Ukrainian dissidents in the Soviet criminal-executive system

Abstract

While struggling with captivity, and partial or complete blocking of individual rights and freedoms, the main task for Ukrainian political prisoners was to develop a behavioural strategy to cope with the demands of camp life. In places of detention, there was an inconspicuous consolidation of prisoners along ethnic lines and the type of crime committed. Communities organized based on affinity and similarity of political views often built their own networks of survival and a peculiar ethic of care within the framework of an informal group. The prisoners’ adaptation to the appropriate environment greatly depended on their ability to get accustomed to the prison norms, which contradicted existing norms and regulations, and their attempts to master everyday life through the reproduction of the basic elements of “normal life”. Representatives of the scientific and creative intelligentsia perceived the corrective labour camp as a place to work in extreme conditions. One of the Ukrainian dissidents’ most common creative practices in captivity was literary translations of the world’s classic works of art. The publishing and distribution of camp samizdat were among the most common methods for political prisoners to struggle with the regime. An exhausting daily uncompromising struggle for the status of a political prisoner took an important place in the resistance movement in the camps.Isolated in strict and particularly strict regime camps, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons, members of the Resistance movement developed effective ways of adapting and counteracting the destructive influence of the Soviet penitentiary system. The prisoners managed to preserve the stability of the spirit, the system of values established in freedom, and their own national identity, creating an environment focused on resisting the camp administration through self-education, drafting petitions, statements, protests, hunger strikes, group boycotts, etc.