Museums’ activities as de-Stalinization practice

A solitary confinement cell, death row, an investigator’s room – all this is now open to visitors at Tiurma na Lontskoho (“Lontskoho St. Prison”), a Lviv museum in memory of occupation regimes’ victims. One can see the truth about terrible events in the summer of 1941 on movie and photo stills or hear an eyewitness account from former prisoners. The exposition displays the recently declassified execution lists and archival files on one of the best-known inmates, the Rev. Mykola Khmilevsky, head of the underground Greek Catholic Church and member of the Ukrainian General Liberation Council, the parliament of the fighting Ukraine. Researchers have collected and inscribed on the Stele of Memory all the 757 known names of those killed in 1941. There are stands in the corridors, which show the history of the building, the names of some of the shot prisoners, and texts of the documents that laid down this prison’s rules at various periods. “This Western Ukraine’s largest prison must be not only a reminder of the horrors of the USSR’s totalitarian past, the German and the Polish occupation regimes, but also a warning for the Ukrainians and the rest of the world against the repetition of the horrible tragedy of a totalitarian society,” says Ihor DEREVIANY, a senior research associate at the museum.

A lot of specialists, organizations, and institutions, including the non-profit Liberation Movement Research Center (LMRC); the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU); the Lviv Oblast Administration; the Lviv Oblast Council; Pamiat (“Memory”), a war victims search society; and the Poshuk (“Search”) regional society, worked to establish the museum. On June 28, 2009, the LMRC opened, in collaboration with the SBU, the first stage of the current exposition at Tiurma na Lontskoho. And, as soon as October 13, 2009, the President of Ukraine decreed that the museum should be granted national status. The museum associates have audio- and video-recorded about 50 eyewitness accounts of former prisoners and other resistance fighters, scanned more than 2,000 photos and documents on the history of this prison, including the period of dissident movement, and searched for items to top up the museum’s collection which will form the basis of this exposition’s second stage.

What is the chief mission of your institution?

“To establish not just a museum but a research institute, like in Central and Eastern European countries, such as Lithuania [it is about the Genocide Victims Museum, an integral part of the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Center. – Ed.]. In general, the memorial Tiurma na Lontskoho is being established for the coming generations – not as a reminder of the tragedy but as a symbol of the Ukrainians’ unrelenting liberation struggle. Our main ideas are the ultimate triumph of good (sacrifices offered in the name of independence and freedom) over evil (tortures, occupation, death, enslavement), the grandeur of the spirit of struggle and self-sacrificingness for independence of Ukraine. We do remember that not only the Ukrainians, but also other nations suffered. The Ukrainians won independence for both themselves and others. We are saying that it takes more than physical destruction to kill the aspiration for freedom and, hence, the freedom itself. As a museum, we are prepared to be part of the joint efforts aimed at honoring the national memory.”

Who are your visitors?

“All ages – the older, middle-aged, and younger generations – are taking interest in history. I would even say the middle-aged generation is less interested in history. As for the older generation, they come to our memorial museum to look for their prison cells. In other words, they are the people who took part in the liberation movement and were imprisoned in Tiurma na Lontskoho. There are also among the visitors the people who languished in Bryhidki [a prison on Horodotska St. – Ed.] or the Zamartynivska jail – they come as raconteurs. We record their reminiscences, for we have archives. The young come because it is interesting for them. On the one hand, some of the young people who come have something to do with our institution – their relatives, grandparents, took part in the liberation struggle and served a term in prison camps. On the other hand, to some it is just interesting to know what a prison is. It is difficult to say what young people learn from visiting our museum. But the way they behave here… When we were opening, we did no renovation on purpose – we tried to keep the prison’s atmosphere intact. This is the way the prison looked in the last 30 years of the USSR.”

Your museum is a collection of human destinies maimed by the system – a sight not for sore eyes. Can you say that you singled some life paths that struck you the most?

“There are some. What is very interesting for me is the destiny of Volodymyr-Ihor Porendovsky. He was in Volhynia, in the Lviv region, and in the Transcurzon land. He was engaged in publishing and established an underground communication system. He was captured in Czechoslovakia in 1947 and turned over to the Poles who in turn handed him over to the Soviet authorities. He was immediately taken to Moscow, then to Kyiv, and then to Lviv. Porendovsky gave a detailed account of being under investigation in Lviv. It follows from his reminiscences that the whole period of imprisonment, not only interrogations, was a never-ending torture. He was at once thrown into the punishment cell, where there was a stone floor flooded with water. The several-centimeters-thick layer of water had chlorine diluted in it. You can’t sit or lie in this cell. Besides, you can’t breathe there. You were given a board to lie on at night, but you were called to an interrogation at night, too. And they would take this board away at The Daytime. So Porendovsky would lie down on the floor into that solution… He would sleep, wake up, and look at chlorine-caused burns. So it was an endless torture – every day and every hour – during the whole period behind bars, i.e., more than six moths on the average. He was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment [this occurred in 1948, when there was no capital punishment in the USSR. – Ed.] and sent to Kengir [one of the largest high-security prison camps in Kazakhstan. – Ed.]. Together with the well-known OUN political figure Mykhailo Soroka, he took part in the 1954 uprising as well as in working out the demands that the prisoners put forward to the administration. Predictably, the uprising was crushed and its masterminds were executed, while Porendovsky found himself in Kolyma’s other prison camp – Taishet [Irkutsk oblast. – Ed.], where he stayed on until 1959 and then freed as a Polish citizen (on the basis of a petition filed by his parents who had moved to Poland for permanent residence). Since then Mr. Porendovsky has been living in Wroclaw and writing memoirs – three books have already come out and a fourth one is in the pipeline.”

Could you give us another detailed account of somebody’s life path?

“Yes, about the destiny of Ivan Hel from the family of professional insurgents. His maternal uncle was Zynovii Tershakovets, an OUN territorial executive. His grandfather had served in the Ukrainian Galician Army and father Andrii was an underground fighter, too. In other words, Ivan Hel was the next generation brought up in the same insurgent spirit. Ivan was arrested in 1965. Knowing from his father that the detained were beaten at interrogations, he was psyching himself up for this. Ivan was not beaten in the first days of being in jail – this must have been an attempt to aggravate the psychological situation. He even began to wash himself with cold water in order to get better prepared for beatings. But nobody beat him, for times had changed and KGB investigators played a different role. It was no longer the Stalin era. Ivan said that once, at about 4 a.m., he distinctly heard somebody moaning, as if being tortured. He even presumes that it was a recording being played in order to scare and unsettle the prisoners. Ivan Hel was sentenced to serve a three-year term in a high-security camp under Article 62, Part 1, and Article 64 of Soviet Ukraine’s Criminal Code [“anti-Soviet propaganda” and “organizational activity.” – Ed.]. Presumably, the camps were to morally and physically cripple and destroy those people because they were kept together with hardcore criminals who were encouraged to assault political prisoners. But, on the contrary, the 1940s-1950s insurgents used the camps as a stepping stone for a new phase of struggle which included uprisings. Even though the latter were unsuccessful, the GULAG system began to gradually decline. Finally, only one camp – DUBRAVLAG – remained behind in Mordovia, which kept dissidents. Dissidents were very strong people, for they were sure that their cause was right. It was impossible to suppress them even in a prison camp. To tell the truth, there were no longer such things as shootings and incitements and, accordingly, a man could feel more freely and even offer resistance. There is an interesting document: a KGB report to the Party authorities, which says that political prisoners have ‘foiled an event’ to be held in the prison. It is about Ivan Hel, Ihor Kalynets and many others dissidents who ignored lectures by certain research associates, even academicians, who were invited to the prison camp to tell the inmates about how nice it was to live in the USSR. The argument was airtight: the prison regulations did not set out that prisoners were obliged to attend lectures. As a result, lectures were thwarted, which was also resistance of sorts. Clearly, it is thanks to all these people that we have a state of our own.”

I will be perhaps right if I say that there is an opinion that such museums as yours stir up hatred of the Ukrainians towards the Russians and vice versa, cause our society to split, and alienate eastern, western, and central Ukraine from each other. Do Russian visitors or, say, Russian-speaking Lviv residents often visit the museum?

“I’ll tell you what. Last year (in the early summer) two Saint Petersburg girl students came to us. They saw the exposition and wrote in the guest book: ‘Forgive us.’ You see, different people come to see the exposition. For example, I can remember a Polish family that represented several generations. The elderly gentleman said to me: ‘The truth is that both the Ukrainians and the Germans used to kill the Poles.’ In other words, there are biased people on one side and the other. We are trying to change this because we do not believe in personal responsibility for crimes. It is the regime that must be held responsible for crimes.”

Do the national Ukrainian media pay adequate attention to your museum? Do journalists from Ukraine’s other regions come to visit you?

“As for the print media, newspapers are not interested in these matters and are taking a biased attitude to us. So we work differently – via the websites that focus on history. Among them are Ukraine Incognita and Historical Truth, to which we contribute our articles. We receive different comments on these articles, but this can be called a debate. We also publish literature, such as research or popular-science papers accessible to the grassroots. As for television, regional channels evince interest in us. As for the central channels which hold lengthy political shows… Their programs invite Volodymyr Viatrovych but give him very little time to speak. Clearly, it is very difficult now because of the political situation in this country and the way national memory is interpreted at the moment. It is important for us to show history the way it was, without dodging delicate questions. For example, some are trying to hush up the Polish-Ukrainian confrontation in World War Two, reducing everything to the Volhynia events: they keep silent about Transcurzon and even Galicia, where there were also a lot of conflicts. This should not be shunned. We must clear up what this led to. Only weak people, who are afraid of being condemned, can dodge this kind of issues. (There will always be condemnation because it is the nature of many people.)

Therefore, we must find the cause and never bypass such things in the future. Unless we provide knowledge, we will still more injure our society. Whenever we speak about real facts, with all the complexities and tragedies involved, we encourage people to think. Unconventional facts impress people. A thinking person, who reflects on the existential questions of his or her own life, will always show interest in such things and imagine that he or she is involved in them. The more an individual thinks, the freer he or she becomes. For this reason I am deeply grateful to the newspaper Den for fighting historical forgetfulness and, particularly, for the initiative to declare 2012 as Sandarmokh List Year because that place became a ‘death factory’ for Ukrainians, Russians, and many other nations and ethnicities. We are thus making people ponder over whether order needs to be established at the cost of millions of human lives. Fyodor Dostoevsky once said that even happiness of the entire world cannot justify an injured child’s teardrop. The 20th century showed us the cost of these tears – millions of innocently killed people.”

The Day’s FACT FILE

A building designed by architect Jozef Janowski was put up in 1889-90 at the intersection of Leon Sapega (Stepan Bandera today) and Copernicus streets as headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian gendarmerie. The prison itself was built in 1919-22, when the city was part of Poland. The prison block housed the 4th Department of the General State Police Directorate responsible for fighting against “anti-governmental organizations,” such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. Unofficially, the prison was used to hold political inmates. From 1935 onwards the building also housed the police investigation department, while the prison was used as a pre-trial jail. During the 1936 Lviv trial, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, Mykola Lebid, and other defendants were held in this jail. In 1939-41, the building comprised Jail No.1 for 1,500 inmates, while the next-door main block was the NKVD Oblast Directorate. When Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, NKVD operatives shot dead 1,681 people (according to a report by Lieutenant Lerman, chief of the Lviv Oblast NKVD Prison Department, and the execution lists dated June 26 and signed by the chief of the Lviv Oblast NKGB Investigatory Department, Shumakov, and the Lviv Oblast Prosecutor Kharitonov). In 1941-44 the building was used as Gestapo investigatory jail and SD Einzatzgruppen headquarters. The prison floor was paved with tombstones from an old Jewish cemetery. A well-known Polish scientist, Kazimierz Bartel, was held in this prison for a long time. In 1944-91 this building housed an NKVD (NKGB) – MGB – KGB investigatory department and pre-trial jail as well as the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Lviv City Executive Committee and the Lviv Oblast Police Headquarters of Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior.