Borys VASYLCHENKO
MEMORIES OF A FRIEND (Ivan SUK)
In 1970, a wave of repressions rolled across Ukraine. The creative intelligentsia was “taken,” accused by the Moscow occupational regime of so-called “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” The absurdity was that there was no bourgeoisie in Ukraine, yet here was bourgeois nationalism...
One of the victims of the repressions was a doctor from Donetsk, a Candidate of Medical Sciences, and a lecturer at the Donetsk Medical Institute, Ivan Stepanovych SUK.
Fate brought me together with him twice. In the late 1950s, I was a student at the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy, and Ivan was a postgraduate student at the Kyiv Medical Institute. We used to go to the same room in the medical institute’s dormitory to “visit” girls, where he would meet the tall and beautiful Lida Orel.
When I got married and we moved to Donetsk in 1963, Ivan, having defended his dissertation, was assigned to work at the Donetsk Medical Institute. We met again there. We both spoke Ukrainian.
Later, Ivan opened up to me: he was troubled by the fact that Ukraine’s history was forbidden, its language was being destroyed, and its culture was permitted only at the level of folkloric pageantry and nothing more. He worked hard to shed light on the national question through the works of the titans of the Italian Renaissance and the classics of Marxism-Leninism. He particularly loved to repeat de Gaulle’s phrase:
“For me, the most sacred concepts have always been the Fatherland—France—and my own mother.”
In 1965, he introduced me to Ivan Dziuba’s work “Internationalism or Russification?” which was circulating in samvydav in Donetsk. Even earlier, we had read a US-printed copy of N. S. Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU about Stalin’s cult of personality, which was not published in the USSR.
Ivan Stepanovych introduced me to the writer Volodymyr Mishchenko, who had been in the same university group as Vasyl Stus and was, of course, of a like mind. Among Donetsk writers, Ivan associated with Hryhoriy Kryvda, Halyna Hordasevych, and Vasyl Zakharchenko. And especially with Yevhen Mykolayovych Letiuk, who was then the literary editor of the Donetsk Regional Ukrainian Drama Theater. When the repressions began, Yevhen died suddenly. This led to the suspicion that his death was not without the “help” of the Chekists. In his circle of friends was also a university associate professor (I don’t remember his name) who was later found hanged on the balcony of his apartment. It is possible that the Chekists were also involved in this.
In 1965, Ivan gave me Andriy Malyshko’s speech from Sosiura’s funeral to read. But I was pleasantly surprised when I read a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine about the events surrounding Sosiura’s funeral, authored by a physics lecturer from the Agricultural Academy I knew well, Valentyna Pavlivna Drabata. She was known as a fervent patriot of her Fatherland and lectured at the academy in the students’ native language, which was practically forbidden at the time. Later, Valentyna Pavlivna “accidentally” fell from the balcony of her eighth-floor apartment...
Ivan stated clearly that if fascism is the theory and practice of destroying entire peoples, then the homeland of fascism is Russia, ever since the time of the Tsardom of Muscovy. He was convinced himself and convinced others that Muscovites were not Slavs but Tatars, referencing Marx:
“Scratch a Russian a little, and he still turns out to be a Tatar.” (vol. 30, p. 306).
Ivan quoted A. Herzen and the historian M. Pokrovsky, who argued that Bohdan Khmelnytsky trusted Moscow, which deceived him, and made Ukrainians hate the Muscovites. That the alliance with the Swedes was first made by Bohdan, and Mazepa merely continued it. He said that the desire to deceive a person is a national trait of the Muscovite. As an example, he cited an episode from the Koliivshchyna rebellion, when Russian Colonel Krechetov informed the rebel leaders that the Russian army had arrived to help them and invited them to a friendly dinner. When Honta, Zalizniak, and the Cossack elders got drunk, they were bound and handed over to the Polish executioners. “My heart bleeds from this Russian villainy,” wrote A. Herzen.
Ivan awaited the liberation of Ukraine from the yoke of the Tatar-Muscovite horde like a second coming, because he understood what Sakharov would later articulate:
“The USSR is a gigantic concentration camp, and the existing order within it is ordinary fascism.”
An informer was found, and Ivan was arrested. When Ivan was released, he told me about that tragic day for him, when he was summoned to the dean’s office without being allowed to finish his class. On the way, Ivan noticed a minibus stop in front of him, from which four young men in then-fashionable muskrat fur hats emerged—hats that some of them, burdened with power, had once torn from the heads of their owners. Another minibus just like it stopped behind him, and more young men got out. And there were minibuses on the sides as well, from which Chekists poured out, hunting their prey with predatory glances. The operation to arrest the respected associate professor of the medical institute was successfully carried out by a KGB unit of almost 20 people...
And when Ivan was sentenced, he was thrown into a cell with criminals. But the unexpected happened. The criminals had their own code of honor, and their leader said:
“Guys, they put the professor in for nothing. We’ll take care of him.”
And indeed, when Ivan was sick, they worked his quota for him; when he was hungry, they shared their rations.
After his release, Ivan worked as a doctor in Donetsk and died in 1990.
Reflecting on the fates of people like Ivan brings sad thoughts: when Ukraine gained its freedom, the hat-snatchers floated to the surface of the ruling Olympus. But the victory of good over evil is inevitable. People like Ivan Stepanovych Suk firmly believed that, in the words of Ivan Franko,
Кров’ю власною і власними кістками
Твердий змуруємо гостинець, і за нами
Прийде нове життя, добро нове у світ.
Borys VASYLCHENKO, engineer, Kyiv.
Ukrainske Slovo, no. 25, 2004. – June 16–22.
Prepared by Vasyl Ovsienko on May 2, 2009.