LIDIA LARIONIVNA HUK

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V. V. Ovsienko: On February 18, 2001, in the city of Skadovsk, we are having a conversation with Lidia Larionivna Huk. Vasyl Ovsienko is recording.

L. L. Huk: I, Lidia Larionivna Huk, maiden name Piven, was born in the village of Synchar in the Poltava region. My grandmother’s last name was Chub—they said she came from an old Cossack lineage. I don’t have a genealogy. My mother, Anastasia Chub, worked on a kolkhoz from 1929. She had very little schooling, she could only read and write in block letters, because she was born in 1911, when there were no schools to attend. My father, Larion Piven, died in 1948.

I went to school. I went to school until the first frost, barefoot or occasionally in canvas sandals. And then we wore valenki [felt boots].

V. V. Ovsienko: What year did you start school?

L. L. Huk: In 1947. In 1948… life was materially difficult. I remember in the spring we would go to gather the ears of corn that were left in the field, because the kolkhoz chairman had wanted to give the grain to the people, but the raikom [district party committee] came every day to shake them down, and they weren't allowed to harvest it in the fall. So it stood all winter, and then we would go out—Nina, my cousin, would break open the ears like this, and it would all pour into a bucket, and then we would dry it, grind it on a hand mill, and make pancakes. You couldn’t eat many of them.

What else? Life was hard. I remember we had nothing to heat the house with, and we would walk 8–10 km to the field for straw, and carry the straw back. Once, already in the village, a mounted guard set the straw on my shoulders on fire. In the summer we would go to gather leftover grain stalks—we also hid from the mounted guards, and they would chase us and whip us. A mounted guard even pierced one girl with a pitchfork, drove it into her side, because she was grabbing stalks after the sheaves had been taken away. More stalks were left near the stack, and she was gathering them. I remember how…

V. V. Ovsienko: And what happened to that girl? Did she die?

L. L. Huk: No, she survived. Then there was another situation: they were hauling out potatoes, and part of the potatoes they stored in a pit. They stored them in a pit and, apparently, didn’t make any ventilation, and they rotted. And so in the spring, when they opened those pits, we would go out very, very early, break open these potatoes, take out the white part from the inside, and from that white starch we would later cook a thin gruel. So life was very hard. And I don't remember us ever eating our fill—only on Easter, and sometimes on Christmas. My mother worked day and night at the pig farm, and we raised ourselves. I was raised with the idea of escaping the village. The newspapers and books all wrote that “I know of no other country like this,” that life was so wonderful everywhere, and for a while I thought that it was only in our village that life was so bad. And I thought, when I was later finishing the ten-year school, that I had a lot of strength, I read a lot and I could bring order to our village kolkhoz—not as the chairman, but just by raising the people up so that we could live better. I went on a Komsomol assignment. There were those Komsomol assignments to the Virgin Lands, and they wrote one out for me, and I went to work in the kolkhoz.

V. V. Ovsienko: What year did you finish school?

L. L. Huk: In 1957.

V. V. Ovsienko: Was it a ten-year school?

L. L. Huk: Yes, I finished the ten-year school and went to the kolkhoz. At first, I did various jobs, as it was harvest time, the end of June. We received our diplomas on June 27, and I went to the kolkhoz right for the harvest. We winnowed grain and hauled it to the station. We earned one trudoden [workday unit] for twenty-five hundredths of a hectare, but they didn’t pay us. They didn’t give us money in 1957 or in 1958, but in 1959 they started giving 30 kopecks per trudoden. And then I went to the poultry farm and worked there. Well, I had some achievements there, they even wrote about me in the newspaper and interviewed me. But in 1960, I went to apply to the institute, because in the village, nothing depended on my hands or my head. I also did sports, went to competitions, and saw that in other villages it was the same as in ours. At first I thought it was only like that here, but it was the same everywhere. And to live a little better, to not have to toil around the clock like my mother—there were two farrowing seasons, and when the sows were giving birth, she would be there even at night, and during the day she would run home, have lunch, and run back to work.

I remember that as children we were always hungry. And when I would go to the pig farm to see my mother, they would be boiling potatoes for the pigs in these huge vats, and to eat a potato, you had to steal one and hide, because if, God forbid, the brigadier caught you, he would beat my mother or me—he’d beat one of us. Or they’d even fire you. And in the village, we lived, in principle, only off our garden plot. As long as I can remember, I first herded geese, then goats, then a cow. And it would still be dark when they would already drive us out to the pasture. And from early in the morning, we didn't play, read, or write—we worked hard: either weeding the garden, or gathering grass, or carrying water, watering the cow, or feeding the livestock. So the whole situation was hard—it was always work, work, and more work, with no end and no pay for it, neither then nor now. Even now the situation is the same.

In 1960, I was accepted into the Kyiv Medical Institute. I settled in the dormitory at 4 Petro Mohyla Street. And there I met Mykola Plakhotniuk.

And you see, I missed something: when I was working in the kolkhoz, they offered me to join the Party. I joined the Party because I thought I could change something, do something. I joined the Party, they elected me to the raikom of the Komsomol as a member of the plenum of the raikom bureau. I was the Komsomol organizer in the kolkhoz. So I wanted to and tried to do something within the system that existed. But nothing could be done, and that's why I entered the institute. But in general, if things had been normal on the land, if there had been land then, I would not have gone anywhere, because I love to dig in the earth.

At the institute, I met Mykola Plakhotniuk, and then Nadiya Svitlychna, and then many people who were connected to the Ukrainian word. For now, we started by defending the Ukrainian language. We gathered, read poems by Ukrainian writers, held evenings for Shevchenko and Lesia Ukrainka. And what shook me, or moved me, or stirred me up the most was when there was an evening for Vasyl Symonenko at our institute.

V. V. Ovsienko: That was right after his death, correct?

L. L. Huk: No, he was still alive. He was there, Korotych was there, Mykola Vinhranovskyi was there. I remember he arrived in a little gray jacket, his face red from the road, because it was already chilly at that time. And he read: “Гранітні обеліски, як медузи, повзли, повзли і вибилися з сил, на цвинтарі розстріляних ілюзій уже немає місця для могил.” [Granite obelisks, like jellyfish, / crawled, crawled and were exhausted, / in the cemetery of executed illusions / there is no more room for graves.] And it was after that evening that I realized that we still have people, and I grew close to those people who want to revive Ukraine, to revive the Ukrainian word and to trample, cross out, and cast out from our land this entire system that led to us being simply robbed and paid nothing—that my mother, who worked on the farm, was not paid, that I worked on the farm and came to apply to the institute in canvas sandals and a raincoat that cost 10 rubles back then—that was all I had. And during my time at the institute, what I acquired was from unloading wagons with the boys. I earned more from that unloading work, just in the evenings, than I earned in the kolkhoz. I worked maybe four, five, well, maybe six evenings a month and I earned more than in a whole month at the kolkhoz. Actually, more than not just me, but me and my mother combined. So that’s when I was able to get some clothes, relatively speaking. Relatively, not like everyone else, because the others had something when they entered the institute.

Then I got into the Club of Creative Youth. Then with Mykola Plakhotniuk and Nadiyka Svitlychna—or rather, Nadiyka Svitlychna was in a different group—we organized Christmas carols and shchedrivky. And we organized them so well. When they were still forbidden, we were warned, “Why are you returning to obscurantism?” But it was so beautiful: Malanka and Vasyl, and Satan, and a witch, and a devil, and handsome girls and boys dressed in Ukrainian attire—in svytky [outer coats], yupky [skirts], kerchiefs, and the boys in hats. I remember one New Year, we collected about 300 rubles, which we gave to Vasyl Symonenko’s mother for his monument. And later I was in Cherkasy, doing my internship there, and I went to Vasyl's grave, and I was very pleased that we had contributed something—he has a beautiful monument there in the cemetery—that we had helped in some way.

V. V. Ovsienko: And that evening for Vasyl Symonenko, the one Mykola Plakhotniuk organized shortly after Vasyl Symonenko's death, do you remember it?

L. L. Huk: That one—no, I didn't make it to that one. After Symonenko's evening, I think I was sick or something. I must have been seriously ill, because when I’m not seriously ill, I still go out, but this was serious, my temperature was around 40 degrees Celsius [104°F], and I couldn't make it to that evening. I also couldn't make it, say, to Alla Horska's funeral—I had been to her house many times—because I was already here, but my son had just fallen ill, he had a high fever and there was no one to leave him with, I was alone. I also missed, I think, when they were reburying Vasyl Stus. It was the same situation, I couldn't go then either.

V. V. Ovsienko: So, you studied from 1960 until…?

L. L. Huk: 1967. I graduated in 1967. For instance, I remember how we used to go to the Shevchenko monument.

V. V. Ovsienko: Please, tell us about those instances.

L. L. Huk: I remember, it was on May 22nd…

V. V. Ovsienko: What year?

L. L. Huk: I think it was 1965 or 1966, I don't remember exactly.

V. V. Ovsienko: The time when they marched to the Central Committee, that was 1967.

L. L. Huk: 1967? Right, that was when they were grabbing the boys and throwing them like sheep into a truck.

V. V. Ovsienko: Tell us about that evening, how you perceived it. How did you see it all?

L. L. Huk: How I saw it… They were reading poems by the Shevchenko monument.

V. V. Ovsienko: Do you remember who?

L. L. Huk: I think Olena Chornovolova was reading poems, many people were reading. They laid flowers. I remember we made a beautiful wreath from wheat stalks, and one man attached a yellow-and-blue ribbon to it—and it looked so beautiful—and there was viburnum on that wreath. And so they read. Oles Serhiyenko read something, and that girl, I think it was Olena Chornovil who read poems. Then they sang. Then people started shouting that plainclothes agents were coming towards us, coming, coming… A friend and I moved away, sat on a bench, there was a bench there. And against this backdrop, they started grabbing people and throwing them like sheep into a truck. Well, and they drove them away. And we went, I think, before that… on the twenty-second… then, some time later on May 22nd, they started holding some kind of festival near this monument.

V. V. Ovsienko: But did you march all the way to the Central Committee then?

L. L. Huk: No.

V. V. Ovsienko: No? Because Mykola described that in more detail.

L. L. Huk: I didn't go to the Central Committee. I must have fallen behind. I sat on that bench and probably missed the part where they went to the Central Committee. But I was later near the Shevchenko museum, when they told me about it, that they had gone to the Central Committee and written a protest, that someone met them there, received them and gave a long lecture…

V. V. Ovsienko: Holovchenko.

L. L. Huk: And some Popov, the secretary for ideology, Popov. Well, Holovchenko… So they received them, talked to them, calmed them down. I remember that too. Then we often made those wreaths at Alla Horska's place. She lived not far from the monument, on Repin Street, and we would make them and carry either a basket or a wreath, usually a wreath, from there. What else? I was at Alla Horska's grave when she still had that wooden monument, it had already fallen apart.

V. V. Ovsienko: And what about samvydav literature, did it circulate among you then, and what was circulating?

L. L. Huk: What circulated among us was “Regarding…

V. V. Ovsienko: …the Trial of Pohruzhalskyi.”

L. L. Huk: Ivan Dziuba's “Internationalism or Russification?” circulated.

V. V. Ovsienko: Symonenko's diary, with his poems, probably circulated?

L. L. Huk: Symonenko's diary with his poems, I remember, I had that diary. And I went to my late husband's place (late now, he was alive then), and we buried that diary in a bottle somewhere under a tree. And I tried to go back, tried to get to that diary, but I couldn't find it anymore and never did. And then there was literature here. I came to Skadovsk in 1967 after graduation. And from 1967, I had Sverstiuk’s “Cathedral in Scaffolding” here, and something by Drahomanov, and a lot of literature was here, it's listed in the inventory of items confiscated from me. By the way, in 1972, they even confiscated works by Lenin, in which I had marked quotes defending the Ukrainian language and the right of a nation to self-determination—and they confiscated those books too. And they never returned them.

V. V. Ovsienko: So Lenin also ended up as a criminal.

L. L. Huk: Yes, he did, and he’s still there in the criminal files, sitting somewhere in the KGB archives. But I don't know why they won't return them.

V. V. Ovsienko: Did you appeal?

L. L. Huk: I wrote a request, I think the request is somewhere in there. They never gave them back, just refused, and that was it. So, well, in 1967 we also had a community here.

V. V. Ovsienko: You came back here, right?

L. L. Huk: After I served my time?

V. V. Ovsienko: No, no, after you finished your studies, where did you go?

L. L. Huk: I came here by assignment, to Skadovsk.

V. V. Ovsienko: And where, where did they place you for work?

L. L. Huk: As a doctor at the district sanitary-epidemiological station. I worked there as a doctor.

V. V. Ovsienko: And how exactly did they send you here—you didn't have any roots here, did you?

L. L. Huk: No, no, no one, nothing, they sent me to Kherson Oblast. Actually, at graduation, the “buyers” came, remember? They offered me Kherson Oblast specifically. Dr. Huzeyeva from the oblast san-station came from Kherson Oblast, she was inviting people to Kherson Oblast. People didn't really want to go to Kherson Oblast. I, for example, wanted to go to my Poltava Oblast, closer to my mother, wherever they would send me there. But they offered me Kherson. I said: “I can't go to Kherson, I want to go to Poltava Oblast. I have a sick husband, I want to be near my family.” “Alright, we have a place on the Black Sea coast.”

V. V. Ovsienko: Did they give you some housing here or what?

L. L. Huk: If it's on the Black Sea coast, then I'll probably go, because I have a sick husband.

V. V. Ovsienko: Could you give your husband's name, first and last?

L. L. Huk: My husband was Vasyl Musiyovych Huk, born in 1926, from Cherkasy Oblast, the village of Veselyi Kut in Talne district. His father, Musiy Huk, was repressed in 1937, and he left behind six children. A single mother, with six children on her hands. They took the father, and he never came back. And by the way, this husband of mine—we met in Cherkasy, in a sanatorium—by the way, he was the one who most opened my eyes to the truth of the present day in 1962, that this is the kind of system it is. I used to think it was just in our village, and in the neighboring ones I'd been to. That it's a system and that the main culprit of this system is Stalin. Well, there's even a photograph of me burning a picture of Stalin.

V. V. Ovsienko: So he’s gone?

L. L. Huk: He passed away.

V. V. Ovsienko: When?

L. L. Huk: In 1971, before my arrest. One of my friends said that thank God he died, because he wouldn't have been able to bear them taking you away from a small child. And practically or legally for nothing, because all, almost all the evidence was fabricated. Because those who they said would confirm that I gave them something to read, they denied it in court, saying they hadn't read it, didn't remember, that I hadn't given them anything, that they had looked through books in a bookstore, took them to read, and returned them, put them back. So very few confirmed that I was, so to speak, disseminating anti-state or deliberately slanderous literature that defamed the Soviet party system.

V. V. Ovsienko: And when you came here, you probably visited Kyiv quite often, right? You maintained contact with people from Kyiv?

L. L. Huk: Often, often.

V. V. Ovsienko: And who did you visit there?

L. L. Huk: Nadiya Svitlychna, Mykola Plakhotniuk when he worked in Dymer, Oksana Yakivna. In general, during my studies, I was often at Oksana Yakivna’s, at Nadiyka's place when she lived somewhere on the outskirts, I often went to Alla Horska's, to Halyna Sevruk's, I was acquainted with Liudmyla Semykina. I later met Oles Shevchenko, and who else from those who were repressed?… One time, around 1968, 14 people came to my place for a vacation.

V. V. Ovsienko: I've heard about that. Who was it?

L. L. Huk: It was Shemeka, I don't know if he's still around.

V. V. Ovsienko: His first name?

L. L. Huk: I don't remember. Shemeka, then Vysota with his wife, Anatoliy Vysota with his wife, Mykola Plakhotniuk was there, then Katrusia Vysotska,..

V. V. Ovsienko: Ah, I know Kateryna.

L. L. Huk: ...Zhora Veremiychyk...

V. V. Ovsienko: I know Veremiychyk too.

L. L. Huk: Well, they created—they are younger, they might remember the names—they created the Skadovsk People's Republic here, they had their own flag.

V. V. Ovsienko: How so? What kind of republic was that?

L. L. Huk: Well, just like that, they wrote a charter for the Skadovsk People's Republic, made a flag—yellow on one side, blue on the other, this was in 1968. A cat was sewn on one side, and on the other, a skull with a spoon and fork underneath it. And they would take this flag to the beach, and on the beach, people took them for foreigners. They would come up to them and ask what country they were from. They would joke that we are from a people's republic. And they published a newspaper every day. I deeply regret not keeping that newspaper, that they took it with them. And since they took it, they probably lost it, because if I had it, it would have survived.

V. V. Ovsienko: So they were vacationing here—for how long?

L. L. Huk: About a month, I think. They vacationed for a month, sleeping side-by-side in that room, side-by-side here, and our children were in there. And Shemeka was the president. There were ministers—of education, and security… My three-year-old son was the minister of security.

V. V. Ovsienko: Interesting…

L. L. Huk: It's interesting how he determined loyalty. He decided whether to accept other people into the Skadovsk People's Republic or not. So if he said yes, if he liked them, they were accepted. If not, they could only come as guests, they didn't become part of the People's Republic.

V. V. Ovsienko: Please state your son's name and when he was born.

L. L. Huk: Yaroslav Huk, my son, was born in 1966.

V. V. Ovsienko: And the date?

L. L. Huk: May 18.

V. V. Ovsienko: Let it be recorded. And please continue about the republic.

L. L. Huk: They made a very interesting newspaper here, they took it with them, it was kept in the house.

V. V. Ovsienko: What was its name?

L. L. Huk: I don't remember, I've forgotten.

V. V. Ovsienko: I'll ask Veremiychyk.

L. L. Huk: Or Mykola…

V. V. Ovsienko: Or Mykola.

L. L. Huk: Or Veremiychyk, he's younger, Veremiychyk, he'll remember that newspaper. What else? They took turns cooking. Everyone would go to the beach, one person would come back earlier and prepare lunch. Then they would go to the beach after lunch, and after lunch someone would come back earlier to cook dinner. And in the morning, I guess they cooked all together, because I was at work. So I had, so to speak, a month of rest, meaning I only went to work and didn't have to deal with the kitchen or cleaning. It was so strange to not have to do any of that. That's about the Skadovsk People's Republic. Well, we held evenings here.

V. V. Ovsienko: You said this was in 1968, right?

L. L. Huk: 1968… no, 1969, the Skadovsk People's Republic. What else? Many people came to visit me. It was, so to speak, something like a “transit point.” Oksana Yakivna came several times, Serhiyenko was here, Mykhailo Masiutko was here with his wife, Svitlana Kyrychenko was here, Levko Yashchenko and Lida Orel.

V. V. Ovsienko: Leopold?

L. L. Huk: Leopold. They were with their children… Shevchenko came with a friend, Iryna Korsunska, who was Sakharov's secretary for a time, Nadiyka Svitlychna.

V. V. Ovsienko: So you really did have “anti-Soviet gatherings”?

L. L. Huk: Yes. Sashko Martynenko, Ivan Sokulsky. So I had, so to speak, as you said, “gatherings of nationalists.” And it was obvious they were being watched, because both Masiutko and Badzio noticed it. [Interference, tape recorder turns off].

V. V. Ovsienko: You can speak now.

L. L. Huk: People from Skadovsk, young people, used to come over. They would read, borrow my literature, my books. I had and still have many books, and they would take samvydav works and read them. And a lot of young people would come. Apparently, that's what scared them.

In 1972, the repressions began in Kyiv. They came to search my house.

V. V. Ovsienko: You must have heard about them on the radio, right?

L. L. Huk: I heard about Yaroslav Dobosh on the radio. Then I read in “Pravda Ukrainy” that he was a great enemy—that he was smuggling some kind of literature out of Ukraine. Well, they connected his name with Nadiyka Svitlychna, and then they connected mine as well. When they interrogated my colleagues or the people from our evening gatherings, they would ask, “Look, Huk doesn't deny her involvement—here, look,” and they would give them the article about this Dobosh to read, showing what an enemy he was. “She doesn't deny that you were present during such a conversation.” She would say, “I swear to God, I don't remember.” “But you were there.” And they would convince her that she was there, that I had once said something, told some political jokes, that I justified the Banderites, that I said we have no freedom of speech, or that our elections are undemocratic, or about the Holodomor of 1933—did we talk about that? Some confirmed it in court, but most did not confirm it in court, they evaded it, said they didn't remember. I, of course, told people this information and gave them things to read, whatever I had. But when it came to court, people, practically, got scared and even avoided testifying—saying they didn't remember. So during the investigation, they were convinced, and they gave testimony that, yes, she said we have no freedom of speech, or about the Holodomor, or about Russification, that such great Russification is happening in Ukraine, that there is no freedom for the Ukrainian language, no development, that they force us to write official documents in Russian. Just like our chief doctor of the Skadovsk district sanitary-epidemiological station, Mykola Ivanovych Podlyavskyi, he just…

V. V. Ovsienko: What was the last name?

L. L. Huk: Podlyavskyi, Mykola Ivanovych. He would simply force me to write in Russian. I would write in Ukrainian, and he would curse me out—go rewrite it. I’d say I wouldn’t, and he would curse me out and still force me to rewrite it, because if I didn't submit the information to the oblast san-station by a certain deadline, then I would have to be punished. And punishment meant being thrown out on the street, and I had a small child, so sometimes I was forced to, most of the time. Then I convinced the oblast specialists that I write in Ukrainian, and they agreed. There was even a Jewish man there, Rafail Semenovych Rytsyk, so when I was submitting my annual report, Podlyavskyi came later to trip me up—at the oblast san-station, we go there every year—to trip me up: “Rafail Semenovych, do you know what a ‘tsvyn-tar’ [cemetery] is?”—he was in the middle of a story. “Some kind of musical instrument.” And he accepted the report from me. But he accepted it, he had no objections to the Ukrainian language.

So, I had already heard that there were arrests across Ukraine, especially in Kyiv—Nadiya Svitlychna, Serhiyenko, Plakhotniuk. But I didn't expect it for myself, because I wasn't some major figure here. Well, I wrote poems—some were published, some were not, we held evening gatherings. We held them, so to speak, within the framework of the law at the time—we spoke, presented facts from Lenin, from the classics, Karl Marx, the classics of communism. But even these quotes, information from Lenin, irritated them, and they were afraid to allow them.

And then on February 16, they pick me up from the kindergarten, right after I dropped off my child, bring me home and—a search. Four KGB officers and two witnesses. Well, they conducted the search, going through all the books, leafing through every page. They took two sacks of literature, packed it all up, two sacks of literature. They took Lenin’s works with my notes and markings. They took several of my notebooks—I wrote a lot, I tried my hand at a long poem, at prose, but I didn't submit much for publication. They were especially enraged by the poem “The Steppe and the Dry Wind,” where there was a hint that the dry wind—a wind from the East—meant it was from Moscow, and so on. And that was all considered slander, even Lenin's works were slander against the Soviet government.

And then from February 16 they didn't touch me, I just worked. Actually, they searched for two days in a row—they didn't finish the first day, so they sealed the sacks and left them here. My assistant from the san-station was living with me then. So they entrusted them… Valeriy Zheleznyi and his wife—they were both living with me because they had no money to live on, and I didn't take any rent from them—so they were tasked with guarding those sacks of literature. They confiscated notebooks with phone numbers, addresses, everything. True, I managed to snatch one notebook from them—they had piled them on the table, and I quietly sat down, took it, and tucked it into my waistband. But that didn't change anything—they already had all my acquaintances and were shaking down all my acquaintances.

And then until July, they didn't bother me. I just worked and thought it had blown over. Practically, there was nothing to charge me with, because legally, according to their own laws, there was no corpus delicti in my case. Even by their laws, because it wasn't slander that there was no freedom of speech—it wasn't slander, it was the truth, it was all true, everyone said it was the truth. And then, well, people wouldn't say it on the street, but when they talked to me, they would say that it was the truth, it was clear that it was the truth. And then sometime in July, they conducted a second search, confiscated another pile of samvydav literature. I didn't think they would conduct two, three searches. Well, everything quieted down and it started to accumulate again. I was traveling to Kyiv, after all. And so after the second search, I went to Kyiv, consulted with Oksana Yakivna. It was she who told me to deny everything, to admit nothing, because she said, in 1937, when they imprisoned…

V. V. Ovsienko: In 1947.

L. L. Huk: In 1947, when they imprisoned her and her sister Vira, Vira admitted her guilt, and because of that, she was never rehabilitated. But Oksana Yakivna admitted nothing. They were imprisoned together, but Oksana Yakivna was rehabilitated, and Vira was not. So she said: don't admit anything. And I admitted nothing. At first, I argued, proving that this is true, that is true, that is true, and then I started denying it. That I had bad relations with so-and-so, for instance, with Minayev—he slandered me a lot too. Dr. Minayev even wrote in his own hand that I even told him jokes, that I told him Soviet troops had occupied Czechoslovakia and that they behaved like occupiers—he wrote all this, as if they had behaved any differently. That was the slander.

Well, so they conducted two searches that summer, then things quieted down. And when they were searching, they even looked inside the stove, I had a stove. And they have this habit of behaving crudely during a personal search. It's a habit of theirs. When they were going through the literature, for example, one of those KGB agents said: “For some people, maybe, but for us these libraries don't smell very pleasant.” I understood then that they were shaking down many people. They went through these libraries, the libraries were hostile to them. They were used to having specially selected literature. I had mostly Ukrainian literature. In the 1960s, it was the “Thaw,” so you could find literature that wasn't to their taste. Well, so they confiscated it, and from about July things went quiet. August, September, October—it was quiet, but they had already made me sign a pledge not to leave in the summer. The interrogations began. I remember how Mykhailo Lytvynovskyi interrogated me, he interrogated me in an office on the second floor of our militsiya [police station], and on the desk under the glass was a portrait of Stalin, and they were interrogating. But it was already 1972, Stalin had supposedly been debunked, but they were returning to Stalinist methods. They didn't beat me, but Lytvynovskyi once said, while cracking nuts, “If only your little fingers were in here.” Later I wrote a protest to the prosecutor, and they replaced my investigator. They gave me another investigator—Aleksandrovskyi. That investigator behaved more civilly, he didn't allow himself such outbursts, such statements.

V. V. Ovsienko: So they summoned you?

L. L. Huk: They summoned me for interrogation here, in Skadovsk. Here in Skadovsk, there was prosecutor Yurpolskyi and this Aleksandrovskyi.

V. V. Ovsienko: Yurpolskyi?

L. L. Huk: Yurpolskyi, yes. And they interrogated me, for a very, very long time, going over every little detail twenty times—who heard it, who said it, did you say it? I didn't say it, as for jokes, I said I don't like telling them in general, maybe I told one once, but everyone tells them, including you, I said. Who knows, maybe we got together with friends and told one. What else? The main accusation—which the Supreme Court later dismissed—was that I defended the Banderites, that they were national heroes, in that vein. And they also threw out the charge about the Holodomor of 1933, because one person confirmed it, but no one else did a second time. And in court, that one person started to have doubts: maybe I didn't say it, maybe I misunderstood, because I was asking questions there. I had a good lawyer in court, he defended me.

V. V. Ovsienko: What was the lawyer's last name?

L. L. Huk: Yezhov, Ivan Semenovych Yezhov. Later, after my trial, they stripped him of the right to defend people like me.

V. V. Ovsienko: Did he also defend Halyna Hordasevych? She recently… No, that wasn't her, no, no.

L. L. Huk: Well, I don't know. I know that after that, Oksana Yakivna—she found him for me—said that he was deprived of the right to defend people like us.

V. V. Ovsienko: But someone else has mentioned him to me, I'll recall who.

L. L. Huk: And in his closing statement, he said that I should be immediately released from custody. So from the summer, I was living under a sword of Damocles—July, August, September, October, November, and on December 9, they took me. I was at a funeral for some acquaintances, and Yurpolskyi came right up, called me out “for a minute,” led me to the militsiya station, and there they arrested me and put me in the KPZ—the pre-trial detention cell.

V. V. Ovsienko: The KPU [Kamera Poperednioho Uviaznennia].

L. L. Huk: It was terrible. I think if you put criminals in that KPU for a week or two, they wouldn't want to be criminals anymore. You walk in, it’s about a meter and a half, then there's a sort of platform—not a platform, but a stage, and on that stage, the length of the wall and about a meter and twenty centimeters wide—that’s where you could sleep. The light bulb was huge and so bright, and it burned all night, so you couldn't sleep all night. It felt like it wasn't just emitting that bright light and heat, but it was actually burning your eyes, your head, your brain. It was terrible.

They put someone in with me, of course—Oksana Yakivna had already warned me that they plant “stool pigeons,” as they call them, with prisoners to get information—but they took her out after forty minutes and didn't bring her back, because I didn't tell her anything, as I already knew. If, perhaps, Oksana Yakivna hadn't warned me, I would have been in for much longer, but as it was, I didn't take anything upon myself, I didn't try to prove anything. I was told that you can't prove anything to them, they know it all themselves, but they need to imprison you, and they will imprison you in any case, but the less you take upon yourself, the shorter your sentence will be.

And so I spent a few days in that terrible KPU, with that latrine bucket, they brought porridge once a day, and otherwise water that they called tea. But since they didn't give anything else, and they only gave you this much water to wash with, in your two cupped hands, and no other water, you had to wash somehow. They gave you water for two cupped hands, but you need to wash a bit more, so I used the tea—not tea, but boiled water.

A few days later they sent me to Kherson. I asked the chief of police and the prosecutor here, because my mother, who was already old then, had come to stay with my son, and I asked if I could give her a note for my things, my clothes, because it was still warm when they took me. It’s still warm here in December. I wrote a list of things for them to bring—they didn’t allow it, they took me there in my summer clothes.

V. V. Ovsienko: And who was your son left with?

L. L. Huk: With my mother—my mother came from the Poltava region. I wrote to them to come, and they came. My son was with my mother, and I asked them not to leave the house, to live there.

V. V. Ovsienko: How old was he? You said he was from what year—sixty-five?

L. L. Huk: From 1966. They took me in 1972—so he was 5 years old. He started school at 6. I asked my late husband's sister to take him earlier, because I wanted him to have the opportunity to enter an institute before the army. Because the army often distracts from studies—a person learns some trade there and then goes to work as a driver or something else.

And so they lived here, and they took me to Kherson. It was only in Kherson that they brought my things, brought a package. But I don't think I need to tell you how they feed you there.

V. V. Ovsienko: Please do, it's not just for me. Tell some details—it's not for my sake.

L. L. Huk: Well—they fed us very badly, extremely so. In the morning and evening, a soup with nothing floating in it, almost transparent—there was something whitish in it, rarely you’d find a piece of potato a third the size of a finger, and that was it. And they gave us kasha. And the worst thing—that could be endured, because I was used to hunger since childhood—the worst thing was that there were 12 people in the cell, and in the corner stood that latrine bucket, or toilet, and that you had to use it—that was the worst, the most terrible thing.

V. V. Ovsienko: The kind that was carried out, right?

L. L. Huk: No, in the Kherson prison there was a toilet. And then they brought us work there—there were 12 of us, but sometimes, when they were moving a transport, there would be 17, or 20 people, sleeping on the floor or two to a bunk, or on the table, or on the benches. And the worst situation was precisely that one, I still can't—everything could be endured, but I cannot stand that crude profanity, even though our chief doctor curses and swears, and this kind of humiliation—no way to wash, no way to wash yourself, forgive my language, no way to relieve yourself, nothing—everything in full view of people. [End of track]. Once a day they took us out for a walk—a walk in a kind of casemate, the sky covered with barbed wire, and there between those walls, covered with cement “fur coats,” so you couldn't even lean your shoulder against them because it was prickly—we walked in a circle there. They led us out cell by cell—hands behind your back and they led you out. But people sang there—some danced, some sang, some shouted to the neighboring casemate: “Marusia, don't confess to anything!” Because although they were constantly saying that a confession is taken into account at trial—no, it just gets you a longer sentence. And they systematically said that, yes, but they tacked on longer sentences, while those who didn't confess got less.

Later. Then they gave us work in the cells. The Gorky candy factory in Kherson started ordering boxes for candy.

V. V. Ovsienko: This was still during the investigation? Work during the investigation?

L. L. Huk: Yes. Well, my investigation was already closed.

V. V. Ovsienko: Because I know that during the investigation there is no work.

L. L. Huk: No, in the SIZO [pre-trial detention center] they gave us work.

V. V. Ovsienko: Interesting.

L. L. Huk: They gave us work, and we glued and assembled boxes for candy. And whoever could quickly make the quota—if you made 20 boxes, you earned 10 kopecks. And we earned enough for at least toothpaste. We had our own toothbrushes, but we earned money for toothpaste, because there was nothing else, because they gave you 2.50 a month, and with that, thank God, you could buy soap and tooth powder, because they didn't let you buy paste. Then I somehow bought… no, didn't buy—I begged a guard, and he brought me a piece of shoe polish to polish my boots, because they were so worn out. What else was there? And when they gave us the boxes, we said we wouldn't do it—we'll do it if you give us a piece of cardboard. They gave us a piece of cardboard, it was rolled up, and we used that cardboard to screen off the toilet, and then we started to feel better, because it wasn't in full view of everyone, it was partitioned off. And we made boxes—different, beautiful boxes for candy, and we earned money.

And then after that, in February, they sent me on a transport.

V. V. Ovsienko: But wait a minute—what was the date of the trial and how did that procedure unfold?

L. L. Huk: The trial itself? The trial itself—it’s in the documents, when it was, because I can't tell you right now. I think it was February 9, 1973. It was in the oblast court. The judge was Zhadanivskyi or Zhadanovskyi, he was the judge. First of all, the trial was closed.

V. V. Ovsienko: Is that what the verdict says?

L. L. Huk: No.

V. V. Ovsienko: It doesn't?

L. L. Huk: It says that it was in an open session. They let the witnesses in only after they had given their testimony. So, Oksana Stepanivna stood there for several days, then they postponed the trial again.

V. V. Ovsienko: Oksana Stepanivna—perhaps Yakivna?

L. L. Huk: Oksana Yakivna Meshko, I beg your pardon. My mother was not at the trial. My colleagues were there and some acquaintances, neighbors, who used to come to my place to read books. We held evening gatherings—8–10 people would gather, we would read Shevchenko, Symonenko, Ivan Drach, Lina Kostenko, especially her “Berestechko.” And Vasyl Symonenko was, so to speak, the idol of the youth at that time, and he said exactly what pained people the most. And his “Diary” was also read, about how his mother worked her whole life and received a pension of 12 rubles, and he appealed, I think, to someone to support her, because you can't live on 12 rubles. By the way, my mother also initially received 12 rubles, and then they added 36, and then, like now, they add 5 hryvnias at a time. That's the situation.

They tried me, interrogated me well, but most people—almost all of them—behaved decently in court. Most said they didn't remember me saying such things. Only the Minayevs testified against me. This Anna Petrovna said: “Yes, she said there is no freedom of speech.” But then at the trial she says: “Well, does it exist, if you are trying her for saying that? She didn't do anything, she just talked.” Well, they gave me a good character reference at work, because I really worked like a Trojan—that's how I'm used to it, I still work that way—the reference was good, people also characterized me well, that I was conscientious, honest, willing to share, and so on. And I, for example, am very grateful to these people who truly behaved decently—it's a rare phenomenon even now, to behave decently. And in fact, even now some perceive the word “Banderite” as a curse word, the syndrome of a bandit—they've cultivated it from the war until the present day, that they are just bandits, and that's all. But they didn't testify against me, they even evaded it—saying they didn't remember: maybe she said it, maybe not, maybe I heard it somewhere else. And this was at the trial.

And so they gave me not much—they gave me one year under Article 187-prime for the dissemination of knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet system. That's what it was.

I served my time in Dniprodzerzhynsk.

V. V. Ovsienko: And the name of that institution? Do you remember the number?

L. L. Huk: I don't remember. Maybe it's in the letters, but Mykola Plakhotniuk took the letters, I gave them to him. The address is there—I think, 301… I don't recall. Well, what about there? It was terrible there. There were terrible women there—drug addicts, and so brutal that one time I thought… This Fefelova… She was cursing and swearing so much, and screaming, and this was in the washroom, so I thought I was going to smash her head with a bucket—for that brutality. All my life, even the men in my village didn't swear in front of women—and here the chief doctor swears in front of women, and not just like that, but swears during a staff meeting.

V. V. Ovsienko: That was their language.

L. L. Huk: It was the language of the leadership, and it still is. And I heard so much profanity there, but to this day it provokes such a resistance inside me that I can't stand it. As the chief doctor once said to the three or four of us when we went to his office—I was just back from vacation, and he was cursing at them. So I said something, and he said: “Not at you, not at you!” But it was at me—I was right there. We leave, they're laughing, and to this day I can't forget it, even though so many years have passed.

V. V. Ovsienko: You know, I was held in Vilniansk, I was also in a criminal zone—it was normal, the zeks and the wardens, they all spoke the same language. And once, one of the unit heads started in on me, and I couldn't hold back either—I sent him back to his own mother, who taught him such language. He was dumbfounded—I explained the meaning of those words to him.

L. L. Huk: That's how it was. Well, I served my time there. But it was terrible—that zone, although I say it's a prison, it's located in a basin, and up above, you can see the blast furnaces. That zone is covered with asphalt, and when we go out in the morning, everything is completely covered with a shiny metallic dust.

V. V. Ovsienko: It's a sediment.

L. L. Huk: Yes, a sediment, can you imagine? That's at night, but it's there during the day too, it's just not as visible during the day. Then, during the day it gets trampled down, so it's not as visible. And imagine, all the people sitting there are breathing this metallic dust. And they want our people to be healthy? It's as if it's on purpose. In Kherson, they paved the floors in the dormitories with asphalt, and there, in such a basin, they built a concentration camp, in a way that the destruction of these people's health was planned in advance.

V. V. Ovsienko: And how many women were in that zone?

L. L. Huk: About fifteen hundred, and it was built for eight hundred.

V. V. Ovsienko: And it was all full?

L. L. Huk: It was all overcrowded.

V. V. Ovsienko: And what was the work?

L. L. Huk: We sewed women's nightgowns, bedsheets, and duvet covers. Since I didn't sew, because one of my eyes is injured and I don't see well with it, I can't sew a very straight line—so I ironed and folded. They would take us out at four in the morning…

V. V. Ovsienko: Why so early?

L. L. Huk: We worked in two shifts, not three. There were two shifts, and we practically worked a shift and a half. Maybe that's how it was supposed to be? Perhaps there weren't enough people, because it was probably planned for one shift from the beginning—some work before lunch, others after. But then they made it two shifts, so we worked a shift and a half. And the worst thing, what struck me—now they talk about homosexuality openly, but I saw it then, and that, along with the profanity—that struck me the most. Although I believe and say today that some biochemical processes occur in the human body, I still consider it debauchery. This you can leave out if you have to write it down…

V. V. Ovsienko: And did drugs get in there too, vodka?

L. L. Huk: There were drugs, but I didn't see any vodka—probably if anyone had vodka, it was only the administration, and they drank it somewhere secretly, so that few would see. At least, I didn't see anyone drinking vodka. There was a commissary once a month, for seven rubles. And on commissary day, we would buy cookies, margarine, and make a cake.

V. V. Ovsienko: Did you ever have a visit?

L. L. Huk: No, I had a visit in the prison in Kherson after the trial, but not in the camp, because my mother was frail, she had a tumor. She was undergoing radiotherapy, and I was simply afraid she wouldn't endure it, so I wrote to her not to come. So… Well, I was in Kherson for a long time, so I wasn't in Dniprodzerzhynsk for that long. They sent me packages sometimes. Then—an interesting fact, maybe I shouldn't say this—I have an acquaintance here in Skadovsk, and that acquaintance had someone from the municipal services in Dniprodzerzhynsk, who worked there, and she came on an inspection, for a consultation on how to build stoves—so she brought me a chocolate bar once, and a second time. So we made a drink from the chocolate. I was friends with one woman who was imprisoned for a scam—she wrote off something for someone whose meter wasn't working. She wrote it off, and they caught her in the scam—it's called a scam. So I ate with her, because you couldn't live alone there. And if it weren't for this Lyuda Pluzhnyk—her name was Lyusia—I would have gotten myself another sentence then with that Fefelova for her profanity. It was Lyusia who stopped me from hitting her on the head with a bucket, she intercepted the bucket. And so we ate there in pairs, in threes—then you could somehow vary the commissary: someone buys margarine, someone buys cookies, someone buys tea, and then it was easier to survive, because what could you buy for seven rubles.

Well, and that's it—I served my time, came back to Skadovsk.

V. V. Ovsienko: Were you released on the exact day?

L. L. Huk: No, a month before my halfway point, I filed all the documents for a case review, to be released early. And by the way, we even organized a Lermontov evening there, there were sports competitions.

V. V. Ovsienko: So, there were more or less decent people there after all?

L. L. Huk: How decent? Well, someone got caught in trade, short-weighted someone. Or in re-sorting—products at one price and another price, and she sold them at the second price. So they… What kind of pennies were they all paid?

V. V. Ovsienko: Ordinary Soviet people who got caught.

L. L. Huk: Yes, who got caught. Of course, there were some from the kolkhoz—carrying half a sack of potatoes from the field. Or this one who wrote off for some woman that her meter wasn't working. So there were all sorts, but mostly, the majority were criminals who behaved brutally and didn't go to work, didn't work on the job. They didn't punish them with anything either—they couldn't be punished, because I think they themselves were afraid of them.

V. V. Ovsienko: So when were you released?

L. L. Huk: I was released in September, two and a half months before the end of my term.

V. V. Ovsienko: And how did that happen?

L. L. Huk: It’s considered release after half the term, but they dragged it out so long that… They probably dragged it out on purpose, because I had already been offered one job, one director offered me a job, and then they kicked him out of that job. Then, when I came here, wherever I turned—no work. At the san-station they refused me immediately, at the hospital they refused me. I went to the veterinary clinic—“We need a sanitary doctor right now, come on such-and-such a day.” I arrive—“You know,” Melnychenko throws up his hands, “they told me this position has been cut, when I said I wanted to hire you.” Then I tried to get any job—they wouldn't even take me as a cleaner; I arranged to be a guard at the construction site of the district state administration, or RAPO, they told me when to start work. I show up for work, and everything is locked up, nowhere to go. In the morning I call the director, or he was the construction manager, Mykhailo Pavlovych Bratash—he says: “You know, they cut the guard position for me too.”

V. V. Ovsienko: Just like that.

L. L. Huk: So it was locked up, and that was that. And then for a long time I was without work. Then I went to the oblast health department several times, and to our prosecutor. He says: “Maybe they don't want to hire you?”—“Look, here's a signed application—how can they not want to?” He threw up his hands. I went to Kateryna Ivanivna Kharlamova, who was the head of the oblast health department, and she agreed to give me a job as a methodologist doctor at the district hospital. I am grateful to her for that. Still, she told me to come back in a few days, but still she was taking a burden upon herself, sticking her neck out. They hired me for a job where I don't go out much, because the san-station involved visiting sites. I know everything in general that's in the district, but as a methodologist—it's office work, writing speeches, analyzing medical work, treatment, morbidity, and so on. And they hired me. I was waiting for a job at the san-station, and I waited for it with great difficulty. I was released in 1973, but they didn't hire me until 1974. And the chief doctor of the san-station, even back when they were searching my place, said: “Whatever happens, I will hire you.” Because he never had and never will have such a fool for work. And then—he's afraid. There was a position, for instance, of assistant sanitary doctor—I submitted an application. “No, because you are [unintelligible] a doctor.” I say: “But you don't want to hire a doctor?”—“I can't.” And only after more than a year did he hire me, after he probably held consultations and got it through the trade union meetings—that the employees were petitioning for me to be hired. So they hired me again at the san-station, and I've been working there to this day, in communal hygiene. My sites are difficult—sanitary cleaning, sewage treatment plants, water pipelines, hairdressers, bathhouses, dormitories, which are now in a state of neglect, everything is in a terrible state.

So, I think, that's everything concerning the repressions. In 1988, I was rehabilitated, they sent me a certificate of rehabilitation.

V. V. Ovsienko: And during these years after your release, did you experience any harassment, other than with work? Were you summoned, perhaps, in connection with any cases?

L. L. Huk: They didn't summon me much—sometimes they would drop by, sometimes they would call me in for a chat, but nothing major, like who was at your place and who comes to visit. I'd say: “You already know anyway—why do you need me to tell you?”

V. V. Ovsienko: So people did come to visit you?

L. L. Huk: Every summer—my house is full every summer. Only in recent years, when Mykola comes alone, or Valentyna with their son, or Mykola with their son. But before, they would come every summer, it was nothing. What happened? During that period, in 1977, we started a battle. We had rice paddies here, seven farms were growing rice and using pesticides from airplanes—and the paddies are located 50, 100, 200 meters from the bay, and to grow them they need to be flooded with water, and then the water is drained into the sea and they are flooded again, and the pesticides were put into the ground during planting, then they sowed, then it stood under water for 7 days, then after 7–9 days they drained it, because the plant needs to catch a breath of air, to grow, and then they flooded it and sprayed from a plane. And this is a resort area, and these plumes of pesticides from the planes are swirling around, falling into the drainage canals, and right over the bay—where people are swimming. And this is called a resort area! And so from 1977, we conducted scientific research, the oblast san-station helped me—there was Tamara Leonidivna, she helped, we even set up 14 stationary points through the oblast san-station, took weekly samples for pesticides and then wrote a letter to the Academy of Sciences about the fact that the bay is becoming desalinated and pesticides are appearing in large quantities. They then sent a floating laboratory from the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, the “Miklouho-Maclay,” which conducted research and proved that the bay was being desalinated and contaminated with pesticides, and they issued a resolution to declare our zone the Skadovsk medical zone for health improvement and treatment of people, mainly children. And the Skadovsk medical zone includes Skadovsk, Holoprystan, and Kalanchak districts.

And so our actions began, we started to gather materials to prove that growing rice in Skadovsk is ecologically harmful. We worked with the Medical Institute in Kyiv, with the Institute of Economics, and the Institute for Productive Forces of the Academy of Sciences, with the Institute of Biology, the Institute of Geology. And finally, in 1987, we succeeded in getting a scientific validation of the economic inexpediency and ecological harm of growing rice in the Skadovsk medical zone. We spent all our money—at least I did—all our savings (but what savings could there be, if after that prison I sold everything from the house until I got a job?), but still we had some savings, and we traveled to Kyiv, and to Simferopol, back to Kyiv, and to Odesa. And we still managed to get this scientific validation. I dug through mountains of project documentation. We have the administration of the Krasnoznamensk irrigation system here, and back in 1967, it was already laid out in their project that due to widespread rice cultivation in the Skadovsk district, flooding of populated areas and the liquidation of the resort zone were anticipated. Nobody knew about this! And if back then, in 1967, there were 27 health resorts in the district, now there are 80—and nobody knew about this, and they allowed construction! Even though the degradation of the Dzharylhach Bay, which adjoins our districts, was already planned by the project. And when we raised these documents, when in 1986, 66.6% of the water in the bay was contaminated with pesticides, which is 33% above the maximum permissible concentrations, they published a notice for me in the newspaper about it.

But this stirred people up so much that they started coming to me, and we created the Dzharylhach Ecological Society. And journalists supported us, Yura Vertepa was the first to support us, he wrote a big article in our newspaper. Then Oleksandr Horobets came—he was working for “Pravda Ukrainy” at the time—he published one article in “Pravda Ukrainy,” then a second one, we prepared material for the “Medical Gazette.” Alla Tiutiunyk prepared a film, “Underwater Waters”—she also proved that it was being contaminated. Then Tamara Khrushch came here with a television crew, they also made a film about the harmful effects of rice cultivation with so much evidence that everything was already substantiated. How many meetings we held, how many times they called us scoundrels and bandits and enemies! Because we were pushing for a resolution from the Ministry of Ecology or Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Health to stop rice cultivation in the Skadovsk medical zone using the existing technology. And in 1987, they stopped it with a resolution from the deputy chief state sanitary doctor of Ukraine, Brui, prohibiting aerial chemical treatments. This means that from 1988 they stopped aerial chemical treatments and from 1990 they stopped the use of pesticides in rice cultivation, and we don't know how to grow rice without pesticides, because we can't manage the technology. According to the rice technology—you throw in this soil pesticide, so to speak, but before that, you have to level the land so that the water evaporates gradually, gradually. That is, the level of this paddy must be plus or minus 12 centimeters. But they couldn't level this land properly, and the water level there was plus or minus up to your knees, plus or minus 27–34 centimeters. And it's clear that it dries up on top during this time, while a puddle remains at the bottom—which means you still have to drain the water. But a no-discharge technology was planned. But the no-discharge didn't work, and they were constantly draining. So, they sowed, threw in “Saturn” or “Ordram,” whatever they threw in, then sowed and flooded it. They flooded it, but not plus or minus 12 cm, but it stood at plus or minus 35 cm, it's clear that it's high, and in about 7–9 days the rice begins to sprout. Once it started to sprout—it needed to be dry so it could grow. And then they would flood it so there was always water. But it wouldn't dry out and wouldn't evaporate, because the water level was too high due to poor leveling of the paddies—and so they drained it, with fresh pesticides. And it's clear that these pesticides—according to the norms, for example, “Saturn” has a half-life of 40 days, but we were finding it in the water of the Dzharylhach Bay and in the canals the following April. So what 40 days?

In short, even these periods that were established for pesticides were lies, so as not to frighten people. People were being poisoned left and right—poisoned by rice, and by water. In short, in the 80s, at the end of the 80s, there were no gobies in the bay. According to the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas, 90% of the gobies that used to spawn here were destroyed. No crabs (80% that used to spawn here were destroyed by chemicals), and the shrimp also died. And for about 7 years, we had none of this in the Dzharylhach Bay. In 1990, when they stopped using pesticides, many farms gave up on rice because you can't grow it without pesticides, we don't know how, but 4 or 5 still grew it. And right away the next summer after that, shrimp started to appear, right away. This meant that the Dzharylhach Bay was showing that it could recover, just give it a chance, don't pollute it. And indeed, now you can buy shrimp from us, you can buy gobies, even crabs. Crabs are being caught and even that large flatfish, which is called kalkan here, has appeared.

So I, for one, consider it a merit of our community and my own merit—not of the official forces in the district, neither the san-station, nor the raikom, nor the district executive committee helped us with this, they only harassed us. The first secretary of the district party committee, whom, by the way, they recently honored, wouldn't even come out to talk to us and called us nothing but… And how hard it was for me at work! Every time I wrote a letter about this rice cultivation—it was a scandal, the chief doctor would come and curse and swear all the time, although he sometimes supported me secretly, so that no one would know. This led to stressful situations almost every day. But I believe that the fact that Skadovsk is now a resort, that people can come to Skadovsk to vacation from all over the world, especially from northern countries—there is no sea like it, and in general, no natural conditions like those in the Dzharylhach Bay anywhere else. There is a high concentration of iodine and bromine compounds here, which have a very positive effect on the body as a whole—on the nervous system, on the treatment of lungs—and also mixed with the field winds that carried and still carry the fragrant scents of medicinal field herbs, the healing properties of our resort are very high for people. And if our state understood and gave funds for the industrialization of this resort, this resort would be priceless in the whole world. For now, of course, there is no such possibility—for it to be a recreation industry, for the entire agriculture of our district and Holoprystan, and Kalanchak districts to work to create rehabilitation points or a rehabilitation center for Chernobyl children. You see, Chernobyl children—it's not just the Zhytomyr and Kyiv regions, about two-thirds of the entire territory of Ukraine—these are Chernobyl children, because the amount of iodine is decreasing and decreasing, and a rehabilitation center could be created here in Ukraine that would be unlike any other in the world.

Of course, there are also preserved mineral waters here, which could be used for treating the digestive tract and for treating joints, and for baths, but so far no one is developing them. True, there are also medicinal muds in small quantities, but so far this has not been developed here either. In short, if there were such state will and opportunity—of course, I understand that we don't have the opportunity for now, because the Lazarenkos and everyone else are taking huge billions for themselves, appropriating them, but a world-class resort could be created. We have now achieved that in 1998, a resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers was adopted on granting the Skadovsk medical zone the status of a state-level resort and on the improvement of the sanitary protection zone of the resort. So we are now, so to speak, on a legal footing—although back then we were piecing together laws from articles or points of various laws, but now it is written in one law what we need to do, if only there were good will and not this corruption that exists—from Skadovsk to Kyiv.

This is what I wanted, perhaps, to be heard. Because this is not so much my achievement, but it is important for the resort, for Ukraine.

V. V. Ovsienko: I would also like you to talk about your other public work, besides this environmental work—even briefly, just to outline it. What organizations were you in and are you in?

L. L. Huk: The very first organization was the Dzharylhach Ecological Society. They registered it for us, although they didn't allow it for a long time. We held many rallies. Then, from the very beginning—with the creation of the People's Movement of Ukraine with the announcement at the Writers' Union.

V. V. Ovsienko: Ah, so that was around February 1989?

L. L. Huk: Yes, yes, Vadym Smohytel called me and said that it had happened, the creation of the organization was beginning. And he, Vadym Smohytel, got me into the first constituent meeting of the Kyiv organization—we went through a boiler room somewhere, then from the boiler room we came out right at the door of a restroom, into the restroom, and then we came out of the restroom as if we were legitimate delegates. Then we went to Kherson to create the oblast organization. How much was said there, how many people spoke about violations, about crimes, about everything—well, people were venting then. And we went with Oksana Stepanivna Bilynska—there is a doctor here, she worked at the sports base—we went every Saturday, I can't even imagine it now: the buses were full, it wasn't very expensive, but all the time, as she puts it, we were riding “on our heels,” because so many people traveled on weekends. So on Saturday we would go there, spend the night with acquaintances, and return on Sunday, because we couldn't make it back on Saturday. And every Saturday. Then we went to the first congress, we also had another organization, which I think the KGB created, that there was supposedly another Rukh in Kherson, that supposedly the wrong members of Rukh went as delegates, but they recognized us from the very beginning. And Mykola Bratan went then, and… well, there were 22 of us.

V. V. Ovsienko: Was this here or in the whole oblast?

L. L. Huk: No, from Kherson to the congress in Kyiv. It was at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, and they wouldn't let me into the congress because I had to travel on Friday or even Thursday, I don't remember exactly.

V. V. Ovsienko: So it went on for three days? I remember, September 8, 9, and 10.

L. L. Huk: So I arrived at the very end of the day, I escaped from work by plane. But in the morning they wouldn't let me go. At first, the chief doctor said: “Fine, you can go,” and then he comes back from the raikom, where he was summoned, and said: “No, you're not going.” And so at the end of the day I went and flew there, arrived at the Polytechnic Institute, got in, and made it to the congress then. It was something amazing—people were on such a high, in such unity, and I can't even believe that now they have split, that now everyone has created their own party, they've created dozens of these little parties, forgetting the main goal—the building of Ukraine as a state, spiritual revival, the revival of language, culture, history. Because to this day there is no normal history textbook for studying history.

Then we created the Union of Ukrainian Women. The Union of Ukrainian Women is sort of registered and exists, but it is practically inactive. I managed to meet Nadiya Samuliak, and we created the Social Service of Ukraine, a district branch. And we work in this direction. What do we do? I met people at the congress and just got to know them, so we organized humanitarian aid—at first we brought it from Kyiv, then we arranged with the Mutual Aid Service in America, in Newark. Professor Voronka is the head there, and Sofia Temnytska—an elderly woman, already 60 years old—is connected with us and helps organize the parcels.

V. V. Ovsienko: I know her too.

L. L. Huk: And at 60 years old, she sent us about 20 boxes of parcels. And we distributed them—to the boarding school, to schools, to orphans, to my neighbors, to pensioners. In short, we clothed and shoed many people.

We won a grant for the “Good Samaritan” project, which exists, and every month we prepare food packages for orphans and children from single-parent or guardian families and large families. We have 20 children under our constant care. We also work with other local Skadovsk businessmen, and they help us buy medicine for those in special need of medicine, they help us prepare Christmas gifts. We organized a trip for our children to the western oblasts for the Christmas holidays. They went caroling and singing shchedrivky there.

Now we have prepared a project for a shelter. In our district hospital, in the children's ward, there are constantly from 4 to 10 orphans who were abandoned from the maternity hospital or, as once happened, a mother brought a girl even from Kaliningrad Oblast and abandoned her. That girl, I think, is still in the hospital. So we also selected clothes for them from these parcels and we are still selecting them, and there are still some clothes for children there now, I don't give everything at once—I think, when they wear out, then we'll give a little more later. Otherwise, if there's a lot at once, it will just get lost somewhere. And if they supported this “Shelter” project for us, it would be a great thing, because the children are allocated one hryvnia for food there, there are no medicines, we buy medicines for these children, especially infants. There are no clothes—we provide clothes. And there is no nanny for constant care, for a nanny to take that child and take them outside for at least half an hour for the child to get some fresh air. None of that exists. We drew up an estimate and submitted the project. One organization rejected us for this project, and now we've sent it to the social service, and the social service will get in touch with some firm or, if not a firm, then with some public organization in Canada or America, and maybe they will allocate funds there. That would be good, it would be the beginning of a real shelter. For now, we've written it for 12 people, and then if an opportunity arose, we would find more for a real shelter for orphans, for a real children's home.

This is everything we did on the public front. What else? We organized rallies—for Shevchenko every time and every year, on March 9 and May 22, we also held rallies, participated in elections. And many of our people were on the councils.

V. V. Ovsienko: It seems you were also nominated as a candidate for deputy?

L. L. Huk: Yes, I was nominated as a candidate.

V. V. Ovsienko: What year was that?

L. L. Huk: For deputy of the second convocation, after…

V. V. Ovsienko: 1994, right?

L. L. Huk: Yes. I didn't have enough money to be able to talk to people. They wouldn't let my campaign speak at organizations. I would come, say, to the Holoprystan district, arrange with our people that I would speak at a certain time, I arrive—and they tell me bluntly: “We were forbidden.” And to go to every village and for the elections to be truly democratic, to be able to speak, to have money for travel, to be allowed to speak… There are populated areas where I was far ahead of other candidates—for example, in some hall in the port of Holoprystan district I managed to speak, I got through there, and in Skadovsk, in some villages—in short, to be a deputy, you need to have funds. Now, I suppose, it will be possible to organize speeches, because the authorities don't interfere much, although they do interfere too. But now you need funds, and only the oligarchs have funds.

Now I am the head of the Skadovsk district organization of the People's Movement of Ukraine, the Chornovil one—I think it's the only one, and the lawyers should name those other organizations differently, you can't have three parties under the same name—the lawyers are messing things up.

Second—I am the head of the district organization of the Social Service of Ukraine. I don't hold any other public leadership positions. I am also heavily involved in ecology through my work. For example, we organize help for children from Chernobyl who come here. We have a doctor, Oksana Stepanivna Bilynska, she helps. We are preparing the zone for vacationers, and everything in that vein. And on this subject, I think that's enough.

Now about my children. My son, Yaroslav Huk, graduated from the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, the faculty of electronic engineering, and then he got in, just as they were opening the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and he went there. But he studied there for one year and said there was nothing for him to do there, because the talk was that the academy would operate on the basis of students, but they had accepted schoolchildren, and he passed a computer exam to get into Prague University, studied economics there. And there he passed a computer exam, and 12 universities invited him to study, and he went to Boston. Cross my heart and hope to die, I found out post-factum that he had gotten in, and there were no efforts on my part. He studied in Boston, there he got in touch with Nadiyka Svitlychna—she is his godmother, so she helped him a little, because he was robbed somewhere on the way from Prague to Boston. She helped him, and I don't know—if it weren't for Nadiyka… a monument should be erected to her in Ukraine, because she has worked so much for Ukraine. Then he graduated from Boston University, he was invited to Canada for work, and now he works in Canada.

My daughter is Yaroslava Nazarenko, from my second husband.

V. V. Ovsienko: Did you mention her date of birth? You mentioned your son's?

L. L. Huk: She was born in 1978. She graduated from the pedagogical university, with a specialty in history and law. Then she finished psychology, has a bachelor's degree in psychology and is now studying for a master's in psychology and writing a dissertation. And I am very happy—she gave me a scientific journal where her article was published. It is very pleasant for me that my children had—precisely had the opportunity, because my son, when he graduated from the institute, was given a good job, but he had no housing, and when he entered the academy, they wouldn't let him leave his job—they said, you study at the academy and come work for us. If he was such a valuable employee, why didn't they give him at least a room in a dormitory and a computer, let him work. It's a great shame that he is not needed here in Ukraine.

Thank you very much, Mr. Vasyl Ovsienko, for coming, for finding the time and opportunity to record my words.

V. V. Ovsienko: Please give your address as well.

L. L. Huk: I, Lidia Huk, live in Skadovsk, 8 Humanenko Street, apartment 11. Telephone 2-62-15.

V. V. Ovsienko: Thank you.

L. L. Huk: Thank you too. Thank you to Mykola Plakhotniuk, Nadiyka Svitlychna, Valentyna Chornovil, Viacheslav Chornovil, who helped me a great deal. When they discovered a tumor in me, he helped me…

[End of cassette 1]

V. V. Ovsienko: February 18, 2001, in Skadovsk, Mrs. Lidia Huk continues her story.

L. L. Huk: I would like to add to that conversation. We had many people in Skadovsk who gave their lives, their strength, their skills, their talents to the altar of Ukrainian statehood. This includes Stepan Khmara, and Mykhailo Kosiv was in Skadovsk. But the one who made the biggest impression on me was Viacheslav Chornovil, who, shortly after his release, was vacationing with us in Skadovsk, in Lazurne, at the “Korabel” resort, and then he was in Skadovsk in my home. He was an exceptionally kind and good person, and he had such a computer-like mind, he could orient himself in a situation very quickly and very quickly figure out what needed to be said and what decision to make, what word to say. I, for one, remember how he met with people in Kherson—no other person could have handled those leftists who sat in the front rows, aggressively opposed to the Ukrainian state, who attacked him with provocative questions, statements, and so on. He very quickly, within half a minute, put them all in their place, and they didn't jump out again. And he spoke about what needed to be done, and answered people's questions about the current social, public, and political situation, and the tasks that needed to be accomplished. He spoke very clearly about what Rukh had done and what still needed to be done, very clearly. And if we had elected him president then, if the democrats had supported him then, we would be living in better conditions now, we might have been a Ukrainian state with a spiritual life in Ukraine, we would have had our own state and would be living better economically, Ukraine would truly be Ukrainian, because people would already feel national pride, would have realized themselves as Ukrainians and would be defending themselves as Ukrainians, and not with a “what's the difference” attitude.

Oksana Yakivna Meshko was also here, she came to visit me for several summers after her exile in Ayan. We, neither I nor she, ever thought we would meet again. I knew her from my student years, from the early sixties. And we didn't think that she would come, if we did meet, that she would come right here, to the Black Sea, to warm up her, as she put it, bones and soul. And she had a very good influence on my children, they became truly conscious Ukrainians.

I cannot forgive myself for not having done something, whether I could have or not, so that we elected Chornovil in the first presidential election. It was clear, before the elections and during the election period, even before election day, they said that all the democrats, there were four of them, would withdraw their candidacies in favor of the one with the highest rating. Chornovil had the highest rating. And it was clear that it was Chornovil, and the others would withdraw, but when I read a statement from one of the democrats in “Samostiyna Ukrayina” a month before the election, that he would not withdraw his candidacy because he disagreed with three or four of Viacheslav Chornovil's postulates, we lost everything there. And I am afraid that we might lose Ukraine, because before that, all the people supported Rukh, but after that statement, when neither the first, nor the second, nor the third withdrew in favor of one, they said: “You are just like all the rest.” That's what people told me: “You're fighting over a briefcase.” And this fight over a briefcase is leading to the complex situation we have today, from which it is very difficult to get out. And it is still unknown how it will end, because our ideology—there is no state ideology, no Ukrainian national ideology. Spirituality doesn't come through the churches, the Bolsheviks, that is, the Muscovites, destroyed the Dormition Cathedral, and we rebuilt it with our blood and gave it to the Moscow Patriarchate. In Skadovsk there was one Moscow church, the so-called Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate—and the city council gave a second building for a church, a second church of the Moscow Patriarchate, but they didn't give a place for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate. So Russification continues, despite the fact that we are called an independent Ukrainian state.

It's the same with the language. Just as the Russian language, or more accurately, the Moscow surzhyk [pidgin], was heard in the Kherson region, so it is still heard, and more and more so. Not all state institutions and not all heads of state administrations have switched to the Ukrainian language. Look: television is flooded with Russian and Russian-language broadcasts. To listen to a Ukrainian broadcast, you have to sit day and night and listen to see if you can catch anything or not. But it should be at a certain time, precisely at a time when there are no “good” movie broadcasts on other stations, so that people would listen specifically to those programs about national self-awareness, national self-defense, national dignity. So that they would know who they are and from what roots they came. I think I have nothing more to say. [Tape recorder turns off].

I would like to say a few words about Valentyna Chornovil, who carried on her shoulders, on her frail shoulders, all the difficult situations with the arrest of her brother, her husband, and many people who were in prison. It was she who collected and packed parcels, sent food parcels, book parcels to prisons in Perm, and in Ayan, and to the Urals, to Kolyma, wherever she sent them—wherever our prisoners were, she sent them everywhere. It was she who, on her own shoulders, carried packages to Slavko, her brother Viacheslav Chornovil, packages to her husband Mykola Plakhotniuk, who languished in psychiatric hospitals, an absolutely healthy man who was kept in a psychiatric hospital because there was no legal reason to imprison him, or they would have had to torture him more than others.

By the way, Mykola, if he wanted to and if he were healthier—he would have been a brilliant president. He thinks so intelligently! And especially with Valentyna, because he thinks a little longer, while she thinks like a computer, like Slavko. She is an exact copy of Slavko. If she had the disposition for political activity—she doesn't want to be in politics, she is simply a great patriot of the Ukrainian state, language, history, literature, a patriot of everything, but she doesn't want to be in politics—then Ukraine could still be put back on its feet.

V. V. Ovsienko: And how well Mykola writes! I'm always pushing him: write about this, about that, about that! He has written so little—he should write everything down.

L. L. Huk: Yes, he should be writing, but they still have a small child, 10 years old, and they want to raise a good person out of the child, and they are indeed raising a patriot. And they have little time, they need a grandmother to look after that Bohdan more, so that Mykola has the opportunity to sit down and write.

Not only does Mykola write well, talentedly, he can very meticulously select the most valuable and richest material—I only recently discovered that Valentyna is just as talented as Slavko, as Mykola. She knows how to write, she knows how to select material, to choose, to sift through that material to select the most valuable grains.

V. V. Ovsienko: There was something recently about Kachanivka, right?

L. L. Huk: Yes, about Kachanivka, recently. And I don't know how it was lost—well, this is our state.

V. V. Ovsienko: By the way, I was at that evening where she talked about Kachanivka—brilliant!

L. L. Huk: Yes, brilliant. When I read it in that journal—well, she writes brilliantly, brilliantly! And she orients herself quickly, just as quickly as Slavko, she quickly knows what decision to make. If only someone could really help them write!

V. V. Ovsienko: How to help them?

L. L. Huk: How to help them? By relieving them of those extra tasks that someone else could do.

V. V. Ovsienko: Take Bohdan away from them?

L. L. Huk: No, take away some of the museum work. If someone could physically help with the museum, so that Mykola doesn't have to go from house to house, but so that he just says this and that, and that, and someone else who doesn't know how to write does it—that would be real help. Well, if Mykola could publish several volumes, if he had time for that writing. And Valentyna too—she has a scientific mind, she could write. Every year for 10 years they have been coming here to me in Skadovsk, to improve the child's health, because the child was born in the Chernobyl zone. And they improve their own health. I owe them a great deal, they have also connected me with many people with whom I now have good relations. Mykola cares a great deal for other people, a great deal, and not only helps, but specifically cares, provides concrete help: arranging things with doctors, getting money, getting medicine, and so on. He is truly a person with a big soul.

V. V. Ovsienko: That's about the present, but I'd like to ask about the older times—how he organized those evenings, the shchedrivky, the carols. He once told me how in some village somewhere in the Kyiv region they organized an Ivan Kupala Day—were you there by any chance?

L. L. Huk: No, I wasn't. I wasn't there. We were once in Horenka (?) at Hrunia's place, we met Danylo Shumuk there, and Pavlo Kulyk, who later became her husband. Four of us slept crosswise on one bed, with chairs at our feet. And somehow back then we didn't even think about needing any conveniences or something to eat, like now—people walk around hungry, but throw bread into the bins. And they say they walk around hungry. It's hard now, of course, very hard, but now we are supposedly working for our own state, and everyone should work, not just individuals like Mykola Plakhotniuk or Viacheslav Chornovil, or Valentyna Chornovil, or Mykhailo Masiutko—everyone should work, so that at least everyone takes a small step forward and does something for Ukraine. Well, here in the Kherson region they uprooted the Ukrainian, in the Poltava region and so on, for more than 300 years—they uprooted, exterminated, killed, hanged, starved, exterminated priests and morals, everything you can imagine. So of course, we still have this today, and to exorcise the slave, it takes a long time. And you have to work with each person as if they are seriously ill. And you talk and talk with a person, they agree, and then at the end they say: “This is your independence, because we lived better under Brezhnev.” But the fact that the economy was already destroyed then, that there was practically no production, and to buy anything, you had to “get” it through third or fifth hands—that has been forgotten. That we received sugar with coupons, that has also been forgotten. And now there is one problem—that we are not Ukrainians, that Ukraine is not Ukrainian.

I think that I wouldn't want to say anything more. If a thought ever comes to me, I will write it down then.

Thank you, all the best to you.

V. V. Ovsienko: And I thank you.

That was Lidia Larionivna Huk, February 18, 2001, in Skadovsk. Vasyl Ovsienko was recording.

[End of recording]

Photo by V. Ovsienko:

Photo film 4947, frame 20. 18.02.2001. Skadovsk, Kherson Oblast. Lidia Larionivna HUK at her home.