Yuriy Badzyo

Yuriy Vasyliovych Badzyo (Ukrainian: Бадзьо Юрій Васильович) (25 April 1936 – 1 September 2018) was a Ukrainian literary critic, activist, and political prisoner.

Early life and career

Badzyo was born into a peasant family of ten children in the village of Kopynivtsi, located in the Mukachevo Raion, Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine.

In 1958, Badzyo graduated from the Faculty of Ukrainian Language and Literature of the Uzhhorod National University, becoming a teacher of the Ukrainian language and literature before serving as a director of a school located in Mukachevo.

In 1961, he began studying for his PhD at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences located in Kyiv. In 1964, he married Svitlana Kyrychenko, a fellow student at the institute whom he had met the previous year, and successfully defended his PhD, becoming an assistant researcher at the institute.

Dissident activity and imprisonment

During his time in Kyiv, Badzyo became a member of the Klub tvorchoyi molodi or Club of Creative Youth, a cultural organisation founded during the Khrushchev Thaw that became a centre for dissident members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, collectively known as the Shistdesyatnyky or "Sixties". Here, he came into contact and became friends with Vasyl Stus, a fellow student and dissident, among others.

On September 4 1965, Badzyo participated in a protest against the arrests of political activists in Ukraine alongside Ivan Dzyuba, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Stus, Kyrychenko, and others, at the premiere of Armenian director Sergei Parajanov's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" at a cinema in Kyiv. Badzyo was subsequently dismissed from his position at the institute, expelled from the Communist Party, and gradually deprived of the opportunity of further work in the academic field. From 1965 to 1974, Badzyo worked as a teacher, proofreader, and editor between periods of unemployment, and as a loader at a bakery from 1974 to 1979.

In 1971, Badzyo wrote a letter to the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine in which he criticised the cultural policy of the government and argued that Ukrainian literature and culture held inferior positions in relation to their Russian counterparts.

The arrests of political dissidents close to Badzyo, including Dzyuba and Stus, in 1972 as well as a KGB raid on his apartment the same year prompted him to begin writing a treatise on the Soviet political system, Soviet historiography, Russification, and the subjugation of the Ukrainian nation, titled "Pravo zhyty", or "The right to live". In 1977, the 1,400 page draft manuscript, encompassing four out of a planned five chapters, disappeared. Badzyo set about writing a new version and had completed 452 pages Soviet authorities raided his apartment again in February 1979 and seized the second manuscript. He was arrested two months later in May.

On December 12 1979, Badzyo was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment, which he served at the Dubravlag labour camp, and a further five years in exile in Khandyga, Republic of Sakha, for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" under Article 62 of the Ukrainian SSR's Criminal Code (Article 70 in the Russian SFR).

The death of Anatoly Marchenko in prison, a dissident and founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, international pressure, and the beginning of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev led Soviet authorities to begin granting amnesties and early release to prisoners in 1986 on the condition that they pledged to refrain from future "anti-Soviet authorities" or wrote letters requesting pardons. However, having refused to request for clemency, Badzyo was only allowed to return from exile on December 9 1988, two days after Gorbachev publicly asserted at the United Nations General Assembly in Geneva that all political prisoners in the Soviet Union had been freed and allowed to return home.