Гелій Снєгірьов

Activity: Human rights advocacy
Date of birth: October 14, 1927
Date of death: December 28, 1978, Kyiv
Navigator: Post-war USSR

Ukrainian Soviet writer, director, and publicist. Born on October 14, 1927, in Kharkiv. Died on December 28, 1978, in Kyiv. A dissident and political prisoner, he was the first person to renounce Soviet citizenship without leaving the borders of the USSR.

Heliy Sniehirov was the son of the Ukrainian writer and playwright Ivan Sniehirov. He spent his youth in Kharkiv. After studying at the acting department of the Kharkiv Theater Institute, Sniehirov moved to Kyiv and joined the “Ukrkinokhronika” studio for newsreels and documentary films. There, he worked as a director, head of the screenwriting department, and later as editor-in-chief.
In the 1950s, Sniehirov began his literary career. Writing in Russian, his works were published in the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina. His short story “Bear Me Three Sons” (Narody meni try syny) gained particular popularity; in 1967, it was published in the Moscow magazine Novy Mir and was subsequently translated into several languages and published outside the USSR.
“He was a handsome Viking, a tall Scandinavian-Slavic type, a brilliant guitarist, sang beautifully, and was terribly attractive to women. An avid motorist and motorcyclist, he wrecked two cars. He was a very kind person,” recalled art historian Vadym Skurativsky.
Sniehirov’s path as a dissident began in 1966 when he filmed a documentary about a rally at Babyn Yar on the anniversary of the mass Nazi executions. The rally was attended by “unreliable” figures such as Ivan Dziuba, Viktor Nekrasov, and the Russian dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich. The film reel was confiscated the very next day, and Sniehirov was demoted and banned from filmmaking.
Following this incident, the KGB kept a close eye on him. Soon after, another trial began against his close friend, the dissident writer Viktor Nekrasov. Pressure was put on Sniehirov to publicly condemn Nekrasov, but he refused to betray his friend. Consequently, Sniehirov found himself on the KGB blacklist: he lost his job and the ability to publish. However, he did not give up; instead, he transformed this experience into a unique literary work.
“From the very first hours of this incident, Heliy Sniehirov took a literarily genius step: he began to very carefully, meticulously, and at the same time vividly record everything that was happening to him,” says Vadym Skurativsky. “That is how his Roman-donos (‘The Informer-Novel’) came to be. It is an extraordinary book about the impasse, the dead end into which society had driven itself—based on lies, terror, individual and collective humiliation of humans, and untruths about the past and possible future. […] In essence, it is a novel-protocol of our existence. For me, it is one of the most interesting and characteristic texts of the twentieth century. Western literature knew no such genre, and in our society, it was brand new.”
Having embarked on the path of resistance to the Soviet system, Sniehirov could no longer look back. In 1974, he wrote the novella Nenko myia, nenko… Naboi dlia rozstrilu (“My Mother, My Dearest Mother… Ammunition for the Execution”). The story was based on his mother, Nataliia Sobko, who had been targeted in a fabricated show trial against the Ukrainian intelligentsia—the so-called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine trial of 1930. The novella was published in the Russian-language Parisian magazine Continent and in various Ukrainian diaspora publications in the USA.
In 1977, Sniehirov took an unprecedented step. Gathering a press conference for foreign journalists in the Moscow apartment of former general and fellow dissident Petro Hryhorenko, he publicly read open letters to General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and US President Jimmy Carter, announcing his renunciation of Soviet citizenship.
“With this statement, I renounce my Soviet citizenship. I came to this decision during the days when you are conducting the so-called discussion on the draft of the new Constitution. […] Your constitution is a lie from start to finish. A lie that your state expresses the will and interests of the people, that all power belongs to the people. […] A lie and a shame is your electoral system, which the whole nation mocks; a lie and a shame is your coat of arms, the grain for which you import from the USA; a lie and a shame is your anthem, in which you replaced Stalin with Lenin,” Sniehirov wrote in his letter to the USSR government. Enclosing his Soviet passport in the envelope with the letter, he mailed it to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
On September 22, 1977, Sniehirov was arrested by personal order of KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and thrown into prison. He stubbornly refused to give a “full confession,” preferring to write his answers into the interrogation protocols with his own hand. Despite holding a second-group disability status, he went on a hunger strike. To break his spirit, investigators resorted to “sedative injections,” which caused his health to deteriorate rapidly. Sniehirov developed paralysis in his lower body and went almost completely blind. Driven to a nearly unconscious state, he was ultimately forced to sign a confession titled “I Am Ashamed and Condemn,” which was published in the newspaper Radianska Ukraina. Having squeezed the false repentance out of Sniehirov, the system “pardoned” him—suspending the criminal case and sending the dying man to spend his remaining days in a hospital under the strict supervision of KGB agents.
Heliy Sniehirov passed away on December 28, 1978. In defiance of his final wish—to be buried in his father’s grave at the Baikove Cemetery—the secret services cremated his body to prevent any medical examination from determining exactly how they had “cured” him of his aversion to the Soviet state.

Author: Olha Herasymenko