TRETYAKOV, MYKOLA MAKSYMOVYCH (born 1941 in the village of Mosiienkove, Mahdalynivskyi district, Dnipropetrovsk oblast).
An engineer and author of anonymous letters criticizing national policy.
His father, a front-line soldier, died in 1951. His mother worked as an agronomist in another oblast. Mykola Tretyak grew up with his sister, raised by his grandfather, who was fluent in German, French, and Italian. He also taught Mykola German and encouraged him to read historical literature, especially about Ukrainian antiquity. In 1959, he graduated from Hupalivka secondary school. For a year, he trained and worked as a lathe operator. In 1960, now under the surname Tretyakov, he entered the Dnipropetrovsk Agricultural Institute, and in 1965, he was accepted for postgraduate studies. Six months later, due to his marriage, he switched to correspondence studies. He did not write a dissertation, as he had to earn a living. He had publications in his professional field. The Committee for Inventions registered one of his agricultural aggregates as an invention.
Along with his wife, a medical institute graduate, he moved to the city of Ordzhonikidze, where he worked as a teacher at a technical school, a technologist at the Sholokhivskyi auto repair plant, and later as the chief engineer of the mobile mechanized column No. 3 of the “Dniprosspetssilhospmontazh” trust. When their son fell ill and a healer refused to treat an unbaptized child, they had him baptized, which drew criticism from the authorities. Before his arrest, he lived in the town of Krynychky, separate from his family.
Tretyakov consistently spoke Ukrainian, for which he was subjected to insults, being called a “khokhol” and a “nationalist.” He listened to foreign radio stations. He was troubled by the declining number of Ukrainian press publications, by hearing Ukrainian less and less in cities, and by its diminishing presence in kindergartens, schools, workplaces, and on the streets. Beginning in 1964, Tretyakov wrote letters to Party and Soviet bodies, and to the editors of newspapers and magazines in Moscow, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and other cities, criticizing the national policy of the CPSU. He signed these letters with surnames of various nationalities and mailed them from different cities.
In February 1974, Tretyakov was “exposed” by the KGB and convicted by the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court (Judge I.V. Kashcheyev) under Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. He was sentenced to 2.5 years in a general-regime labor camp for the “dissemination of knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system.” Forty-six letters were incriminated as slanderous. At trial, Tretyakov pleaded guilty to writing them.
Tretyakov’s subsequent fate is unknown.
Bibliography:
Nikolayenko, G., Pankratov, A. *Pysmo, napysannoe zhelchiu. Ystoryia moralnoho padenyia odnoho neudavshehosia dissertanta* [A Letter Written with Bile. The Story of the Moral Fall of One Failed Doctoral Candidate] // *Dneprovskaya pravda*, 1974. – April 2.
Udovenko, L. *Zatianuvshaiasia zlost? Zakonomernyi final klevetnyka* [A Lingering Malice? The Inevitable Finale of a Slanderer] // *Dnepr vecherniy*. – 1974. – April 2.
Ushatkin, L. *Krakh naklepnyka. Notatky z sudovoho protsessu nad M. Tretiakovym* [The Collapse of a Slanderer. Notes from the Trial of M. Tretyakov] // *Zorya*, 1974. – April 3.