An insurgent who served a 25-year sentence. A participant in the struggle for the Status of a Political Prisoner.
His father, Mykola Oleksandrovych Pokrovsky (1894–December 19, 1943), was from a Russified priest’s family from the Oryol region, a graduate of a theological seminary who also studied at the University of Tartu. In 1915, he completed a six-month officers' training course. After the end of World War I, he found himself in Volyn. He was ordained a priest and appointed to the parish of the St. John the Theologian Church in the village of Shtun, on the Buh River. He was a stateless person. He married a teacher, Maria Pavlivna Kuzhil (1904–1960s), who was also from a priest’s family from the village of Zlazne, Kostopil Raion, Rivne Oblast. They had four children—the eldest, Ivan, and three daughters: Natalka, Oleksandra, and Anna. From 1927, Father Mykola began to conduct services in Ukrainian. He had knowledge of medicine and was an active member of the Prosvita society, respected by his parishioners.
Ivan studied for four years in his home village and two years in an Ukrainian school in Liuboml. In 1935, he entered a Polish gymnasium in Kovel (because it was cheaper). He did not finish his studies because the war began in 1939. The Germans occupied the territory on the left bank of the Buh River but soon ceded it to the red “liberators.” Repressions began.
Ivan worked on the family farm. In June 1941, when the Soviet-German war broke out, fierce battles raged in the area for three days. The peasants hid in the swamps. Self-defense units (Ukrainian militia) were organized in the villages. Ivan, however, did not join, but on the Feast of the Intercession in 1942, he swore an oath on the Decalogue of a Ukrainian Nationalist and became a member of the OUN. In early 1943, he organized clandestine military training in the forest near his village, hidden from the Germans, and when the UNR officer leading it was killed, he had to teach his fellow villagers military skills himself. They had to disarm a group of Germans who tried to prevent the training. Pokrovsky then worked as a propaganda and military affairs officer, creating OUN cells in villages and organizing self-defense. He was repeatedly required to stand in for the district OUN leader.
Effectively, there was no German authority in Volyn: the peasants had dismantled the estates, taking livestock and produce. Pokrovsky took part in numerous skirmishes and battles with the Germans and with the red partisans, who looted and burned villages and killed peasants. He managed to persuade a unit of the SS “Galicia” and a unit of Lithuanians mobilized by the Germans to defect to the UPA. The leadership sent Pokrovsky to the Shvatsk district, then to the Zabolottya district, and later recalled him to the Liuboml region, where the OUN network had been crushed, and Pokrovsky had to rebuild and lead it.
In the spring of 1943, Poles began to attack Ukrainian villages, looting and burning them, and killing Ukrainians. Pokrovsky participated in retaliatory actions.
In 1943, Pokrovsky did not make it to his home village of Shtun for his father's name day (St. Nicholas, December 19), and on December 22, Poles tortured his father, his sister Natalka, and many fellow villagers to death, and simulated the execution of his mother and two sisters. The surviving villagers, on Catholic Christmas, buried the priest with honors near the church and erected a memorial that remains to this day.
His mother and sisters moved to the neighboring village of Vyzhhiv, while Pokrovsky continued his activities in the underground. Before the arrival of the Red Army, he received an order to lead his unit across the front line, but without success. The command came to disperse. At the end of April 1944, Pokrovsky came to his village, where his mother and sisters had already returned. They lived in the watchman's lodge near the church (the Germans had burned their house). Pokrovsky hid in the attic.
On May 1, 1944, the Red Army broke through the front, but the Germans managed to close the breach. The Red Army soldiers, probably new recruits, scattered. The Germans organized a massive roundup for them, seizing all men with short haircuts. They pulled Pokrovsky from the attic, as he also had short hair, forced him into a barracks in Liuboml, and the next day sent him by train to Germany. “This is where I say that I sometimes lacked resolve. It was possible to escape from that camp,” says Pokrovsky.
In a distribution camp in Krakow, a prisoner named Tikhon Sheremeta asked Pokrovsky to switch names, because Sheremeta was being sent to Germany alone while all his fellow villagers were being sent to Czechoslovakia. For nine months, Pokrovsky worked under this name as an *Ostarbeiter* in the town of Ahrensburg near Hamburg at a factory that produced torpedoes. The food consisted of rutabaga, a small piece of margarine, and 300 grams of bread.
As the front approached, the prisoners were moved to the city of Kiel, where they were liberated by the British. The food improved, and they no longer had to work. They lived in the same, but now unlocked, barracks. Some *Ostarbeiter* began to loot bombed-out German houses, warehouses with food and wine, and civilians. Then, one morning, the British loaded all the *Ostarbeiter* into Studebaker trucks and took them to the Soviet occupation zone. Thus Pokrovsky ended up in a filtration camp. Here he reclaimed his name and, after interrogations, was mobilized into the Soviet Army.
The recruits, without even being uniformed, were taken to harvest crops in Pomerania, which had been cleared of Germans and given to Poland. Later, Pokrovsky herded cattle. In the spring of 1946, after being uniformed, he and others were sent with carts to drive the cattle and horses to the USSR. In Bialystok, they were demobilized and put on a train to be distributed to their home districts. Not wanting to return to his region, Pokrovsky asked the train commandant to let him off in Brest. He secretly traveled to Liuboml, where he learned that his mother and sisters Oleksandra and Anna had been deported to Northern Russia on Epiphany, January 19, 1945.
Pokrovsky saw an announcement that railroad workers were needed in the city of Baranavichy (Belarus). He got a job there as a cashier. On December 7, 1949—Pokrovsky was just about to go on vacation—there was a knock on the ticket office door. He opened it to the voice of a familiar cashier— “Hands up!” During the investigation, Pokrovsky confirmed the actions he was accused of. The investigator said: “Confess, because if we take you to Volyn, they will do much worse to you.” In early 1950, the OSO “troika” sentenced him under Article 58-1 (equivalent to Article 54-1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR, “treason”) to death, commuted to 25 years. He was held in Grodno until spring.
After a long journey, he was taken to Karlag in southern Kazakhstan. He worked in construction. He was later transferred to Mezhdurechensk in the Altai, where he built a settlement for prisoners, which was converted into dormitories after Stalin’s death. In 1954, he was taken to Omsk to build a power plant and an oil refinery. He was acquainted with Cardinal Yosyf SLIPYJ and the son of General Tarnovsky, who managed the plant’s electrical network. Here Pokrovsky trained as an electrician.
The Supreme Soviet commission did not reduce Pokrovsky’s term as a combatant, also taking into account his participation in a strike demanding payment for work. He later served time in Taishet, working at a sawmill. He trained as an electrician. In 1959, he was transferred to Mordovia, to a camp in the village of Yavas. He worked as an electrician at a furniture factory.
Meanwhile, Pokrovsky’s mother and sisters were in exile in the village of Motma near Kotlas, Arkhangelsk Oblast. The camp commandant forced his lame mother, whose leg had been injured during interrogations, to work in logging. Convinced she could not work, he sent her 13-year-old daughter, Oleksandra, in her place. The younger daughter, Anna, helped in a kindergarten and was fed there in return. They were released in 1961 but remained in Motma. His mother then traveled to Yavas for a visit with her son. The visit was granted in the evening, and in the morning after reveille, Pokrovsky was led out into the camp zone. The chief demanded: “Write a letter of repentance.” “I don't know how to write.” “Well, then go, you get no visit.” His mother walked crying between the work zone and the camp, while her son sat on the roof of a barrack, also crying… Soon after, his mother died in Motma. His younger sister, Anna, also died there during childbirth.
When a new generation of political prisoners—the Sixtiers—began arriving in the camps, Pokrovsky organized help for them: he collected sugar and food, brought them up to date on affairs, and organized celebrations of religious holidays and national commemorative dates. He associated with Sviatoslav KARAVANSKY, Mykhailo and Bohdan HORYN, Panas ZALYVAKHA, Oles NAZARENKO, the Jewish “hijackers,” Yakov Suslensky, and others. As a specialist of the highest, VI category, Pokrovsky taught electrician courses. Someone informed on him that political issues were also being discussed there. The courses were disbanded.
In 1972, Pokrovsky was sent with a large transport of prisoners to the Urals and served the rest of his term in the strict-regime camp No. 36 in Kuchino, Perm Oblast. The regime here was much stricter than in Mordovia, but his time there was brightened by his interaction with a new generation of political prisoners of various nationalities (in particular, he taught L. LUKYANENKO to be an electrician). According to Y. SVERSTIUK, Pokrovsky “had a reputation as a good professional electrician. He had a reputation as a very consistent, principled prisoner, of which there are few among the old ones. There were many decent ones, but few remained active to the end after 25 years of imprisonment.”
Pokrovsky also took part in organizing various gatherings. At one celebration, he read a prayer and offered greetings. The guards took him to the watchtower and interrogated him about the paper from which he was reading. He said he recited from memory. They stripped him naked and searched him. The reason was that the prisoners had written an appeal to the UN. Pokrovsky had copied it into his electrician’s notebook, concealing it. The ruse was discovered during a search. At work, a list of friends and close ones was confiscated from him under the heading “Subscription to the newspaper *Literaturna Ukraina*.” Pokrovsky snatched the list, ran, and tore it into small pieces on the go. The guards collected the pieces and glued them onto a sheet of paper.
Pokrovsky participated in a month-long strike, provoked by the beating of political prisoner S. SAPELIAK by guards on June 22, 1974. On June 26, Pokrovsky was thrown into a PKT (prison-type cell) until the end of his term. This was despite the fact that he had an open form of tuberculosis. Many political prisoners of different nationalities then issued statements in his defense. In the PKT, Pokrovsky went on a week-long hunger strike, demanding the Status of a Political Prisoner, and was held in a punishment cell.
He was released directly from the PKT on December 5, 1974. He was not allowed to return to the border region of Volyn, nor to go to Kharkiv at the invitation of A. ZDOROVY. He was permitted to go to the Chernihiv Oblast, to L. LUKYANENKO’s parents. However, he first visited his sister Oleksandra in Motma. An attempt was made to stage a provocation against him on the train.
In Chernihiv, officials refused to register his residence, advising him to sign up for work in Dnipropetrovsk or Zaporizhzhia. They sent him for a medical examination, which diagnosed Pokrovsky with tuberculosis and sent him to the regional tuberculosis hospital in the town of Horodnia.
For six months, a KGB officer named Polunin visited Pokrovsky every month, inquiring about his health and views, and the head nurse kept an eye on him. Pokrovsky was hired to work at the hospital as an electrician with a salary of 68 rubles. He met Yefrosynia Markivna Sereda, who worked in the kitchen. She registered him as a resident at her place, formalizing their marriage. As his health worsened, Pokrovsky moved to a job at the sanitary station in 1980. He retired in 1985.
Pokrovsky corresponded with former political prisoners. Oleksa TYKHY, whom he had not previously known, came to visit him. With his wife, Pokrovsky traveled to Kyiv to visit Oksana MESHKO. Based on his accounts, she compiled a report on the situation of political prisoners, which was later used to create a list of Ukrainian political prisoners appended to Memorandum No. 1 of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. This text was seized during the search and arrest of M. RUDENKO. Pokrovsky was summoned for interrogation but said he had never seen RUDENKO and had told him nothing.
When L. LUKYANENKO was arrested for the second time (December 12, 1977) and there was a threat of him being committed to a psychiatric hospital, Pokrovsky and his wife issued a protest. He was interrogated in this case, and on this occasion, the head of the Chernihiv KGB, Herasymenko, visited him. Pokrovsky was summoned to the trial, which took place in Horodnia.
After the arrest of M. HORYN (November 3, 1981), Pokrovsky’s home was searched, and his letters were confiscated, along with a postcard from P. ZALYVAKHA and several photos of political prisoners.
Pokrovsky was surrounded by informers. A teacher once stole the keys to his house. When a stack of flax burned down at the flax factory, Pokrovsky was accused of arson. His wife and her daughter Olena were interrogated, and a forensic examination was conducted (a boot print was taken). Fortunately, the real culprit confessed.
When L. LUKYANENKO was released into exile (December 1987), Pokrovsky, along with Lukyanenko's wife, Nadia Nykanorivna, visited him in the Tomsk Oblast.
With the onset of perestroika, he collaborated with the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. He was a delegate to its Constituent Congress (April 29–30, 1990). At the Second Congress of the URP (Ukrainian Republican Party) (June 1–2, 1991), he was elected a member of its Ethics Commission.
He has not been rehabilitated. By order of the President on May 22, 2002, he was granted a lifetime state-named scholarship.
He lives in the town of Horodnia, Chernihiv Oblast.
Bibliography:
1.
Pokrovsky, Ivan. “Sviashchenyk – patriot Ukrainy” [A Priest – A Patriot of Ukraine]. *Nashe Zhyttia* newspaper (Liuboml), December 19, 1998.
2.
*A Chronicle of Current Events*, no. 33, 1974.
*A Chronicle of Current Events*, no. 35, 1974.
KhPG Archive: Interview from July 25, 2002, in Horodnia, Chernihiv Oblast.
Olkhovsky, Ivan. “Teren-dolia Pokrovskykh” [The Thorn-Fate of the Pokrovskys]. *Ukrainska Hazeta*, no. 4 (99), February 1, 2007.
Compiled by Vasyl Ovsienko on December 22, 2008. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
Corrections made by his wife Yefrosynia Sereda and her daughter Olena on January 11, 2009.
Photos:
Pokrovskyj2 –2098, k.34A, 25. 07. 2002. Horodnia in Chernihiv region. Ivan Pokrovsky. Photo by V. Ovsienko.
PokrovskyjIvan – old photograph.
POKROVSKYJ IVAN MYKOLAJOVYCH
POKROVSKYJ IVAN MYKOLAJOVYCH