It was frequently said, “Brezhnev’s rule is not that terrible–it is bloodless totalitarianism.” However, this group of panels shows a tally of people who were arrested
in those years. Their numbers include Ivan Svitlychny, who lived in freedom for forty
years, was imprisoned for twelve years, and was paralyzed for eleven, and the artist
Alla Horska, who died under mysterious circumstances in Vasylkiv, near Kyiv. There
are many such examples of broken lives. In September 1965, at the premiere of
Serhii Paradzhanov’s film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” at the Ukraine cinema
in Kyiv, V’iacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus, and Ivan Dziuba held a public protest
action. Also displayed on the panels are photographs of people who courageously
challenged the political system and were then punished.
Among the exhibits is a photograph of the brilliant journalist and renowned
human rights activist Valerii Marchenko, who died in October 1984. President
Ronald Reagan and the U.S. State Department issued a special declaration in which
they expressed their profound indignation to the USSR in connection with the death
of this Ukrainian dissident. Also pictured are Yurii Badzio and Semen Gluzman, the
head of the Ukrainian–American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights.
Gluzman was the Soviet psychiatrist who declared in his diagnosis that General Petro
Hryhorenko’s mental state was normal and thus could not be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. The idea of using psychiatry to fight against dissidents was conceived by Yurii Andropov, who was then the head of the Soviet KGB. Gen. Petro
Hryhorenko was only one of many victims of the Soviets Union’s abuse of psychiatry.
In 1972 Volodymyr Shcherbytsky came to power in Ukraine. In contrast to his predecessor Petro Shelest, Shcherbytsky introduced a brutal campaign of Russification in
Ukraine. This group of panels displays Shelest’s book Our Soviet Ukraine, as a result of
which the author was retroactively accused of “Ukrainian
bourgeois nationalism.” The year 1972 launched a period
of particularly savage repressions against dissidents. The
ranks of Ukrainian dissidents include such figures as Yurii
Lytvyn, Zynovii Antoniuk, Sviatoslav Karavansky, Mykola
Plakhotniuk, and Oleksa Tykhy, to name but a few.
The last panels in this group portray an era of great
change marked by the deaths of Communist Party leaders Konstantin Chernenko and Yury Andropov and
the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The panel entitled “Lost Memory” presents for the
first time a chronological survey of architectural monuments that were destroyed throughout Ukraine: sixty
monuments prior to 1914, seven during 1914–1918,
and 251 in the years 1918–1941.
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