YULIY SHELEST

Ihor HYRYCH,

PhD in History

A “NON-CLASSICAL” SIXTIER: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MEMOIRS OF YULIY SHELEST

The Ukrainian revival of the post-Stalin era, which we also call the Sixtiers movement, seems like a weighty history from the perspective of nearly fifty years. Only now is it beginning to become a subject of scholarly research in the fields of historical science and literary studies. There are already solid monographs on this issue by H. Kasyanov and A. Rusnachenko, as well as separate studies on the movement's landmark figures—V. Stus, I. Svitlychny. There is the archive of the Smoloskyp International Charitable Foundation, in which O. Zinkevych has compiled a considerable information base on the Sixtiers movement—and this is just a drop in the ocean. There is a grassroots-run Museum of the Sixtiers, headed by M. Plakhotnyuk, which collects information on this topic. V. Ovsiyenko also accumulates materials on the Sixtiers, and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, under the leadership of Zakharov, even plans to publish a dissident handbook. But in reality, the vast scope of this problem is only beginning to be explored; the source base of the issue remains very poorly researched.

The era of the 1960s generation passing is upon us, and it is a matter of urgency to collect information about every figure in the national liberation movement, including their handwritten autobiographies and memoirs. Once, in the 1920s, the head of the Historical Section of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, after founding the Commission for the Study of Modern Ukrainian History, commissioned memoirs from everyone who still remembered the Hromada movement of the second half of the 19th century. Today, these materials, printed in the journal *Ukraina* and the almanac *Za sto lit* (*Over a Hundred Years*), are the primary source for studying the socio-political life of that time.

In the post-revolutionary USSR, the Society of Exiles and Political Prisoners, together with Istpart, managed to publish the multi-volume encyclopedia *Revolutionary Figures of Russia* before the Stalinist repressions. It was based on materials from the gendarmerie and security departments, as well as questionnaires filled out by the revolutionaries who survived into the early 1920s.

A centralized collection of materials about former political prisoners of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era has not yet been undertaken. Meanwhile, such autobiographical visions of past experiences are an exceptionally important material, irreplaceable by other sources. *Geneza* does not claim primacy or originality in this matter, but by printing the autobiographical memoirs of Yuliy Volodymyrovych Shelest below, it hopes that other veterans of the Sixtiers movement will also come forward with their recollections.

Yuliy Shelest has written an autobiography in which the emphasis is on the preconditions for the formation of a Ukrainian dissident's personality. Unfortunately, it does not deal with his direct dissident activities. Perhaps the author will write about that later.

I met Y. Shelest in the winter of 1992, quite by chance. The writer and archaeologist Yu. Oliynyk, when I suggested he work as a literary editor for *Starozhytnosti* (*Antiquities*), declined and instead proposed the candidacy of a man “who knows everything” and was simply made for the job of editor. I knew nothing about Yuliy Volodymyrovych’s past (the man in question was Shelest). I called him at home and arranged a meeting. We met on what was then October Revolution Square. He had just bought a book by O. Zabuzhko, *Deryhent ostannioyi svichky* (*The Conductor of the Last Candle*), for fifty Soviet kopecks at the “Poeziia” (“Poetry”) store (where the Raiffeisenbank is now located). At the time, I didn't yet know that he didn't quite appreciate postmodern Ukrainian literature and read Zabuzhko more for counter-propaganda purposes. From the phone call, I knew I was to recognize the candidate for the editorship by his “Russian” hat and beard. When I saw a slender and lean, stately man who seemed to fit the description, I realized that the “Russian” hat was, in fact, an ordinary Soviet-era hat, the so-called *ushanka*. I had never really thought about its national affiliation.

Shelest immediately made a pleasant impression: a certain old-world charm in his manners, a polish in his demeanor, a neat speech peppered with neologisms of his own making and half-forgotten native Ukrainian vocabulary. It was hard to believe—before me stood a man, a former graduate student, who through no fault of his own had not worked in his humanities field for over twenty years. He exuded significant life experience, a wonderful sense of humor, and great erudition. Shelest was somehow very different from the classic image of a Ukrainian dissident. By the early 90s, Shelest's former “accomplices” had already managed to build decent careers: they went into politics, became deputies of councils at various levels. Yuliy Volodymyrovych, on the other hand, found himself on the sidelines, without acquiring what is called personal well-being. He was a manual laborer before, and he remained one with the advent of the longed-for independence.

However, this did not particularly bother him. Among dissidents, he also seemed to be a dissident. He was a stranger to empty pathos and cheap moralizing. His behavior and manner of speaking were very different from the traditional fiery speeches of dissidents, which too closely resembled the addresses of loyal Leninists with their calls for a sacred struggle for the ideals of communism. I often asked myself: “What most distinguishes him from our other dissidents who have now made careers?” He is honest with himself (but not in the Vynnychenko sense of the expression), he does not live by a script, he does not adapt—he is a living person.

In his visions of the past, Shelest is a realist. He doesn't believe that a small handful of dissidents destroyed the system. Rather, the system used the dissidents as a smokescreen and mimicked them under new historical circumstances. The call to leave the opposition trenches was issued by the authorities themselves to identify a new layer of their enemies and, at an opportune moment, settle scores with them. Evidently, this vision of a young but tuberculosis-weakened Shelest had matured immediately after he served his time in the mid-1970s. It was then, in the Akademmistechko area, that V. Stus approached him and suggested he join the Helsinki Union (Group. – V.O.). All the while, several plainclothes agents were already circling, painting the final Golgotha for the poet. Shelest cited his health and declined. The events of the late 80s and early 90s only confirmed Shelest's suspicions.

Gone was the reckless youthful zeal of 1966 when Shelest published the article “Gargle with Bubbles” in a Komsomol youth magazine, an article still remembered by the old-timers of intellectual life. The article was directed against T. Levchuk's “creation” about the Kyiv underground (Shelest was writing his dissertation on Ukrainian cinema). This was the beginning of his hardships. He was immediately purged from graduate school. I recall a photograph from the first American edition of Stus's *Palimpsests*. At Alla Horska’s funeral, Shelest is holding a portrait. In 1972, he was caught in the great “harvest,” when up to fifty “nationalists” were arrested in one night.

In the 80s, he became a wiser man. He withdrew from active politics but did not abandon politics in the cultural field. He translated from English, including Thoreau for L. Lukyanenko's Republican Party. He has a brilliant command of language, and one can learn a lot from him. I felt the charm of Shelest’s personality during our collaboration at *Starozhytnosti*.

I remember his first article in the journal, about our necropolises—cemeteries. Philosophical reflections on whether it is necessary to preserve these monuments of the colonial past, especially in cities. A paradoxical thought, one not easily agreed with at first, but one whose validity is hard to deny. From the very beginning, Shelest became a true fan of the newspaper, filling it with small notes and reviews of publications, spicing up the materials with witty headlines and publicistic inserts. In less than four years, more than fifty of his popular science articles appeared. His article on the Cossack *oseledets* (topknot) was particularly popular. But *Starozhytnosti* quietly died, and Shelest felt uncomfortable in other newspapers, never staying there for long.

Shelest has another passion. For thirty years now, he has been compiling a card index of Ukrainian surnames, having collected 300,000 of them. Will it ever be published? However, perhaps the greatest cultural significance lies in Shelest’s diary of grandiose proportions, which he has kept since the 60s. The entries from the first ten years, however, remained in the KGB archives and have apparently perished. But the entries of the last twenty years are a kind of Ukrainian “Forsyte Saga.” Readers could get a glimpse of the diary's literary merits from his excerpts about the Orange Revolution, published in the magazine *Moloda Natsiia* (*Young Nation*, first issue of 2005).

Not a day goes by that Shelest does not read all the Ukrainian newspapers. He keeps his finger on the pulse of life. In this thirst for knowledge, even a person half his age cannot compare. Every year he attends the Lviv Book Forum, which he calls his personal “Calvary.” I can still picture him now, hunched over open books and newspapers, with his constant cigarette and cup of coffee.

The published autobiography is more of a journalistic essay with elements of belles-lettres. Therefore, we have forgone a scholarly commentary and limited ourselves to a purely formal introduction. In this text, Y. Shelest focuses only on his youth, his family's genealogy, and his student years at the university. There is nothing about his adult life. Shelest was interested only in the problem of his national self-awareness, the sources of his national self-determination and his anti-imperial dissent. Far from all villagers took the path of confronting the system, and a city dweller in Ukrainian cities, if they disagreed with communist ideology, preferred to join the cosmopolitan Russian dissident movement. Shelest’s father was among the village activists, so it would seem his son should have followed the same path. But the telluric force of the Ukrainian village suppressed all foreign and non-native influences, leading him onto the only possible path of service to the national idea. It is no coincidence that Shelest's grandfathers were active insurgents during the Ukrainian-Bolshevik wars of 1917–1920.

At the end of the Second World War, Y. Shelest was about ten years old. The Sovietization of Western Ukraine began, with a brutal struggle against the forces of the Ukrainian underground resistance and partisan movement. From the start, the child’s sympathies were on the side of the OUN-UPA, not the “valiant” KGB-NKVD. Stories circulated through the village about the unsubdued Banderites who were deported to Siberia in Stolypin wagons but managed to escape. And the boy’s imagination painted pictures of the Haidamachchyna and Koliivshchyna. In their image, he saw the figure of the people’s avenger for Ukrainian truth, and not even his father's party card was an obstacle. However, Volodymyr Shelest was a communist in an autochthonous Ukrainian environment, so he thought not in terms of party directives, but as his national conscience dictated.

The universities of life made a Ukrainian out of Shelest from a very young age. Even during the fascist occupation, at the age of five or six, he felt shame at the words of a relative about the “German-ness” of a person who wore the trident. The communist school, the university, and graduate school failed to make Shelest truly Soviet. But the Bolshevik authorities “cleansed” him when he was already a fully grown man. He was over thirty. That is, as long as a person remained on the margins of the social hierarchy of the time, he was left alone, but as soon as he laid claim to a place among the Soviet intelligentsia, he immediately received a rebuff from the relevant bodies that cared for the ideological purity of the ranks.

We hope that the second part of his autobiography, covering the late 50s to the 80s of the 20th century, will soon be written and see the light of day.

Yuliy SHELEST

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ETUDE*

(*The text is presented preserving the author's style.)

In the memoirs of one of the “Sixtiers,” Yuliy Volodymyrovych Shelest, the author recounts his family history, his childhood during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and his university years. It traces the origins of his national self-awareness and, consequently, his oppositional, anti-imperial worldview, as well as the sources of his inner resistance and rejection of the totalitarian regime.

The first printed mention of my humble self, a sinner, dates back to September 1953. The *Literaturna Gazeta* (I believe that was still its name then) published a group photo (by Yaitsky? Khoruzhenko?) of the newly admitted first-year students of the journalism faculty, with an extended caption by Markiyan Vynokurov.

In general, bibliographic references have accompanied almost all stages of my life, starting from my very birth on May 25, 1937. Around that time, the first elections under the new Stalin constitution were being held, and my father’s surname often appeared on the pages of the district newspaper, *Kolhospnyk Rokytian-shchyny* (*The Rokytne Region Collective Farmer*). In late May (or was it already 1938? For my birthplace is the village of Lubianka in the same district, where my father arrived as school director in the hungry year of ’33, and he returned to Nastashka with my one-and-a-half-year-old sister Inna and me, a few months old), a letter to Comrade J. V. Stalin was being printed, reporting the unanimous vote for him in Nastashka, signed by the chairman of the village election commission, Volodymyr Denysovych Shelest.

Not in the open press, but in the KGB archives, one can find records of the arrest in that same year of 1937 of Denys Izmailovych Shelest along with his two brothers in the village of Hrebinky, not far from Nastashka... By that time, Yosyp Hermaize's *Outline of the Revolutionary Movement* had already been published, where under the year 1905, Fylyp Izmailovych Kutsenko-Shelest is mentioned, an exile in the Arkhangelsk province for distributing Socialist-Revolutionary press in those very same Hrebinky. Strangely enough, I also know something about this event from family stories. My father's aunt, whom I called Baba Dasia, who lived next door with her husband Anton Sadovskyi, an engineer at the local sugar factory, and their married son and daughter, once nonchalantly recalled Easter of 1905, when her basket was filled with stacks of leaflets under the Easter eggs and pysanky, and she was sent to the church to have them blessed. After the service, she went to the village scribe, where the leaflets were removed, and the pysanky and eggs were put back in their place. Such was their conspiracy, or perhaps an attempt to sanctify a revolutionary act in church, which God did not tolerate, for wasn't it the scribe who “ratted out” the Kutsenko-Shelest brothers? I'd have to delve into the archives (Y. Hermaize provides the archive file numbers!) to clarify the details. I hold a grudge against Hermaize for not mentioning my own grandfather Denys, even though they both appear in nice large photographs from their Arkhangelsk exile, along with a third exile (the fourth was likely taking the picture). Those two are dressed like gentlemen, with ties and white shirtfronts, while my grandfather sits humbly near a haystack with the Pomor haymakers in the same type of cap with a lacquered visor as all of them. But one can understand Hermaize: Fylyp was from Kyiv, close to the leadership of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, married to a revolutionary Jewish woman, Mariia Rudenko, while my grandfather was just a cobbler in his home village, where family tradition drew Fylyp for gatherings on major holidays.

Interestingly, Baba Marushka (Maria Grigoryevna) was spared by the repressions, as she was by the German occupation, which she criminally welcomed with a yellow star armband. However, duped by her neighbors, she soon hid it and began passing herself off as a Frenchwoman, which she could, as she knew the language. A certificate of her baptism before her marriage to Fylyp was found, which saved her life. Unfortunately, she did not command much authority in my family circles, and to this day I reproach myself for the childish superiority with which I brushed off her attempts to break through with her memories. “You know, Lyovushka Nikulin, his mother used to…” Pfft, who would listen to that! And she and Fylyp had known the Vynnychenkos, their daughter, my aunt Lyuba, studied at a Kyiv gymnasium, and her younger brother Volodymyr Fylypovych was a first-grader at the first Ukrainian gymnasium in Kyiv, and I saw the graduation photo with the teachers in the middle…

But let's return to my own biography. No, one more historically documented branch. So, Grandfather Denys, having returned from Arkhangelsk province, did not repent, just like Fylyp. In the center of Hrebinky, they rented a shoemaker’s workshop from the Jews. There, the sotnyk (captain) of the Free Cossacks, Fylyp, received daily reports from his khorunzhyi (lieutenants) and pidkhorunzhyi (second lieutenants), and my father, the same one who “corresponded” with Stalin, as a boy (he was born in 1904) heard and remembered their address: “Pane sotnyku! I humbly report that...” In the rehabilitation documents, I managed to read, literally over the shoulder of a KGB officer, a denunciation from some Rosenberg, that the Shelest brothers, Fylyp and Dyzyo, had stormed Bila Tserkva with Gonchar's “gang” in 1919 or 1921, and Dyzyo personally collected the contribution imposed on the Jewish population of the city. This is not in the rehabilitation documents handed to me.

Meanwhile, I don't know in which year, Grandfather Denys became a widower; my grandmother Fenya Chornohorenko from the village of Nekhvoroshchevo, Obukhiv district, died. Grandfather found her in Kyiv while learning the shoemaking trade as an apprentice. And Grandfather Fylyp was learning to be a hatter. And another grandfather, Mytka, nicknamed “Satan,” was also learning to be a shoemaker and picked up a novice from the Pokrovsky Monastery, Anyuta, whom he also brought to the village, where they had a son, Dmytro, and a daughter, Tetiana, who became Arstymovych by marriage. She now lives with her daughters in Transnistria. Dmytro Dmytrovych Shelest graduated from the pedagogical institute before the war along with Mykhailo Rubashov, wrote poetry, submitted a book to a publisher, and was killed or went missing in the war. I still remember the Russian-speaking-to-her-dying-day Baba Anyutka, as well as Grandfather Mytka “Satan,” alive. We weren’t close, because Grandpa Satan was a policeman under the Germans, though he was completely unpunished after the war for being entirely harmless; he just carried a rifle around the market, and that was it. “But our fathers wouldn’t have done that!” Uncle Volodymyr Fylypovych would say disapprovingly, referring to his sotnyk father and my grandfather Dyzyo. So Grandfather Dyzyo was left with three small orphans. At that time, the Soviet authorities gave the brothers land, and they both, along with their stepbrother Yasio Pashkivsky and their brother-in-law Anton Sadovskyi with his family, began to build houses near the pond, all four of them next to each other, to get out of the overcrowded ancestral house right by the sugar factory “na Yarku” (in the ravine). Only Mytka-Satan remained on the ancestral plot. Father recalls that they built as orphans; his younger sister Lyuba, not the gymnasium student, but our Lyuba, cooked for them; it's just a silly family tradition of ours to compete with names.

And in the neighboring village of Pynchuky, a powerful family clan of the Lopukh-Lopushenkos flourished and branched out. A large and wealthy “kulak family,” which early on understood the advantages of education and did not spare money for it. The Lopushenkos, Korniievych or Kyrylovych, are profusely sown in the annals of the Central Rada, the UNR army, and emigration papers. But enough of them remained in the village—enterprising, zealous, disobedient—and in the difficult post-revolutionary times they could think of nothing better than to ambush night travelers on the high road (the future highway of the late Kirpa) from Kyiv to Odesa. Such activities were hard to keep secret, and the village community somehow rebelled against the Lopushenkos and lynched them. Local historians can tell you what happened to the brothers, I only know that one Lopushenkivna—Stepanyda—fled from lynch justice and ran through the fields towards Hrebinky. She was pursued by horsemen from Pynchuky, but Stepanyda managed to beg her way onto the wagon of a Hrebinky resident, Artem Shadura, hiding among the sheaves he was transporting from the field. The Pynchuky men caught up with him on horseback, but they didn't search the sheaves, they took his word for it. Stepanyda hid with her sister, who had married a Shamanskyi in Hrebinky, on the remote khutir (farmstead) of Baltasy, until people recommended her to Denys Shelest as a candidate for a stepmother for his orphans.

It seems that Baba Stepa genuinely fell in love with her benefactor, to whom she bore two more daughters, Aunt Lyuba (another one!), who was only two years older than me, and all three of us went to school in the same class. And I received a small portion of that love, because I was the “spitting image of Grandpa Dyzyo” to her, when we ended up in my father's native Hrebinky after our failed evacuation attempt.

By the way, I have a finished fragment about the beginning of the war and the evacuation somewhere among my files, which I started a long time ago. Why not include it in this text for convenience?

Lyotra the Hunting Bitch

(Memories from Olshanytsia)

...my father had her before the war... Thus, continuing the title, I want to begin these memoirs from my very early, pre-war childhood, two or three years of which were spent in the small village with a railway station, Olshanytsia, in the Rokytne (or, as it is now considered more correct to write, Rokytnianskyi) district, where our family was when the war began. Olshanytsia was like the district's Solovki of the Rokytne region. Everyone who had done something wrong in other villages was exiled there, and my little sister and I, studying the alphabet just before our move, nicknamed the letter D “kandibaka.” Back then, we called O a bagel, C a half-eaten bagel, G a poker, and A a splayed-out thing. And this one was a kandibaka. Why? The word “kandydat” (candidate) was used too often by the adults in the house. It was because my dad, on account of his grandfathers, had been demoted from a party member to a candidate member at a party meeting and sent for re-education to Olshanytsia as an ordinary history teacher.

So, our bitch was named Lyotra. What does that mean? Blessed be the fathers who present their children with philological problems, big or small, from a young age. Although I don't know if my dad named her that, or if he already acquired her as Lyotra when we moved to Olshanytsia from Nastashka. I found the answer to the second question just recently, in my old age, flipping through a pre-war binder of the newspaper *Kolhospnyk Rokytian-shchyny* in the silence of the academic library. I was interested in the youth of my dad, Volodymyr Denysovych Shelest, almost all of which was spent in the Rokytne region, in its villages of Nastashka, less so Olshanytsia, and also Lubianka, which I have indicated my whole life in the "place of birth" box when filling out forms, without ever having visited it! The opportunity never arose, although I feel a pull, a curiosity.

I was looking for information about my father, but I unexpectedly found the name of his hunting hound. (I was as happy as if I had met a relative!) Lyotra, it turns out, was the name of a record-breaking sow at the First of May collective farm in Nastashka. She was a famous pig, if they even wrote about her in the newspapers, so my father, even though he didn't work on the collective farm but at the school, also knew her name and it came in handy, so punchy and original, in the new village of Olshanytsia, where for the first time in his career he had the opportunity to indulge his private hobbies, get a violin, a rifle, a hunting dog, go hunting, even bring back hares, and if not—then without fail a treat “from the bunny” for me and my sister Inna, who was a year and three months older than me. It was, of course, a sandwich he had brought from home. He hunted with one of his teacher colleagues, Kucherenko or Kravchenko, and they didn't drink before the war. Not even on such a legitimate occasion as hunting. I can attest to this authoritatively, because the snack my father brought from home always remained untouched and served as our treat.

In Nastashka, where the sow Lyotra was, father had no free time to hunt. The school, where my mother also taught and he was the principal, and other public duties that still fall on the shoulders of teachers in villages, left no free time, not just for hunting, but even for his own children.

“Mda,” as Bohdan Zholdak writes, I haven't benefited much from my previous drafts, because in that fragment I never got to the real story of Lyotra the bitch. The mention of the 1941 earthquake is perhaps the only thing of some historical and biographical significance.

I experienced a real earthquake back in 1941 in Olshanytsia, when my little green cradle-crib was rhythmically rocking back and forth, creaking, and I froze with horror, certain that it was wolves or thieves (for my sister and me then it was the same thing, because we would ask each other: What kind of belly (ears, legs) do thieves have? The belly was somehow imagined as green). From then on, for some time in Olshanytsia, I regularly woke up at the same pre-dawn hour and lay silently in my cradle (my biological clock is still so easily set by one or two precedents), sincerely indulging in the wild erotic fantasies available at that age—I imagined myself as a mother breastfeeding an infant, even actually getting up to take an imaginary glass from the stool beside me to replenish my milk supply, pretending to drink).

We were “friends” with Lyotra, but when her puppies were born (four of them, every one a spitting image of their mother in coloring), my father nailed a canvas rag over the entrance to her kennel and strictly forbade us from approaching it: Lyotra, he said, has puppies and will now get nervous if anyone comes near, and might even bite. The puppies were still nursing when the war began.

Believe it or not, but I remember clearly and vividly the day of June 23, 1941, when my father’s friend and colleague (the principal of the Olshanytsia school, as I managed to establish from printed sources—Vasyl Artemovych) Kartavyi came to our house in the evening and sadly announced that the Germans had bombed Kyiv at dawn yesterday, and today Molotov announced on the radio that the war had begun. I remember well the expression of “consternation” that appeared on all the adults' faces at that moment.

My second vivid memory is of how, as we prepared to evacuate, we burned our home library. We carried the books out in piles (the first job in which we, the children, were enlisted as helpers) and threw them into the fire. It was, perhaps, my first childhood tragedy. We even wanted to save some volumes of the subscription-based *Hunter's Encyclopedia* from destruction, about three volumes of which had been published before the war. They had such beautiful color plates with squirrels and bunnies...

The furniture and bulky items were distributed among the neighbors; the étagère, wardrobes, tables, a “Singer” sewing machine—my mother’s blessing from her father, Manoil Palamarenko, also noted in printed sources (but I won’t say which ones), a village semi-intellectual who, while his wife and hired hands managed the farm in the village, worked as an accountant at a leather factory in the Kyiv suburb of Demiivka. Grandfather bought a “Singer” for each of his two young daughters for their future.

I've forgotten how we got our things to the station, very close to our house. I used to go there daily for milk from a railwayman's wife who lived in the station building with a flywheel and a transmission belt in the corridor. It was scary to walk past that wheel and belt. I don't know if that lady approached us at the station (my mother recalls that many acquaintances came up, begging us to take pity on the children and the puppies and to give up the hopeless idea of getting on a train). They were all passing the station overcrowded, sometimes without even stopping. A few hours later, a rumor would spread that one or another of them had been completely bombed to pieces beyond Sukholisy. We were glad we hadn't boarded and remained to wait for the next one. The dog was also with us. The puppies were on top of the bundles of our belongings, and she would cleverly climb up on the things to feed them.

For one night, someone took us from the station to spend at least one night in a good, warm place. I remember that there, we sat with the host's children in the cellar and were fed young chicks, boiled whole. I have never tasted anything more delicious to this day.

Our attempt to evacuate “beyond the Dnipro” ended with my father untying someone's horses, harnessed to a cart, from an apple tree (whoever had come here with them had obviously managed or had the strength to get on a train and was possibly already bombed to pieces beyond Sukholisy or Zhytni Hory), loaded our things, carefully placed the four puppies between us, the two children, took the reins in his hands, and we drove off. There was even a whip under the straw in the cart, a good one, with knots, on a cherry-wood handle...

I cannot now reconstruct the route of our journey, though it interests me. After the war, when my father returned, I would ask him why we were going to Berdychiv. My father’s face would tense (the same consternation as at Kartavyi's words about the start of the war), he would raise his eyebrows in surprise and ask: “Berdychiv? And what does Berdychiv have to do with anything?” And it was clear from his face that he knew very well “what it had to do with anything”... The men from the villages we passed with Lyotra trailing the cart would jeer at us with questions: “So, off to Berdychiv, are we?” Berdychiv—the anecdotal Jewish capital. Father preferred not to recall this, but mother often commented on those taunts, quoting: “So, had your fill of being lords, you kikes? Running away?” I myself remember how bitterly my mother cried, bent over the puppies; “But we’re not kikes at all! There they go, on the cobblestones, with their ficus plants in the truck beds...” And we were indeed often passed by one-and-a-half-ton trucks, and mother would carefully observe the women in the cabs next to the drivers: did this one also have a pug on her lap, or not? There’s no denying the truth: whoever had the chance, evacuated with their beloved pets, just like we did with Lyotra. We did have something in common with the kikes.

In the poetic works of my classmate and, I'll say it outright, good friend Valeriy Huzhva, there are also evacuation reminiscences. How hungry they were in the cattle car, where one of their fellow travelers secretly devoured lard from his bundle in a corner at night. Jedem das Seine!

But no one threw clods of earth after their train car, at least Valeriy did not notice anything of the sort. But for us, after one village where exactly that happened, a memorable incident occurred. Having driven past the outskirts, my father stopped the horses, carefully wound the end of the reins around the linchpin, heavily walked around the cart and bent over the puppies. Then he slipped his palms under them, huddled in a tight, constantly whimpering pile, and gently lifted them all together, balancing so that none would fall out. Then he turned away from the cart with them, stepped over the shallow ditch-like trench, crouched down, and placed his burden on the path that ran alongside the road. He returned, unwound the reins, sat down in his seat with them in his hand and cracked the whip... “Giddy-up!”

I recount this so sequentially because my sister and I, understanding nothing and therefore watching the events with particular curiosity, only realized the full depth of this tragedy from our mother's tears and began to scream as if we were being slaughtered. Imagine how our childish hearts broke as we watched Lyotra’s behavior after the cart moved. For the last couple of days she hadn't fed them, because her milk had “burned out,” it was gone. But she had dashed after father with interest as he carried them, sniffed her litter, nudged them with her nose. When the cart moved, she lifted her head and looked after it with interest, and even, it seemed to me, with surprise. She sniffed the puppies once more, flicked both her tail and her head, and rushed after the cart, her empty udder swinging from side to side... This was repeated countless times... After the cart—to the puppies, after the cart—back, after the cart—back. The last time, when the puppies were no longer visible, she ran only after the cart, merely glancing back from time to time...

Later, father explained that the puppies would have died without milk anyway, and on the path, shepherds herding their flocks from the fields would surely come across them. They were so cute, why wouldn't someone take them home and feed them milk from a saucer...

Even today, when I happen to recall this little life story in conversation, I cannot control my voice to keep it from trembling. And mother sobbed her heart out, recounting this incident to father's relatives when we finally arrived in Hrebinky. Baba Dasia, the same one who had been a colporteur of SR leaflets, immediately created a little piece of folklore: “The bitch abandoned her puppies and followed her master, while he abandoned his children and ran like that dog after Stalin.” Her son Zhorzhyk, also an adult and even involved with the army, was a driver in the army, but he didn't do that. After our escapade from Olshanytsia, he drove his commander's family through the village in a car, as they used to say, “beyond the Dnipro.” In Ksaverivka or Maryanivka they came under an air raid, and the little boy in the car was wounded by a shell fragment. Zhorzhyk unloaded him and his mother, and returned with their belongings to Hrebinky to find a doctor. He must not have found one, because he didn't go anywhere else, he stayed with his mother-father-wife and son Lesyk.

Interestingly, they found another doctor for that little boy, he survived, endured the evacuation and came to Bila Tserkva after the war. He sought out Zhora (by then a teacher, Yuriy Antonovych Sadovskyi), they had a reunion, but that's a completely different story, not related to me. I will only note that his son Lesyk—my first cousin Oleg Yuriyovych Sadovskyi, a dental technician—is now working as a manual laborer-loader in Israel, having followed his half-blooded wife, and never acknowledging their son as his own. And that son, already married, died recently in Hrebinky. Zhorzh is still alive, he's over ninety, a long-liver.

And my father's stepmother, Stepanyda Lopushenkivna, received us kindly, as was already said, but over time her attitude towards three extra mouths with only one pair of working hands changed drastically. Especially since winter came, and there was no more work in the garden and in the cultured orchard planted by grandfather. People told us that she went to the burgomaster appointed by the Germans, Zelensky, and announced that the family of a red commissar was living with her, so what did the new authorities order to be done with them?

Zelensky, bless him, greeted her with a sincere Moscow curse and showed her the door, but the attitude towards us in grandfather's house did not improve. I remember that when they slaughtered a pig, everyone who entered the house ate the fresh meat; the Germans who came to court my aunt Yuliya ate, but my mother and my little sister didn't get a single crumb, not a morsel. I exclude myself, because on the third day, baba did give me, from her own hands, a single slice (her word: one!) of blood sausage—I did look like grandfather after all—but to my mother and sister, absolutely nothing. Is it possible to believe such a thing?

It ended with mother transporting us one by one, in the middle of winter, with Kyivites who traveled through villages exchanging things for food, to her sister's in Nastashka. I lived through the occupation there, I saw and well remember the Germans, that's another generous field for memoirs, but not for now. I cannot resist, however, mentioning one incident, connected in some way with the early awakening of national feeling.

Mother had a childhood friend in the village, Yevka Shylo. Also an interesting human story. She was once adopted by a childless village elder (I saw him in a group photo of the all-Russian congress of elders in St. Petersburg), raised, given his surname. Before the war, Yevka Shylo “thundered” (her own expression, confirmed by an analysis of the press of the time) as one of the first team-leaders of the five-hundreders. At that time, she married a man with the same surname, Shylo (there are many of them in Nastashka), who was the secretary of the village council during the years of dekulakization. He had once issued a life-saving certificate of non-kulak origin to a kulak and, having escaped the Kyrponos encirclement near Kyiv, trustingly turned to his benefactor, now a Kyivan from his home village, to hide. But the kulak in him resurfaced and he too went to the burgomaster. The Germans shot Shylo as a party activist. And so we often went to visit this Aunt Yevka. I would hang around on her stove, sorting through piles of tsarist and Petliurist money accumulated by elder Shylo (he and his wife died of starvation during the famine, they were also robbed through a tunnel, hungry people stole their cow), while she and mother talked. And so once, when the conversation turned to how people change, Aunt Yevka gasped: “And Skochok!! You know? He’s become so German, so-o-o German: he wears an embroidered Ukrainian shirt!” Skochok was their mutual acquaintance and Yevka’s comrade from the times of her “thundering” in the Soviet aktiv from the neighboring village of Ostriv (the own uncle of the journalist-dissident Pavlo Skochok, father-in-law of Father Petro Zuyev). And that combination of an embroidered shirt with German-ness somehow stung me so sharply, as something personal. A yellow “spade” bill froze between my fingers, and I felt myself gradually, but radically, turning red to the tips of my ears!—flooding with the color of shame or some other feeling, at that time still unknown to me.

However, my father, upon returning from the war in the first days after the German retreat (discharged from the army due to injury and illness, he was part of the reserve of administrative activists who followed the front and awaited further territorial gains beyond the Dnipro in Hoholiv), still had a lot of work to do with me, teaching me to say “Jews” instead of “kikes” and “ours” instead of the more familiar to me “the reds” and “the Russians.”

Then we moved to the district center of Rokytna, where my sister and I went together to the so-called “incomplete” first grade. The better-prepared children and over-agers were gathered there, and after a quick review of the first-grade program, it automatically became the second grade. It was still 1943 or the spring of 1944, I was turning six.

At that time I didn't know at all, nor had I heard from anyone, that before the war there had been a national Jewish village council in Rokytna; I only found out about this from the newspapers, along with the sow Lyotra. My first teacher in the now “completed” second grade was Fira Markivna Shapiro, a prominent activist of Jewish national life until 1937. The school principal was her comrade-in-arms from the pre-war years, Iosif Veniaminovich Gutman—the very own brother of the then still little-known Benny Goodman from the USA, the jazzman. Obviously the younger one, because Jews do not name their children after living parents.

Then came more of my father's official wanderings—to Stavyshche in the Kyiv region, with a demotion from head of the district education department to a simple inspector, and in the autumn of the hungry year of 1947, back to his native Hrebinky. I don't know how he felt, but to me this move seemed like an inglorious end to his party career. After all the suffering, achievements, and accomplishments, to be back in the same house he had helped his father build as a boy... Baba Stepa had made peace with us even earlier, during the German occupation, having suffered misfortune from the new government, which returned nothing of the Lopushenkos' property to her, and caused a lot of grief: her eldest daughter Yuliya was carted off to Germany. Out of foolishness and a romantic nature. Her sweetheart, Vania Pyvovarenko, from a conscious and wealthy Ukrainian family, frequently repressed by the Soviet authorities back in the 30s, was slated for deportation as an Ostarbeiter, and Yulia volunteered to go with him. She also “thundered” for this act in the occupation press and on the radio, but Vania's relatives with nationalist connections somehow got him out—in modern terms, they “fixed it.” My aunt Yulechka, however, was sent to Germany, found herself a Donetsk miner named Litvinov there, and now her eldest daughter's passport lists her place of birth as Frankfurt am Main. As for Ivan Pylypovych Pyvovarenko, born in 1924, he is mentioned in the press in a mysterious and regrettable context: in 1949 he was convicted while serving as an assistant to the deputy chairman of the Transcarpathian Regional Council. It's not so much surprising how he ended up in Transcarpathia, but why he was pushing into the higher echelons of local government?

Now from romantic memoirs to dry documentary facts. In 1953, my sister, my aunt Lyuba, and I all finished high school. Most of the boys were lining up for military academies, and I, going with the flow, changed my documents to reflect a 1935 birth year (the military commissar himself suggested how to do it), because they didn't accept sixteen-year-olds into the academies. But the university, where I had submitted my documents in the meantime while waiting for a call for the autumn entrance exams at the Kharkiv Tank Academy, accepted me, even with a respectable competition of up to five people per spot. My classmate, the orphan Vovka Ostroshapkin, who had applied to the Food Technology Institute but failed to get in, went to Kharkiv in my place. In Kharkiv he was accepted, graduated with honors, received an assignment to Hungary and was injured there in an accident during training: his tank overturned and exploded with all its ammunition and fuel, the crew died, only he, terribly maimed and his face disfigured, was discharged on a disability pension, returned to his mother's village, where they drank together and soon died from alcohol, he first, by the way. When I visit the village on Remembrance Day, I always visit his neglected grave and leave sweets. I have the impression that he took my fate upon himself.

At the university, everything was going swimmingly at first, until I made, as I now understand, a terrible mistake. This was in my third year. Walking to lectures at the Red Building one morning, I stopped dead in my tracks at the spot where the open-air chess club is now, struck by a sudden thought that came to me from who knows where or why: I'M HAPPY! If you think about it, I'm actually happy!!! And so-o-o happy! It was a beautiful autumn morning of Indian summer, the swept asphalt smelled so deliciously of withered leaves, a gentle breeze tickled my nostrils, and ahead of me was an auditorium of the capital's university with good friends and interesting things to do. And I had a girlfriend, a beautiful one, she loved me and I her... What more could I ask for?

And from that moment on...

...My young colleague, the historian Yaroslav Fedoruk, will surely laugh heartily at the lines that follow. A convinced Greek Catholic, he resolutely rejects everything from folk demonology that so beautifully humanizes the native Orthodox confession. Here is how the dissident Mykola Horbal describes the beginning of his family, the first conversation between his future father and mother:

He knew that she would go for blueberries today; he was waiting for her here. He had to tell her today... They had exchanged glances more than once and had always hidden them from one another, as if it were a fire that could incinerate everything around. This was the first time they had met like this, alone.

“Praise Jesus!” he said, taking her hand, but she snatched it away. “I wanted to ask you, Teklia, to be my wife,” and he took her hand again.

...She startled. “I must ask my mother...”

For a while, they walked in silence along the meadow at the edge of the forest, she with her head down, and he looking far over the mountains. He was gathering his thoughts. Only now did he hear the song of the larks, which glorified the heavens with their golden and silver bells. It seemed that at that moment, everyone was happy in this dear land.

Suddenly... it sounded as if someone in the forest had burst out laughing. ...Somewhere here was also the one to whom this harmony of souls was not pleasing. His nourishment was the energy radiated by suffering, not love. And this “someone” was indeed muttering by the rock near the ravine in the stream: “I will turn your joy into sorrow and weeping; you will not have time to enjoy your firstborn before you bury him; I will make your second son a cripple, and the third will go through prisons; I will let you build a house with fine rooms, but you will not get to live in it, and not a stone will remain upon a stone of it; you will live in a stable; I will turn this land into a wasteland, you do not have long left to sing here; you will wander the world, you will beg, and your children will swell from hunger; you will live in fear and destitution.”

(Mykola Horbal. *Odyn z shistdesiaty* [One of Sixty]. – K., 2001. – pp. 109-111.)

...I barely managed to graduate from the university, falling from an advanced scholarship student. P.M. Fedchenko graded my thesis on the journal *Kyivskaia Staryna* (*Kyivan Antiquity*) a three out of five. I got no better than threes on the state exams in all the ideological disciplines, and I failed Ivanov’s “History of the CPSU” course completely, having to come back a second time for my three. Our dean Matvii Shestopal also knew something bad about me, and Komsomol activists from the junior years asked me provocative questions about my school dealings with the aforementioned Ostroshapkin... As I understand it now, the “kontora” (the Office) was actively working me over, perhaps even keeping my grandfathers in mind.

And there is already printed evidence about that, my first brush with politics at seventeen. It's in the newspaper *Radians'ka osvita* (*Soviet Education*), in an anniversary issue dedicated to the journalism institute. A lecturer from there recalls:

One beautiful September morning I, Robert Tretiakov, Vadym Boiko, Valeriy Huzhva, and Yuliy Shelest, sitting on a bench in the park by the Shevchenko monument, started talking about publishing a manuscript journal. And why not? We decided to publish one and even came up with a bold name for it: *Abrakadabra*. And the next morning, the university rector summoned me and asked: “What are you getting yourself into? What journals?”

End of quote.

Now, exactly half a century later, it's too late to ask the memoirist why only he was summoned by the rector, and I—Yuriy Shelest, Robert Tretiakov, Valeriy Huzhva, and the other “founding members” of *Abrakadabra*—was not? Secondly—how did the rector find out so quickly about such a private decision by a small group of students? Could it be that one of the people listed ran to him the evening before with a denunciation?

These memoirs require commentary and revelatory clarifications. The manuscript journal really existed (attention, researchers of the samvydav movement in Ukraine!), its full title was *Visnyk klubu “Abrakadabra”* (*Herald of the 'Abrakadabra' Club*). It was born as a result of the existence and activity of an informal “club,” that is, a group of students who were too lazy to take notes on the history of the CPSU lectures by associate professor Stoliarenko and entertained themselves during the “pairs” (classes) with various intellectual games: bouts-rimés, “balda,” etc. “Balda” (scientifically—anagrams, creating new words from the letter material of a given one) gained incredible popularity and mass appeal at that time, requiring some qualification of its participants and winners, and distribution of places in tournament tables. For this, a periodic manuscript publication was needed, which became the *Herald*. Although the respected memoirist “ratted out” its creation to the rector or someone else (the political surveillance of students was handled by a special “special department” at the rectorate under the leadership of the now-famous Colonel Yelisarov, thanks to dissident memoirs), no one interfered with its publication for a fairly long time. My closest collaborators—Vitaliy Sazonov, Arnold Shuster, and Leonid Kostyuk—could provide more information about it. The journal survived the summer holidays and took on a new student, Yura Kovalenko, who transferred to us from the correspondence department, as a member of the editorial board. He even managed to change the name to *Boustrophedon* (for some reason he liked this incomprehensible word more), but under this name, the journal withered, bored the readers, and then the official action against it began. Somehow I was told that the book shelver from the student reading room was looking for me. I came. She asked if I was the one who had forgotten several copies of the manuscript journal *Herald of the 'Abrakadabra' Club* in a library book. Yes, it was me—I had to confess, although I didn't remember the circumstances under which the journal could have ended up in a library book. The librarian—a hook-nosed blonde, some relative of our Professor Nazarevsky—didn't return anything to me; her find got lost somewhere. For her, my official admission of authorship was enough. The very next day I was summoned to the Military Registration Desk at the rectorate, where the chubby Colonel Yelisarov, with a characteristic wart near his nose, handed me over to a younger and thinner colleague named Romanov, and it was he who began a long, tedious, and fruitless work on me.

The next morning he visited my private apartment, a “corner” rented for me on 8 Tolstoy Street by a nice elderly Jewish couple named Vecherebyn. I remember it like it was yesterday, he was severely hungover from the day before; he was a drinker, and that “work” weighed heavily on him. Taking one of the issues of *Abrakadabra* from my table, which I, of course, didn't hide in any hideouts, and glancing over it, he pointed his finger at the surnames of two characters from a joke-note on the first page: Potsker and Nakoyker. “Now we can pin antisemitism on you...”

It was hardly possible, since the author of the witticism was one of my Jewish collaborators, but it was enough to “start the conversation.” They concerned everything—first of all, my classmates, who among them was authoritative and could “lead others,” and who was not, who correctly understood the steps and measures of the Party and government, and who allowed for deviations and vacillations, and so on. The “processing” ended with a proposal to “signal” in a timely manner and a signed pledge of “non-disclosure” of our conversations, nothing else.

On an official level, the matter ended with an unexpected “promotion” for me: the Komsomol bureau of the faculty or course appointed me, without any official meetings or elections, as the editor of the wall newspaper *Akademvisnyk* (*Academic Herald*), specifically to cover the educational process of the course, to criticize the “tail-enders” and truants. The wall newspaper was published for some time, and of course—it didn't win me any friends among my classmates.

Then my romance fell apart too. It was my own fault; I wasn't ready for the marital yoke yet. And among the reasons and pretexts, the national motive was not lacking: what would our children be? My Nina was willing to register a daughter, if God willed it, as Ukrainian, but as for the boys—only Russian. (Life, a propos, laughed at us both: both her sons with a Kremlin pilot, a native of the same Olshanytsia—it just happened that way, no one tried—received their passports independently in the Urals and, without consulting anyone, registered themselves as Ukrainians. The telluric force is with us!)

I was assigned to the district newspaper of the Snihurivka district in the Mykolaiv region as a literary worker, although many much duller classmates of mine received much more attractive positions in capital and regional publications. It was none other than “he” from hell, and “those” from Colonel Yelisarov, who were doing their work. Through certain bureaucratic maneuvers, I changed that assignment to the closer Berezan district of the Kyiv region and tried to arrive in Berezan with a small delay of a week. During this time, the editor took pity on a graduate of the philology faculty, Alkhymenkova, who had been assigned to the same newspaper as a proofreader for some transgressions, and appointed her to my still-vacant position of literary worker. Oh, this was exactly what I needed. Fortune seemed to have turned halfway towards me. I get an official release from the editor, return to Kyiv and begin to live by my own wits, outside the Soviet system, independently searching for work, an apartment, a residence permit, and everything else that the rest of my peers were served on a silver platter by the authorities.

All of this is interesting, instructive, and at times detective-dramatic, but for now I will limit myself to a dry list from memory without exact dates.

1958–1959 Editorial office of the Medical Institute’s high-circulation newspaper, *Medychni Kadry* (Medical Personnel).

1959–1960 Editorial office of the inter-regional newspaper, *Kyivskyi Komsomolets* (Kyiv Komsomol Member).

1960–1962 Editorial office of the journal *Zaklyk* (Call, formerly *Pratsia slinykh* or *Labor of the Blind*).

1962–1965 Graduate studies at the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore, and Ethnology (IMFE).

1965–1967 Junior researcher at the IMFE.

1967–1968 Engineer for Scientific and Technical Information at the Main Gas Pipelines Administration.

1969–1970 Flutist-artist at the Musical and Choral Society of the Ukrainian SSR.

1970–1972 Editor at the “Naukova Dumka” (Scientific Thought) publishing house.

1972–1974 First arrest and two-year imprisonment.

1975 Briefly – Engineer for Scientific and Technical Information at “Silhosptekhnika” (Agricultural Machinery).

1975–1978 Second, three-year imprisonment.

Further on—a kaleidoscope of jobs until my first return to civilized tracks in the editorial office of the weekly *Starozhytnosti* (*Antiquities*). I even worked as an orderly in the ward for the violent at the Academician Pavlov Hospital. Another detail worth noting, important for understanding the nature of perestroika. Yuriy Badzyo was sending his freedom-loving perestroika letters to Korotych's *Ogonek* from the snows of his Siberian exile. Meanwhile, I was demolishing old brick toilets with a crowbar in the courtyard of that two-story building on Borychiv Tik, where the future capitalist on the island of Cyprus, Mr. Serikov, was already operating with his numerous perestroika projects and lavishly spent capital of unknown origin. Oleksandr Kucheruk, who often visited his editorial office of *Pamiatky Ukrainy* (*Monuments of Ukraine*) with his co-author Hryhoriev, would fastidiously walk around me in a wide arc. I am grateful to Anatoliy Makarov and I.B. Hyrych for pulling me out of that long-standing freelance existence and somehow bringing me into the “system.”

Further:

Editorial office of the newspaper *Zelenyi Kalendar* (Green Calendar).

Editorial office of the newspaper *Zakon i Biznes* (Law and Business).

1998 – Editorial office of the newspaper *Vechirniy Kyiv* (Evening Kyiv).

2000 – Vernadsky National Library.

2001 – Editorial office of the newspaper *Silskyi Chas* (Rural Time).

2002 – Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography and Source Studies.

SUMMARY

The memoirs of a “man of the sixties,” Yuliy Volodymyrovych Shelest, tell of his family, his childhood during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and the author's university years. The text traces the origins of his national self-identification, his resulting oppositional, anti-imperial worldview, and the sources of his inner resistance to and non-acceptance of the totalitarian regime.

Geneza. Scientific and socio-political journal, No. 1 (11), 2006. – pp. 100–110.

Scanned by V. Ovsiyenko on May 2-3, 2009.