Just a reminder of ethnic Russian tolerance in Crimea under Yanukovych.
Back to the USSR -- the tools of Genocide remain unchanged
http://yaroslawsrevenge.authorsxpress.com/2013/02/09/back-to-the-ussr-%E2%80%93-the-tools-of-genocide-remain-unchanged/
Posted on February 9, 2013
Myroslaw Petriw
Readers of my blog A-B= Genocide may question why I wrote in it "that a genocidal policy continues today". The following article is a translation of an interview with a student that was recently published in Censor.Net.
I remind readers that in the heyday of the USSR, an alternative extralegal method of punishing opponents of the regime was to have them committed to psychiatric wards. The logic was that anyone who could possibly oppose the wonderful and just Soviet regime had to be insane. I will leave the conditions and treatments that were used in these facilities to the reader's imagination. There is plenty of literature on the subject. What is shocking is that in a nominally independent Ukrainian state the Russian regime that rules it continues to apply all the old methods.
In 2010, 21-year old Ihor Mitrov was committed by the Kerch Military Commission [Kerch is in Crimea, the most southern part of Ukraine] to a mental hospital. The reason was simply that Ihor spoke Ukrainian with the doctors just as he did with everybody else. The diagnosis -- psychopathy, neurasthenia and personality disorder. Now Mitrov is studying philology in the Shevchenko University in Ukraine's capital.
- I went for a medical examination at the recruitment office. I did not want to dodge the draft, -- but I was not accepted. This was after I quit university and spent a year unemployed while losing interest in everything. I figured, I'll go into the army, -- says Ihor Mitrov while sipping tea in the apartment in Podolia, where his friends came to visit.
- ... I was sent for a medical examination. I passed all the doctors' medical examinations but with the psychiatrist -- one had to actually speak. They asked me various provocative questions about religion, war, and nationalism. She asked me, "And why do you speak Ukrainian?" I explained to her that it is the official language in Crimea [and all Ukraine]. She declared: "This is simply too much, this is a personality disorder." I was locked up for three weeks in the psychiatric ward. In any case they declared me unfit for military duty. -
- I became a Ukrainian speaker during one week of my life at age 14. I have been speaking Ukrainian since the ninth grade. They even sent me to the national competition of Ukrainian language in Sumy. There, for the first time I heard the living language that was so different from that spoken by announcers on television. I heard alternative views of history. Previously I had no doubts that the Soviet Union was simply wonderful, that the whole post-Soviet space should in fact be united by one language [Russian] and that we had a most benevolent government. In Sumy I had my eyes opened. -
Igor began pouring boiling water on the green tea. We were sitting on the floor. In the room at the table a half dozen boys and girls were talking. They discuss travel gear and skydiving.
- Where did you learn Ukrainian well enough to be sent to the national competition? -- we asked Ihor.
- I simply knew it. I think anyone with a working TV and even a bit of brains can learn it because it is similar to Russian. The historian from Sumy, Nikolai Karpenko gave me his book "The Great Patriotic War or World War II?" I read the book and since then I started to think for myself. After high school I entered the Kyiv Shevchenko University to study writing. After a year I realized that it was an absolutely useless faculty and specialty and it was taught by worthless teachers. I had expected much more. I expected special courses, workshops, readings by famous poets, writers, and meetings with writers. All I got was boring bullshit. I gave it all up at the end of the third semester.
- In Kerch I went to a Ukrainian class expecting that everyone would speak Ukrainian, which in theory, they should. It turned out that only I and two teachers, one of mathematics and the other of art spoke Ukrainian. Mathematician Jaroslav Grabowski was from Drohobych. He told us about Stus [the poet who died in the Gulag in 1983]. The father of Basil Khymiy, my teacher of art was listed by the NKVD among the enemies of Soviet power. No one else spoke Ukrainian in that school -- nobody. And I immediately began speaking with everyone and with my parents. After returning from Sumy I said, "Dude, I lived for a week with Ukrainian speakers! I'm still getting over it!" Then I decided -- why give it up? Classmates reacted quite normally. When we went somewhere or drank, some of them actually tried to switch to Ukrainian. But dad kicked me out of the house. He was furious. He's a foolish worshipper of the Soviet idiocy. "I don't need any Khokhly in my home!" -- he'd yell and would point to the door. Mother always i
ntervened in these arguments, but she also shared the views of his father. But when Dad would order me out of our home, she defended me.
Those present in the room fell silent and listened to our conversation.
- Last fall, two Interior Ministry agents beat me up. On October 14, on the feast of the Protection of St Mary, I pinned a yellow-blue ribbon on my sleeve. When they smashed me in the face I cried, but not because it hurt and blood was flowing from all openings. I cried because it was so shameful that people beat others just because they speak another language or because they have a different point of view.
- So hasn't word gone around in Kerch, that some dude there speaks Ukrainian? -- asked 25-year-old Natalya Shevchuk.
- If you wrote about me every time I was beaten by some thug, I would be in third place in media ratings -- after Yanukovych [the current President] and Mazurok [once Ukraine's most wanted murderer]. -- says Ihor.
InfoUkes Inc. Gerald William Kokodyniak
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