by L. Dennis
Perhaps no other case in the recent history of man’s inhumanity to man is more tragic than that of Valentyn Moroz. Unlike other Soviet prisoners who have one way or another escaped captivity, Moroz appears to be doomed to suffer until his death. There is no exile in store for him, as was the case with the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and no deus ex machina device operation in the guise of American citizenship will get him out of prison and to the “Land of the Free,” as it did with the Lithuanian sailor Simas Kudirka. The tragedy of Valentyn Moroz, most Ukrainians would agree, lies in the fact that he is a Ukrainian. He is the son of a forgotten nation and thus in this sense, his personal tragedy is symbolic of the national tragedy of Ukraine.
History has convinced the Russians that they can literally get away with murder when dealing with Ukraine and her people, and they are acting on that presumption. After all, so far, they have had no reasons to change their policy. Ever since the beginning of their domination of Ukraine, be it Czarist or Communist, the Russians have constantly perpetrated genocide in Ukraine and assassinated Ukrainian émigré leaders while the rest of the world talked about the conversion of Russia or about coexistence with the Soviet Union.
In our modern world, however, things are constantly changing: what was true yesterday, need not necessarily be true today, and in the case of politics, it most likely will not be true tomorrow. More and more powerful voices are heard speaking out in defense of Valentyn Moroz. The eminent Soviet Russian scientist, Andrey Sakharov has already come to his aid. His Beatitude
Patriarch Joseph Slipyj, in a moving and compelling address to the World Synod of Bishops 1974, revealed to the Pope and the entire Church, the depth of suffering of Valentyn Moroz and other Ukrainians incarcerated behind the Iron Curtain. Acting on a more personal level, His Beatitude sent a telegram to President Ford just prior to the latter’s departure for the summit meeting at Vladivostok, requesting him to intervene personally in Moroz’ case. Even the New York Times, which in the past showed only little interest in Ukrainian affairs, came out with a brief but eloquent editorial in defense of Moroz, and there is hope that other American institutions and public figures will follow suit. The said editorial stated, among others, the following: “The current symbols of the Ukrainian campaigne against Russian domination are a 38-year-old historian named Valentyn Moroz, reportedly held by the Soviet secret police in Vladimir prison, and 35-year-old Leonid I. Plyushch, a cybernetics specialist associated with the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences until his “psychiatric detention” in 1972. Both men were openly engaged in the civil rights struggle which has tied together many of the Soviet dissidents. Such distinguished teachers of that movement as Andrey Sakharov and Pavel Litvinov have repeatedly protested the inhumane and illegal conditions of their detention.
Moroz and Plyushchare not well known in the West, and their plight has attracted little attention outside the circles of Ukrainians in this country and Canada. Perhaps for this reason, Soviet authorities have so far turned deaf ears to pleas in their behalf from international civil liberation groups. Moscow’s policymakers should not be deluded into waiting until some specific outrage against the two Ukrainians makes the protest genuinely universal.”
(The New York Times, Sept. 12, 1974)
Thus at this stage, even the Soviets must realize that Moroz is on the way of becoming a cause celebre in the West; obviously not to the degree of an Alexander Solshenitsyn, but nonetheless enough to cause them embarrassment.
In view of this, one cannot help but wonder at the bestial obstinacy of his jailors. Why do the Russians remain immovable in their hatred and cruelty in the face of a changing political reality? Surely, they cannot afford to be too arrogant to the forces of the West with whom they hope to reap the fruits of the detente? Granted, perhaps at this moment the pressure to release Moroz is still too small, but they are aware that it will grow and increase in intensity and eventually cause serious problems for the regime. Perhaps the Soviets hope that Moroz will become another Dzyuba, that he will recant his “sins” and praise the regime which incarcerated him? If so, they are sadly deluded. Even if this most improbable thing would come to pass, Moroz has already suffered enough to remain a martyr in the hearts and minds of his fellow Ukrainians, and nothing that he would do now, could possibly detract from that image. Yet ultimately, the most probable final solution to the tragic Moroz affair is his death. Day by day he remains incarcerated; his will to live wanes as the effects of his hunger-strike and the unceasing torments of his jailors ravage his emaciated and frail body. There is little doubt that Moroz is doomed to die, unless a radical change for the better takes place very soon. But, to pursue our line of reasoning: will his death help his murderers realize their objectives? To this question, none other than Moroz himself supplied the answer: “The dead,” he once said, “are more important than the living. They become symbols — the building blocks of spiritual fortresses in the hearts of man.” Clearly, Moroz death would only be the ultimate crowning of his martyrdom, and no totalitarian regime needs a martyr, especially a dead one. We can be sure that the Soviet regime is aware of that truth also, and yet they do nothing to preclude his martyrdom.
It is quite possible that this unyielding Soviet attitude towards Moroz can be explained in terms of arrogance which flows from the historical possession of power, that type of thinking which has its roots deeply imbedded in Stalinism, and for which human life and morality have little or no meaning. However, as Sovietologist would point out, the Kremlin rulers are too sophisticated at this stage of their own political past and of their stereotyped rhetoric. Hence one must seek the reasons for their unyielding obstinacy in Moroz’ case elsewhere.
It is quite possible, that the Soviets consider Moroz more dangerous to their system than anyone else. Moroz is a Ukrainian patriot; he loves his country, and by virtue of that fact alone, he is dangerous to the regime. But there are other Ukrainian thinkers who have expressed even more fervent patriotic sentiments than he, and there were and are even today intellectuals in the Soviet Union whose ideology comes closer to nationalist than Moroz’ views. And yet, none are as fiercely persecuted by the regime as he. The answer for Moroz’ tragic plight suggests itself if we analyze, however briefly, the content of his writings. Already a cursory examination of his essays reveals, that he is a profound religious thinker. In fact, Moroz is the first prominent Ukrainian secular prisoner to emphasize the importance of religion for the preservation of Ukraine and her culture. And herein, it appears, he poses the greatest threat to the atheistic regime, and because of this, Kremlin wants to make an example of him. To be sure, this was recently vehemently denied by the Soviets (see Z. Franko, “Bez vas obiydemos”,” in Radyans’ka Osvita of Nov. 23, 1974), but it is nonetheless the truth. Moroz’ writings reveal the inseparable bond between religion and the culture of the Ukrainian nation, and he postulates the survival of religion as a condition for the existence of a national culture. We quote from his essay entitled “Vasyliy Lyubchyk”: “Generally speaking, the easiest way to destroy the foundation of nation is to do it under the pretext of fighting the Church. The Church has rooted itself in the cultural life so deeply that it is impossible to touch it without damaging the spiritual structure of a nation. It is impossible to imagine traditional cultural values without the Church. It is ultimately necessary to understand that an attack against the Church is and attack against culture. How many times has the nation been saved by the Church? This was especially important when a change in faith meant a change in nationality. There were a number of villages near Kholm where Ukrainians spoke Polish. But they remained Ukrainians as long as they adhered to the Ukrainian faith and Church. Similarly, a Polish family in a Ukrainian village in Podilya would remain Polish for generations without knowing the Polish language as long as the family remained Catholic.”
The historian Moroz knows and values the role and function of the Church in the national and spiritual existence of a people. In the face of his powerful historical arguments, Soviet atheistic propaganda is simply reduced to absurdity. The following quotation from the same work makes this abundantly clear: “In Eastern Europe the Church was the only power independent of the authorities. Let us take the Ukrainian revival in Halychyna, how trivial was the role played by the teacher as compared with the priest! The teacher was a state employee afraid of losing his job. The priest did not know this fear. The majority of the people working for the Ukrainian cause came from the clergy. The Reverend’ was often justifiably criticized, but it is also important to remember that it was he who kept the Ukrainian movement alive. Halychyna did not turn Polish because of the Ukrainian Church. In this and similar cases we can equate the Church and the nation — just as we can equate the Church and spirituality, in general.
We often hear: The Church always sided with the exploiters! We hear it so often, in fact, that we accept it as a matter of fact. But facts give us a different story.”
At this point Moroz quotes and old folksong in which the Ukrainian serfs bemoan their fate as they are being driven to work on Sunday instead of going to Church. Moroz knows the Ukrainian religious mind. He, perhaps better than any other Ukrainian dissident understands its working; and this, and the knowledge and proper interpretation of history make the frail Ukrainian prisoner a powerful and feared man. The Soviets fear, Moroz could rekindle that divine spark in the human heart known as grace, and thus cause a renaissance of Christian culture in Ukraine, and then statehood and independence would only be one step away. With cool and rational arguments Moroz calmly destroys the Soviet myth of the exploitative nature of “the opium of the people” and puts religion once again in its proper perspective: “The exploiters, as we see, drove the people from church with whips. Would they do this if the Church were really on their side? And the people were willing to work any kind of serfdom — just so they were not forbidden ‘to go to church and pray.’ People know instinctively that under certain conditions the Church is their only hope for spiritual self-preservation, their only guarantee from becoming a beast of burden. The master also understood that it is impossible to break people and make slaves of them until you have robbed them of their holydays, ruined their traditions, trampled their temples.”
In a world controlled by atheists, the manliness of Valentyn Moroz shows that man, despite all the attempts to corrupt him, is basically a spiritual being. His martyrdom says the unsayable in the best Ukrainian tradition: that of the Servant of God Metropolitan Sheptytsky and Patriarch Slipyj. And when the murderous frenzy of his adversaries dissipates into nothingness, his message to Ukraine and to the world will nourish and sustain the generations of the future.
