killed at least 4 million Ukrainians just a decade ago, whispered into his ear by mother, who survived it. That was the moment when he realised how evil the USSR regime was

‘When you see injustice, when you see your people oppressed, you feel an urge to change it. I knew the regime would collapse, I just wasn’t sure whether I would be able to live up to it’, Matusevych told me in his modest house in Vasylkiv, 25 km from Kyiv

Less than six months after the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was established, the crackdown by the Soviet authorities began. Matusevych and his colleague, philosopher Myroslav Marynovych, were arrested in April 1977. They were accused of ‘spreading anti-Soviet propaganda’.

Matusevych refused to testify or show up in court. A year later, he was sentenced to seven years in a strict-regime prison and to five years in a gulag: a typical verdict for dissidents in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. But Matusevych told me he was ready for it.

‘When we founded the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, we were aware that we could get arrested and imprisoned’, Matusevych recalls. ‘It was not a matter of if, but of when. So I was not surprised when they came for me. I just told the officer: I will not leave until I finish my coffee’.

Matusevych spent ten years in Soviet prisons and gulags, as far as 7000 km from his home. Unlike many Ukrainian dissidents, he was lucky to survive. One of those who weren’t was a famous poet Vasyl Stus, who died in a Soviet gulag in 1985, the year Gorbachev came to power.

Matusevych recalls he met nationals of various Soviet republics in the gulag, all imprisoned on similar charges. ‘There were Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians… The USSR was really ‘a prison of peoples’, he says.

Mykola Matusevych was released from the Soviet gulag in 1988. Three years later, his dream came true: the USSR ceased to exist and independent Ukraine was proclaimed. But were his expectations met?

‘Ukrainian society is still paralized by fear in many ways and that hinders the country’s development’, he says. ‘Many of the best and brightest people, of those able to resist, were exterminated by the Soviet regime’.
However, he has no regrets and is hopeful about the future.

‘Those ten idiots who dared to openly express their views, who co-founded the Ukrainian Helsinki Group back in the 1970s, gave an example of resilience to next generations’, Matusevych says in his typical ironic fashion.

This story was produced by me for @EFEnoticias, photos (with the exception of the first one which is mine) by Sergei Dolzhenko. Here's a full text in Spanish.
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