From Gulag to UCU,
It’s Been a Wonderful Life
Myroslav Marynovych reflects on his 60th birthday
By Matthew Matuszak
Special to America ---February 2009
Myroslav Marynovych, vice rector for university mission of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) (center, with moustache), celebrated his 60th birthday, among other ways, by playing the role of King Herod in a vertep (Christmas play) that the staff of UCU’s rector’s office put on for the students.
LVIV --- Like the title of one of his favorite American movies, it’s been a wonderful life for Myroslav Marynovych. Like the movie’s hero, he also struggled through a period of darkness to enter a great light.
At times, hope seemed very dim. For a decade he labored in the Gulag for daring to expose human-rights abuses in Soviet Ukraine. In prison, however, he would find freedom in Christ. “The total conversion to Christianity in my case was caused by what you might call a personal revelation,” he once told an interviewer. “After leaving the Gulag, I had to analyze the nature of evil and its hidden dangers while witnessing to the urgency of kindliness.”
In Ukraine today, he is prominent in academic and political circles as a key figure in the ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox. He does so from his post as vice rector for university mission of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU).
On January 4, Mr. Marynovych turned 60. He waited to celebrate this milestone with UCU’s students until after they returned from Christmas vacation on February 2. The festivities included a vertep (Christmas play) performed by members of the administration and a “creative meeting” with the students during which he shared some lessons on life.
As UCU rector Fr. Borys Gudziak, Ph.D., explained in his introductory speech for the “creative meeting”: “Mr. Marynovych agreed to share with us some lines from his biography… How to stand up for something when you are alone…. A few years after leaving school, he made some fateful decisions. He was a prisoner at 27 years old.”
In the presence of students and staff of the Ukrainian Catholic University, as well as young men from Holy Spirit Seminary, Fr. Gudziak noted that “there were significant numbers of people involved in the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church, the Sixties generation, the UPA generation. But the group defending human rights in the Seventies was very small.”
Fr. Gudziak challenged the students: “Young people, listen carefully. Think: Am I ready to be a joyful, peace-making witness of Jesus Christ?”
Two UCU students then played the bandura and violin during a slide show of pictures from Mr. Marynovych’s life. Then Mr. Marynovych talked about his life, often giving examples to demonstrate his conviction that “Every element of our life is a prompting from God, an attempt to help us.”
Mr. Marynovych recalled how, as a third-year student at Lviv Polytechnic University, he was detained by the KGB and accused of spreading “anti-Soviet lies.” The KGB told him he had two choices: either cooperate by informing on critics of the Communist state or be expelled from the university.
He went back to the dormitory and heard students there saying lots of bad things about then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and decided that he couldn’t inform on them. He was expelled.
A few years later, he was in Kyiv helping found the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. They did not operate in secret. Soon the authorities hauled him in and gave him an ultimatum.
“Either you’re for us or against us,” they said in a scene worthy of the big screen.
“Then I’m against you,” he replied.
“Only a young man could say that,” Mr. Marynovych remarked. “Today, I would say: ‘On the one hand… While on the other hand…’” The audience burst out laughing at his frankness.
“No one with a sound mind wants to go to prison,” Mr. Marynovych explained. He realized this was a possibility while helping form the group. He and his fellow activists considered the threat but concluded that other things were worse than prison. They had to continue their struggle, he said, because “otherwise we would have been ashamed of ourselves. Some day, I didn’t want to have to look back into the past and say, ‘I was too scared to do this…”
Today, he can look into the mirror and feel justified.
He reflected on “radical breaks” in his life that made it seem “like more than one life.” He recalled the hardships in the Gulag (1977-1987), as opposed to his beautiful life now. “Good and evil were clearly before you in the camps,” he explained. “There was tension in the spiritual life.”
Mr. Marynovych described how “two promptings from God” encouraged him to begin his prolific career as a writer in many genres. In the Gulag, some Russian poets read their works and suggested that he should write, too. Then he heard another political prisoner, Oles Shevchenko, recite a poem brimming with hatred for the Russians.
“How people offend each other with words,” Mr. Marynovych thought. He came up with the title of the book he would write, The Gospel according to God’s Fool. Throughout his talk to the students he read passages from this book, one of his many published works.
Reading from the book, he asked the audience: “Do we have a feeling that God is saying something to us?”
Marynovych reflected on how “Ukrainians and Jews were, for the first time, on equal terms in the camps. It was the first chance we had to listen to each other.”
He then read some conciliatory lines that he had written about the Russians and, when Oles Shevchenko heard these, Mr. Marynovych recalled what Mr. Schevchenko told him: “You know, Myroslav, after this, one wants to become a better person.”
Maryvnovych was determined that he didn’t want “to be a source of further harm to others.”
He recounted how, when he returned from the camps, the “new generation encouraged [him] to go into politics. But I never wanted to do that.”
“I wasn’t successful in everything,” he admitted. “Some questions still bother me today, like ‘How can I influence what’s happening in Ukraine now?’
“The best we can do, however, is what we are capable of doing where we find ourselves. You can’t always change the world, but you can change the area immediately around you,” he reflected. “You are an instrument in God’s hands.”
At the end of his presentation, he thanked his wife Luba, who visited him when he was in the prison camp in Kazakhstan, by presenting her a bouquet of flowers. Then he showed a brief home movie in which he, his sister, and late mother sang a song about a cuckoo.
Father Gudziak encouraged students and staff to get to know Mr. Marynovych. As Vadym Adadurov, a history professor at UCU, noted: “Marynovych is not a statue on which to place flowers, but a living, breathing authority.”
In appreciation, the university presented him with a rocking-chair upholstered in red velvet: UCU’s “Marynovych Chair,” Fr. Gudziak quipped.
After Liturgy was celebrated in the UCU chapel, Mr. Marynovych joined the staff of the rector’s office in putting on a vertep for the students. He played King Herod and, among other actors, Fr. Gudziak played the Devil. The moral incongruity between the roles and the men playing them was cause for comic appreciation.
Last December, Mr. Marynovych was awarded the Order of Freedom by President Yushchenko. In January, he received the Vasyl Stus Prize.
The UCU Press is now preparing to publish the first of a planned four-volume collection of Mr. Marynovych’s essays.
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