Columns 
Originally published on The Ukrainian Weekly
In this column, as Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on with Moscow not relenting on its maximalist demands, I look back at one brief but spectacular moment that came amid a time of hope and change in Moscow. In November of 1988 I had the privilege of taking part in a historic, groundbreaking bipartisan Congressional delegation that travelled to Moscow. It was a visit that even one year earlier would have been nearly impossible to imagine. Regrettably, it is impossible to imagine a similar visit happening today in Moscow under the despotic rule of war criminal Vladimir Putin.
In November of 1981, when I started working at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – a bipartisan, bicameral U.S government agency (also known as the Helsinki Commission) – the human rights situation in the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies was bleak. Human rights were routinely and flagrantly violated. Fundamental rights – freedom of speech, of the press, of association and assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to emigrate – were either nonexistent or severely curtailed. Dissidents, including members of Soviet Helsinki monitoring groups (the largest and most repressed of which was the Ukrainian Helsinki Group) faced imprisonment and other forms of persecution.
The Helsinki Commission, Congress and the Reagan administration, through various means and in various venues including conferences and meetings of the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (which later transformed into the OSCE), routinely called out the Soviet government for its violations of the Helsinki Final Act’s human rights commitments. The Soviets detested that we raised human rights issues, especially by speaking out on behalf of individual prisoners of conscience. They largely ignored our concerns and those voiced by our democratic allies. Things began to change in 1987 after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev initiated limited reforms that allowed for more transparency and freedom of speech. This also opened additional channels for the U.S. to convey our human rights concerns.
In November 1988, a U.S. delegation led by Helsinki Commission Chairman and U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer – who decades later served as the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023 – and Co-Chairman and U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini traveled to Moscow to meet with the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to discuss an array of human rights issues. The bipartisan delegation included 11 members of Congress, including 1960s civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, and assistant secretaries of the State, Defense and Commerce departments, who also served as representatives of the executive branch on the Helsinki Commission, as well as staffers.
Among the topics discussed in three separate working groups were religion, legal reforms and defendants’ rights, and freedom of movement. Among the issues at the forefront of the discussions were the status of the banned Ukrainian Catholic Church (UCC) and the plight of remaining Ukrainian political prisoners, including Helsinki monitors Levko Lukianenko and Mykola Matusevych, both of whom were released shortly afterwards.
Perhaps the most unprecedented events were three separate luncheons hosted by the U.S. delegation, divided along the lines of the working groups, which included Soviet human rights and emigration activists as well as leading Soviet officials. Ironically, the venue was the Sovietskaya Hotel, which was built in the early 1950s on the orders of none other than Joseph Stalin.
These luncheons included Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk of the banned and repressed UCC, who came dressed in his clerical clothing and who sat across the table from Soviet officials, among them the editor of the Soviet government’s official newspaper, Izvestia. They discussed the legalization of the church, which joyfully occurred a year later in December of 1989. Former political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil, who became a leading and iconic figure in independent Ukraine, also met and had lunch with top USSR Supreme Soviet officials. To say that this was unusual would be a glaring understatement. Moreover, Soviet officials were willing to admit some of their shortcomings at these meetings and they were far less defensive about U.S human rights concerns than was the case earlier. They also addressed some of these concerns and resolved nearly 150 emigration cases.
There were other groundbreaking meetings between members of the U.S. delegation and dissidents of various nationalities and faiths from the Soviet Union who were invited by the Helsinki Commission to take part in the meetings. Notable was a reception at Spasso House, the residence of the American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Soviet dissidents mixed not only with the Americans, but with Soviet officials who were part of a government that had imprisoned and otherwise repressed many of them. Among the guests that the U.S. delegation invited to the reception was Roma Hadzewycz, the long-time editor-in-chief of The Ukrainian Weekly and Svoboda.
It was remarkable to see all of the invited dissidents whose cases and causes the Helsinki Commission had championed. But, as a Ukrainian American who had participated in Ukrainian human rights organizations such as Smoloskyp in the late 1970s and early 1980s before coming to the Helsinki Commission, I was especially thrilled to meet with leading figures of Ukraine’s human and national rights movements, most of whom had been harshly repressed by Soviet authorities. Among them, in addition to Mr. Chornovil and Bishop Vasylyk, were Mykhaylo and Bohdan Horyn, Stepan Khmara, Ivan Hel, Oles Shevchenko, Mykola Horbal, Yevhen Sverstyuk, Mykhaylo Osadchy, Mykola Muratov, Serhiy Naboka and two Ukrainian Catholic priests. They all made a deep impression on members of our U.S. delegation, who found them to be courageous, principled, intelligent and committed people.
We also met with some of those individuals in more private venues to discuss what more could be done to help facilitate additional reforms. I recall, for instance, Rep. Don Ritter, the top House Republican on the Helsinki Commission, and myself meeting at an apartment with Mr. Chornovil and my casually mentioning to him that a Plast Ukrainian Scouting Organization camp near Cleveland that I had attended as a youth in the early 1970s had been named in his honor. He barely nodded his head, and, true to form for anyone who knew this man of action, he immediately switched to talk about concrete matters that would bring more freedom to Ukraine.
In one capacity or another, all of these activists played leading roles during the early years of Ukraine’s independence, with Mykhaylo Horyn and Chornovil playing especially crucial roles as co-chairs of Rukh, the leading national movement for Ukraine’s independence. I consider them, along with a few others, to be the founding fathers of independent Ukraine.
For members of the U.S. delegation, it was an unforgettable week, particularly because they met with Soviet dissidents on whose behalf we had been speaking out for years.
Change happens quickly. And history is replete with examples, including relatively recent history. We saw this with the dramatic changes that took place in the late 1980s (as illustrated by the Congressional visit to Moscow) that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, something that few people would have predicted even several years earlier would happen as quickly as it did.
It might be so with the war in Ukraine. The current situation – largely a stalemate with no side essentially having the upper hand – may look similar a year or two from now. Or there could be a ceasefire that reduces the level of violence (I say reduces rather than eliminates because it’s hard to imagine such an agreement would not be violated, given Russia’s modus operandi throughout the full-scale war). However, there is always a possibility of a radical and rapid change in circumstances that leads to Ukraine prevailing over Russia and its forces of darkness. The chances, of course, would greatly improve if America and its allies further stepped up their support of the war-ravaged country. Let’s continue to hope, pray and support the brave and resilient people of Ukraine as they work to achieve that outcome.