AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE OF HRYHORIY MAKOVIYCHUK
I, Hryhoriy Trokhymovych Makoviychuk, was born on January 30, 1935, in the village of Ivcha, Lityn district, Vinnytsia region, into a peasant family. My father worked as a tractor driver on the collective farm, and my mother raised us three children (three brothers, including me). I was the eldest. I was born with poor health: the famine of 1933 took its toll. A healthy child cannot be born to parents worn out by hunger. My younger brothers, unlike me, were never sick, neither in childhood nor in adolescence.
To this day, the image of a beggar who came to us in the dead of winter to ask for bread is preserved in my memory. I was 5 or 6 years old. They called him “panich” (little master), because he was from a family that had been “dekulakized” by the Bolsheviks...
I remember how at the beginning of 1941, the Soviet army was retreating. In our village, soldiers sawed and chopped down many trees, including fruit trees. They covered their military equipment with the branches, hiding it from German aircraft.
When German soldiers came to our village, there was no such thing as Germans chasing our girls or women and raping them, as the Bolsheviks showed in their films about them. There was something else: they would entice them with some things or sweets.
I don't know if the Germans went from house to house for grain, or if they only came to us—based on the denunciations of neighbors or enemies. But one day, a Soviet prisoner of war came to us by cart for that grain. Who knows how much grain they needed to take from us. My mother carried it to another hiding place, and we, the two older brothers, passed it down from the ‘hirchyna’ (as we call the ceiling over the pantry, which is lower than a regular ceiling. Things could be stored on it, in this case grain). My mother poured the grain into sacks that were in a pit, previously dug for vegetables. We did not die of hunger then.
When, in the spring of 1944, other invaders, the Soviets, came to our village instead of the first ones, they also looked for grain from us. And when they found nothing in the granaries, they began to poke around the house with iron spikes, found and took everything to the last grain, including what was hidden in the ground for sowing.
I well remember how Soviet soldiers tried to rape our neighbor's daughters, which caused their mothers and neighbors to raise a great outcry in their defense. They ran with complaints to the female commander who was quartered with us. Her name was Marusia.
I went to school during the German occupation, but I had no shoes, so I missed a lot, not going for several months at a time.
My father, Trokhym Onykiyovych Makoviychuk, fought throughout the entire war of 1941–1945, right up to the end of hostilities against Japan. Returning from the war, he again worked as a tractor driver on the collective farm. In a pair with an assistant, for a full day—in shifts every other day. There was a lot of work to do at home in the village, and my father didn't have time to do it all, so my mother often scolded him. My mother herself—her maiden name was Maryna Yakivna Pshenychniuk—worked hard both at home and on the collective farm field.
Once, my father had an accident at work. He was so exhausted that he didn't notice how the foot of one of his legs got under the tractor wheel when his assistant was driving it. My father’s foot bones were crushed. He was taken to the district hospital. That same night, a tractor driver died in another village, Mykulyntsi. When my mother was informed by phone about the accident, she ran on foot (10 km) to the hospital. On the way, she met a woman who confirmed the fatal accident involving the tractor driver. Due to this stress, my mother developed a heart defect, and then liver disease. She lost her ability to work. My mother had a medical certificate exempting her from work for health reasons, but despite this, the collective farm management terrorized her, taking her to court for not meeting the minimum number of workdays. Although the courts acquitted her each time, it took a toll on her. Her health deteriorated so much that liver attacks occurred several times a night. Hearing my mother’s frantic groans in my sleep, I would jump up, massage her liver, then heat water on the stove for a hot water bottle, burning straw. This continued for about three years. Why did no one but me get up? After all, everyone heard my mother’s moans. My younger brothers probably thought that the eldest should do it. And my father never had a normal sleep because of his work, I realized that.
And so we lived until 1953. Mother was sick, I took care of her, what kind of schooling could there be... That year my mother died at the age of 37. At that time, I turned 18, my middle brother Volodymyr was 16, and the younger Yevhen was 14.
After our mother’s death, we, the two older ones, went to find work. Volodymyr went to the Mykolaiv region to relatives and entered a technical school there, and I went to Odesa, was an apprentice molder at an enterprise, then a molder. Then in Moscow, I was an apprentice painter, but not for long, because I was drafted into the army from there in 1955, even though I was not registered in Moscow. I served until December 1958 at the Vaganove, Vsevolozhska, and Vaskilove stations in the Leningrad region.
After the army, I found myself in a senseless situation. When I was being discharged, I asked the administration in Vaskilove to prepare the documents for my home address, to Ukraine, to my homeland, and to issue a corresponding travel ticket. But they told me that according to Soviet law on military service, they were sending me back to where I was drafted from, that is, to the Sokolniki district of Moscow. None of my petitions helped. I had to go to Moscow, from where I was drafted. But who needed me there? They never gave me registration, because I hadn't been registered in Moscow even before my service. Then they took my passport to the police station for registration, but without registering me, they put me on the military register and immediately sent a draft notice, which they had no right to do. After all, an unregistered person supposedly does not exist for the state. Now at the military commissariat, they said that the commissar had already been dismissed, and they could not help me. When I went to the construction management office where I had worked, they told me they had no information about me, nor my workbook. If I had intended to stay in Moscow, I would have fought for it, but I saw that I wouldn't get anywhere with them without going to court. And who knows how much time that would take. So, I used my army pennies to travel to my native Ivcha.
I did not want to work on the collective farm for “tallies” (workdays) and in the spring of 1958 I went to Donbas, where I worked until the next spring of 1960 in mine No. 20-20 bis in the Shakhtarsk district of the Donetsk region. From there I moved to Kremenchuk with a friend, who registered me in his own house. At that time, it was harder for peasants or Ukrainians from other regions to get registered in Ukraine than for a Russian. Russians who came from Russia were given benefits that were not spoken of publicly. But some of them revealed this secret: they were equated with the category of citizens who had suffered from natural disasters. In addition, citizens who arrived from Russia did not have to wait so long in line for housing. They were obligatorily provided with temporary housing (a family dormitory), unlike our citizens. Russians were placed on housing lists as “young specialists.”
In Kremenchuk, I got a job at the Road Machinery Plant named after Stalin, as it was then called. This plant mainly produced military products. It worked extremely erratically, so the salary was correspondingly very low, somewhere around 500-600 rubles of that time (from 1961, after the currency reform—50-60). When I tried to move to another job, in the public service sector, the pay there was even lower, 25-30 rubles a month and 20 rubles “on the side,” that is, “kalym” for work beyond the norm.
I quit my job, leave Kremenchuk, and go to my homeland. When they say that there was no unemployment in those days, it's not true. There was. Admittedly, not for everyone. I wanted to get a job at the Vinnytsia electric lamp factory, but no such luck! They said they weren't hiring local residents because they had already ordered young specialists from Russia, from Syzran... They would take a six-month course and come here to work. Well, I'll be! And wasn't that the Russification of Ukraine?
I temporarily got a low-paying job as an electrician at "Zagotzerno," and that was through a connection. I worked for a few months, simultaneously looking for another job. But since I had a rural registration (at my uncle's in the village of Yakushentsi, 8 km from Vinnytsia), they wouldn't hire me. In addition, I had difficulties with housing, because even for a fee, it was impossible to find housing, even without registration. In small towns, it was hopeless to even think of finding any work, because there was total unemployment. Even on the Left-Bank Ukraine, where industry was more developed, there was unemployment in small towns.
I had to go to Donbas again, to Shakhtarsk, where I got a job as a water pipeline station operator at mine No. 30-31. After working for a few months in the mine, I went back to Kremenchuk and in May 1963 got a job at the Automobile Plant (KrAZ). I was about to get married, so I wanted to join a housing cooperative at the auto plant, because I was earning good money then. But they said: “We’ve filled up, and we’re not accepting any more.” I had to resign from this plant in 1964 and go to the oil refinery (NPZ) to get housing as quickly as possible. They gave me an apartment from the oil refinery after about a year and six months. But those who came from Russia received one after two or three months, out of turn. They bypassed us; we received housing in the last turn. I married Valentyna Hnativna Riznyk, from the village of Bondari in the Kremenchuk district; she also worked at the auto plant.
I developed an allergy to petroleum products. It so happened that I injured my hand, and diesel fuel got into the wound. My hand swelled up. I ended up in the hospital. They treated me and treated me, and finally discharged me. Two days later, I drank a hundred grams of vodka, and within a few seconds, both my hands swelled up, and there was swelling on my legs and chest. I was taken to the Kremenchuk dispensary again. I could not stand the smell of petroleum products. And what kind of doctors were they? They thought I just didn't want to work.
On August 31, 1966, I resigned from the NPZ and on September 9, I went to work at the road machinery plant where I had worked before, but in a different workshop. At that time, the Kremenchuk people's court ruled to evict my family from the apartment received from the NPZ. We were supposed to be evicted by June 9, 1967. Therefore, on this day, I resign from the road machinery plant and on June 15, I move to the thermal power plant of the NPZ.
Due to my illness (allergy to petroleum products), I was forced to resign from the NPZ in September 1968 and move back to KrAZ. There I worked in two workshops. In one workshop, the work was dangerous with my illness, and in the other, I ended up in a collective where a godfather, a brother, an in-law, and other relatives and friends had gathered, where it's not sweet for an "outsider" to work.
In June 1969, I moved to the wheel plant with the same profession of a tool and die maker, as at KrAZ.
In April 1971, I returned to KrAZ, where I worked in mechanical workshop No. 1 until my very arrest on January 31, 1973, under Article 62, Part I of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
They arrested me right at my workplace, in mechanical workshop No. 1 of the auto plant. The workshop chief, Arkadiy Oleksandrovych Skorokhod, called me. “For a few minutes,” as he said. But it turned out to be for three years... Leaving all the expensive instruments and tools on my workbench—inside micrometers, indicators—I went up to the office on the second floor. (By the way, all my instruments and tools were stolen then. They were expensive, and I couldn't pay for them during my imprisonment...) In the office sat KGB men in civilian clothes. About four of them. Among them was Major Lysenko, the then head of the Kremenchuk KGB department, and Captain Shkurba, the investigator. They sat in different places around the perimeter of the large office. They suggested I change into clean clothes and took me home to conduct a search. On the way, I reminded them that I had left my tools at my workplace, but the KGB men assured me that the tools would not disappear.
During the search, they found audiotape recordings of Radio Liberty broadcasts. Mostly, they were programs about repressions and the mockery of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Excerpts from Vyacheslav Chornovil's book “The Chornovil Papers,” Ivan Dziuba's work “Internationalism or Russification?”, and Yevhen Sverstiuk's “Cathedral in Scaffolding.” I was fond of radio engineering, had a receiver, and modified it to receive short waves up to 13 m, and I listened to the world, to “Liberty.” For some time, I even worked as a radio technician. I constantly, since about 1968, listened and told people about what I heard. And they spoke the truth, the bitter truth about Ukrainian history and modernity. I let Vasyl Tkachuk listen to a recording. And then it turned out that he was a KGB agent. It dawned on me when he said, "God forbid!" And when he got married, he invited me over. And at the wedding, he spoke Russian. And he started singing a Russian song. And he himself was from Lviv. I came to hate these Mankurts. After I was released from prison, I met him on the street—and turned away.
They also found drafts of some leaflets that I had pasted on fences in Kremenchuk in November 1972. This was just once. There were seven leaflets in total; I wrote them by hand.
During the search, they also found drafts of complaints to higher authorities about the disorder and abuse of power at the oil refinery, as well as drafts of letters to higher authorities of the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR, where I demanded a pension for my maternal aunt, Motria Yakivna Vusatiuk, who had four children and had worked on a collective farm for 24 years, but did not receive a pension because she had moved from a collective farm to a state farm. At that time, peasants who moved from one village to another where there was a state farm system were deprived of their pensions. (What further proof of serfdom is needed?). I mention this for a reason: the investigator warned me during an interrogation that for these complaints alone, I deserved to be brought to criminal responsibility. I had spoken with some people at work, mentioning the famine and repressions. "How do you know that?" I said, "I know, my aunt told me." And my aunt was like an encyclopedia... If I had then the mind I have now... Unfortunately, she has passed away. She was an encyclopedia. Tetyana Yakivna Holovashchenko, my maternal aunt. How much she told...
I was under investigation in the Poltava prison until May 18, 1973. The investigation was conducted by Captain Shkurba, and sometimes by Major Redkin. I had “conversations”: Major Lysenko spoke approvingly of my collection of Ukrainian, Spanish, and Italian songs. In contrast, Major Redkin once remarked that for such a collection, in Stalin's time, he would have put me against a wall and shot me. He didn't say why, but I guessed: among the collected songs, there were no Russian ones...
The trial was closed. "Special public" sat in the hall: party organizers, Komsomol organizers, ideological orthodox activists. Character references written by the heads of the enterprises where I had worked were read out. Of course, they were all equally negative, written "under dictation." They even read out a character reference written by the school director in the Vinnytsia region where I had studied. It was painful to hear. To say that this character reference was biased is an understatement—it was an outright, brazen lie. And it was written by the hand of my teacher, Nadiya Dmytrivna Haidei... Only one character reference was not read, the one given to me by the head of the BIG (bureau of instrumental economy), Vasyl Vasylovych Kopychko. Because he gave me the character reference I deserved. When I returned three years later, Vasyl Kopychko himself told me how they terrorized him, summoned him several times to the KGB, and forced him to write a negative character reference for me. He was such a cultured man, with a higher education, and he simply said: "This, guys, will not happen. I will write the character reference he deserves; that is my right." So they didn't even read it at the trial, just briefly said that there was also a good character reference.
The testimonies of my wife Valentyna and my mother-in-law Khrystyna Kononivna were falsified. They allegedly testified that I forbade them to watch and listen to television programs in Russian. The question is, were there many Ukrainian-language programs then? So at the trial, my wife didn't know how to respond to this lie. That is, the witnesses found themselves between a rock and a hard place. I told very few people that I listened to the radio. My wife knew but paid no attention to it. The aforementioned works were broadcast in excerpts, so I recorded them in excerpts. They were broadcast on short waves, around 13-16 meters. These waves are difficult to jam because of their propagation nature. Even if the jammer was 500 or 600 kilometers away, the short waves could not be jammed.
My wife also read the leaflets I wrote. She simply had no idea that you could be imprisoned for this. And I didn't think I could be imprisoned for listening to radio broadcasts and talking about it. I thought they only imprisoned intellectuals, and for something more serious, for calls for a coup or something. But it turns out that they, like me, were imprisoned just for talking. I was that naive.
The court sentenced me to three years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps. They said it was a “mild punishment” because I was from a working-class background. “You are lucky that you are a worker,” they said, “otherwise they would have given you the ‘full treatment’...”
During the investigation, there was another prisoner in my cell, Akishev. He had robbed a church several times. They gave him 2 years for that...
They took me on a transport. From Poltava to Kharkiv, and there in a “Stolypin” wagon to Mordovia...
I served my sentence in Mordovia in camp ZhKh-385/19, in the settlement of Lesnoy, Tengushevsky district. There was a woodworking enterprise there; they made wooden cases for various clocks. There, compared to Ukraine, the production quotas were different: one could produce 160-200 percent. There was a higher salary for over-fulfillment. Although the state took half of our earnings, I had to work to help my family at least a little. But they never paid bonuses to Ukrainians. We asked why, and they said we violated discipline.
The camp administration paid the most attention to Ukrainian prisoners of conscience. They sicced provocateurs on us who tried to "sniff out" what you were thinking. There was a man named Mykola Siryk, a criminal. He had been in a criminal camp but had a falling out with someone and could have been killed there. So he drew a portrait of Hitler, wrote some primitive leaflets—and now he was an "anti-Soviet," now he was in the political zone. Here he performed his mission, informing on us. Once, as a test, I told him that I intended to blow up the Kremlin. He believed it and reported it. The KGB man Stetsenko summoned me and said: "You have serious intentions."
Without exaggeration, it must be said: it was the Ukrainians who were most humiliated, punished, and persecuted in the zone. They incited and forced prisoner-policemen to serve the administration as informers and provocateurs for a meager reward, or even to make false reports against prisoners of conscience.
In the morning, the prisoners, without even being allowed to go to the toilet, were driven to physical exercises or a “walk” to the tune of the “March of the Slav Woman.” After work, they were required to go to “political classes,” where they preached their communist dogmas. In short, the small zone was the “large zone” in miniature. But there I met bright personalities, true Ukrainian patriots: Zoryan Popadiuk, Mykola Slobodyan, Kuzma Matviyuk, Lubomyr Starosolsky, Vasyl Dolishniy. I probably served about two years of my sentence with Vasyl Ovsiyenko; Ihor Kraintsiv was also there. Former UPA fighters made a special impression on me: Ivan Myron, Mykhailo Zhurakivsky, Mykola Konchakivsky, Roman Semenyuk, Dmytro Synyak. They had been imprisoned for 25-28 years. These were people of the highest moral qualities, firm, unshakeable personalities.
Until 1973-74, political prisoners who had served their sentences were simply released home (from the small zone to the large one). But from 1975, they began to be transported under special convoy to the place where they were tried. This was so that on the way, in Moscow, they would not go to see Academician Sakharov and give information about the situation in the camps. So they brought me in a “Stolypin” wagon to the Poltava prison. I was already there on January 18, 1976, and I was released on January 31.
When I was returning from Mordovia, they took me again through the Kharkiv transit prison. I then asked a female guard if it was possible to let my brother, who lived in Kharkiv at the time, know that I was there. I didn't even think about meeting my brother. In response, I heard a harsh: “You can't have a brother, you are an enemy! And don't even try, or we'll add more time to your sentence!” They were instructed that political prisoners were fascists. But they treated criminals with indulgence.
Before my release in Poltava, they also planted an informer with me. A man from Kremenchuk, I forgot his last name, a Russian. He starts telling me: "You won't recognize Kremenchuk now, it has changed so much over these years." He praises Kremenchuk so much. And then he starts praising himself: "And why get involved in politics? You should be like me. I have a wife, we put our children in a boarding school. We live happily ever after." I say: "I wasn't involved in politics, I just wanted the Ukrainian language to be spoken, not a foreign one." Well, he reported what I said.
At home, my three-year-old daughter barely recognized me, because she had only seen me in photographs and heard about me from her mother and grandmother. My grandmother didn't live to see my return—she died a month before. My wife Valentyna suffered enough: more than once, she was reproached with having an enemy husband. I was arrested on January 31, and not even a month had passed when my wife gave birth to our daughter Oksana. That is, on January 6, 1973. She had a difficult birth. At the Railway Hospital, they even mistreated her. She couldn't give birth, and the midwives said: "Ah, you like to have sex, now die as you wish." Then the gynecologist, Volodymyr Borysovych Lytvynenko, delivered the baby, using a vacuum extractor to pull the child out. Otherwise, she might not have given birth and could have died herself. Not to mention a doctor like Yeremeyeva, who even refused to admit and examine the sick wife of an “enemy of the people.” So much for the Hippocratic Oath...
It’s impossible to describe the hardships of the family in those years: two small children, my wife was unemployed for a year. For a whole year, they lived on my mother-in-law’s pension of 12 rubles. Fortunately, my mother-in-law had some small savings. They collected beer or seltzer bottles that someone left behind and sold them for kopeks. And my wife was also told to pay the court costs. They said, either pay, or divorce him, then he will have to pay. She paid. She lived for another nine years. They received only 12 rubles of my mother-in-law’s pension until my wife went to work. When they were doing the search, my mother-in-law lay down. She never used to lie down like that, but she did—which meant she was already feeling unwell. She died right before my release; she was paralyzed.
My son had just started first grade when I was arrested. He went to School Number 10. He was bullied at school, too. His homeroom teacher said, “He can’t fight back.” But how could he fight back? They would have beaten him down. That same KGB agent, Stetsenko, had told me back in Mordovia, “You know, everything depends on us. Maybe your son will continue his studies, or maybe we’ll make it so he doesn’t.” My son was drafted into the army after his first year at Kharkiv University. As for my son later falling in with a cult, I believe it was their doing; they set that cult up for him. He would come to visit and turned my daughter against both of us—me and my son-in-law. My son is a biophysicist by training. I told him he had to stay in Ukraine. He was assigned to Belgorod. That is also Ukrainian territory, but it’s under Russian control. So he requested to be allowed to stay in Kharkiv, at a research institute. But when perestroika began, that research institute started to fall apart. His salary was so pitiful that he couldn’t afford to pay rent and moved into his laboratory. He said he couldn’t even find a wife because his salary was so low. He had to go into business for himself.
And Oksanka was little; she had to be transferred to a different daycare facility. I remember when that “childcare center” was switched to Russian-language instruction. I arrived—it was a nightmare! Ukrainian-language books were strewn all over the floor. I asked, “What is going on here?” “We’re switching to the Russian language.” That’s how the new methodologist was running things, mocking the Ukrainian language. My daughter was forbidden to speak Ukrainian. So I really let them have it: “I don’t know what I’ll do to you if my child complains to me again.” That’s how they carried out Russification. And now they whine about Ukrainization… But back then, they simply forbade children to speak Ukrainian.
After my release from the concentration camp, I had trouble finding a job because company administrations didn't want the extra hassle of employees who were inclined to stand up for their own interests as well as the interests of the entire workforce, and especially to criticize the state’s bureaucratic apparatus. I was forced to go back to my old place of work. Knowing my skills, Hashevsky, the head of the tool department at Mechanical Shop No. 1, sent an envoy to my home to help me return to a job I could perform professionally and with high quality. At the same time, he warned me that the auto plant’s Party leadership must not find out about his efforts, as Hashevsky himself could lose his position over it. He was forced to do this because not every metalworker could handle such complex work; it depended not only on skill but also on a person’s psychology, their patience, and technological precision.
On KGB orders, I was under constant surveillance. I had one year of administrative supervision: I had to be at home from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., I could not leave Kremenchuk without permission, and I had to check in with the militsiya weekly. I was also summoned by the KGB. My KGB “guardians” were Borys Ivanovych Khrystenko, Ivan Mykhailovych Lisny, Mykola Vasylovych Moskalenko, and Valentyn Ilkovych Starosolsky. The worst were Khrystenko and Moskalenko. It was under their “guardianship” that there were the most informers. Khrystenko was a hangman; you could see it on his face that he was a hangman. He behaved formally with me, but he let me know he could do whatever he wanted to me. In the nineties, he worked at the city executive committee, and he always glared at me like a demon. Moskalenko promised me a second term. He would show me some slip of paper and say, “So you say you don’t talk to anyone. Then what’s this? Someone wrote this.” I couldn’t recognize the handwriting. He’d say, “If you end up back there again, you won’t be coming back.” He told me I would never be reformed. But as for Starosolsky, God must have punished him. He had allergies and bronchial asthma; he would gasp for breath. But this Starosolsky was the most straightforward in his dealings with me. He never threatened me.
I also recall how, some time after my release from the concentration camp, a man named Volodymyr Zhovnir appeared. The very one who had served time in camp ZhKh-385/19 for his affiliation with the “SS-Galicia” division. To avoid suspicion, he didn’t come directly to my home but instead lingered near my apartment on the Dnipro embankment, which is where I met him. He began making excuses for his behavior in the camp—and it had been hostile toward the prisoners of conscience. There was no doubt then that he was an informer. He became a regular “guest” in my home. He would often try to draw me into provocative conversations and actions. And he was so very “concerned” for the patriots of Ukraine who were suffering in the concentration camps. I didn't want to push him away, because I knew they would certainly send another informer, perhaps one who was even worse.
When Ukraine became an independent state, Zhovnir thrashed about like a madman, darting one way and then another, not realizing that his behavior and emotions were giving him away. Only when there was no one left for him to inform on me to did he leave me alone. I don’t know what became of him, as I never visited his home. At first, he lived in a small-family dormitory, and later he was given a one-room apartment. He lived with his wife, a Muscovite. He often told me how she disdained Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, and most importantly, how she was terrified of Ukrainians.
The KGB agents “saw to it” that I was at my job, working, on all the communist holidays. This was an unofficial ban on my participating in public events, though I had no desire to be there anyway. On communist holidays, all employees who were present in the parade column at the rally received a certain bonus, and I did too, but I had to earn it by working on the day of the holiday.
There was a tradition at the auto plant to give some kind of bonus to an employee on their anniversary. For example, workers in the repair services would get 50 rubles for their 50th birthday. In 1985, I turned 50, but I was not given any bonus. In 1995, I turned 60. My pension papers were processed, and seven months later, I was laid off due to staff reductions.
After being laid off, in August 1996 I started a job as a security guard at a vehicle garage belonging to the trade organization AT “Prodtovary.” I was later transferred to be a guard at a store owned by the same organization, where I worked until January 16, 2003.
Despite all that, life goes on. My son Vitaliy lives and works in Kharkiv. My daughter Oksana got married and lives with her mother-in-law. Could their fates have turned out differently? More comfortably, more warmly. Almost certainly. I remember arguing with little Oksana’s kindergarten teachers, telling them not to reprimand her when she spoke Ukrainian. Even today, you rarely hear Ukrainian in kindergartens, although it is now the state language. Ukrainization in kindergartens, as well as in other state institutions in our cities, has gone into reverse, toward an even more vicious Russification—not just in Kremenchuk, but all over Ukraine, with the possible exception of Galicia. This can be explained by the government’s weakness. And how many human lives and destinies had to be destroyed for the Ukrainian language to become the state language! How many Ukrainian patriots had to be put behind bars so that Ukraine could finally exist. Though it is still far from patriotic, far from being a state governed by the rule of law, it is a state nonetheless—one without Russia’s Solovki and Mordovia.
Prepared on May 17, 2006, by Vasyl Ovsiyenko (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group) based on the manuscript of Hryhoriy Makoviychuk; a publication by Tamara Prosyanyk in the Kremenchuk newspaper “Informatsiynyi Byuleten” (Information Bulletin), No. 3 (357), January 21, 2000; an interview conducted by Nastia Prosyanyk in 1999; with corrections and additions by H. Makoviychuk made to the text on June 7, 2006.
