Oles Nazarenko. The Vyshhorod Legends
I arrived at the construction of the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) in the spring of 1962. It wasn’t the earnings that attracted me to the great construction project. At the time, I imagined that on the banks of the gray-haired Dnipro, Ukraine was not yet Russified, that Ukrainian life must still be pulsating there, and perhaps—I cherished the thought—the spirit of the unconquered nation still lingered. Before the war in the Donbas, where I am from, our people were not yet ashamed to be Ukrainians; they kept their distance from the Muscovites. The oldest generation reminded themselves that they were of Cossack lineage, and among the children, no one wanted to be a *katsap*, a butcher-*tsap*.
Every year with the first snow, snowball wars would break out between the students of the Ukrainian and Russian schools, which sometimes escalated into battles with stones. Among our people, the name “katsap” was associated with dirty drunkards, with vulgar foul-mouths. After the war, the Ukrainian-speaking Donbas began to rapidly lose its spirit. The Ukrainian language was losing its prominence. The younger generation did not want to live a life without prospects and rushed to learn the “progressive language” so that no one could call them an “uncultured *khokhol*.”
The year 1950 was catastrophic for the Ukrainians of the Donbas. In the cities and workers' settlements, all schools, supposedly at the request of parents, were switched to Russian as the language of instruction. My father, with whom I often had political discussions, once expressed his thoughts on why our people had so drastically changed their convictions. It was because after the war, when the USSR defeated its strongest enemy—German fascism—people lost faith in their long-held hope that the Soviet government they hated would soon fall. My father’s lesson became my guide, for I saw with my own eyes how Ukrainians had changed. Before the war, they spat on the party holidays, but by the late fifties and early sixties, they had begun to celebrate what were once bandit holidays and even to love the government. My native Yasynuvata, where I grew up, became a foreign, suffocating city for me.
So I decided to leave in search of a better fate. I simply could not believe that all Ukrainians had vanished, that there were no decent people among them who cared about the fate of their dying nation. Love for Ukraine entered my soul in childhood, when my father would often tell me of the immortal glory of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. As a teenager, he had read the works of Andrian Kashchenko, a popular writer at the time. (I don't know why that book said Koshchenko, not Kashchenko.)
A whole sea of young people flocked to the Vyshhorod HPP. But in this human cauldron, for a full two years, I couldn't find any like-minded friends. Although the newcomers to the construction site spoke Ukrainian, they had no understanding of their people’s tragedy. Their thoughts and aspirations were directed only at good earnings. Nevertheless, I didn't want to lose hope and continued my search for friends.
From my first days at the HPP, after I arrived and got a job, I noticed a handwritten newspaper of a rather large size, written in Ukrainian. I had never seen such a wonder anywhere in the Donbas. From its readers, I learned that it was produced by the Chornovil couple. Although I very much wanted to meet these people I dreamed of, I couldn't overcome my own nature, as I was both shy and indecisive. The newspaper, however, did not last long. A rumor spread among the workers that a disguised Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist, who had been publishing a harmful newspaper, had been exposed in the Komsomol organization office at the HPP. I couldn't have imagined then that such rumors in Vyshhorod would have their own history and, like a snowball, would grow with new fabrications year after year, and that all of Ukraine would eventually talk about the Vyshhorod nationalists.
I met my first brother-in-arms, Vasyl Kondriukov, through a roommate with whom I rented a bed. He confessed to me that on their production site there was a worker who had created a “Committee of Just Communists,” which operated secretly. Vasyl also turned out to be from the Donbas; he spoke Russian but considered himself Ukrainian. He had never been concerned with the problems of the Ukrainian nation, but he came to understand them quickly, as he had seen with his own eyes how Russification had occurred in the Donetsk region. I managed to convince him then that there could be no good communists; they were all in the state service of Great Russian imperialism, performing gendarme functions—suppressing the spirit of the enslaved peoples. Thus we became friends, and he became my first like-minded companion.
We did not have to stew in our own juices for long. God himself did not let our intentions wither and sent us Volodia Komashkov, also a worker, who was close with Viacheslav Chornovil—they lived in the same barracks. Volodia began to bring us poems by Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Mykola Kholodny, Lina Kostenko, and prose memoirs by Petro Panch about his experiences. The author allowed friends to read these memoirs only in his presence. With great difficulty, we managed to take them from his house for just one night to finish the work. Although there was nothing criminal in them, the writer, terrified by the bloody Soviet system, trembled for his life until his very end. In one night, I had to photograph the entire thick, typewritten book on film.
Thus, books published abroad gradually began to fall into our hands. To expand production, I bought a “Moskva” typewriter. In Kyiv, on Vitriani Hory, Vasyl Kondriukov found a paid typist, Larysa Panfilova (Filatova – V.O.), who asked for twenty kopecks per typed page. But when she began to work, she liked our materials and refused to take payment, saying that she does not take money for the truth. She stored all the used filmstrips and some of the photographic prints. Kondriukov and I called this material our archive.
Perhaps few people know today what kind of literature passed through our hands. I will name only those I remember. They were Dmytro Dontsov’s *Nationalism*, Yuriy Klen’s *Ashes of Empires*, the poetry of Yevhen Malaniuk, Yuriy Lypa’s *The Ukrainian Race*, Pylyp Orlyk’s *The Derivation of the Rights of Ukraine*, Pronin’s *Ukrainian Politics and the Politics of Moscow*, a *Collection in Honor of Scholars Destroyed by Bolshevik Moscow*, Valentyn Moroz’s *A Report from the Beria Reserve*, Sviatoslav Karavansky’s *Ukrainian Education in a Chauvinist Noose* and his other petitions in defense of the Ukrainian language, Viacheslav Chornovil’s *Justice or a Relapse into Terror?*, *The Chornovil Papers* (literally, Woe from Wit, or Portraits of Twenty Criminals), and Ivan Dziuba’s *Internationalism or Russification?*. One day, Volodia Komashkov brought me the manuscript “On the Trial of Pohruzhalsky” and asked me to rewrite the article in block letters and photograph it on film for transmission abroad. I fulfilled this request but remarked that the text needed editing, as it would be unseemly to release a document containing words like “bandits” and “party swine” into the world in such a state.
The next time, Komashkov brought me the text edited by Slavko Chornovil. Volodia then said that the author of the document was Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, who had suffered for many years in the camps for no reason and had therefore written about the trial in such a harsh tone. I do not know for certain who the true author of the article that awakened the creative intelligentsia to resistance was. After the library was burned, the creative youth were utterly outraged by the savage vandalism of the Soviet system and were ready to go on the offensive against the vile party dictatorship.
At that time, I was attending the republican literary studio “Molod” (Youth) and could feel this surge of hatred among those present. Later, when I was imprisoned, the document about the library burning frightened me the most. The investigator, Major M. Koval, began to intimidate me with a foreign newspaper that had my photographs of this text with corrections in my own hand. The investigator said then: “You don't want to name the people who led you down the path of anti-Soviet activity; you feel sorry for them—but they didn’t feel sorry for you. They used you and threw you under a tank. Now you will be held responsible.” At that moment, I thought the investigation might charge me with espionage. I stood firm—that I had made the prints for myself, for my friends, and I did not know how one of them had ended up abroad. My testimony could easily have been refuted, because that film was not in our archive. But the investigation did not think to turn the case in that direction.
The poet Volodymyr Zabashtansky was not part of our Vyshhorod group, but he was not an outsider to our cause. I no longer remember who introduced me to him. He wrote beautiful poems, was published, studied at the university’s philology department, and led the literary studio “Sich.” Volodia had been maimed by an explosive since his youth, completely losing his sight and both his hands. Our guys from Vyshhorod often went to visit him in Podil to talk, to listen to his new poems. And I would bring him samvydav literature.
One day, Zabashtansky told us that he wanted to see the HPP. We were struck by such a desire. After visiting Vyshhorod, he was very pleased, as if he had seen the construction with his own eyes. It was through him that student youth sought to establish friendly contacts with the HPP workers. One day, Zabashtansky proposed that I arrange an agreement with the Komsomol organization to hold a literary evening and an amateur arts concert in Vyshhorod. The secretary of the Komsomol committee, Vasyl Pcholkin, gladly accepted the proposal and set a date for the students' arrival, but two days later he informed me that the party committee wanted to review the evening's program in advance. I brought Pcholkin such a document, but it did not satisfy the party authorities; they set new conditions: the dean of the faculty had to take written responsibility for the evening, certified by a university seal. The students were utterly outraged and refused to hold the literary evening. This gave rise to even more rumors about the legendary HPP. I first heard this expression from the young poet Nadiia Kyriian, who had been expelled from the university at that time for her nationalist convictions. She wrote beautiful poems, was published in the almanac *Vitryla* (Sails), and had her first small book published. She worked as a laborer in the Botanical Garden with Mariia Ovdiienko, and together they read the samvydav literature I brought for Mariia. A photocopy of “On the Trial of Pohruzhalsky” was confiscated from Kyriian.
At the trial, these girls behaved heroically as witnesses. Nadiika claimed that this incriminating document had fallen into their room from the sky, that she did not trust her memory and did not want to tell lies.
I don’t know for what reason, but Volodymyr Komashkov never once suggested introducing me to Slavko Chornovil. And I wasn’t particularly eager to enter his circle of friends, as I considered myself still intellectually unprepared and was afraid of embarrassing myself in front of educated people. It was only in 1967 that we saw each other up close, at an evening celebrating the birthday of Liudmyla Sheremetieva-Dashkevych, who was living in Vyshhorod at the time. Chornovil showed no desire to come over and introduce himself. In contrast to Slavko, Ivan Svitlychny acted differently. When Chornovil was first arrested, Svitlychny came to Vyshhorod and wished to meet me. Komashkov arranged for us to meet in the forest. I was nervous, expecting some kind of conversation that would be beyond me, but he didn't ask about the cause or my political convictions; he only wanted to know where I was from, who my parents were, what I did at the HPP, and in which department I was studying at the university.
Over the four years of my so-called anti-Soviet activity, a whole group of like-minded people formed in Vyshhorod. I met Oleksandr Drobakha, a Ukrainian language teacher, around 1964. He had heard from someone that a man who had a museum lived on Bronvakhta Street. Oleksandr came to meet me with his friend Vitaliy Rieznik. In my so-called museum under the bed were stored two pieces of mammoth tusk, a whole pile of mammoth bones, a rhinoceros horn, a bone hairpin for a woman’s hair of crude workmanship—probably also from the Stone Age—and a stone cross necklace. All these exhibits had been dredged up by a suction dredger during the construction of the HPP.
Besides Komashkov, Kondriukov, and Drobakha, the Vyshhorod circle included Valentyn Karpenko, who worked as a foreman at the construction site; Bohdan Dyriv and Vasyl Gedz, electricians on the dredgers; and workers Petro Yordan and Ivan Honchar from the village of Havrylivka. Mykola Ponomarenko and I were in the same university course, and Mariia Ovdiienko worked at the Botanical Garden. Vasyl Gedz, for example, took literature from me not only for himself but also for his brother, who worked in a mid-level party position in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Mykola Ponomarenko also worked in the Central Committee in a non-political capacity, as a courier for administrative matters. He introduced me to the guards and had the right to enter the CC building without a pass, and I also had access. Mykola boasted that he trusted some of the guards enough to let them read samvydav. Once he brought me a unique book, *The Ukrainians*, and told me how he managed to hide it in his bosom while burning Central Committee papers and books under the commandant’s supervision. I gave this book to Viacheslav Chornovil through Komashkov for his perusal. I do not know what became of it.
Oleksandr Drobakha was the most erudite among all of us. From him, we learned to understand true poetry and tried to write poems ourselves. He considered himself a poetic genius and was confident that he would become Ukraine’s first Nobel laureate.
He eagerly read all the samvydav literature I produced, but he showed no initiative in multiplying and distributing it himself. Oleksandr believed that my work was an inefficient affair that would not lead our people to a national revival; only great poetry of a world-class level could lead Ukraine out of Moscow's bondage. On this matter, we sometimes had disputes.
In Vyshhorod, Drobakha organized the literary studio “Crimson Sails.” But he did not get to work long in this noble field, teaching young people to learn the poetic craft. The HPP party committee, frightened by Ukrainian nationalism, forbade the young people from gathering for their poetry meetings, seeing nationalist meaning in the studio's name. Oleksandr Drobakha complained to the Writers' Union. The well-known poet Abram Katsnelson came to the HPP to investigate the incident, but even he could not convince the party members that there was no nationalism in the name “Crimson Sails” or in the beginners’ poems.
However, the lie had already been launched and went on its way, first through Kyiv, and then throughout all of Ukraine. An acquaintance of mine named Mykola—I don't recall his last name—told me that at their Institute of Communications, a lecture on Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism was given, in which the lecturer from the Komsomol Central Committee claimed that an underground organization called “Crimson Sails,” which was preparing an uprising, had been uncovered in Vyshhorod, and that it was led by a Ukrainian language teacher. The lecturer did not name Drobakha. A former classmate of Drobakha's brought similar news to Kyiv from the Slobozhanshchyna region; he also told of a similar lecture that was given at the Kharkiv House of Writers. Drobakha and I were utterly astonished.
The next legend about Vyshhorod created by the KGB special services was even more horrifying. A rumor spread through Kyiv that Ukrainian nationalists were preparing to blow up the Kyiv HPP to flood everyone living in Podil and Darnytsia. In our circle, we couldn't understand where the legs of this legend had grown from. It was only when I was imprisoned that I learned how the lie was created. The matter was this: one day, instead of scrap metal, boxes of live grenades with fuzes were delivered to the Kyiv test range where AN aircraft were tested for lift capacity.
Four loaders took the explosives home to stun fish in the Kyiv Sea. The careless fishermen were punished with imprisonment.
Besides the legends of, so to speak, a strategic scope, another legend began to form in Vyshhorod, but for some reason, it didn't go far. Maybe because it wasn’t very impressive to the Soviet man-in-the-street, it quickly lost its provocative steam. I learned about this legend from Tetiana Tankova, who worked as an engineer at the HPP, lived with us in the same dormitory, and sympathized with our Ukrainian group. She informed me that her friend socialized with KGB agents and had confessed to her in secret that a congress of nationalists had taken place in Vyshhorod, that their names were already known to the KGB, and that they would all be arrested after the October holidays.
I told Komashkov about this warning, but he just laughed, because there had been no congress. On Kozachyi Island, it was just an ordinary party with Chornovil’s friends, who had come from Kyiv and Lviv to see the newly created sea.
Although Volodymyr Komashkov played a significant role in the work of the Vyshhorod group, he avoided meeting with everyone else. He only constantly communicated with Drobakha on matters of the literary studio.
One day I approached Volodia with a proposal to collectively discuss a pressing question: wasn't it time to call the Vyshhorod group an organization? Kondriukov, Dyriv, and I gathered at his apartment and talked together for the first time. Kondriukov proposed making our group a disciplined, party-type organization. Volodia did not support such an idea; Dyriv was also against it. For a moment, I hesitated about what position to take, and suddenly I realized that in the event of our arrest, the investigation would not be able to charge us with treason, and this would be our salvation. We continued to act spontaneously, each on his own responsibility.
In early May 1968, when Chornovil was serving his first prison term, we learned that Komsomol members were being prepared at the Arsenal plant to disperse students at the Taras Shevchenko monument on May 22. On this occasion, I wrote an appeal to all citizens of Kyiv, urging people not to believe the chauvinistic fables about Ukrainian nationalists and to come to the monument to pay homage to the great Kobzar. I concluded my appeal with the words: “Shame on the Russifiers of Ukraine! Long live the Leninist nationalities policy!” Although I no longer believed in the justice of this policy, at that time there was no other form of protest. Ivan Dziuba, in his work *Internationalism or Russification?*, also defended the “purity of the Leninist nationalities policy.”
My work was the first and last attempt to test my abilities. In addition to this document, I also sent a letter to Ivan Dziuba, asking him to speak at the monument with a new programmatic word, so that the spirit sown among the people by his work would not lose its potential power. At that time, many hoped that Oles Honchar would raise the banner of national resistance, because the KGB would not dare to challenge his authority. But after his novel *The Cathedral*, he did not have the spirit to take up the fight.
As soon as Komashkov brought me the news that Dziuba had approved my appeal, I gave it to Mariia Ovdiienko, who printed over a hundred copies. Together with Mykola Ponomarenko, I mailed them to all higher educational institutions in Ukraine and the trade union organizations of Kyiv's factories. It seemed to me then that information could best reach the masses through the authorities in this way. And perhaps I was not entirely wrong, because during the investigation, I learned that half of our letters were not returned to the KGB.
Around 1966, I learned from Komashkov that Chornovil intended to create a printing press and was worried about how and where to get type, because, in his opinion, the time had come to produce printed materials. In the Donbas region, at my parents’ house, I had a hidden bottle of newspaper type. Once, back in the fifties, I also had the intention of publishing some kind of printed organ, but nothing came of it, because I didn't have enough characters to set even the smallest text, and some letters were missing entirely. I brought the bottle and gave it to Chornovil. Volodia joyfully told me that it had inspired Slavko’s group; they were all confident that now their cause would prosper.
After some time, Komashkov brought me a linotype slug of a leaflet authored by Viacheslav Chornovil. My task was to find a way to make printing ink and produce hundreds of copies. For over a week, I tried all sorts of options, but the prints came out very pale and were unreadable. Whether anyone else managed to print the text, I do not know. There was no talk of any typographically produced leaflets.
Recalling the events of years past, it can be said without exaggeration that Viacheslav Chornovil was the first to initiate the national-democratic dissident movement; he was the first to break through the imperial prison walls and tell people who was being punished there and for what. His work *The Chornovil Papers*, which the world began to talk about, awakened the conscience of the tormented prisoners in the camps, who had been silent for years, dragging their prison yokes and unable to make their voices heard outside. Chornovil’s book reached the prisons, awakened a spirit of defiance, and they suddenly realized that one could fight the repressive regime even behind barbed wire.
For a full five years, apart from their relatives, no one in Ukraine knew about the Lviv group of lawyers who were being punished in the Vladimir Prison and the Mordovian camps. It was only when Chornovil, full of zeal, paved the way there, over high fences and barbed wire carrying an electric current, that camp information began to penetrate from Mordovia. The first to pass his famous work, *A Report from the Beria Reserve*, to the outside world was Valentyn Moroz, which was eagerly read not only in Ukraine—it was also distributed among Russian dissidents in Leningrad. Following Moroz, Mykhailo Horyn, and Mykhailo Osadchy, Levko Lukianenko, Ivan Kandyba, and other Lviv prisoners of conscience told their stories.
Evaluating the past, I want to add that I was fortunate in life. I am glad that I was a participant in the Vyshhorod resistance, and that together with the tireless fighter for the freedom of the Ukrainian people, Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil, I took a feasible part in the public cause at the dawn of a new Ukrainian era.
I believe that history will yet give him an objective assessment, because he was not only the leader of Rukh, but the only mature politician in Ukraine. Or maybe it is truly the fate of our fighters that we are able to “conquer ourselves” for the benefit of our Moscow enemies? It is a shame that at the most crucial moment, when we all needed to strike while the iron was hot, we began to divide, devouring one another, and could not appreciate Slavko's bright mind. Symon Petliura was also eaten alive by his comrades, but they could not devour him whole. He, like Christ, rose above Ukraine and illuminated the right path to freedom. But only after his death were they able to evaluate him truthfully. Viacheslav Chornovil did not rush to create his own ambitious party, because he saw in the People's Movement of Ukraine (Rukh) a real force that could lead the Ukrainian idea to victory.
Unfortunately, there were many opponents of his in Rukh who did not want a civic organization to become a political party. Thus, the Ukrainian revolution lost its prospect of coming to power. The former communists, frightened by Rukh, came out of their so-called trenches, repainted themselves as Ukrainians, and began to strengthen their shaky pro-Moscow government. The most difficult times began for the Ukrainian state and the national revival of the people. The pro-Russian reaction in Ukraine began to slander Rukh’s leader, Viacheslav Chornovil, viciously, which indicated that he was a real danger to Russia. The Ukrainian revolutionary boat proved to be unsinkable, for it was charged by Chornovil’s Rukh. For ordinary people, the members of Rukh and Chornovil were one and the same; all other national-democratic parties posed no such threat to the enemy. The masses did not know them and did not want to know them. They were, in essence, zero-parties, like clubs for fans of good beer.
A great man is no more in Ukraine, who, starting with a handwritten newspaper in Vyshhorod, for 38 years, like the Kamenyar, tirelessly hewed the Ukrainian rock and burned out prematurely in the movement.
I recall with pleasure the words of Oleksandr Drobakha, who loved to rhetorically repeat in our circle: “First Vyshhorod, and then—Kyiv!” I think these were not simple, but prophetic words. Chornovil's Vyshhorod awakened not only Kyiv, but all of Ukraine.
Oles Nazarenko, Skadovsk, January 2000. (Author's final corrections made July 4, 2006)