MENU
Documenting
war crimes in Ukraine

The Tribunal for Putin (T4P) global initiative was set up in response to the all-out war launched by Russia against Ukraine in February 2022.

Yevhen Zakharov: '...And that's when we created KHPG'

05.12.2024    available: На русском
Yevhen Zakharov
Fighting against punitive psychiatry, helping distributors of the informal press, and... gardening. On the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group's birthday, its director, Yevhen Zakharov, tells us how it all began.

Editor: ...We should have published these memories two years ago, in 2022, when KHPG turned respectable 30. But in the first months of the war, it was obviously not the time. It seemed that everything was about to end, and then we would celebrate. Today we are 32. This is not an anniversary date. And the war is still going on. So again, no celebrations. But why not recall the events that preceded the Kharkiv Human Rights Group’s creation and the people involved?

Сидять (перший ряд): Євген Захаров, Інна Шмеркіна, Марлена Рахліна, Юхим Захаров, Софія Карасик, Олександр Тульчинський, Тамара Алтунян, Анна Свербілова. Другий ряд: Софія Тульчинська, Алла Ладензон, Елла Подольська, Борис Ладензон, Римма Алтунян. Стоять: Олена Алтунян, племінник Римми Алтунян Олексій Розуван, син Тамари Алтунян Павло Забровський. Seated (front row): Yevhen Zakharov, Inna Shmerkina, Marlena Rakhlina, Yukhym Zakharov, Sofia Karasyk, Oleksandr Tulchynskyi, Tamara Altunyan, Anna Sverbilova. Second row: Sofia Tulchinskaya, Alla Ladenzon, Ella Podolskaya, Boris Ladenzon, Rimma Altunyan. Standing: Olena Altunyan, Rimma Altunyan’s nephew Oleksii Rozuvan, Tamara Altunyan’s son Pavlo Zabrovskyi. Сидят (первый ряд): Евгений Захаров, Инна Шмеркина, Марлена Рахлина, Ефим Захаров, София Карасик, Александр Тульчинский, Тамара Алтунян, Анна Свербилова. Второй ряд: София Тульчинская, Алла Ладензон, Елла Подольская, Борис Ладензон, Римма Алтунян. Стоят: Елена Алтунян, племянник Риммы Алтунян Алексей Розуван, сын Тамари Алтунян Павел Забровский.

Seated (front row): Yevhen Zakharov, Inna Shmerkina, Marlena Rakhlina, Yukhym Zakharov, Sofia Karasyk, Oleksandr Tulchynskyi, Tamara Altunyan, Anna Sverbilova. Second row: Sofia Tulchinskaya, Alla Ladenzon, Ella Podolskaya, Boris Ladenzon, Rimma Altunyan. Standing: Olena Altunyan, Rimma Altunyan’s nephew Oleksii Rozuvan, Tamara Altunyan’s son Pavlo Zabrovskyi.

The first days of the Kharkiv Memorial

When the first meeting of the initiative group for the creation of the Memorial was held in Kharkiv in August 1988, I was one of the first to arrive. It was my thing. I’ve always been interested in history. Many of my older Moscow friends were historians. In the second half of the 1970s, I participated in preparing the dissident historical publication Pamyat, and I met Senja Roginsky before his arrest. But I was disappointed: leftist communists and Komsomol leaders ran the first meetings in Kharkiv, and for me, at the time, all such people were a priori foreign. The initiative group’s leader was historian Valerii Meshcheryakov, an associate professor at the university’s history department who joined the CPSU after perestroika began. There were many of his students in the group. In those years, I believed that belonging to the Communist Party was definitely a negative characteristic. That is, I believed that a decent person could not be a member of the CPSU. There’s a trilemma here: you can’t be honest, intelligent, and a communist at the same time: any two of these qualities in one person exclude the third!

And I thought: why get involved with these foreign people? Literally two days later, I arrived in Moscow. At Lara’s (Bogoraz) house, I met Sergei Kovalev, who, after prison term and exile, still had restrictions about his living place and was visiting Moscow illegally. I told them about the creation of the Memorial in Kharkiv, and they both said: “Zhenya, you should definitely go to Memorial; it should be ours, not theirs. In Moscow, Communists are neither seen nor heard in Memorial. We control it completely, and it should be the same throughout the country.” I followed their advice. But at first, I was extremely cautious about these leftist communists and Komsomol youth.

The founding meeting of Memorial took place in the university’s assembly hall on February 11, 1989. The hall was packed, and Valerii Meshcheryakov chaired the meeting along with Lev Ponomariov, then quite reserved professor of physics, who came from Moscow. So, the audience, despite the initiative group’s clearly expressed desire, elected Heinrich Altunyan, Boris Chichibabin, and me to the Council. No matter how hard the initiators tried to prevent this, they failed.

Борис Чичибабін та Лілія Карась Boris Chichibabin and Lilia Karas Борис Чичибабин и Лилия Карась

Boris Chichibabin and Lilia Karas

Heinrich and I were the black sheep, and everyone feared us then. They believed that we were being watched and that we could bring bad luck. But everything was developing very quickly, and the idea of what was possible was changing. It was happening extremely fast.

Анатолій Корягін з дружиною Галиною та Генріх Алтунян (1987 р.) Anatoly Koryahin with his wife Halyna and Henrik Altunian (1987) Анатолий Корягин с женой Галиной и Генрих Алтунян (1987 г.)

Anatoly Koryahin with his wife Halyna and Heinrich Altunian (1987)

Arkadii Isaakovych Epshtein, a teacher of CPSU history at the Aviation Institute, was also elected to the Council; I studied with his daughter Anya in parallel classes at school. He was a WW II veteran, covered with orders, but he was afraid of everything. My uncle Feliks was also elected to the Council. Epshtein, not knowing I was Feliks’s nephew, told him that the Communists must fight back against people like me. Nina Lapchynska, who headed the Soviet period department at the Historical Museum and was also a member of the CPSU, became a member of the Council. There were many students from different universities — Igor Rassokha, Volodymyr Kabachek, Zhenya Solovyov, and others.

The Memorial had three areas of activity: historical and educational, charitable, and human rights. This has always been the case from the very beginning. The goal of the historical and educational direction was to restore the truth about political repression in the USSR and to compile a list of people shot and perished in the GULAG. We were very much involved in collecting information about the whole system of mass political repression in the USSR — the GULAG system, burial sites, executioners in the punitive bodies, their informants, resistance in the camps and on the outside — as well as collecting items of camp and exile life.

Стоять: Владислав Недобора, Генріх Алтунян, Олександр Калиновський, Роман Каплан, Семен Подольський. Сидять: Володимир Пономарьов, Давид Ліфшиць (початок 70-х) Standing: Vladyslav Nedobora, Henrik Altunyan, Oleksandr Kalynovskyi, Roman Kaplan, Semen Podolskyi. Seated: Volodymyr Ponomaryov, David Lifshitz (early 70s) Стоят: Владислав Недобора, Генрих Алтунян, Александр Калиновский, Роман Каплан, Семен Подольский. Сидят: Владимир Пономарёв, Давид Лифшиц (начало 70-х)

Standing: Vladyslav Nedobora, Heinrich Altunyan, Oleksandr Kalynovskyi, Roman Kaplan, Semen Podolskyi. Seated: Volodymyr Ponomaryov, David Lifshitz (early 70s)

The second area is charitable. It includes assistance to former political prisoners, former prisoners of Stalin’s camps, and the post-Stalinist period. In the late 80s, many of them were still alive and relatively young. I am not even talking about the generation born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and who managed to become political prisoners under Brezhnev and Andropov; I mean those born in the late 20s and early 30s. In 1988-89, they were not yet sixty, and many of them, still students, managed to go to jail in the late 40s: there were many underground anti-Stalinist organizations at that time. In Ukraine, these were primarily members of the armed resistance — UPA fighters sent to concentration camps in large numbers. These former prisoners, especially the elderly, needed various kinds of assistance, and Memorial was involved in much of it.

And the third area is human rights: the protection of human rights. Suppose we shall not fight for the protection of human rights. In that case, everything can happen again, so we need to foster respect for law and human freedom to exclude the very possibility of political repression.

All three areas were represented in the All-Union Voluntary Historical and Educational Society Memorial branches in many cities and villages of the USSR. From the moment the Kharkiv branch was founded, I was a member of the Council and coordinated the human rights group’s activities. We protected those who demonstrated the Ukrainian national flag, distributed informal publications, and participated in rallies from administrative persecution. We also published the Memorial newsletter. We made several dozen issues, printed them on a computer, and distributed them in all possible ways. The bulletin reported on specific human rights violations and reprinted some of the most relevant texts prepared by the Moscow Memorial Board. When Meshcheryakov became a member of parliament in March 1990, I was elected co-chairman, and I sort of took his place, relatively speaking, as the leading co-chairman. I had to answer letters and maintain contacts with the Board of Memorial in Moscow. I was still in charge of the human rights group, editing the newsletter, printing and distributing it, and doing a lot of other work. As before, I was connected with the Foundation for Assistance to Political Prisoners, from which I received parcels and money for elderly political prisoners and then sent them throughout Ukraine.

From fighting punitive psychiatry to delivering potatoes

Here is an example of the work of a human rights group. I have not been able to find any information about one person on the Ukrainian part of the list of political prisoners, Mykola Oleksiyovych Valkov, born in 1936, because no one has heard of him. I sent inquiries but received answers that the correctional system did not hold such a person. And then I found him in a psychiatric hospital. He ended up in the regional boarding institution for psychiatric patients in the village of Strilecha, Kharkiv region, near the current border with Russia, where he was put under the most severe regime — compulsory treatment. He was not even allowed to leave the ward where he was kept. Each ward was located in a separate building, and there was always a guard at the entrance. I started visiting him, bringing parcels, and talking to the psychiatrist, the chief medical officer, and the director, and his regime gradually relaxed. At first, he was allowed to walk around the hospital and then to go outside the territory. Several times, he was given to his relatives for a few days, and then they started letting him go to Kharkiv on his own. He would come to our office, spend a few hours, and return. He was eventually discharged from the hospital and moved back to his native Izyum. He had a sister in Izyum, and he lived there, coming to visit us in Kharkiv quite often. He died there, in Izyum, in the 2000s. His fate was brutal; from his youth, he was imprisoned with short breaks on political cases for public protests and Ukrainian samizdat, and on the third occasion, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was kept for many years. Outwardly, he seemed to be a completely healthy, sane person, and I never noticed any signs of mental disorder during my many years of communication with him.

First, the Memorial human rights group responded to direct HR violations, of which there were many. However, there were two topics that I dealt with systematically, and they took a lot of time.

The first topic was the persecution of informal press distributors by the authorities. People who brought these informal publications to Kharkiv and sold them were detained by the police and prevented from doing so. So, I legalized this activity through the city council and wrote a regulation on the procedure for selling these publications in the place where they were usually sold—at the entrance to the Shevchenko Garden from Dzerzhynsky Square (now Svobody Square). I thought it all through and described the procedure: a person was assigned a place he was obliged to keep clean and where he was to sell his publications, even paying a small pennywise tax. These were the forerunners of future stalls, whо began appearing later en masse. Evgen Kushnaryov, then the Chairman of the Kharkiv City Council, supported this idea, and the city executive committee approved this document. In the process, I discovered that there was already corruption there; informal rules had been established, and some criminal boss was in charge of all this: determining where to sell literature, negotiating with the police, and collecting tribute from all these sellers. When the city council decision came into effect, everything calmed down, and then, as long as this trade existed, everything was quite civilized. But it ended very quickly, with the onset of the economic crisis in 1992.

The second topic was persecution for displaying the Ukrainian national flag. In 1989, the most “malicious” demonstrators who came to meetings with the blue and yellow flag were systematically persecuted, even subjected to administrative arrest. I constantly wrote in Memorial’s bulletin and the Express Chronicle that these police actions were absolutely illegal. The police qualified the flag demonstration as a violation of the Code of Administrative Offenses article on the procedure for holding peaceful assemblies. Still, there was no offense in the flag demonstration. We also went to these meetings to support the Kharkiv National Democrats. For the first time, on December 5, 1989, at a public meeting in honor of Constitution Day at the Palace of Culture of Builders, the police did not detain anyone for holding the flag and had to accept its presence. When the policeman demanded that the flag be removed, Mykola Grygorovych Starunov, the leader of the group “Vybory-89” who was leading the meeting, replied that this flag has been known since the time of Vladimir the Holy and we will not take it anywhere. The police let it go and the harassment stopped from this time.

Shortly before that, I went to see General Oleksandr Bandurka, the head of the regional police department. I introduced myself as a member of the Memorial Council. And we argued with him for about three hours. He was a worthy opponent, and I didn’t know how to answer some of his arguments. For example, he said: “You are a Jew, but you are actually defending these bandits, the so-called UPA fighters, who organized Jewish pogroms under this flag! How can you do this?” I knew nothing about this then and did not immediately know what to say. “Look at the communists,” he said, “they confessed that they committed crimes under the red flag, didn’t they? They confessed! And now it is common knowledge! And they condemned these phenomena! The Communist Party condemned them! Why didn’t these people confess their crimes under the yellow and blue flag?” Here, it was easier for me to talk about the crimes of communism that the party did not confess to. So we argued and argued, and then he said: “Well, on the other hand, it’s useless chasing kids with these flags. What’s the big deal with this flag? We need to talk to Vasylyshyn about this.” (At the time, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR — E.Z.) Later, Bandurka became very friendly with Ukrainian organizations, such as Prosvita and the Society of Friends of the Ukrainian Language. He always gave them premises for meetings, concerts, and other events, often wearing an embroidered shirt, and they doted upon him.

But let me return to the activities of the Memorial in Soviet times. In 1990, Solzhenitsyn decided to give every former political prisoner a copy of the first edition of The Archipelago in the USSR; it was published in sets of four light red paperbacks. I sent the Foundation the first compiled by the Memorial lists of former political prisoners who lived in Kharkiv, including more than 200 people. I brought these 200 sets from Moscow to Kharkiv on my own, then delivered one to each former political prisoner and gifted on behalf of Solzhenitsyn: “This is from Oleksandr Isayevich personally.” I think his signature was on the title. At the same time, realizing which former political prisoners were in need, I suggested: “Let’s buy some potatoes with the budget money, and I’ll take care of distributing them.” Both Kushnaryov, the city council chairman, and Mykhailo Pylypchuk, the head of the city executive committee, were so pleased that they immediately allocated money and bought potatoes. We delivered a bag of potatoes to everyone during that hungry winter. The following year, we did it again.

Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression

At the same time, in 1990, I decided to create a commission at the city council to help victims of political repression. Here, Kharkiv’s communist city council deputies saw an opportunity to show their best side. Thus, they unanimously supported this idea and it passed with a bang. I wrote the commission regulations, outlining what and how the commission should do, who should be in it, and which local bodies should be represented. The council session voted for it, and the commission was created. However, the law on rehabilitation was not yet adopted at that time; it was only adopted in April 1991. Simultaneously, the city council session decided to grant benefits to political prisoners and their families (widows and, in exceptional cases, children), which were more significant than those provided for in the later law. I was appointed the deputy head of this commission. The chairman was the deputy head of the city executive committee, who signed the commission’s decisions, but I did all the work. We announced that a decision on benefits was made and invited people to come to the commission. And people came. I was interested in talking to them because they told me a lot. It was all interesting, helpful, and essential for the former political prisoners. Not everyone came: many people were still afraid then, and came later when the USSR law on rehabilitation was enacted.

At that time, nothing forebodes the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, Kharkiv was the first city in the USSR to make such a decision: To provide benefits to former victims of political repression at the local budget expense. Vira Ivashchenko was assigned to help me. She was in her 60s, once the secretary of the city council, and now retired and head of a special unit (unit in charge of processing classified documents). She was a tough party lady with a robust and plummy voice and a great administrator and organizer. She was tasked with receiving and checking the documents of all those who applied for benefits. And she soon was filled with compassion for these people. At that time, the Communist Party’s popularity was practically zero, and it was an opportunity for communists to show themselves in a positive way. But she was very strict in checking documents. And we often argued with her: I interpreted all the inaccuracies in favor of the repressed person, and she interpreted them in favor of the state. Sometimes I managed to convince her.

There were especially many arguments about granting benefits to children of the repressed people. I insisted on helping those who had once been sent to the NKVD orphanage, which was quite similar to a concentration camp, as well as those who had lost both their repressed parents. In addition, it was apparent how the repression (especially in the 1930s) affected the children’s entire lives: they were unable to evacuate during the war, many were abducted to Germany, and many of them never received higher education — the stigma of being the son (or daughter) of an enemy of the people deprived many of the opportunity to study at a university. The commission members checked the social and economic status of such people and, my God, what unspeakable poverty do they saw sometimes! The commission considered such cases to be exceptional.

The benefits were substantial — 100% compensation for apartment rent, utilities, and free city public transport — all already covered by the local budget. People came and registered to receive benefits, which helped Memorial keep in touch with them. When the law on rehabilitation was passed, the benefits were made consistent with it, and our commission was re-created according to its provisions. Its essence had not changed, but it no longer operated purely voluntarily; it now had two full-time staff members.

Стоять: Роман Каплан, Олександр Калиновський, Аркадій Левін, Владислав Недобора з сином Мишком, Семен Подольський, Володимир Пономарьов. Сидять: Андрій Григоренко, Тамара Левіна з сином, генерал Петро Григоренко, Гриша Недобора, Софія Карасик (1973 р.) Standing: Roman Kaplan, Oleksandr Kalynovskyi, Arkadii Levin, Vladyslav Nedobora with his son Myshko, Semen Podolskyi, and Volodymyr Ponomaryov. Seated: Andrii Hryhorenko, Tamara Levina and her son, General Petro Hryhorenko, Hrysha Nedobora, and Sofia Karasyk (1973). Стоят: Роман Каплан, Александр Калиновский, Аркадий Левин, Владислав Недобора с сыном Мишей, Семён Подольский, Владимир Пономарёв. Сидят: Андрей Григоренко, Тамара Левина с сыном, генерал Пётр Григоренко, Гриша Недобора, София Карасик (1973 г.)

Standing: Roman Kaplan, Oleksandr Kalynovskyi, Arkadii Levin, Vladyslav Nedobora with his son Myshko, Semen Podolskyi, and Volodymyr Ponomaryov. Seated: Andrii Hryhorenko, Tamara Levina and her son, General Petro Hryhorenko, Hrysha Nedobora, and Sofia Karasyk (1973).

Heinrich Altunyan and I managed to get our friends from Memorial, Iryna Rapp and Sofia Karasyk, the wives of Volodymyr Ponomaryov and Vladyk Nedobora, who were Altunyan’s accomplices in his first case of 1969, a job in the commission. (They signed open letters to the public in defense of Petro Hryhorenko and to the UN Human Rights Committee about human rights violations in the USSR, for which they were sentenced to three years in prison by the Kharkiv Oblast Court — editor) Ira and Sophia were in 1969 fired from their jobs. Sophia could no longer work as an engineer; she worked as a nurse, a loader in the post office, or at some other physical job. Ira stopped teaching physics at the university, and there was no longer any thought of defending her thesis. She was transferred to the university research sector. So, a few years before they reached retirement age, we sent them to work in the Commission for the Restoration of the Rights of Rehabilitated Persons of the Kharkiv City Council, as it was called. For Iryna and Sophia, it was a permanent daily job. They were very active and engaged in implementing the law on rehabilitation in Kharkiv. I was the deputy head of the commission. It’s possible to say that we controlled the charitable direction of Memorial activity at the local level. When Ira and Sophia retired, they continued to work in the commission voluntarily, and Igor Lomov, also a former political prisoner, started working there permanently.

Ірина Рапп, майбутня багаторічна співголова ХПГ (1977р.) Iryna Rapp, future long-term co-chair of the KHPG (1977) Ирина Рапп

Iryna Rapp, future long-term co-chair of the KHPG (1977)

Rehabilitated by history

In early April 1992, the Ukrainian parliament passed a resolution to create a multi-volume scientific and documentary publication about the victims of repression in Ukraine. Editorial and publishing groups were created in each oblast under the general title “Rehabilitated by History,” and their activities were funded from the budget. They had to prepare books with the same title about the repressions in each oblast of Ukraine. In fact, they were creating remembrance books that included the names of all those repressed and rehabilitated. These groups worked in the SSU (Security Service of Ukraine) oblast archives, preparing and publishing remembrance books. Some of these groups, particularly in Kharkiv, also created a database of victims of political repression in their oblast. In Kharkiv, Memorial also controlled the editorial and publishing group, which was headed by Nina Lapchynska, co-chair of Memorial and a historian and museum expert. Therefore, in Kharkiv, we started to enter into a database all archival investigative files stored in the SSU archive, and this process has not yet been completed.

Ірина Рапп з Юлієм Кімом Iryna Rapp with Yuliy Kim Ирина Рапп с Юлием Кимом

Iryna Rapp with Yuliy Kim

Another interesting story related to both the Memorial and the city council is the mass grave in Lisopark (a large park and forest area on the outskirts of Kharkiv). It is the grave of Poles shot in Kharkiv in the spring of 1940. Earlier, Memorial activists found various pieces of evidence of the mass burial in the 5th quarter of the forest park zone: uniform insignia, buttons, and other items. They collected them all and sent them to Poland. The Poles presented these artifacts to Gorbachev, and an investigation began in Kharkiv. In early 1989, the Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of the Poles. The case was soon transferred to the USSR’s Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office, which investigated it jointly with the Polish Military Prosecutor’s Office. In July 1991, specially dispatched military units conducted an exhumation that revealed numerous remains of those shot, both Poles and Kharkiv residents. On August 7, the reburial of the bodies and the opening of the Memorial Complex in memory of the victims were scheduled.

Memorial proposed installing a marble slab with Ukrainian and Polish inscriptions at the entrance to the Memorial Complex on behalf of the Kharkiv City Council. The city council supported this proposal, but the inscription caused some controversy. The text read as follows: “Here, rest the remains of Soviet and Polish citizens tortured in the dungeons of the NKVD.” The KGB people did not like the words “NKVD dungeons” and a lot of pressure was put on Kushnarev to change the inscription, even the Deputy Foreign Minister called him. But Kushnarev refused to change the inscription, saying he could not object to Memorial’s proposal. So, this inscription remained on the slab.

From Memorial to KHPG (and what does gardening have to do with it)

As I have already written, the state began to support historical, educational, and charitable activities, and the Memorial in Kharkiv sent employees to work in state bodies permanently. The human rights group dealt with specific HR violations and assisted their victims. It issued Memorial bulletins, kept records of Ostarbeiters, and helped them obtain evidence if there were no documents about their stay in Germany in our archives.

Read here how Memorial helped Ostarbeiters receive compensation from Germany.

However, there have also been significant changes inside Memorial. What happened in Kharkiv also happened in 1990-1992 in almost all regional branches of Memorial and in the central Moscow branch. Some of the victims of repression and their children were dissatisfied that Memorial was engaging in anything else besides helping them. They did not want human rights activism, research on the history of terror, etc. They believed that the Memorial was created for them, a veterans’ organization for people who had suffered during their time, and its main task was to help them. And everywhere Memorials began to divide, societies of the repressed were created, dealing only with their members. Such a society was also created in Kharkiv. Even earlier, our members wanted to create their allotment gardeners association, which they called Memorial, of course, and obliged the Memorial management to work on its establishment. I was a co-chairman of Memorial and had to take care of this association.

Heinrich Altunian and I went to see Oleksandr Maselsky, the head of the Kharkiv Oblast Executive Committee. The oblast executive committee allocated to Memorial 80 five-acre land plots not far from the city and near the railway station. Local trains often ran there, so it was a very convenient location.

And it turned out that our Memorial members didn’t want to hear about anything but garden plots. I had a lot of trouble with them because they did not want to do everything according to the rules: First, a land plan must be prepared, then approved by all the necessary authorities, the plots must be distributed in accordance with this plan, and so on. Some people started seizing plots before the land plan was approved and the association was established, while others seized four plots and did not want to give them up. And, of course, there were more people wanting a plot than plots available. I introduced a principle: One land plot for one certificate of rehabilitation. Then we redistributed all the plots again, completed all formalities, held a constituent assembly, and elected the association management, and I could resign from this business only then. I didn’t want to take the plot myself, and my mother refused because she already had problems with walking. Although our old people wanted me to become the head of the association very much, I refused outright. Ira Rapp with Volodya Ponomaryov and Sophia Karasik with Vladyk Nedobra also did not want to take care of the association because we were so tired of these squabbles.

Андрій Григоренко, батьки Євгена Захарова – Юхим Захаров та Марлена Рахліна, Олексій Смирнов, Лариса Богораз та Генріх Алтунян (1993 р.) Andrii Hryhorenko, Yevhen Zakharov’s parents Yukhym Zakharov and Marlena Rakhlina, Oleksiy Smirnov, Larysa Bohoraz, and Heinrich Altunian (1993) Андрей Григоренко, родители Евгения Захарова – Ефим Захаров и Марлена Рахлина, Алексей Смирнов, Лариса Богораз и Генрих Алтунян (1993 г.)

Andrii Hryhorenko, Yevhen Zakharov’s parents Yukhym Zakharov and Marlena Rakhlina, Oleksiy Smirnov, Larysa Bohoraz, and Heinrich Altunian (1993)

For a whole year, the Memorial’s meetings were all about these garden plots and there was no time for any other topics. Our newly converted gardeners were simply not interested in anything else. We were so tired of this that we decided to legalize the Memorial human rights group as a new organization. This is how the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG) was born. It was registered on November 10, 1992, but in fact, we worked separately from Memorial throughout 1992. We all continued to be Memorial members, but it gradually ceased functioning. Those who wanted to get garden plots were already working on them, and nothing else was interesting for gardeners. The historical and educational activities were transferred to the budgetary organization Rehabilitated by History, and the charitable activities were transferred to the city council’s Commission for the Restoration of the Rights of Rehabilitated Persons. And people gradually left Memorial simply because of their age. I am always bitter when I remember that our Memorial died, but this happened everywhere where formerly repressed people created their own veterans’ organizations separately from young people, and these organizations gradually died.

KHPG was founded by 11 people and has grown into one of the largest public organizations in the country. There are only two such large human rights organizations in Ukraine: KHPG and the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union which was founded on our initiative in 2004. Gradually, the work at KHPG became my main and only job.

 Share this