This memoir is a damning indictment of Soviet-style Communism. Myroslav Marynovych was a political prisoner in the USSR for a decade. He was arrested in 1977, aged twenty-eight, for circulating information about the Soviet regime's human rights violations. He spent seven years in the notorious Perm-36 camp in Russia and three years in internal exile in a remote village in Kazakhstan. The ‘universe behind barbed wire’ of the title refers not only to his deprivation and confinement but also to the Soviet system writ large.
Marynovych was a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, established in 1975 after the USSR signed the Helsinki Final Act. Marynovych and his fellow dissidents highlighted the regime's breaches of its own legal guarantees of human rights. They protested against the Kremlin's dominance of Ukraine and campaigned for national independence. This account reveals the extent of the Kremlin's efforts to destroy Ukrainian nationhood, using a wide range of repressive mechanisms against its advocates – KGB intimidation and harassment, brutality against prisoners, degradation and deprivation, psychological torture.
The leading lights of the Soviet dissident movement appear in the book, as friends and acquaintances when he was at liberty and as fellow inmates in the camps (notably Sergei Kovalev and Aleksandr Ogoronikov). Indeed, it reads like a ‘who's who’ of the underground human rights movement (and looks it: there are seventy-one photographs). Marynovych does not shy away from critiquing dissidents with opposing views, including Russians who did not regard the Ukrainian struggle as important.
Marynovych experienced a spiritual epiphany during his most trying period in Perm-36. He developed a rich Christian inner life. The relevance of biblical Scripture coupled with the sacrifice made by fellow prisoners and the kindness of sympathetic citizens convinced him of God's grace. Frustratingly for the reader, he does not outline his beliefs much beyond his Greek Catholicism. As we know, affiliation tells us little about personal spirituality.
Marynovych is currently Vice-Rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. In the closing chapter, he reflects on the role of religion in Ukraine's social, cultural and political life and the country's post-Soviet challenges. He focuses on two salient themes. First is the failure to bring Communist authorities to account for their crimes. Marynovych regrets that those who participated in upholding the regime were not called to account after 1991. Second is Putin's policy towards Ukraine. He advocates the ongoing importance of Ukrainian dissent in the face of Russian aggression: ‘By shedding blood and sowing suffering in Ukraine, Putin's regime is both consolidating a consensus around the need for real independence and, amazingly enough, strengthening the Ukrainian nation and giving it vigorous strength that had been lacking up to now’ (pp. 419–20). This was prescient: the memoir was completed in 2020, before the invasion.
The foreword by Timothy Snyder contextualises the Kremlin's campaign against Ukrainian nationalism. It is an illuminating introduction to the memoirs and an excellent explanation of the fundamental tension between Ukrainian nationalists and the Kremlin. This timely and honest book charts the travails of one Ukrainian dissident and in doing so highlights the inhumanity of the Soviet system and the ongoing struggle to defend independent Ukraine. It also shows that spiritual meaning can be found in the most unexpected, brutal of places.
