A Leninist-Communist. He printed and distributed leaflets.
From the family of a mathematics teacher, Ivan Tymofiiovych Bulbynsky (1895–1954), who lived in a border village on the Polish side. The land in the village was infertile and clayey, so the peasants were potters. His mother Hanna, the daughter of Deacon Vsevolod Trokhymovych, died of typhus in November 1943. On July 1, 1944, his father and he moved to the town of Ostroh. For a year, Borys lived with his grandfather Vsevolod in the village of Rivky, Slavuta Raion (now Khmelnytskyi Oblast), and attended the 5th grade at Hannopil school, receiving mostly homeschooling from his teacher father. In 1945, he returned to his father in Ostroh. For 5 years, they lived on the estate of the Russian intellectuals, the Danenkoviches, who had a good library. Free conversations were held in the house. Borys studied at school No. 1. He was greatly influenced by the Russian literature teacher, Tatyana Oleksandrivna Papashyka from Leningrad. From the age of 15, Borys began to study the works of Lenin. At 16, he realized that Stalin's communist party was the antithesis of Lenin's, that it was not communist. He thought about a new program for the communist party. In 1949, he had the text of a leaflet in his head but found no way to print it.
As a ninth-grader in 1949, he refused to join the Stalinist Komsomol, although he was the best student in the school. The Komsomol meeting demanded his expulsion from the school. His teacher father was fired from his job. A search was conducted at home, and Borys's manuscripts were confiscated. In April 1950, he was allowed to continue his studies. That year he finished school, brilliantly passed the exams for the Rivne Teachers' Institute, but was not accepted due to his unreliability: “We don't need your A's. We need loyalty.” He engaged in domestic chores and political self-education, studied the works of Marx and Engels, was a tutor in several families, and earned a living by digging people's gardens and chopping wood.
In 1951, Bulbynsky was accepted into the Kremenets Pedagogical Institute, to the philological faculty. His father was reinstated at work. He studied with excellent grades, was a candidate for a Stalin scholarship, but did not receive it. In 1952, he finally joined the Komsomol and was an activist, but did not cease his illegal ideological struggle for the purity of communism.
On January 1, 1953, Bulbynsky was held for half a day at the MGB department, where they tried to persuade him into secret collaboration: to inform on his teachers. The result was expulsion from the institute. In 1954, he managed to get reinstated.
After graduating from the institute in 1956, he worked in remote Polissian villages in what is now Zarichne Raion. In the village of Bile, he taught his favorite subjects—history and Russian literature—in a seven-year school. But he was transferred to a secondary school in Borove to teach Ukrainian language and literature.
In 1956, Bulbynsky carved a cliché on rubber and printed 20 leaflets protesting against the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. He planted them on correspondence students and applicants in Kremenets, Zdolbuniv, Rivne, and Korets. When Soviet troops suppressed the Hungarian Uprising on November 1, 1956, he printed three dozen more leaflets and distributed them in Borove and Bile by planting them and showing them to people personally. At the end of December, teacher Mykola Hrytsan, in whose notebook Bulbynsky had placed a leaflet, said: “This is your work—don't deny it.” In early January, he took the leaflet to the Rivne KGB department. On March 28, 1957, Bulbynsky was detained. For several days, KGB and party officials held ideological conversations with him, letting him go to a hotel for the night. One cynically stated: “Yes, everything you have is according to Marx, but if Marx were to write such things now, we wouldn't spare his beard.” On May 5, 1957, he was arrested and charged with conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 54, Part 10 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR). Bulbynsky told investigator Pleshakov that he would not give testimony. The investigation used no pressure or threats.
On May 9, 1957, Bulbynsky was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment with disenfranchisement and subsequent exile from Ukraine. The exile was removed on appeal. On August 29, he was sent by transport to Dubravlag. On September 17, he arrived in the settlement of Sosnovka, Zubovo-Polyansky Raion, Mordovian ASSR, in camp No. 7/1, which held several hundred prisoners, mostly elderly and disabled. He was later in camps No. 11 and 3/5 (Barashevo). In the camps, he met many like-minded Marxists, participated in heated discussions, and defended the theory of Marxism-Leninism and its practice from 1917–1927.
He agreed with fellow prisoners A. N. Yakovlev and V. A. Arbuzov to create an underground communist organization after their release, as well as to cooperate with Serhiy BABYCH.
During the “Khrushchev Thaw,” in 1960, his term was reduced to 5 years. He spent one year on a non-convoy regime in a stone quarry in Sasovo, Ryazan Oblast, where conditions were light and the food was good. On October 14, 1961, he was returned to Mordovia, to the Ozerne settlement, to the 17th camp unit. Here, the prisoners dug turnips and prepared firewood.
From January 1, 1962, a harsh, hungry regime was introduced in the camps. But on March 5, Bulbynsky was released. He settled in the town of Zdolbuniv, Rivne Oblast.
Bulbynsky believed that Khrushchev was continuing Stalin's course: the proletariat lived in starvation, and repressions against dissidents continued, albeit on a smaller scale. In August 1962, he made two rubber clichés and printed about 1,000 leaflets calling for a proletarian revolution against state capitalism, but destroyed them in September.
In September 1962, A. N. Yakovlev visited him in Zdolbuniv from the city of Monchegorsk, Murmansk Oblast. They discussed creating an organization called the “All-Union Democratic Front. Revolutionary Social-Democratic Party.” Bulbynsky outlined the content of the leaflet he had conceived and the organization's minimum and maximum programs. They agreed that Bulbynsky would be the leader of the VDF-RSDP section in Ukraine. In April 1963, without Yakovlev's consent, Bulbynsky made a rubber cliché and printed 4,000 leaflets with the following content:
“All-Union Democratic Front.
Revolutionary Social-Democratic Party.
Comrades! The reaction is advancing: Khrushchev is reviving Stalinism. But his plans are doomed. The people are rising up to fight. We demand:
1. A 100-ruble minimum wage.
2. A 30-hour work week.
3. Bureaucracy and the military—to a minimum.
4. Democratic freedoms.
5. Legalization of the VDF-RSDP.
6. Amnesty for political prisoners.
The state system of our country is a dictatorship of a bureaucratic clique, based on the exploitation of the working people. Our goal is to replace it with a system of socialist democracy. The struggle has begun. The strike movement is growing. Soldiers are refusing to shoot at the people. Everyone to the ranks of the revolution! We will win! Down with Khrushchev's reactionary clique! Long live socialist democracy! Long live the 4th Russian revolution!”
Bulbynsky involved former fellow prisoner Serhiy BABYCH in the distribution of the leaflet, who scattered about a thousand of them in Zhytomyr; the worker Taras Tarasiuk—in Lysychansk; and his cousin, Maria TROFYMOVYCH, a student at the Rivne Pedagogical Institute, who was supposed to distribute them in Odesa but did not, only reading the leaflet to two friends and recounting its contents to two others. Bulbynsky himself scattered the leaflets in the village of Popasna, Luhansk Oblast, and in the city of Mykytivka, Donetsk Oblast. They were also sent by mail, so the leaflet gained significant circulation. Bulbynsky associates it with the state's increase of the minimum wage from 30 to 60 rubles in the summer of 1964 and even with the removal of N. Khrushchev from power.
On September 19, 1963, Bulbynsky went to Rivne with six hundred leaflets, scattered some in courtyards and mailboxes, but was detained. He was charged with conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (Article 62, Part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR) and creating an anti-Soviet organization (Article 64). From December 10, 1963, to January 2, 1964, he was under psychiatric evaluation, which found him sane and culpable.
On February 19, 1964, the Rivne Oblast Court, taking into account that Bulbynsky “sincerely admitted his guilt, repented of his actions, and thereby contributed to the disclosure of the crime” (i.e., he revealed his accomplices, whom he did not consider like-minded people or members of the VDF-RSDP), sentenced him to 10 years of imprisonment in a strict-regime, not special-regime, corrective labor colony. S. BABYCH did not confess to distributing the leaflets, did not plead guilty, but in his final statement asked that the verdict record that he was finally convinced of the truth of the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism, for which he received 10 years of special regime and was declared a particularly dangerous recidivist. M. TROFYMOVYCH and T. Tarasiuk were sentenced to 5 years. All were also accused of oral anti-Soviet propaganda. Yakovlev and Arbuzov appeared as witnesses in the case.
On June 17, 1964, Bulbynsky arrived by transport at the 11th camp unit of Dubravlag (Mordovia, Sosnovka settlement), where he met many acquaintances. On March 18, 1968, while working in the drying shop, he decided to create the Manifesto of the Communist Marxist-Leninist Party (KMLP). He worked on it for over two years. On September 12, 1970, he read it to himself aloud. It begins with the statement that there is no socialism in the USSR, no Soviet power, but state capitalism. According to Bulbynsky, he recounted the Manifesto to at least ten prisoners, half of whom memorized it. Bulbynsky considers the Manifesto the main work of his life. It is not known whether it exists in written form.
At the end of June 1969, Bulbynsky was transferred to camp ZhKh-385/19, in the settlement of Lesnoy, Tengushevsky Raion. He also worked in the drying shop. On October 27, 1970, he was transferred to the 17th camp unit, in the settlement of Ozerne, Zubovo-Polyansky Raion. He sewed mittens and worked on a concrete mixer. In July 1971, he was transferred to ZhKh-385/3, in the settlement of Barashevo. He worked on a 4-ton cold metal press. On July 9–11, 1972, he was transferred with a large transport to camp VS-389/36, in the village of Kuchino, Chusovskoy Raion, Perm Oblast. He was released on September 20, 1973.
Around October 20, 1973, Bulbynsky returned to the city of Ostroh. In January 1974, he was placed under administrative supervision for six months. He had to report to the militsiya for registration twice a month. He was forbidden to leave his house from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. and to travel outside the district.
He could not find a job anywhere. He was only hired at a brickyard, where he bricked up hot kilns. He worked without days off for two years, then was transferred to be a stoker. He was on a waiting list for an apartment and was about to receive it, but it went to someone else. In 1984, he bought a hovel with a thatched roof for 400 rubles, where he lived for 12 years. He barely managed to get a damp basement room in an old house, where he lives in poverty to this day.
In 1987, he participated in the work of the Historical Book Club, and in 1989-90 and 1997-98, in the scientific society “Spadshchyna” (Heritage). He gathered large audiences with his speeches on the “white spots of history.” From 1989 until his retirement in 1993, he worked at the local museum. He was rehabilitated in 1992. He was never married.
Bulbynsky remains on revolutionary Marxist-Leninist positions. He fights against modern pseudo-communists like Symonenko, who, in Bulbynsky's opinion, destroyed the achievements of October, the Leninists, and discredited the idea of communism.
In 1997, he wrote an autobiographical book, “Proletarskoe delo” [“The Proletarian Cause”], which he managed to publish only 10 years later with a print run of 50 copies.
Bibliography:
1.
Memoirs of B. I. Bulbynsky “Proletarskoe delo”: marksist.blox.ua/.../MEMUARY-B-I-BULBINSKOGO-PROLETARS... Dec 6, 2011
Memoirs of B. I. Bulbynsky. “Proletarskoe Delo” [“The Proletarian Cause”] http://sozrev.org.ua/archives/4850
2.
Indictment in criminal case No. 13
Verdict of the Rivne Oblast Court of February 19, 1964.
58-10. Nadzornye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoy agitatsii i propagande. Mart 1953 – 1991. Annotirovannyi katalog [Supervisory Proceedings of the USSR Prosecutor's Office in Cases of Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda. March 1953 – 1991. Annotated Catalog]. Ed. by V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko; comp. by O. V. Edelman, M.: International Foundation “Democracy,” 1999. – 944 pp. (Russia. XX Century. Documents)”: – p. 309.
Autobiography of M. Trofymovych from February 18, 2002.
Information about M. Trofymovych: https://museum.khpg.org/1338890689
Interview with S. Babych: https://museum.khpg.org/1228746466
Olha Zharchynska. A convinced Leninist-Communist served 15 years in a Soviet prison… Visnyk+k, 07.11.2011 http://visnyk.lutsk.ua/2011/11/07/perekonanyj-komunist-leninets-vidsydiv-15-rokiv-u-sovjetskij-tyurmi/
Gulag instead of a ministerial chair. http://rotchina-party.ru/?p=190 DTP today
The Left Opposition in the USSR – how was it? http://www.oocities.org/marxparty/lpp/lp7/leftoppozition.html
On the history of class struggle in the USSR (on the memoirs of B. I. Bulbynsky: B. I. Bulbynsky. Proletarskoe delo. Ostroh, 2007). Category: HISTORY — admin @ 3:26 pm Oct 23 2010
Bulbunsky