PROKOPOVYCH, HRYHORIY HRYHOROVYCH

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Interview with Hryhoriy PROKOPOVYCH

(With Prokopovych's corrections, made in April 2002)

V. Ovsiyenko: On January 31, 2000, in the village of Urizh, Drohobych Raion, Lviv Oblast, we are recording a conversation with Mr. Hryhoriy Prokopovych. The recording is being conducted by Vasyl Ovsiyenko.

H. Prokopovych: As was customary for our Galician families, like all Galicians around, we were mainly farmers. In the neighboring village of Ivan Franko, Nahuievychi, where he was born, he also worked barefoot and in rags, helping his blacksmith father. We lived just like the other peoples around us—just to get by. Because whether it was Austria, after the third partition, or Poland—the Poles called Ukrainians “cattle,” and the Austrians, being a bit more cultured, called them “pigs.” But my parents said life was better under Austria. And my grandfathers praised Austria more. They certainly praised Franz Joseph more than the rule of Piłsudski or Śmigły—those Polish leaders.

I was born on October 21, 1928. I was the fourth child, as three had died before me. So my father sold me, because he had traveled all the way to Austria to see some fortune-teller, and she told him that children would not survive in that house: “If a fourth is born, sell him to some neighbors until you move the house.” And so my father sold me for a pack of *prasivka* (cheap tobacco) and a Polish zloty (it was Poland then). So I survived. The other three were buried...

And so, as usual, I was a child, then school... The Muscovites came, the Germans came, and the Muscovites came again. I attended the village school, and under the Germans, I went to Sambir, where there was a seminary.

V. Ovsiyenko: Please tell us your father's and mother's full names, and preferably your mother's maiden name.

H. Prokopovych: My father was Hryhoriy Prokopovych—same as me, and my mother was Prokopovych after my father, but her maiden name was Boyko. From the same Boykos as Shevchenko's mother. But I don't know if we were related. My father was born in 1900, my mother in 1901. They married after twenty years or so. My father died in 1984, and my mother in 1978. Dad was a village patriot, as they say. He subscribed to a newspaper. Under Poland, there was our paper, “Narodna Sprava” (The People's Cause). Or “Silskyi Hospodar” (The Village Farmer).

People would gather and talk, all complaining about how hard life was because we didn't have our own state. They lamented that our boys, when the UHA (Ukrainian Galician Army) was formed, didn't want to fight but hid in the backwaters. I heard this myself as a child: "Eh, Hryniu!" he says. "And now there's no UHA, nothing. Our boys would go fight somewhere now, but there's no one to fight for."

Well, when the OUN was organized in 1929, not many people here even knew about it. Because in Franko's village of Nahuievychi, there were many communists. And Urizh caught that from Nahuievychi. There’s a village here, a forest, Ploshchyna—they used to gather there. Stalin gave them leaflets, loads of money. They would gather here, hold festivities at night, and try to spread their parties to other villages. But aside from finding some supporters here in Urizh, they had nothing in other villages. There were people here like Kozelovych, Hamziuk—his son is still alive, still drawn to that Moscow church... And Kozelovych was the head of Boryslav after the Muscovites came. But he’s dead now, long gone. Of those communists, perhaps only the Hamziuk family is left now. Hamziuks... Well, people opposed this. But they opposed it spontaneously: no one understood it or knew it for sure, they just said they were against it. Because in the "Zolotyi Kolos" (The Golden Ear), there was a poem by Yuriy Shkrumeliak: *“Кожен раз находять хмари сірі, ви, браття, держіться, стійте в вірі”* (Every time gray clouds gather, you, brothers, hold on, stand firm in your faith). It was about the church, and faith, and in general about our people.

Dad always said that we are Boykos, and we should love the other small peoples in the Carpathians, because they are even poorer than we are here in Subcarpathia. I would trudge behind the plow, and my dad would tell me these things and sing a song about the Verkhovyna region: *“Верховино, світку ти наш...”* (Verkhovyna, our dear world...)

That's how we lived. My father was a peasant with a sixth-grade education. He wasn't any kind of nationalist or fighter... Just a peasant. Everyone in the village was like that: nothing, nobody, nowhere... It was only later that the youth grew up, ones like me and others—and during the second coming of the Muscovites, we went into the underground. Before that, there was nothing.

When the Germans came after the first Muscovites, they were greeted here with bread and salt: people rejoiced because the Muscovite had fled. And since the Muscovites had been deporting people to Siberia, they thought the Germans would be better. So they rejoiced, greeted them, and hung out the German and Ukrainian flags. Later, at the village administration office, the viyt (village head) had Hitler on one side and Bandera on the other. The Germans didn't say anything about it.

My father planned for me to become a priest. And I loved the church, I went to it. I studied in Sambir for two years, 1942-43. But in 1944, the Muscovites came and broke everything up, closed the churches. And I went on there, in Sambir, to a so-called international school, which was a village ten-year school. I was there for a year, until an announcement came to go to Drohobych, for teacher training courses. There was a shortage of teachers, so they were recruiting young people aged 15-17. They taught us there for nine months, took us to schools in Drohobych (which was the oblast center then), so we could become quick-baked teachers. I came out of it a teacher.

First Arrest

That's where I was arrested for the first time, for leaflets. The six of us who were arrested had no idea about those leaflets. There was a fellow named Kovaliv with us... At that time, there was a writer named Kovaliv from Bronnytsia, who has a street named after him in Boryslav. But this was just a boy named Kovaliv who studied with us. Two of us boys and four girls were arrested. They beat us for nothing, about nothing: "Who gave you the leaflets?" They said the same thing to each of us: "You brought them." They'd take one away, then ask another: "You brought them." They'd beat and beat you, but nobody knew anything... I had no clue about those leaflets, who had distributed them. We were innocent. So they took all our books and held us for the whole summer. My father brought a food parcel once, and the priests in the cell told me, “Don’t be afraid, son, they’ll let you go because you’re innocent.” And I was only 17 in 1945. "Don't be afraid, they'll let you go." So I wasn't afraid, so what if they beat me... It wasn't like they beat me hard, because they saw I was just a kid and knew that even if I had brought the leaflets, I wouldn't confess. Who would confess? (Laughs). If you confess, it's straight to prison. But this way—I don't know, you didn't catch me—and that's that. They taught us that, we knew it.

The fact is, they let us go in the fall. An order was given for all of us to take exams. We studied for another month, passed the exams, and became teachers. They sent us out to the villages.

Teaching

I and two boys from Nahuievychi, Ivan Franko's village—Dobriansky and Hrom—were sent to Turka, up in the Carpathians, a hundred kilometers from here. They came to my place (Nahuievychi is close by), and we went there on foot, as there was no transport, nothing. It took us two days to get there. We arrived in Turka itself, at the district education department (it was a raion center). It was raining heavily, no authorities were around, nothing... That Dobriansky from Nahuievychi says: "That's it, I'm outta here." And we all fled from there. We came to the village of Vovche near Turka and spent the night there. A woman living all alone let us sleep on some straw. The next day we got up—the woman had nothing to eat. The next day we found ourselves in the village of Chukva (near Sambir). They were exhausted and couldn't walk anymore—a hundred kilometers, and they were 16-17 years old. But I managed to run to my village, and when I sat down in that very armchair, I didn't get up until morning.

Dobriansky was sent to Dubliany, and as for Slavko Hrom, I don't know where he was sent. I was sent to Mokriany. I was there, in Mokriany, for less than two months before they kicked me out, because the director (also named Dobriansky) had a wife and two daughters who were teachers. And there were only four classes in total, so there was no place for me there...

Then, in 1946, they sent me to Smilna (there are villages here: Pidbuzh, Zalokot, and Smilna). My father brought me there. The director there was Yaroslav Dmytriv—from Stanelia, a village not far from here. The director and I. Just the two of us. But there were eight classes, meaning four grades, but each had an "a" and "b" section because it was full of children, they had enrolled everyone, even some older than me.

Here, in Smilna, in the winter, I got to know the boys from the UPA. I was living with a host named Pihura, and they would come to his house. He wasn't a stanychnyi (local OUN leader), but he was a supporter; if he had something, he would give it, and others would bring things to him as well. They would come in groups of eight or ten. I remember, I was sitting at the table once, and a boy sits down next to me and sings a song: *“В степу під Херсоном висока могила, в степу під Херсоном курган. Лежить одинокий в могилі глибокій Максим Залізняк партизан.”* (In the steppe near Kherson stands a high mound, in the steppe near Kherson a kurgan. Lying alone in a deep grave is Maksym Zalizniak the partisan.) He's singing that song, and the other boys are talking with the host about their own business. And one, an older one, comes up to me: "Son," he says, "you should pray with the children in class when you start the lesson. Do you pray?" I say: "I do pray. I've heard before that one should pray. My father told me to. I pray," I say. "Well then," he says, "keep doing that. And don't say a word about Lenin and Stalin, about those murderers. Just teach them to write, to read, and history. You know our own history, don't you?" he asks. Well, back then, our own history—nobody wanted to even hear about it. But I said: "Our own, yes."

Those boys came like that often. They would ask how things were, what was happening. Eventually, they asked the host about me, what kind of boy I was—they still called me a kid, a child—and then they started bringing leaflets, bringing *bofony* (UPA bonds): "Maybe you have someone in your village—give these to them." Well, those *bofony* were for five, for ten karbovantsi: for the development of the UPA, as aid. There was a crown of thorns drawn on it, with an inscription at the top: “10 karbovantsi. For a Ukrainian Independent United State. OUN-UPA Leadership.” And a signature. And they told me verbally: "These *bofony*—tell everyone to keep them. And you'll pay your contribution. Keep it—when there's an Independent Ukrainian State, you'll get ten times back." Now people are collecting them, from anyone who still has them... They searched the house here, so you had to hide them somewhere, bury them. Otherwise they'd be lost.

That director from Stanelia, Yaroslav Dmytriv, he was a fellow I trusted. We taught together. But what happened? Once I dropped by his apartment. He lived near the school. Also at a Pihura's place, just a different Pihura, because there were many Pihuras there. And his host's wife says: "Slavko's not here." "Where is he?" "I don't know where. He's gone." Well, then I went on my own, somehow got through the day—he's not there. The next night, Slavko returned, and in the morning he came to school. He came back, but said nothing to the host or to me. Two months later, they took him again. Again I came, asked the hosts—he's gone. I finished my time at that school, and on the second and third day—he's still gone. The forest boys had taken him for good. It turns out the host knew about it... The forest boys came and took his pistol from him. And they said: "Sonny"—he was a year older than me, a tall, handsome, fair-haired boy—"Little boy, don't you ever take that pistol from the NKVD men again." They took his pistol. He spent some time in the forest, they scared him a bit and let him go. Well, and he took the pistol again... With me, he was like a friend: he neither betrayed me nor did me any harm... When they took him, he never came back.

Then, at the end of 1946 or early 1947, in the winter, they made me the director there in Smilna. (Laughs). All by myself... Then they gave me a teacher named Ivasenko (I studied with him, he lives in Boryslav now), and another one from Pidbuzh named Vynnytsky. So there were three of us. Those boys were less involved, but I started getting more interested in politics, because I had come to love those boys who came from the forest. It was scary, but I looked at them with admiration. What soldiers they were... It sent shivers down my spine: two pistols each, grenades, submachine guns, their hats tied up. It was winter, but their sleeves were rolled up. Each had his submachine gun at the ready. They didn't carry them on their shoulders, but always in their hands. And there were lookouts all around... They always treated me like one of their own: "Will there be a Ukraine?" "There will be."

One night, I'm sleeping in the other room, in the alcove, as they called it, on the sofa—someone wakes me up. I look (there was a clock on the wall, with weights, you know)—it's three in the morning. Someone is shining a light on me. I look—two men are standing over me, shining a flashlight. And the host from the main room: "Hryniu, Hryniu! Don't be afraid," he says. "They're gathering people for a meeting. For a meeting." That calmed me down a bit. The one with the light says: "Get ready, teacher, for a meeting." A meeting it is. The host takes me, his wife. Only the daughter-in-law stays behind. But the three of us are taken by force: to a meeting, and that's it, no discussion. The village council was maybe 150 meters away from us, not far. Snow everywhere, just like it is now. We went from the Pihuras' house through the snow to the main road. We got to the village council, and they had already rounded up a whole crowd of people. I didn't hear anything, because people had first gathered from the ends of the village, and by the time they brought us, the meeting had been going on for a long time. I only caught one speaker: “One woman says—we come to her to ask for bread—and she always says: ‘Boys, boys, I keep giving and giving to you—for two winters now I’ve been giving you bread—but when will that Ukraine come?’ Some people laughed, but others... There was nothing to laugh about, because there was no Ukraine. They held us there for a bit. Another one spoke: ‘Hold on, people, there will be an independent Ukraine! Believe in it! Help the UPA!’ And then: ‘Disperse!’ And we dispersed. And there were a lot of them, those insurgents... They had cut the telephone wires: you couldn't call the raion—that's one thing. And second—they had outposts: in the ditches, they were surrounded. When they held meetings, there were more of them, they weren't afraid anymore.”

In early 1947, in the winter, a family arrives from Eastern Ukraine: a male teacher, a female teacher, and two daughters. One daughter was underdeveloped, mentally ill. Their surname was Pavlov. (One of their daughters is still in Pidbuzh, she was a teacher). They took over the entire four-class school with their whole family. So they transfer me to the neighboring village of Bystrytsia, where there was an eight-year school. The director there was Kozbur, Ivanna Stepanivna—a priest's daughter from Storona, a village not far from here. She was the school director—and she was like a mother to us. She was a Ukrainian, never married, because she was supposed to get married back in the Polish times—and her fiancé never showed up for the wedding. So she remained a widow—not a widow, but simply a maiden, and never married anyone else. She had suitors, but she decided to live without a husband. And so she lived her whole life until her death. So, when it was Christmas Eve or something, she would call all of us to her place, we would celebrate New Year's together. There were seven of us teachers in Bystrytsia. And Hryhoriy, and Mykhailo, and Antonina Storonska (she's in Boryslav now), Yevhenia Kolod (she was from Eastern Ukraine, from Kyiv). That Ivanna Stepanivna Kozbur raised us in her own Ukrainian spirit, being a priest's daughter herself, and helped us.

Here, the UPA came more often. My landlady's husband was imprisoned for a kolkhoz matter, not for politics, but she was a liaison for the forest insurgents. I remember, one with the pseudo ‘Iskra’ (Spark) would come, another with the pseudo ‘Skoryi’ (Swift). These weren't the same boys I knew, they were different ones. They would talk with my landlady. She always said: "Oh, there were boys, there were boys." So I asked her: "Wake me up sometime, so I can see them." And one time she wakes me up. It's about one in the morning, the moon is shining: "Come," she says, "teacher. The boys are here. You wanted to see the boys, so come." Half-asleep, I went out of the house, I look... The Bystrytsia River flows nearby. And there are a lot of them standing on the bridge. On the bridge, on the road. Maybe eight of them near the house. I was a bit scared, because I hadn't seen them here in Bystrytsia for a long time. I had gotten used to them back in Smilna, but not here. Well, a few shook my hand, but the rest didn't even speak. What was this teacher to them... Then they start to leave, and the one with the pseudo ‘Iskra’ (I don't know where he was from) comes up to me and gives me leaflets and *bofony*. "Here," he says, "give these out to the teachers. Take this for yourself, and you'll pay your contribution. Ten karbovantsi each."

Money wasn't so valuable then. Bread in 1947 cost less than a karbovanets. I distributed them, except I didn't give any to the director because I was ashamed. She found out anyway: "Go on, Hryhoriy, give me some too, don't be afraid." So she took one and paid.

The next day they came, and I gave them the money. Iskra then gave me more *bofony*, saying: "Distribute these around the village, if you can and when you want. Here's another hundred's worth, ten *bofony*." I distributed those later too, it was a contribution from the youth, who were also helping. But he also gave me maybe three kilos of leaflets, a whole bag full. He says: "Don't scatter them here in the mountains, go down to the lowlands—to Mokriany, to Vynnyky, to Nahuievychi. You have to scatter them there. Do you have anyone to do it with?" I say: "Yes, there are some boys." "Then give me their names, who can you trust?" I say: "You wouldn't know them anyway." "That's none of your business. You tell me who you'll give them to." I said: "Stas Burzhan, Vasyl Holub—there are some you can trust. There's Petro Petrechko..." "Enough," he says, "three. You'll scatter them, and that's it. Is there someone to scatter them? Take them to the houses of those communists who work for the Muscovites. Pin them to their doors. Can you do it at night? You walk around the village at night like young gentlemen, like bachelors."

I took them eagerly. Truthfully, I wasn't afraid, because there was nothing to be afraid of yet. You know you'll scatter them. If you get caught, that's another matter...

Then in Bystrytsia, in 1948, I decided to go to the pedagogical college in Boryslav to finish my secondary education. I enrolled as a full-time student. They accepted me straight into the third year because I had teacher training. I finished that third year and returned to the same Bystrytsia, because the director had sent me on assignment from there. Then I enrolled in the Lviv Teacher's Institute, in the correspondence department of the history faculty.

The "Organization named after Stepan Bandera" Youth Group

Then on December 9, 1949, I was arrested...

By then, on UPA orders, we had an organization in the village. It included Stasyk (he was from the Dolyna Raion of Stanislav Oblast, he was a teacher here). Stasyk belonged, I did, Antonina Storonska did. There were also four boys from Urizh—on the orders of that same Iskra. He named it the "Organization named after Stepan Bandera": "And you will be the secretary, your pseudonym will be Ihor. The other boys can call themselves whatever they want." Stas Burzhan had the pseudonym Holub (Dove), but the others were afraid of the word "pseudonym" and went without one.

Vasyl Holikiv, who was part of that network, had a girlfriend in Pidbuzh who worked as a secretary in the raion executive committee. When the boys from the forest came and gave me the text for leaflets, I told them that they could be printed here in the raion. I passed the text of the leaflet to Vasyl, and he was spending the night with that girl. She stayed behind at the raion executive committee and typed up the leaflets. But on that typewriter, instead of the letter "i", there was the number "1". We printed those leaflets once, then a second time... We distributed them. But the time came when the NKVD men figured out where the printing was being done. They figured it out—and we all got caught...

She confessed immediately—her name was Mariyka Pohutiak. They arrested her, searched Stas's place... And just before that, I had brought another whole pile of leaflets to Urizh. The boys wanted to scatter those leaflets near our club: the store and the club were next to each other. Just as they were about to scatter them—they ran into an ambush. The boys, out of fear, left the leaflets there and fled. But the sack was signed by his father, Stas's. And his father was also named Prokopovych. He was delivering his grain quota, and everyone marked their sacks so they wouldn't get lost, because they had to take them to Boryslav. You had to sit there for a day, two, or even three days to deliver that quota. And the *istrebki* (Soviet militiamen) and NKVD men found that sack near the club. They found the leaflets—and went straight to Stas Prokopovych, because I wasn't there, I was in Bystrytsia. They knew I was teaching there. And the other Prokopovych—that could only be that Stas. They went to his place, climbed up to the attic—and found more leaflets there. It was all over...

Stas fled. He hid for about a month. He was caught by Petro Homziak—an NKVD man, one of ours, from Urizh. He died last year. And his sister is now with the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate...

At Brygidky

They arrested Stas Prokopovych. In the NKVD headquarters in Drohobych, after three months, they planted what's called a “kvochka” (stool pigeon) on him—a so-called “friend.” That boy was, you could say, illiterate. Stas confided in him, spun all sorts of tales, and the guy in turn told everything: who he was with and who gave him the leaflets, who carried them... And then they rounded us up—Vasyl... But they released Vasyl the next day... They took me, the two boys from Bystrytsia, and that girl who did the printing. She served three years. She got pregnant in the camp, and they released her. They used to kick out pregnant women back then. How they exposed us, I still don't know to this day, because I wasn't acquainted with her. Maybe it was Vasyl Holikiv... And Vasyl Holikiv was apparently playing for both sides—the fact is, Vasyl wasn't imprisoned, only we were.

So, I was arrested on December 9, 1949. I was tried on February 23, 1950. I remember, the investigation was conducted in Drohobych at the KGB (back then, in 1950, it was still the NKGB) by a certain Kodakov and Reznichenko. Reznichenko had previously been the head of the NKVD in Pidbuzh, in the raion, and later he was promoted to the oblast level. And Kodakov was a young NKVD investigator. He... well, no need to talk about that: a pistol to the forehead...

V. Ovsiyenko: You must, you must talk about it!

H. Prokopovych: Must I? He tormented me as he pleased. One girl escaped from his grasp, ran past him and threw herself out of a third-floor window... After that, they put bars on every investigator's office. And the stairs leading from the second and third floors were also fenced off. Once, a boy—not from this investigator, but from some other—jumped and was killed. So they fenced off all the stairwells right up to the walls with a solid, dense mesh. They also fenced off the top of the exercise yard so no one could get through. Even though armed guards stood there in the yard.

We were sentenced then under Article 54-1a, 54-11. Me, as the first in the case, to 25 years, 5 years of exile, and 5 years of deprivation of rights. Chopyk—to 10 years, Stas Prokopovych, the one arrested first, to 10 years. Ivan Haman was also sentenced to 25 years and 5, and 5, as was customary—they gave that to everyone.

Those 25 years were on my record until 1956, when a commission came around after the camp uprisings. From then on, it was always listed as 10 years, because the commission didn't release me but reduced my sentence to 10. And so it was written from then on, 10 years. But until then, it was always 25, and the verdict even stated that it was a commutation of a death sentence. That's what they wrote for everyone.

They kept me in the Brygidky prison in Drohobych for over a month after the trial. Those were the Brygidky, famous throughout Galicia. That prison was built by the Austrians. It has something like 999 cells, or a thousand. And now all sorts of common criminals are held there. But back then, it was packed with our people, political prisoners.

I was in cell number nine. One time, the guard opened the little door we called the “kormushka” (feeding hatch) and called me over: "Come here!" I approach. He says to me: "Do the guys have any cigarettes? Collect some for me to smoke." Well, the people—there were 11 of us in the cell—hear this. He closed the hatch. The guys gave a few cigarettes each, from what they got in their food parcels. (It was profitable for the prison guards to accept parcels, because they would steal from them in the corridor, and the warden got a cut too.) So I gave the guard those cigarettes. A day later he comes again and says: "Guys, there's a war in Korea soon. You'll be free soon. Maybe everything will fall apart."

He was a fair-haired fellow, a handsome Eastern Ukrainian. You could tell from his speech that he wasn't Galician, and from his looks. That's all. Later, he collected more cigarettes. We would even give him things if we got something special in a parcel... He was on good terms with us and kept cheering us up, saying we wouldn't be in for long, because there was already a war in Korea... But that didn't happen for another forty years.

Once they put a Russian thief, an *urka* as you might say, in our cell. He was an *urka*, but in fact, he was a spy. Whatever was said—we couldn't say anything in the cell anymore, because we were afraid of him. We were with him for five days and then we said: "Get out!" There was an older man there, from Boryslav (maybe Ivan Hnatiuk knows him). He says to him (and we all hear): “You, sonny! Don't you be here anymore. Or we'll strangle you.” When he heard that, he ran to the door and started banging and banging. “We'll give you bread,” we say, because we were getting parcels. But he was the type they moved from cell to cell. He banged and banged until they opened up: "I won't stay here! I won't be here!" The guards threw the crook out into the corridor and pretended to beat him. But they weren't beating him, they just told him: “You scream, as if we’re beating you.” They took him away, put him in another cell somewhere. He never came back to us. So we were among our own again, no longer afraid to talk. Especially since that guard had also warned us: "Watch out," he said, "watch out, he's one of those..."

Convoys

We stayed at Brygidky for over a month. Then they take us in a convoy to Lviv. Trucks arrived—the floor was covered with tar-coated metal sheets. A guard with a submachine gun stood on top of the truck: "Lie down! Sit down, you Banderites! We'll show you how to love the Motherland!" And they made us sit in that tar: one man spreads his legs, then another sits in front of him. Hold on to each other's hands—eight men in four rows in the truck, 32 of us were packed in like that. They close the tailgate. They have a partition separating them from us, behind which they stand at the ready with submachine guns. That's how they took us to the transit prison in Lviv. And they took us then in five or six trucks, with thirty-two men in each truck.

From the Lviv transit prison, they gradually sorted us out to go to Kazakhstan. We weren't there long, a week at most. There I met many priests of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. For example, men like Vovchyk, Horodetsky, Zhymchystyi—I know these names because they were great chess players, they loved to play. So I played with them too, they taught me. That Vovchyk was from Turka itself, and Horodetsky and Zhymchystyi were two from Lviv. Well, where there were priests, there was less shouting. Because the priests, you know, wouldn't allow it, and everyone listened to and respected them. There were more of them there, but I couldn't communicate with all of them, because in our cell there were: on one side, bunks for 40 men, on the other side, bunks for 40 men. On the bottom tier—40 and 40, so you can count: 160 men in the cell! Like sardines in a can. We turned over on command, and turned again on the next command.

And then onto the convoy—each to his own destination. Two Pullman cars of us—I don't remember exactly how many people there were—were taken on one day. They took us to Kazakhstan, brought us to Karaganda. We spent over a month in a transit prison in Kharkiv, but nowhere else for long. They took us straight through, and it was all fields everywhere. They gave us what they called *pryvarok* (an extra ration): a bit of soup or tea. And so we reached Kazakhstan.

Karaganda

I ended up in the first camp, in the settlement of Dubovka. I don't know how many kilometers it is from Karaganda, it's hard to say. No one knew how many kilometers it was to Karaganda. It was a separate camp. First, they brought us from Dubovka to Karaganda to a transit prison, and from there later to a penal camp, to Saran.

There, in Dubovka, we saw Vorobyov's gang. It was what was called in camp slang a "*sucha banda*" (bitches' gang). The Vorobyovites terrorized the Ukrainians, our people. They were NKVD collaborators, serving sentences. But they received better rations and were given what we called *blatnye* (cushy) jobs. In the camp, they helped the NKVD to particularly abuse the Banderites. Wherever they were, these Vorobyovites, our guys beat them everywhere, they would flee, so they were all gathered in an isolation block in Karaganda. They were afraid to go into the main zone, because it was full of the same "Banderites." So they were put in the isolation block.

So we arrived. When we heard the Vorobyovites were there, we charged with a "hurrah!" at that isolation block. We didn't even get within maybe 150 meters of the block when they jumped out with submachine gunners and started firing at us. And they kept firing lower and lower. Finally, they had us all lying on the ground, we couldn't get to the block. But still, some crawled on their bellies and set the isolation block on fire. There were eight Vorobyovites in there. They locked themselves in the guards' room behind an iron door. The guards immediately rushed into the zone, started beating us, and dispersed us.

We met those Vorobyovites again later, in Norilsk. I'll talk about that later.

From the Starodubovka transit prison, they sent us to the camps. There was a camp nearby, and there were mines there. I don't know the name of the mine. The fact is, we were there, mainly in the mines, and near the mine we were building a coal enrichment plant. They processed coal there into coking coal and other types. For a while, we worked in a brigade on the surface, and later a man came to our section. It turned out he was a mine foreman, Friedrich Lemmer, a German. He was a Russian German. He saw me like that on the bunks and said: "You're going into the mine." And what he said was like an order from the boss, because he had authority, even though he was a prisoner too. "You will go," he said, and picked out two more of our guys. "But are you Ukrainian?" "Ukrainian." And he took two more Ukrainians—he didn't take any others. In that section there were Latvians, our friends the Lithuanians. They were always with us—they did nothing without us, only together with us. But he only chose Ukrainians. I joined that brigade, and there too, it was all Ukrainians—from the Stanislavshchyna, from Lvivshchyna, he didn't want any others. I was in that brigade, going down into that terrifying mine. It wasn't producing coal yet, it was still being built.

I worked for many months in the shaft, at its halfway point. The shaft was 250 meters deep, and about halfway down, at 125 meters, we were carving niches, they were called *lunky*, into the concrete of the shaft. Later they would insert iron beams into them and make guide-rails to go deeper. They were preparing the cage. But it was a temporary cage, just for us, so we could work there. And with that cage, we went all the way down. We worked there in those passages and drifts, as they were called. That mine wasn't producing coal yet, it was just being prepared. Russian engineers supervised the construction.

We worked there until the strike. When the strike began, they took me and one other guy out of that mine.

V. Ovsiyenko: And when did the strike start?

H. Prokopovych: In 1951, it was January or February. Around those months, there was still snow.

V. Ovsiyenko: What were the strikers' demands?

H. Prokopovych: For sentences to be reduced, because no one could survive 25 years in the camp due to the harsh conditions in the mine. Those who worked in the mine got an extra 150g of bread and 13g of sugar added to their rations. But those who worked on the surface didn't get that, they had five hundred grams of bread and that ladle, which held about 300-350g of what they called *balanda* (thin soup), and 11g of sugar. And as much water as you wanted.

V. Ovsiyenko: Did you still have numbers on your clothes then?

H. Prokopovych: Yes. There were numbers—that was a given. There was one number on the cap, on the right side. There was a number on the chest, on the shoulders, and on the leg—also on the right side.

V. Ovsiyenko: And were the barracks locked?

H. Prokopovych: They locked the barracks, of course. They'd herd us to the mess hall, and at 10 o'clock it was lights out—and they'd lock up. There was a so-called *parasha* (latrine bucket) in the barracks. We also fought to have the locks removed.

V. Ovsiyenko: And were you given any bedding? Or how was it on those bunks?

H. Prokopovych: There were bunks, and a mattress made of some kind of cotton-like material or something. It wasn't straw... There was one sheet underneath. And a blanket on top. Later there were two sheets, but in 1950, just one.

We were fighting for shorter sentences, better conditions, for the barracks not to be locked at night. But nothing came of it. They took us, the so-called ringleaders, to the penal camp in Saran. That Saran wasn't far—about 19-20 kilometers away. It was the penal camp for all of Karaganda, specially built. There were 1300 of us there—all Banderites.

V. Ovsiyenko: How did the strike take place?

H. Prokopovych: We didn't go to work. We didn't go for a whole week. They didn't do anything to us. We told them what the matter was, we wrote petitions, laid out our conditions. They listened. And later they started to storm us.

V. Ovsiyenko: Storm you how?

H. Prokopovych: I'll tell you. At night, we set up a watch in the zone. During the night, they suddenly open the gates, a fire engine with hoses drives in, and behind it come soldiers—their submachine guns tied on with barbed wire, wearing ushanka hats, greatcoats, and valenki boots. Well, our boys gave a whistle...

There were... Six and six... Seven... Thirteen barracks in that zone, not counting the administrative ones—the mess hall, the cobbler's shop, the *kaptyorka* (storage room), as they called it. There were up to five thousand people there. Mostly, up to three thousand or more, were our people, and the rest were various nationalities. Mostly, the strike was run by our people.

V. Ovsiyenko: Why were the soldiers' submachine guns on barbed wire, not straps?

H. Prokopovych: They knew we had knives, called *finkas*. If they had a strap—there were boys who could jump two on one soldier, cut it, grab the submachine gun—and then they'd be shooting back. That was the most dangerous thing for them—for a prisoner to get a weapon. That's why they tied them with barbed wire, the kind that... The wire was fresh, shiny, wrapped in such a way, once and then a second time or crisscrossed to the gun so that he could hold the gun, and the wire was on this side and that, like a Sam Browne belt. And they were wearing gloves.

V. Ovsiyenko: And they weren't sorry about tearing up their own clothes with that wire?

H. Prokopovych: Apparently not, because, you know, they weren't so poor then, especially for their own, as they called them, red-epauletted men, for it to be expensive for them. Evidently, they didn't spare it.

Well, the fact is, we fought them off—the boys started throwing whatever they could, sticks... How many bunks, as they called them, those plank beds, were taken apart. We fought so hard that when they retreated, the officer who was driving the truck was crushed. They beat it with sticks, smashed the windows in the truck, so maybe the driver got glass in his eyes. He was scared. What could he do? He sees the soldiers are running away, and there was no order to shoot. He was backing up—and the truck crushed the officer who was standing behind it. His wife cried afterwards... We were told that officer had two children. I don't know him or his wife, but that's what was said later.

The next day, they entered the zone anyway. They were already shooting into the zone. It was like: whoever comes out—they'll either shoot you, or don't come out. They occupied the zone and then read out a list of names. In a word, only Ukrainians. There was no one else there.

They sent us then to that Saran, to that penal camp. It was already prepared. They brought 1300 of us there. We were there for about nine months, not a full year. Then, in 1953, they gathered more from all over Karaganda, took us to Krasnoyarsk, and sent two barges with 430 men each down the Yenisei River to Norilsk. They held us in transit prisons, and then sometime in January, in the dead of winter, they distributed us among the camps.

Norilsk. Strikes

There was this one incident. I ended up in the fifth lagpunkt (camp point), and Myron Melen was in the fourth. Next to it was the sixth zone—a women's zone. So when they were leading people to work, the girls would call out to the prisoners from our zone. Our boys didn't call back, only those from the *blatnye* (criminal) brigades. So there was this incident. Some girl yells: "Kolya! Ditch the brigade! The Banderites are coming, they'll chop your head off!" And our boys hear it, and the guard hears it. That is, the women had already heard that "Banderites" were coming down the Yenisei and "they're going to chop the heads off the *blatnye*." And that Kolya yells back: "It's nothing, we'll show them!" They're writing to each other there, throwing notes back and forth. And sometimes someone from the outside would bring news, because the prisoners had some contacts. "Kolya!"—that's what she was yelling. "It's nothing, when they get here—we'll show them..."

And indeed. We arrived at that fifth lagpunkt... Maybe you've heard of Luka Stepanovych Pavlyshyn?

V. Ovsiyenko: Yes, I have.

H. Prokopovych: He arrived with me in that Norilsk, at that fifth lagpunkt. And they beat us right away. About a hundred men with knives and clubs came out onto the road from the assignment office, from the checkpoint where the bosses and guards were. Those "suky" (bitches)—the NKVD collaborators. They're leading us in fives, and they're beating us from this side and that: on our heads, hitting us wherever they could...

We were first put into the last two barracks of that zone, almost 130 of us. And there were many lagpunkts there, they were afraid to put us all in one zone. Because it was: "We'll give it to you!" The Vorobyovites were there, as they were called, a guy named Bessonov—their, so to speak, leader. Then... Vladyslav Vorona—a Pole from among those *suky*, Karpenko—a general's son, Miroshnychenko—a general's son, Murzin—they were all assignment officers at the same time. The administration stands to the side, while they were in charge there, dealing with us. That Luka Stepanovych Pavlyshyn got a good beating on the back, we were walking right next to each other... Later we somehow ended up sleeping next to each other in the same brigade...

So we arrived there, we spend the night. The *suky* don't give us anything to eat. So the boys ask: "What are we going to do?"—they go to him, to Luka Stepanovych Pavlyshyn. "Boys," he says, "don't tell me anything. If they gave me a regiment in the forest, I would know what to do. But here, I don't know a thing." And he just stood there, because he had also been hit on the shoulders. A good thing it wasn't on the head. "I don't know what to do!" Well, but we already knew what to do here.

A fellow named Mykolai Sofiian arrived with us, from the Lviv Institute, mathematics faculty, one of ours, a Ukrainian. After some time, he asked to join our brigade himself when they divided us up into brigades: "I'm going to kill that one and that one!" That Pole, Vorona, who was in charge of the BUR (punishment barracks). Because many of ours ended up in the BUR—barracks of reinforced regime. So he's standing there, others are standing around... And this Mykolai comes up and hits him with an axe. It's broad daylight, full of people, no one's asleep, everyone's talking. And he kills him on the spot, that Vorona. Well, they grabbed him right away. The guards beat him there. They added to his 25 years. They didn't shoot people then.

A month and a half passed. We're sleeping. I was on the night shift. It was called "KIPZ"—some kind of brick factory, where they fired bricks. It was the polar night then, around March. They brought food but didn't take us to work. They drive everyone out. Those in the zone, they drive them out of the barracks, and us, instead of taking us to the living zone, they keep us in the work zone. We hear the entire zone has been driven out and they're leading dogs around. Those dogs [unintelligible] are sniffing and sniffing. They did this for the whole shift, bringing others in, continuously. And they keep us there, in the work zone. And then, as it turned out, during the night, the entire BUR guard and four of those collaborators were all knifed to death. They slept next to each other—and they were all cut down. As soon as they unlocked the barracks and the orderlies from the mess hall started bringing food, they came out in masks, and before they could even get up, they were cut down.

There was another incident, one guy was sleeping on the top bunk above one of the BUR guys, and had his leg hanging out—so he got it in the leg too. Luckily, it was a light wound. Such things happened...

They cut them up. Well, they searched all day—found no one, arrested no one. And then those guys, Karpenko, Miroshnychenko—ran straight to the administration, outside the zone. But Bessonov stayed. I was in his brigade. Well, what kind of political was he—he was an old crook. He had been in prison for ages, and later joined Vlasov's army. And here, being a brave, courageous fellow, he was a foreman, everyone reported to him. He was the most senior. He comes to our guys: "Either," he says, "kill me, or I'll be with you. I wouldn't have gone outside the zone. I'm an *urka*, I never went to them, to the administration. Those guys ran, but I wasn't with them. Ask," he says, "anyone you want. I have a brigade, also Ukrainians and two Latvians—what did I ever do to anyone?" They tell him: "Stay, Mitya, stay and work." And so he remained a prisoner, but he left the brigade.

And what did he do? He did nothing. He'd set up the brigade, and then leave. Houses were being built there on high concrete foundations, so you could even stand up straight. He'd give you something to clean, or a fire to light, because it was cold. And he always reported high percentages, so we'd get our rations. He was the kind of guy who would shout them down—and no one would do anything to him. True, they said he liked to hit someone sometimes, if they were late for the line-up, when it was time to leave work—that's what they said about him, but nothing more. That's the kind of guy he was. And all those others ran away.

Then the Chekists summon a Lithuanian general—his name was Krasauskas. They summon him and show him a list. "Look, there are 503 of you. Get rid of some of the Banderites, take power into your own hands, so that everything goes back to how it was." Because all the foremen had run away, and they needed order in the zone, someone to be in charge. That Lithuanian came and told us what happened.

Then they summon one of our boys. His surname... A boy from Turka. They say: "You take power into your own hands! So that everything runs as it did. We will be friends with you." He comes back: "Where, I'm illiterate, what do I know—do I know who does what? I don't know anyone, no one knows me." And he refused. So they see that things won't work out that way. They're not dumber than we are. So then, in the morning, during the line-up for work—they fire a burst from a machine gun from the watchtower into the crowd... There's a central watchtower, with a machine gunner and a submachine gunner, two of them. I was right there in the back. He fired a burst into the crowd—killed six men, and wounded seven. Thirteen people were hit then. And then the people—only a small part had already passed into the work zone, but everyone turned back to the living zone. And another strike began. They provoked that strike themselves, on purpose, so they could kill us off later. The commander of all the camps in Norilsk was General Derevyanko. When the strike began, it lasted for almost a month. They surrounded our camp from all sides—with soldiers. Not even a week passed before those soldiers went on the offensive...

V. Ovsiyenko: What did you eat during that time, was there water in the zone? How was the internal life of the camp organized?

H. Prokopovych: They brought food every day. Our guys would let them in—and that was it. Our prisoners would take everything and carry it to the mess hall. The gate would close—and they couldn't do anything. True, they were constantly broadcasting over the loudspeakers throughout the zone: "So-and-so, and so-and-so! Surrender! Don't listen to the Banderites! They are staging a provocation. Don't be afraid! Nothing will happen! Come out!" In four places, they cut passages through the forbidden zone, and stood there with submachine guns and machine guns. Some Muscovites started to flee. Then our guys set up lookouts on this side: with clubs. No one was running away anymore. A fellow named Korzhak, Mykhailo, one of ours, from the Ivano-Frankivsk region—he ran away. And he was in my brigade, in Bessonov's. Mykhailo Korzhak, he was a combative, brave guy, but he got scared and fled outside the zone... Later, he laughed about it, and we laughed too. He says: "I don't know what came over me." He got scared. They didn't count it as betrayal, they forgave him. He was the only one of ours who ran. Just one, no one else.

That week passed—and they launched their first assault. So we, the young ones, including me, jumped onto that fire truck and started cutting the hoses. They were coming from behind, but not shooting. A Muscovite somehow hit me in the leg. Through my valenok boot, he broke my leg. I jumped off the truck on one leg, the boys carried me away... After that, I was bedridden: my leg was tied up, because I had a joint fracture. They put me in traction. And soon there were many wounded. And so the weak lay there.

The strike ended, and I was in the hospital. I spent another six months with my leg in a cast—they only took the cast off after half a year. Omelchuk, our camp doctor, removed the cast for me. He was from Volyn. He had been the chief medical officer of the UHA army, of that SS division (the Sich Riflemen). That's what he was imprisoned for. So he took off my cast and said that the joint fracture was severe: "You'll be," he says, "on sick leave for another half a year." They already tried to give me lighter work, something I could do with less walking. He discharged me—and then they select me again for the penal camp. They knew more or less who was who from their stool pigeons. Moreover, since I had been injured, they knew why. So I ended up in that Norilsk penal camp. They gathered us there, the ones they called "the most hardened, the incorrigible." We spent the second winter after Stalin's death there, and then at the beginning of 1954—they sent all of us to Vladimir, to the prison. By convoy, they took us to the mainland, and from there sent us to Vladimir.

When they took us out of the transit prison in Krasnoyarsk, they put us outside the city in three so-called submarines. We held a hunger strike there for eight more days, because we thought they were going to shoot us there. It was so hidden: grass grew on top, and there was only one entrance. We thought: we'll die either way. It was clear they knew exactly how many could fit in there. They took 47 of us from the barge and put us straight in there. The others went to the transit prison, to the zone, but about three truckloads of us were taken outside the city, and we held a hunger strike there for eight days. From there, they started taking us out, dragging us out—each as they could. There were some who could walk. I, for example, could still walk, but there were others who couldn't. Then they took us to the transit zone, to a so-called quarantine, where there was a hospital. Because you couldn't eat right away—we hadn't eaten anything for eight days. But we took water. Some were so weak they could have died.

They kept us there for a long time. They gave us that bouillon, and later they sent us to the zone. We stayed there for some time in the barracks—two of our barracks. The transit prison in Krasnoyarsk was huge—with 3, 4, 5 thousand people. There were many common criminals. We didn't know the situation: the Muscovites could set the NKVD on our people. So we posted lookouts at the doors of our two barracks. Some stood guard while others slept. They gave us the prisoner's ration. But there was this one guy, Ivan Ohorodnyk, sleeping next to me, who says: "I don't care: if I'm sleeping, let them cut my throat, I'm not going on guard duty." That Ivan Ohorodnyk was from the village of Zabolotia, or something like that, near Stryi.

Maybe three days pass, we're sitting in the barracks. The senior guys, the leaders of the *urkas*, the criminals, come over. A short one, but the boss of them all, nicknamed "Landysh" (Lily of the Valley), comes first, with four others behind him. He says: "Guys, will you let us? We caught a *suka*. We don't have a place to deal with him, will you let us do it here?" The boys and I say: "Bring him in." They bring in the one they called a "*suka*"—he helped the NKVD men. (On this subject, they used to sing: *“На пеньки нас становили, раздевали и лупили, ох, зачем нас мама родила.”* (They stood us on stumps, stripped and beat us, oh, why did our mother give birth to us?). That was their song, how they pitied themselves).

There were about six of them. Two jump onto the top bunks (our boys made way), and two onto the bottom ones. And they lift that *suka* up to the ceiling, and then drop him. And the floor was concrete, because it was a transit prison. They threw him down from the top like that four times. Then he sat on all fours, and one of them grabs a piece of wood from near our stove—and beats him on the knees with it. Our guys couldn't watch anymore and said: "Get out of here."

They leave him just like that, and the crooks themselves run off. But he still crawled away slowly. He even crawled to the guardhouse—we didn't watch any further, we couldn't care less. They are their own—let them settle scores among themselves. Because he was the kind that our guys would have beaten up too, for serving the administration. That Landysh was in charge of it. The next day he comes: "Guys, we are not your enemies. We will give you some sugar and bread for the convoy, we will share with you. We only now found out who you are. You are our friends. We have no quarrel with you." That's what Landysh said.

Vladimir Prison

So, there were eight of us left. We were the last ones. When we were traveling to Vladimir, they brought us a little bread and a little sugar.

V. Ovsiyenko: You were being convoyed to Vladimir Prison—was there some kind of trial?

H. Prokopovych: Absolutely nothing! They just read us some joint... resolution.

V. Ovsiyenko: And did it specify the term, how long you were to be in Vladimir?

H. Prokopovych: For a year. Without any trial, without anything, just a resolution. It was written there: "Insubordination to the camp administration." That's all.

V. Ovsiyenko: Can you recall when exactly you were sent to Vladimir?

H. Prokopovych: If I'm not mistaken—we were there for a year, and it was in Vladimir that we encountered that commission that was traveling through the camps. We arrived in Vladimir somewhere, maybe, in 1954, or maybe even in 1955. Around then.

They put us in cells. And there are German officers there, and almost all of them, forgive the expression, are suffering from hemorrhoids. "Why?" we ask. Because we don't suffer from that, and we've also been in the camps. "Well," they say, "we're not allowed to walk." They're not allowed to walk—so we start a general strike. The whole corridor was opened up, everyone came out. Only the central line was blocked off by iron gates. They stood there, and we were here. And the Germans came out too. Then we gave them our conditions, and they gave us theirs: "Go back to your cells!" "No!" They took us by force. The riot police, or whatever they were called then, came with submachine guns, with weapons, and started beating us in the corridors. We scattered to our respective cells. We ourselves removed the wooden shutters from the windows, and the next day they didn't put them back up. And they no longer forced the Germans to sit, they walked around like everyone else, played dominoes. So they said: "These Banderites are good guys! Good guys!"

There, in Vladimir Prison, the commission found us. There were eleven of us in the cell (they took the Germans away from us later). All of us were ours. I remember two surnames: two Students (they were from Kulchytsi, where Sahaidachny was born), they were cousins. One of the Students had his arm broken here and here in that same Vladimir. He came to our cell after being in the Vladimir prison hospital. And the younger one (he was our goalkeeper in soccer—I told you)—and they both embrace. And it turns out, they are cousins. So he tells us why he was beaten. They told him: "Ask for forgiveness, you Bandera!" But he didn't want to ask, so they broke his arm. Later they inserted a metal plate, so he held it like that. The surname—Student. And Ivan Stepanovych Vasylashko from Chernivtsi Oblast, Sadhora Raion, the village of Toporivtsi. One day, out of those eleven, they released nine of us. I and that Ivan Stepanovych Vasylashko were left.

V. Ovsiyenko: Was this the Central Committee commission?

H. Prokopovych: The commission. It was held in the prison. So nine were released that day, leaving the two of us. Vasylashko was from the UPA. His charge was that they had attacked a Muscovite combat group—there were always 11, 12, 13 of them roaming the villages. They caught me once near my house too. They hunted, set secret ambushes—to catch some civilian, or maybe an insurgent or two would fall into their hands... And those insurgents set an ambush for that captain who had been bothering the people so much. So Vasylashko was accused of being there too. They killed all of them, and hacked the captain to pieces. They took a cart and ordered a man there to take the hacked-up captain to the sub-raion, and left the rest as they were when they arrived from Chernivtsi. So he was accused of being there—murder. And they didn't release anyone with a murder charge. Only for other articles. Well, as for me: I never had a weapon or anything like that, only agitation, leaflets. But for what I had done in the camps, they reduced my sentence to ten years. And those boys from Volyn, those Students—the other one was in the UPA—they didn't count anything, just released them. The two of us were left—Ivan Stepanovych Vasylashko and me. We went, and were in the camp again. Well, I was released soon, I earned 11 months of those sentence reductions in Irkutsk Oblast.

Colony 307

V. Ovsiyenko: So which camp were you taken to, from where were you released?

H. Prokopovych: I was released from Irkutsk Oblast. It was colony three-oh-seven. That was in 1958. I left Yurko Lytvyn there.

V. Ovsiyenko: And what can you tell us about him?

H. Prokopovych: About Yurko? We were both friends, you could say. He would always come to me, I would go to him. He loved books—and I loved books. He was interested in our western affairs, the UPA, the westerners, he was interested in the OUN, but he wasn't prepared for it. He would argue with me on topics like us having classes, that we have a working class, a peasantry, that these are all separate. And I would counter that our classic writers, our historiography, rejected this. No one said the Ukrainian nation was class-based. Because when there were Cossacks, they were Cossacks, but they simultaneously kept a rifle at home, and a saber. And the Cossack who worked, and the one who went to the Sich—it was all one and the same. The same in Western Ukraine—it was all peasantry, there were no classes. Priests—that's not a class, they are servants. In short, we argued like that. He told me that the Ukrainian nation is class-based—there's a class of workers, a class of oppressors, a class of peasantry. I say that we only have one class of oppressors—and that's the Party. And who are you? You were put here, what class are you from? That was the kind of conversation we had. And about himself, he said that either his house burned down, that's why his face was burned...

V. Ovsiyenko: That's not how it was. When he was about 12, he was somewhere in the Caucasus with his uncle, a military man, and a car he was sitting in caught fire. So Yurko got burned in that car. So badly that his eyes were bandaged for some time.

H. Prokopovych: He suffered like that? I didn't dare ask, but I knew his face was somehow burned. I don't remember which side—right or left?

V. Ovsiyenko: I can't say for sure. The burn scars were barely noticeable.

H. Prokopovych: Well, I don't know what to tell...

V. Ovsiyenko: Tell what you think is necessary.

H. Prokopovych: No, no. It would be on my conscience, why say such things. That Edik, he was some little Jew...

V. Ovsiyenko: Probably some writer, right? Yuriy Lytvyn wrote poems, so he communicated with those who wrote.

H. Prokopovych: I then told Volodymyr Horbovyi, Mykhailo Soroka, and Petro Duzhyi about Yuriy. I say: “We have a capable young man." And Duzhyi says: "But his views are not quite ours." Then Horbovyi tells me: "Take him for a talk, and I'll come over." Duzhyi didn't want to, he worked as an orderly in the medical unit. But Soroka and Horbovyi—they talked with him. And, you know, it came to the point where Yurko started to distance himself from us. He didn't agree with our views. Because we said that there was nothing to hope for but our own strength. And he still believed that everything would change. But, as experience later showed, nothing changed. Horbovyi was a lawyer by profession...

V. Ovsiyenko: Is that him, the lawyer Horbovyi, who defended Stepan Bandera at the trial for the assassination of the Polish minister Pieracki in 1936?

H. Prokopovych: Yes. Yurko later distanced himself from us. When I was being released, he didn't even see me off. We'd meet in the mess hall, but he no longer had that enthusiasm. He thought we were on the wrong path, and he was on a more correct one. Something like that. He believed that society could be remade within the same system. And as for something like an independent Ukraine—I never even heard such a word from him back then. Later—I believe our words were not in vain—later, it seems to me, he came to the right path.

V. Ovsiyenko: But it's interesting what Yuriy Lytvyn was imprisoned for in 1955. Two and a half months after his release, he was arrested on April 14 and convicted for creating the "Brotherhood of Free Ukraine" with 15 other boys in a camp during the construction of the Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Power Station.

H. Prokopovych: That could be. Well, "Free Ukraine," but we used the word "independent." "Brotherhood of Free Ukraine"... Listen, a person can change in a week, in two... Anything can happen. We only operated with the word "independent." I heard neither one nor the other from him. He always liked to repeat the slogan that was in the camp: "You can't fulfill the plan with your tongue!" So I say: "That slogan applies more to you than to us. Because we fought for this. I'm in prison for this. What are you in for?" He said: “I'm in for anti-Sovietism.” At least he never told me he was in for the “Brotherhood of Free Ukraine.”

V. Ovsiyenko: I have his verdict.

H. Prokopovych: Well, I understand. But that wasn't his work. It was clearly someone else who thought it up, and he was just there.

V. Ovsiyenko: But from the verdict, it seems he was one of the leaders of that group.

H. Prokopovych: That could be, because he was a very well-read, literate, and cultured young man. But at that time, he didn't use those words. If he couldn't even believe Volodymyr Horbovyi and argued with him, who could he believe? Who could he listen to? Me or someone else like me?

V. Ovsiyenko: Well, I knew him much later, in the 80s. And he spoke with such piety about Volodymyr Horbovyi, about Petro Duzhyi, about Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka, about Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj (because he had met him too)...

H. Prokopovych: I know Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj too. Josyf Slipyj always said: "Son, pray and repent! Those are the two main words in this world."

V. Ovsiyenko: Were you with him for a long time?

H. Prokopovych: Oh no, only in the transit prison. It was for a short time. He was such a tall man that only those as tall as him walked with him. And a transit prison—it's like that: you're there for a little while and then they move you on... He liked to say—not just to me, but to others: "Son, pray and repent, repent and pray." You wouldn't hear any politics from him.

V. Ovsiyenko: Who else of famous people did you know during that period?

H. Prokopovych: Who did I know? Only those I was imprisoned with. Horbovyi, Soroka, Duzhyi... Mykhailo Soroka was my best friend. He was of the same mindset as me. I loved Latin: "*Civis pacem – para bellum*." And he would say: "Oh, what do I care about that *pacem* when there's going to be *bellum*." He liked to joke like that.

V. Ovsiyenko: "If you want peace, prepare for war?"

H. Prokopovych: Yes. He says to me: "Why do I need that peace when there's going to be war?" He twisted it like that.

So when I arrived from Vladimir, I ended up in that three-hundred-seventh camp in Irkutsk Oblast, where they all were. Before I was to be released. We had a Holy Supper (Christmas Eve) there. Soroka walked all night with a *vertep* (nativity scene) through all the barracks, all the sections, to wake everyone up...

V. Ovsiyenko: And how was that *vertep* constructed?

H. Prokopovych: It was a stick, and on it, on an axis, was a hoop like from a sieve. It was covered on both sides with colored paper (because some people got things in parcels that could later be used for something). There was a wire handle to turn the *vertep*. A candle burned in the middle above the *vertep*. There was a grotto, shepherds, kings... On a pin... The boys made it, and it was beautiful. And it was made so that it rotated from the heat of the candle, while the nativity scene, with Joseph and Mary, stood still. But that candle only lasted until about two in the morning, so we finished without it.

There were five of our sections where the Ukrainians lived. There was one Russian section—called "Shanghai." There was a Lithuanian section—where Lithuanians and Latvians lived. We went to all of them. We woke everyone up. There was light. We didn't get light from just anywhere; the military garrison had its own generator. It served the zone, the wires, and everything. So we went around with the *vertep* until morning, visiting all the sections. Because Soroka insisted: "We'll visit everyone." We'd come to each section, sing a Ukrainian carol, either “Nova Radist Stala...” (A New Joy Has Come...) or a few verses of “Boh Predvichnyi...” (God Eternal...). Horbovyi went to sleep, Duzhyi went to sleep, but a few of us boys who listened to Soroka stayed with him until the end. And then, just before dawn, as it was getting gray, we hear the garrison's reveille—and we went to sleep. That's what that Holy Supper was like. Yurko Lytvyn happened to be absent from the Holy Supper. We wanted to call him, especially Horbovyi thought highly of him, but he hid.

V. Ovsiyenko: I've heard so many high praises of Mykhailo Soroka, including from Lytvyn. And abroad, where former Soviet political prisoners ended up, many memoirs have been written about Mykhailo Soroka. Why did he command such great authority?

H. Prokopovych: And his wife—Kateryna Zarytska, was an outstanding patriot of Ukraine. And his son, Bohdan, followed in his footsteps. But he himself earned that authority mostly in the camps. He raised the uprising in Vorkuta. Few people know about this, that he obtained almost half a railcar of weapons. Great things were supposed to happen there... But it fell through...

In Mordovia, Mykola Budulak and I looked from our 17th zone at Mykhailo Soroka's grave. It was not far from our work zone, in the forest. We couldn't go to it to pray, because it was a forbidden zone—they would shoot. He died in the 17th zone (Note 1. June 16, 1971. – V. Ovsiyenko). He was later reburied. (Note 2. The reburial took place in Lviv on September 28, 1991. – V. Ovsiyenko). Like those boys: Tykhyi, Stus, Yurko Lytvyn. More will be reburied. God willing...

In the Donbas Mines

So in September 1958, I was released from Irkutsk Oblast on those workday credits, as they called them. I came home in September 1958. I didn't go straight home, but to my brother's in Drohobych: I had signed a paper that I was forbidden to go to Western Ukraine for five years... I signed it, but I came here at night anyway. And they caught me here that very night. That Homziak, who was the local officer here, caught me. They took me to the KGB in Drohobych: "You know," they had already called, "that you're not allowed to come here?" "I know," I say, "why wouldn't I know?" "Well, then. Make a public statement. We will prepare a text for you. You only have to read it. And you won't have to go to the East, wherever you planned to go, but you'll teach here. Here," he says, "you have a day to think it over. You'll stay at your brother's…”—They already knew I was at my brother's, they knew everything.—“You'll think it over, come back here tomorrow, and we'll do it."

I went to my brother's. I even took a coat from my brother, because I had nothing on me but what I had from the camp, and went straight to the railway station in Drohobych—and to Lviv, and from Lviv to Kyiv, and from Kyiv—to Donbas. In the camp, the boys had given me addresses of people they knew. I had one acquaintance, a boy from Pervomaisk (a town in Luhansk or Donetsk Oblast, I can't remember exactly). That boy gave me a small letter. He had stolen some grain from a kolkhoz, and in the camp he got a political charge and was imprisoned in Irkutsk Oblast with us. I went to his relatives, brought them the note. I'll remember the name later, I can't right now... I lived there for a week, and they got me a passport. But I didn't have a work-record book. So I went to another place, where some boys I knew, westerners from the Stryi Raion, were. They got me a job there, without a work-record book for the time being. They always need people in the mines. I had no shelter anywhere. You can't find a job with a release certificate like that from the camp, but in the mines it was still possible. They set me up in a mine. I worked for a bit in one place, then they transferred me to another mine, "Menzhynska," in the city of Pervomaisk, Luhansk Oblast. I worked there for almost eight years.

I haven't mentioned yet that at the same time I was studying at Kyiv University. In the camps I knew many people from abroad, and I used that. Yurko Lytvyn also loved to study... I learned English well, passed the exams, and was accepted into the correspondence department of Kyiv University named after Shevchenko. It held the Order of Lenin. I studied for a full six years, until 1967. I was supposed to take my final exams in June, and in March I was arrested.

V. Ovsiyenko: So you never received your diploma?

H. Prokopovych: No. I was three months short.

The "Ukrainian National Front"

I went to Krasivskyi and Melen, and there we decided together that I would go to Lviv, to Ivan Hubka, because Hubka was supposed to prepare the printing type. We needed...

V. Ovsiyenko: And how did you meet Zinoviy Krasivskyi? He's from your region, he lived somewhere here in Morshyn, right?

H. Prokopovych: Krasivskyi and Myroslav Melen are brothers-in-law, they lived in the same house. And I knew Melen after Norilsk, from my first imprisonment. He was an old camp friend of mine. We always kept in touch. And here, their underground, that UNF, was already established, ready. I joined, as they say... I wasn't the last—others joined too. But they already had everything ready here, they were just waiting for me, as one of their own. So we agreed, I went to Lviv for that printing type. There I dropped in on Bohdan Krysa, who had also been imprisoned with us once, he wrote poems.

The next day I have a meeting in Lviv. And they grab me on the street: "Bandera! Bandera! Boys! A nationalist!"—and he himself is Russian, the one who was shouting and grabbing me. And I had the journal "Volia i Batkivshchyna" (Will and Fatherland), "Mesnyk" (The Avenger), and one hundred and fifty karbovantsi worth of those *bofony*. I was supposed to deliver it. They immediately grabbed me under the arms, and that one grabbed my hands... It was right on the bridge, on Stryiska Street in Lviv, they arrest me and shout: "Good people! Good people! A nationalist!" And I shout: "Good people! Good people! Bandits! Bandits!" I barely managed to say "bandits" twice—they covered my mouth, shoved me into a car, and took me straight to Myru Street, where the KGB was in Lviv. I think the SBU is still there today.

V. Ovsiyenko: Our records say this happened on March 21, 1967. Is that correct?

H. Prokopovych: Yes. Immediately, the so-called "official witnesses" appeared. They spread those *bofony*, the journals "Mesnyk," "Volia i Batkivshchyna" on the table. And those witnesses: "Good Lord! What is happening?" says a woman, a Russian one, apparently. "What is happening! Good Lord!" I say to her: “The ground is burning under your feet.” She didn't even have a clue what was going on. She thought she was here forever! That no one was doing anything here anymore!

The investigator Tarasenko, the head of the investigative department Kersta, and those witnesses all signed off on what was confiscated from me. Valentyn Moroz knows Tarasenko, because he was his investigator too. Moroz even studied with him at Lviv University. Well, they stripped me there, took my belt—and into the cell. There I heard that Melen and Krasivskyi had also been arrested. Hubka later—he was away on a business trip then. Dmytro Kvetsko, Slavko Lesiv, Vasyl Kulynyn, Mykhailo Diak—they were caught earlier in Ivano-Frankivsk, but the Lviv group—a bit later. Well, there are many who were never caught, who just remained free. But us, the ones who were prominent, who had already served time—they had no faith in us and no hope that we would, so to speak, reform. They even came to the camp in Mordovia, summoned us, supposedly to repent. You probably had that too, right?

V. Ovsiyenko: Oh yes, they came.

H. Prokopovych: After some time, they brought Krasivskyi in for a confrontation, as a witness. "Do you know this Prokopovych?"—to Krasivskyi. "No," he says. "And do you know Krasivskyi?" I say: "No." They took Krasivskyi out—and that was the whole conversation. Then they brought in Melen as a witness.

The investigation was completed and we were waiting for the trial. Lieutenant General Nikitchenko, the head of the KGB of Ukraine, arrives. He comes to Lviv and summons each of us one by one. Investigator Tarasenko summoned me and said: "The Lieutenant General will be here shortly—watch, do whatever he says." So I, as usual—I already know what he will say and what will happen. They brought me to that Lieutenant General Nikitchenko. He speaks pure Ukrainian. He says nothing to me about the case, only asks: "And who would get the land, if you were to build an independent state?" He thought that if he asked unexpectedly, I wouldn't know what to say. I say: "He who worked the land will continue to work it." "And you do not repent?" "Why should I repent? This is my second or third time. I have nothing to repent for." "So you will not answer any more questions?" "The investigation," I say, "knows everything." And that was the whole conversation. "Get out."

They summoned Krasivskyi and everyone else in the same way. Well, I wasn't present at their conversations... What did they say—what did Melen, what did Hubka say? Apparently, they were asked in the same tone. I don't know about the others, but I had no intention of repenting. Then they tried us all.

V. Ovsiyenko: And when was your trial? Was the UNF tried in two groups? One group from Frankivsk, and the other from Lviv?

H. Prokopovych: The Lviv group was tried individually. I don't know how it was for the Frankivsk group. I was tried separately too. The trial was like this. I don't remember the judge, nor the lawyer. There were two submachine gunners, no one else. Oh, and a secretary. So there were three of them. They brought me in, didn't ask anything, just read the verdict.

V. Ovsiyenko: What? So there was no trial as such—they just read the verdict?

H. Prokopovych: Yes. They read the indictment, and the secretary wrote something down. And the judge, he was also the prosecutor (I used to remember his name, but I've forgotten): "Such-and-such is the verdict. All rise!"—and two submachine gunners next to me...

V. Ovsiyenko: So there was no judicial examination?

H. Prokopovych: No, where would there be? It was like that for everyone... Our case is described there, in the journal “Volia i Batkivshchyna”. The fact is, there was no conversation—two submachine gunners stood on either side of me, their barrels pointed at me the whole time.

V. Ovsiyenko: The records state that you were tried on June 6 and 7, 1967.

H. Prokopovych: Yes. I was tried. They led me out—and that was the end of it. After the trial, they put two men in my cell. One was the chief engineer of the Lviv Hat Factory, his name was Stakhniak. The other was a construction engineer from Ternopil who had been secretly passing some UPA materials to Poland. We sat together for almost two more months. They had parcels, I had nothing. They were always asking me: "Are you Kuk?"—that Stakhniak had heard of Vasyl Kuk. They were always prying, but I didn't want to say anything, because who knew what kind of people they were? I had learned my lesson, you know... "Are you Kuk?"—that's what I always got. Later we got to know each other better. Then they stopped prying and just played chess, talked about their own things. And that Stakhniak asks me how he'll be transported to the camp. I tell him about the habits of the common criminals, how they'll rob you if you have good clothes, if you have anything to eat. "Don't take anything new," I say, "take old things, because you won't get far with anything, it'll all be gone on the way." He, poor soul, got so scared and was terrified that it would be a disaster. And he got five years.

Convoy

They held me a little longer. One morning they brought soup. Just as I sat down at the table, wanting to eat that soup—the door flew open: "Come on, get your things!"—at me. I left the soup just like that—and onto the convoy. A Black Maria—and to the railway station. There were the so-called "Stolypin cars." I ended up alone in one of those compartments. And the train hadn't even moved yet—they brought Melen. I can hear from his voice that he's maybe two compartments away. I'm traveling alone, and he's traveling with a bunch of those common criminals. I can already hear him: he's singing an Italian aria (I forgot which one), he's already got them all... And the guys, apparently more of ours. Common criminals. And they're saying: “Sing some more...” So he sings in Italian. He liked to present himself like that... He has a beautiful voice. When we were in Norilsk, he sang like a great singer, that Myron Melen. Well, I was quite sure it was his voice, so I shouted. And he answered. And I felt better, and so did he—that there were two of us traveling. That convoy took us to Mordovia. They dropped me off in Moscow, but not him. They took him further. And the next day, we ended up in Mordovia together.

In the Moscow transit prison, in the morning, they brought me in my pea coat, with a bundle on my shoulders, to some reception room. Two women were sitting there and talking: "Let's have a look at this state criminal." I just heard that, sat for maybe a couple of minutes—and they took me away.

Mordovia

It's not that far from Moscow to Mordovia. Well, when I arrived in Mordovia, I met my old acquaintances.

V. Ovsiyenko: Which camp were you brought to?

H. Prokopovych: The one where you were later. Ivan Myron was there...

V. Ovsiyenko: That's ZhKh-385/19. The settlement of Lesnoy, Tengushevsky Raion.

H. Prokopovych: Lesnoy, yes. I don't remember anymore. We arrived towards evening, it was almost dark. And here they are, meeting me: "Prokopovych, Prokopovych!" Vasyl Pidhorodetskyi, Viktor Solodkyi, Vasyl Yakubiak, Hryts Kydiuk all came running—all those I had left behind in 1958... I had been free for nine years, and they were all still there! Yantsio—that's what they called him, and many others. I don't remember them all.

They put me in Ivan Myron's construction emergency brigade. Winter in Mordovia—a fine winter. Mostly they wake you up at night.

V. Ovsiyenko: To unload wagons of timber?

H. Prokopovych: Yes, to unload wagons. The foreman there was one of our boys (I forgot his name). He also had a 25-year sentence. He was a foreman, but he stood and worked like everyone else. I was in that brigade for three and a half months, and then Myron Melen helped me. He brought me to the detachment commander (a senior lieutenant). There was a billiard table in the zone, and he would come in gloves to play billiards. A cultured little Muscovite. And he played with the prisoners. Our guys didn't push in, but the little Russians, the kind that had deserted from the army, would come up to him: "Mr. Senior Lieutenant!"—it was like that, I heard it many times. So he, Myron, brought me to him: "I'm asking you, I'm asking you... This is my co-defendant," he says. "You see, he's wasting away in that brigade. Transfer him somewhere so he's not there," said Myron. And he: "Alright! I'll transfer you to another brigade." He put me in a brigade where we varnished cabinets, cuckoo clocks, all sorts of wooden nightstands they made there. He put me with a certain Petro Fenko. I was his assistant. Fenko was also from the Ivano-Frankivsk region, with a 25-year sentence. He worked with the varnish spray gun, and I cleaned and transported the items. The quota was 17 cabinets we had to varnish per shift. And I had to clean them and then transport them to dry, to get them into a sellable condition. The foreman accepted the work. So Fenko and I worked at that factory.

But there was also other work: meeting among our own people, telling each other what we could, copying things, passing them on. Here, Levko Lukianenko says to me: "There's an opportunity to pass something to the outside. Let's write our biographies: you—yours, I—mine." "Good, I'll write it." I wrote it. He passed his to his brother, and his brother already passed it abroad. That was the kind of work we did.

There was also other work: various holidays. I was in charge of that: all our revolutionary dates. UPA Day, Armed Forces Day, Unification Day or the IV Universal, the death of Stepan Bandera... I organized all of that, Levko helped me find such dates, because sometimes you'd forget. And Stepan Soroka helped to do that. Soroka knew more about all that, being an old OUN member. But Mykola Budulak sometimes resisted. We observed such holidays as best we could.

One time Leonid Borodin asks Levko Horokhivskyi: "Will you sign for one of ours? He died in the hospital.”

V. Ovsiyenko: That was Yuriy Galanskov, he died in 1972 after an unsuccessful stomach ulcer operation.

H. Prokopovych: Yes, Galanskov. "We," he says, "are writing abroad. You sign too. And ask the Jews to sign as well." So Levko Horokhivskyi comes to me: "What should we do?"—Levko always consulted with me. I say: "Alright, Levko. We'll sign, and the Jews will sign.”—Because we were in contact with the Jews.—“But let them sign for Zenyk Krasivskyi."—And Krasivskyi had been put in a psychiatric hospital then.—“We agree: they sign for ours, and we—for their's. We'll collect signatures, and the Jews will sign too." Levko told them that, they thought about it and the next day brought back the answer: "Nyet (No)." Well, I say: "If it's no, then let them write themselves, and we won't, and the Jews won't either." Since they didn't want to sign for our guy, we didn't sign for theirs. There was such an incident with them. And we communicated mostly through Borodin. Slavko Lesiv was there too, but he had already been taken away because he had bad eyesight. He was released early.

There was another incident: someone from their barracks threw a stone and hit Bohdan Rebryk.

V. Ovsiyenko: From which barracks?

H. Prokopovych: The Russian one. They hit him with a stone. Rebryk runs to us: "Boys! This and that happened—they hit me." Viktor Solodkyi goes to them. A certain... -sky, a Vlasovite, was in charge of them... I forgot his name... It's on the tip of my tongue, but I forgot... Viktor came to the zone to negotiate with him. He swears: "It can't be!" But Bohdan saw how he was hit, even saw who did it. No—and that's it. The conversation ended there.

I was in that 19th camp in Mordovia until 1973. And in 1973, they sent me into exile.

V. Ovsiyenko: But wait. There's information that you wrote a history of the UPA in the camp, but while rewriting a second copy, it was confiscated by the administration and disappeared.

H. Prokopovych: Yes. Bohdan Rebryk was rewriting it, and they took both copies: mine and his. He was just rewriting it. Slavko had advised that there should be two copies: one for people to read, and the other to be sent abroad.

V. Ovsiyenko: What was the volume of that text?

H. Prokopovych: It was about twelve notebooks, something like that, maybe a hundred pages each.

V. Ovsiyenko: Wow!

H. Prokopovych: Yes. I wrote it for two whole years. It contained descriptions of people like Hurba. He's mentioned in the "History of the UPA" now, but back then, few knew about him. It described who the UPA company commander Kolestnyk was. How the Kovpak partisans attacked and the UPA retreated. There were tanks... Eyewitnesses told me. "The UPA," says one, "is firing machine guns at the Muscovites, but the Muscovites aren't falling. When I jumped to the machine gunner and started firing myself—the Muscovites hit the ground. And when the battle was over, and the Muscovites had retreated, it turned out that one of theirs had infiltrated!" That's what living witnesses told me, and I wrote it all down.

About Volodymyr Horbovyi, Petro Duzhyi, about his brother, how he was caught in a hideout, about Mykhailo Soroka, about his wife Kateryna Zarytska—there was a lot to write about. But who would have expected they'd take it away? To this day, I wonder how it happened that they took everything from Rebryk. Some of the boys knew we were writing. If I had expected such a thing, I wouldn't have given it to be rewritten. For that, I only got five days in the punishment cell. That's nothing—five days, and they told me I would be tried. Because those notebooks were passed on somewhere. I was writing a history of the UPA, what people told me. It didn't touch upon Soviet power. If I had written openly against the authorities, like Stus, maybe they would have tried me too.

I served those five days in the punishment cell and that was the end of it, thank God. Mykola Budalak didn't know about it. Only Slavko Lesiv, Yakubiak, and Bohdan Feniuk knew. Bohdan Rebryk wrote it, poor soul—and it was all lost. I still have it more or less in my head and I don't regret it. Because what do they say? What's lost is lost, it's good that nothing worse happened. Later, they were transporting one man through Kyiv, and in Kyiv they asked him: "How's that Prokopovych, the one who wrote about all of you?" Ivan Pokrovskyi (he's still alive today) says: "It'll be alright, just let's protect Bohdan, because he only has a few days left. We must prevent them from killing him, because they'll send someone, and then they'll blame us." So Ivan Pokrovskyi advised that we should watch over Bohdan Rebryk. Pokrovskyi thought they might even kill him and then pin it on us, as if for giving away the “History.” God knows if he gave it away or if they took it themselves.

V. Ovsiyenko: Well, they conducted searches, there were plenty of those stool pigeons...

In Exile in Krasnoyarsk Krai

H. Prokopovych: They brought us to Krasnoyarsk. I'm traveling about halfway alone in a compartment and I hear the voice of Anatoly Berger—also a Jew from Leningrad from that same camp. And we both understood through the compartment wall that he knows me, and I know him. All the Jews in the camp in Mordovia had renounced their Soviet citizenship, but Berger did not. They offered him: learn Hebrew, we'll go to Israel together, but he didn't want to. So they didn't speak to him. I knew about this. That Berger is also going into exile for three years. And they were convicted (it was in the case file) of wanting to blow up Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow. Whether it was true or not—the fact is, they were arrested before they were even near the mausoleum. There were five of them, such steadfast patriots. And all sons of such prominent and wealthy people. So it was with this Berger that I was traveling into exile. Later they cleared out his compartment and put him in with me.

We arrived in Krasnoyarsk on April 30, 1973. Tomorrow is May 1st. They take us from that "Stolypin car" into a truck and bring us to the district prison, in the town of Kuragino. Bondarenko, the chief, says: "How can I release you in your prison coats, when there's a parade tomorrow? You'll sit in the prison for all these holidays." What are you going to argue about? They put us in a cell. There are six men there: one for alimony, one shot at his wife with a rifle, ran around the house, another stole... And they put the two of us in there. We stayed there for those two days, then they let us out. Senior Lieutenant Tabunov, our superior, says: “Go and find yourselves work. I’m going home.” He led us out of that district militia prison onto the street...

Chornovil asked me to describe how they transported me. I described it to him. Because we were corresponding. He was in exile in Yakutia.

So they released us, as they say, to that “freedom.” That Tabunov says: “Do you have 20 kopecks for the bus?” I was just walking past him, so he gave me those 20 kopecks: “Here’s for the bus.”

They released us in the morning, and we’re just walking around. That Tolik is even more impractical in life, like a small child. He won’t take a step away from me. I say: “Maybe we should split up: you might find an apartment faster, or I will.” — “No,” he says, “I won’t find one by myself.” And so we walk and walk the whole day. People see those padded jackets, Tolik completely bald, and me with a shaved head—they shut their doors: “Exiles, the exiles are here...” They’ve already heard, everyone knows we’ve been brought here. The settlement of Kuragino has 17,000 residents. Of those 17,000 residents, 25% are Germans.

And two weeks before us, they brought a Jehovah’s Witness there, whom I knew well. He was in a wheelchair; his legs didn’t work. That’s how they transported him through the train cars. I forgot his last name, but we were well acquainted from the camp. He was a German. They didn’t send him to Kuragino, but to the Yuzhny settlement—there was a village like that near Kuragino. He wasn’t interested in politics at all. He was just a man of his faith. He served about ten years. Later, he visited me many times on his motorcycle. That is, once he was free, he healed his legs. He bought a motorcycle—those Jehovah’s Witnesses helped him.

Tolik and I walked the whole day and found no apartment, no food, nothing. In the evening, we return to the police station. I had a wooden suitcase, I still have it now. With books. And there was a towel in it. I left it at the police station. They shout at me: “Take it!” And I say: “Where am I going to drag it? When I find an apartment, I’ll get it.” And Tolik had a bundle, like a rucksack. He left his too. I’m still holding on to those 20 kopecks, because it’s not much for a bus. And where would we go anyway? Maybe one stop. And Kuragino is nine kilometers long from one end to the other.

We’re sitting in the corridor of that police station. The officers on duty are looking at us. One says: “Hey, guys, let’s go to one place. I know a woman who lives alone. She’ll take you in.” He brings us there. She saw the police and opened the door. Their doors in Siberia are wooden, with a high wooden fence. The gate opens in two halves, even higher. When he told her it was about an apartment—oh, she shut it immediately. “Let’s go back,” says the policeman. “I don’t know any other places like this.” We say: “Let’s go to the police station, we’ll spend the night there. Where else can we sleep? No one will take us in.”

And so we stayed there. No one bothers us anymore. They walk past us, say nothing. We didn’t really sleep, just dozed, because it was cold. Although it was already May, the weather there is... No apple trees grow there. Rye grows, but not wheat. They harvested ten centners of rye per hectare. Potatoes grow, but there’s no fruit of any kind.

The next day, we go out, we walk and walk—no one will take us. I say: “Tolik, we’ve already been in this neighborhood.” — “I don’t remember.” — “We’ve already walked here. Let’s go again.” At two in the afternoon, we knock on a gate. The gate is also high, made of iron. A woman comes out. “We,” I say (Tolik is behind me, Tolik doesn’t want to say anything), “we are exiles. We’re looking for an apartment. Maybe you can help?” And she says to me right away: “Do you know so-and-so?” — That Jehovah’s Witness who was sent to Yuzhny. I say: “I know him, I know him. But we’re not here for our faith, we’re here for anti-Soviet agitation...” — “I understand, I understand. I’m a German. Come into the house.”

We enter the house, and there are six girls, starting from the ninth grader—Natasha, and ending with Albina, who doesn’t go to school yet. Six girls. “My husband,” she says, “is at work right now—his name is Yakov. Our last name is Wagner.” And right away to the girls: “Get them something to eat!” They chopped up some potatoes, eggs, and gave us something to eat. It was the first time in two days.

The girls brought their religious album. It had Leonardo da Vinci, the “Mona Lisa,” Michelangelo, all sorts of holy madonnas. From other artists—Picasso, Rembrandt. A whole album of color photographs. Those girls are all believers, they tell me: “We are Lutherans.” I say: “And we are Catholics.” And Tolik is nothing... He didn’t believe in God back then, so he just keeps quiet, doesn’t ask anything. The woman says: “You’ll stay here until Yasha comes...”

Yasha arrived as late as two in the morning—he was a driver for the SST, driving bakers and office workers, and bringing others back. He worked almost a whole shift, went to bed at two in the morning, and was already driving again in the morning. He drove the first and second shifts in a small bus. He came in, greeted us right away, introduced himself, this and that, and says: “It’s nothing, I’ll find something. I already have one apartment. But it’s for someone who will be with his wife. Because the landlady’s husband died at the front. She’s alone. She’s Belarusian. A decent person. There’s a place to sleep there.” Tolik immediately says: “I’ll go. My wife is coming in two weeks.” Indeed, two weeks later his wife arrived from Leningrad. She was a director. She came with Tolik’s father and mother. They brought him money, helped him get settled. As usual, the Jews—they have things, both wealth and support. I had already sent a telegram with Tolik’s money, and a week later my dad wired me a hundred rubles. So I had my own money.

Well, but there’s no apartment for me. They took Tolik in because his wife was coming, but for me, a single man, there’s nothing. I stayed with Yasha for another day, and then Yasha took me to a hotel. He says: “I’ll pay. You stay here. We’ll find something later. We have to find an apartment.” Yasha immediately got me a job at the bakery. At first, it was called a flour-sifter, and then they transferred me to be a stoker. And Tolik says: “I don’t need a job. My father will send me money.” But at the police station, they say, no, you have to have a job. He says: “I don’t know where to find one. I won’t go to the bakery.” He can’t work at all. They found him a job: an insurance agent, traveling around the villages. So he traveled around. He served less than two years, and they released him. And I served all five. They sent me from flour-sifter to stoker because they told me not to let me near the flour. Tolik used to say, laughing, that I might throw some English words into a bag of flour.

V. Ovsiienko: To poison the Soviet people?

H. Prokopovych: Yes, to poison them. The director of the bakery was, may he rest in peace, a wonderful Russian man—Astakhov Vasyl Stepanovych. He helped me in every way, supported me. He says: “You’ll be a stoker.” I don’t say anything to anyone anymore. I understand it all.

I arrived in May, and during the Epiphany holidays, the director calls me: “Grisha, come to my place around one in the morning. We will be blessing water.” I came. And I brought some of that holy water to Tolik.

We had a friend, Ruslan, an artist. He was from Bratsk, he had a German wife. He helped us. That Astakhov brought an underground priest from somewhere a hundred kilometers away. A few people gathered, they consecrated the water. I know the procedure now like a cantor, but back then I didn’t know it. It was shortened tenfold.

V. Ovsiienko: In an abridged version...

H. Prokopovych: Yes, because the priest was afraid, and the director was afraid. I took some of that water, brought it to Ruslan, to Tolik. At Ruslan’s place, we crossed ourselves with that water. He was also a non-believer, that Russian artist.

Time passed, they let me go on my first vacation, and I came home. I hadn’t seen anyone for six years. I saw everyone. It so happened that I arrived at Christmas. I went to church, confessed, even though it was an Orthodox church of the Moscow Patriarchate, but it was still a church of Christ. In exile, I only went to church in Abakan twice—that’s a hundred kilometers from Kuragino. I was there twice—it was hard to travel: I had to get back to work quickly—I was a stoker, working in shifts. I was in church there only twice. And by myself—Tolik didn’t want to go. And there was no church any closer. Absolutely no one knows anything about God. Only how to get drunk... The Germans who live there—you can recognize their houses. And you can recognize the Russian ones too. The German houses are all fenced, and the fences and the houses are proper houses. But the Russians don’t even have a fence. You can see it right away.

V. Ovsiienko: Only the “Russian birch and spruce,” which grew on their own.

H. Prokopovych: Yasha and I became friends. He likes Ukrainians, and he really likes Hitler. I knew a lot about German history, told him a bit about our customs, how we greeted the Germans. And he was a good nationalist. It got to the point where he advised me: an apartment is for sale. Some people from the bakery lent me money. First, Astakhov lent me fifty and a hundred. And I had another fifty. For two hundred rubles, I bought an apartment. I was already sleeping on my padded jacket there. Then I earned money and bought a mattress, bought bedding, which you will sleep on tonight—I brought it from there, bought it new in a store there.

And so the five years of exile passed. I served about a month extra—while they were making my passport and giving me permission to leave. Yasha saw me off at the station, sent me off, and I went home.

With the Moscow Dissidents

On my way back, I lived in Moscow for a week. I was met there by the dissidents Yuri Terentyev, Aleksandr Ginzburg, and Olga Murashko, Yuri Terentyev’s wife. They helped me financially. I still have the address on a box from a parcel. I lived in their apartment for a week. They took me to their underground meeting: “Well now? Let’s have a look at the independence advocate!” They, including Yurko, helped me. He told me: “This help is from the United States Congress, it’s not us helping.” That money comes from America through underground channels. He said he wasn’t helping me with his own money—he made that clear to me right away, but he received me honestly, and he is an honest man himself. He was very religious, took me to church. He had a colleague there who read the “Apostle.” I heard this in his house. And Olya Murashko was there. They brought me to that underground, into some basement. Ginzburg (Sakharov was no longer there—Sakharov was already in exile, and this was his team). There were many people there, about twenty, but I didn’t know them. I only knew Terentyev, Olya, and one other woman—her last name is on the photograph. An older woman, all alone. I didn’t know the rest of the dissidents. They had a small, how to put it, repast. There, everyone wanted to talk to me in their own way. But they all said: “You’re an independence advocate.” And no one liked that.

In the end, at home, Yurko asks me the same thing that Lieutenant General Nikitchenko asked me in Lviv: “And who,” he says, “would the land belong to, if Ukraine becomes independent?” Well, I think to myself, you’re asking this too? I wasn’t surprised to hear it from the KGB agent, but you? I tell him the same thing: “The land will belong to those who work it.” He always went to work, and Olya, a geologist, stayed home. She took me around Moscow all the time to different places, to see acquaintances. She wanted to take me to Lenin’s mausoleum, but I said I didn’t want to go anymore. She walked me past the prison where the monument to Dzerzhinsky stands.

V. Ovsiienko: Now that’s something!

H. Prokopovych: So she says: “There are cells in the basements there, and here stands a ‘man in a coat,’ on guard.” That’s Dzerzhinsky—that Pole in a long greatcoat. The police in Russia still guard him now, they show it in the movies. He’s still standing there, that Dzerzhinsky, that KGB man, the Cheka.

I stayed in Moscow for a week. They saw me off, gave me another 150 rubles from the same fund to get settled here. Yurko took me to the station, we kissed three times in the Christian way—they like to do that. He’s young, maybe a little older than you. Olya is very young.

At Home

So when I returned here, they told me right away: get a job. I got a job at the ozokerite mine in Boryslav. I was home for a week when Yasha Wagner comes to visit me from Siberia. He wanted to get out to Germany. I had written applications for him back in Siberia, but they were always returned. So he says to me: “Help me there, in Moscow.” That Yasha Wagner came with the idea of getting into the German embassy in Moscow: you, he says, help me. I wrote him a note to some Muscovites, gave him the address. I say: “Yurko—he’ll arrange it for you there.” And those Muscovites helped him get into the German embassy. He discussed his case there, went home, and a year later he received an invitation. The USSR hadn’t collapsed yet, but people had already lost their fifty-ruble notes. Gorbachev had said that those who have a lot shouldn’t exchange them, only those who have two. Then Yasha sold his house for a pittance, and all that money was lost. He had a car—everything was lost. He went straight to Germany with two of his daughters, while four had already married by that time and lived in nearby villages. So he brought them over too. Only his wife, Frida, remained, because she had died. We still correspond to this day. He doesn’t want to send me money because he says the postage is expensive—it costs half the amount. Well, I’m a stranger to him, as they say. But we still write, we remember each other. He sent a package last year for the holidays. But that package was returned from Ukraine. They wrote that Ukraine does not need food products, so the package was not accepted. He writes to me: “What is this?” What can I say, with a government like this? Maybe they don’t accept it simply because they don’t want to. Yasha sent money several times. Once in a postcard—he unglued it, put the money inside—they found it. He sent a religious book, put money inside, fifty marks—they found it. He sent it by letter twice—they found it, took it, and that was the end of it. I said: don’t send it, it’s all for nothing. He writes that he has a pension of 1600 marks, his second wife has twelve hundred. He says there are all sorts of products in the stores, 50-60% of which he doesn’t know what they are for. They live well—the only thing missing is bird’s milk. He goes to church, prays, sings hymns—that’s his whole life, he’s alive and well to this day.

And when I got out, I started commuting to that mine. I did it for three years. I worked—I needed to earn my years of service. I had three years of mining service from the camp in Karaganda—they didn’t count it, but in Donbas I had only eight in total. And you need ten. I worked for eleven years, while I was collecting all the certificates and documents from where I worked as a teacher. I had to find everything. By the time I found it, I had commuted for another year, had to work another year. I worked for three years and a month—and I retired in 1981. And I stayed at home. My son had already been born.

V. Ovsiienko: And what year?

H. Prokopovych: In 1980.

Hryhoriy: May 25th.

H. Prokopovych: And you know, I married a woman, his mother—she turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness. I didn’t know, and she didn’t tell me anything. It was only when the child was born that she started sending other people to convert me to their church, to make me leave my own church. I saw that it was a lost cause—I filed for divorce. On holidays, she works (my father was still alive). On St. Michael’s Day, on Christmas, she does the laundry—it means absolutely nothing to her. If she even cared about the house—no: “Armageddon is coming soon!” She carries things out of the house! Armageddon! I think: she’s gone mad! I took her to the medical station in Berezhnytsia. I went there for a while, until they released her. She wasn’t severely ill. They kept her in a way that she was even taken to work. A few months later, it was the same thing again: “Armageddon is coming soon!” And I had to get a divorce.

The child was eight months old, and I was feeding him (eight months!) by myself. They awarded me custody of the child because my wife had those certificates saying she was mentally ill. And that the Jehovah’s Witnesses—the Soviet authorities didn’t like them either, because they are against the state, they don’t take up arms... So the first time, the court postponed the case because I insisted on having the child. The second time, there was a different judge, and they awarded the child to me. I also brought one of their books: “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” that’s what it’s called. I brought it to the court and said: “Read this, so you know what kind of sect this is, you don’t know, do you?” They looked at the book. They set up a village commission, they set up a commission from Drohobych, from the district department of education. They looked me over, questioned all the neighbors: am I a drunkard, can I support a child—and everyone said yes, including the head of the village council, that I was the kind of person who could support a child on my own. And they granted us a divorce. The child was awarded to me.

V. Ovsiienko: Oh, so your child is precious to you—since you raised him yourself...

H. Prokopovych: Yes. From eight months old. And, my friend, I had... I had saved three thousand rubles in those three years in my savings account. Because the house was old, I thought I’d buy bricks—maybe one day we’d rebuild it, because it’s wooden. That’s what I planned. She knew about those three thousand. She hadn’t contributed a single kopeck, but the court ordered me to give her 1200. Well, the court ordered it...

I come home, and an hour later she’s after me: “Give me the money!” And I had taken all the money out of my savings account. The court had previously checked that I had three thousand in a savings bank in Boryslav, near the mine. It was deducted from my salary. I was earning 200 rubles there, 189. She took that money and I never saw her again. Sometimes she would come to see him, because her maternal rights were not terminated. Well, what about her? She only knows her own thing. And she even tells our son: “Don’t go to church, Armageddon is coming soon!” But he didn’t fall for that. He understands things himself now.

So that’s how I’m living out my days, as they say, with this boy. My only help is that they didn’t take him into the army because I’m old and single. And that woman who lives in Mokryany—I married her in the church, of course, in Vynnyky. It’s been eight years now. She has a fine house there, gets a pension of forty-six hryvnias, and has a son. His wife left him because he’s a drunkard. He has golden hands, he’s hardworking—but whatever he earns, he drinks away. She has to live with him in the same house. He doesn’t have money for cigarettes, so she has to give him money for cigarettes from her pension. That’s how we’ve been getting by to this day.

I haven’t finished telling you that when I finished working at the mine, people told me: “Study to be a conductor, because there’s no one to lead the church choir.” And I was already a cantor. I went to be a cantor in the Orthodox church, because it was the only one at the time, there was no other. Everyone went to that Orthodox church back then. So I was a cantor there, because the other cantors were old and couldn’t do it, and I had once studied to be a priest for two years. I know all that. I prepared a little and I’m still a cantor to this day. And then I went to courses in Boryslav, to a certain Morozevych, a conductor and teacher, a music instructor, and I studied conducting with him for six months. I knew music notation as a teacher. So I led the church choir for another 14 years. But two years ago, I had a heart attack, was laid up in Drohobych, and I asked them to let me go: “Find someone, because it’s hard for me to wave my arms.” And it’s constantly nerve-wracking. Dr. Truten told me: “You have to quit that.” So they found someone, he comes from the village of Lishnia, and they sing a bit themselves. I only conducted on Epiphany, on the Theophany, and after that I told them to leave me in peace. And that’s how we live to this day. There’s a lot to do and a lot to say, but nothing to listen to, as they say. Everyone understands this and everyone knows. I am against this partisanship. I argued with Levko Lukianenko, with the Horyn brothers: we don’t need any parties, we need to create one party—the OUN, what we had before. If we were all united, we would have done much more. Only the OUN would have saved us. “No, parties are a good thing.” — And what’s so good about them? What has it led to? It has led to nothing.

That is my opinion and the position of those who were with me in the camps and prisons. We should have continued what thousands of our people died for in prisons and camps. No one knew otherwise: “bandyory,” “banderites.” “Kharaso,” the Japanese shouted, “banderovtsy—kharaso!” The Germans said: “Bandera—gut, gut.” The American intelligence officers who were imprisoned with us... And even that Mykola Budulak-Sharyhin—he knew that you could only do business with us. He was of the same opinion. Well, and now it has come to the point where everyone is his own otaman.

V. Ovsiienko: As Shevchenko said: “It’s as if people have gone mad.” He was talking about us.

H. Prokopovych: About us, yes. And only quarreling. Levko is in one party, his associate Ivan Kandyba is in another. And they are both angry with each other—so what is there to talk about? Mykhailo Horyn told me: “In 30 years, we will rise.” I said that it can’t happen in 30 years. Colleague, that can’t be! Well, thank God, it happened sooner. Then Mykhailo joined another party... What we once talked about with Bohdan Horyn, with Ivan Hel, what Stepan Bandera, Konovalets, Petliura thought about—it all fell apart, what we need is not there. And so, brother, time goes on.

When I returned, the head of the KGB summoned me immediately. I’ll remember his last name in a moment, it’s on the tip of my tongue... Rybalchenko. And he addresses me with the informal “you”: “Remember! Three people in the village will be watching you, and one at the mine. There are two of us like that in the district: Mizyk for the churches, and I for you, all you politicos. So you know: we will be watching. I’m telling you openly.” They are both still alive, and both confessed to me. And one died, his last name was Buhai, he lived up here, his house is on the hill—he never confessed.

Fedio Klymenko came here. My father was still alive. We were cutting chaff together. That Klymenko goes to Basarab in Stryi, because he’s his relative. And Basarab was in Vovk’s company, the one that ambushed General Świerczewski. Basarab served all 25 years. So that Klymenko came to him, he has some relative there—a sister or someone. I didn’t inquire. So in Nahuievychi, they grabbed Fedya right there—and took him to the KGB. They held him all day, interrogating him: “What? Where? Why did you come to Prokopovych?” And it was him, that neighbor Buhai, who informed on him.

And the other two confessed to me. One told me: “They would drag me to Drohobych, give me 15 rubles, like, go drink with him and listen to what he says. And I would drink that money away, you never knew a thing, and I’d tell them: ‘He doesn’t say anything. He works in the mine, he can’t walk around because he’s already exhausted from work and doesn’t say anything.’ And he would talk his way out of it like that all the time. ‘And the money,’ he says, ‘I probably took it about eight times, 15 rubles each time.’”

And the second one, the one from Sadrizhkiv (Note 3. 3. The names of the informants should not be indicated for now... – H. Prokopovych), whose last name... he’s from those Sadrizhkivs, his father (Hlubish knows him) was a great executioner who killed people. But he, the son, was of completely different blood. He says: “I have your biography. It’s a whole NKVD book. I was,” he says, “watching you. Well, I know you, and you know me.” That was the conversation.

And that Buhai, with whom I taught since 1944—he never confessed, and so he died two years ago.

V. Ovsiienko: And after your release, were you in any parties or public organizations? For example, in the Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons?

H. Prokopovych: Yes, I went to the meetings of political prisoners in Lviv. Ivan Hubka, my associate and friend, organized them. They created an editorial office there. Now we just correspond. And I’m in the village, so they don’t need me there—they have their own people in the city who do things. Ivan asked me to write something a few times, so I sent it to the journal “Volia i Batkivshchyna” (Will and Fatherland). I wrote memoirs, but whether they were published or not—that doesn’t matter to me anymore. Because even the former political prisoners—they have all split up.

Now, you will be visiting Vasyl Striltsiv. Vasyl handed over the cow-keeping to me there, in Norilsk, at Kaerkan. He was our head there, and when he was being released, he handed over the management to me. I didn’t tell you about that Kaerkan—he will tell you everything. Don’t forget to give him my regards. I have a photograph of him from a meeting of political prisoners. And Fedir Filko from Stebnyk, Hryts Chublak from Stebnyk. They visit, they correspond.. But it’s all not worth the effort—it’s just a memory of our past, history. And our people have no power—everything has remained as it was. And we are on the sidelines. We suffered so much—and what do you have? Has anyone thanked you, besides us, our own people? Has anyone given you any help, or what? You pay half for electricity—that’s all. Nobody knows us.

V. Ovsiienko: I earn a salary, like other people. I’m younger, so I still can.

H. Prokopovych: If only they would recognize us in this parliament now...

V. Ovsiienko: This is the end of the conversation with Hryhoriy Prokopovych in the village of Urizh, Drohobych Raion, Lviv Oblast, on January 31, 2000.

Photo by V. Ovsiienko:

Prokopovych Film 7946, frame 11A. 31.01. 2000, Urizh village. Hryhoriy PROKOPOVYCH.