PETRO PAVLOVYCH ROZUMNYI

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LIFE'S JOURNEYS

An Interview with Petro Pavlovych ROZUMNYI

December 11 and 13, 1998; April 29 and November 25, 2001.

With corrections by P. Rozumnyi.

Published in the journal “Kryvbas Courier” in 2006, issues 196, 197, and 198.

V. V. Ovsienko: On December 11, 1998, we are speaking with Mr. Petro Rozumnyi at the home of Vasyl Ovsienko—Kyiv, 30 Kikvidze Street, apartment 60.

P. P. Rozumnyi: I, Petro Pavlovych Rozumnyi, 72 years old, was born on March 7, 1926, in the village of Chaplynka, Mahdalynivka Raion, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. That same year I was born, my parents moved as part of a resettlement program to the right bank of the Dnipro, where there was free land that had not been cultivated since the revolution. These were fallow and virgin lands. They moved because here, in the new place, they were given more land, 12 desiatynas per family, and were exempt from taxes for a certain period.

So, my childhood was spent in the newly founded village of Pshenychne. It was founded and so named by the pioneers—the settlers from the left bank of the Dnipro.

My father, Pavlo Petrovych Rozumnyi, was the youngest son in his family, born in 1898. My mother, Fedora Stepanivna Denysenko, was born in 1896. They married in early 1917. As my mother used to say, “The revolution is happening, and we’re getting married.”

I get lost, not knowing what to say or in what order... I will try to continue this story by focusing on my own observations.

CHILDHOOD. THE FAMINE

My childhood was spent in the wide steppe, where as far as the eye could see, there was not a single tree, only burial mounds and blackthorns. The trees that now adorn our area were planted by the pioneers and local residents.

Whenever the question arose as to why my parents had resettled from established places to new land, my mother always said that she hadn't wanted to move, but my father had to, because he feared he might be subjected to reprisals for being a member of an underground organization in 1921-22 called the “Boys in the Willows.” A sheliuga is a type of willow that grew in the Dnipro valleys. I later asked my uncle about it and learned that some teacher from Halychyna had organized several dozen men who offered armed resistance to the expropriations carried out by the Bolsheviks and hid in these willows. They would intercept carts loaded with grain, disarm and chase away the guards, who usually fled, and the grain would be returned. The boys would also scatter and then reassemble, like insurgents. And my father led this kind of double life. My mother, after my father was gone, used to say that she didn’t like that life, that she had threatened to report him to the authorities if he didn’t quit on his own. But he told her: “I’ll come and kill you and your children, and if I don’t, others will come and kill you.” It seems to me that this was the only thing that held my mother back. She often complained about my father, that he was this and that, that he never listened to her. And they already had two children—my older sister, Yelyzaveta, born in 1917, and my younger brother, Ivan, now deceased, born in 1919. So my mother would say: “You have children now, so where are you going and what are you doing? They’ll take you away—and what will I do?” But he never listened to her and, on the contrary, threatened her. My mother didn’t dare report him, and so they lived until 1926. And when the opportunity to resettle came up, they moved, because the authorities were already starting to round up those who had resisted.

My parents settled in at the new place. Although there were six children, in a few years my father became the wealthiest man in the village. He was the first to organize several farmers into an artel, and they acquired equipment, even a threshing machine. With a group of people, he bought a motor with a drive for the thresher. So, by working hard, my father earned a reputation as a farmer who knew how to manage the land. For this, he was later declared a kurkul, because he was the richest man in the village.

I should say that my father came from a prosperous family. My grandfather, Petro Leontiyovych, who died of starvation in 1933, had 50 desiatynas of land and became poorer at the end of the 19th century only because he had to divide this land among his older sons and was left with a small plot. Because that was the custom: to divide the land among the children. Since my father was the youngest son, his father, my grandfather Petro Leontiyovych, lived with him.

When collectivization began—I imagine—some people knew that communization would soon follow, so they sold their equipment cheaply. The men who were organized and who didn't pay attention to what the future might hold, but lived for the day and took care of the present—they simply bought up this equipment for cheap and that's why they had so much of it. These are my conclusions from what I heard later. My mother couldn't explain this to me, and I remember my uncle Denys, my father's brother, couldn't explain this issue either. They said that the threat of communization was always there, it was constantly talked about, but the farmers paid it no mind—they just farmed, worked the land, had their own plans, and tried to carry them out. Those who worked well, lived well, while those who didn't work very diligently just got by on land that was overgrown with weeds, barely able to feed themselves.

I remember my father's reaction when a brigade of Bolsheviks, who were organizing collective farms, came to our yard. My father did not want to join the collective farm. He was one of those who went to hard labor rather than join the kolkhoz. One time—I remember this episode—sometime in early 1932, they came to take the horses. There were four of them—two from our village, and two activists from the village council. The village council secretary had Nagant revolvers tucked into his belt. My father said he would not give up the horses. They asked how was it that he would not give them up? My father said, “Like this!” He took a shovel—and they backed out of the yard. My mother rushed to my father, but he walked around the house with the shovel on his shoulder. And by the time he had walked around, the activists had fled the yard. They didn't come for the horses again.

But soon they came for my father himself. On November 16, 1932, a whole gang of these bandits came to the house, arrested my father, and took him to the village council, and then to a neighboring village. A week later, he was tried on the pretext of failing to meet the grain quota. In reality, he had delivered twice the amount, but he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. They exiled him to the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, where he died of exhaustion. According to people from neighboring villages and two from our own village who were also convicted, survived, and returned, my father organized or took part in an escape from that camp. They first fled into the forests somewhere north of Moscow, and then turned south, where they were caught. They were beaten severely along the way. They were brought back to the camp completely exhausted. My father never recovered from that beating and died of exhaustion and—as I gather from what was said—from gangrene, which had developed on his leg as a result of those beatings. So, he died on Maundy Thursday of Easter week in 1933. I calculated it—I believe it was April 10.

We soon found out that our father had died, and there were six of us left. The famine was looming, but we managed to survive because our father had provided for us... There was a total expropriation of grain, of all possessions. They even took my father's bicycle, which was in working order, and another one he had buried disassembled in the garden in a special box. They found that one too and took it. My father had hidden three pits of grain. My mother knew where these hiding places were. It was this grain that saved us during the famine. If not for those three pits, we would have had absolutely no chance of survival, because everything had been taken. They took things so thoroughly that they even swept up the grain droppings in the attic—this grain mixed with all sorts of trash. There was some beans in a pot somewhere—they took it. Wherever there was another handful of something—they swept it up and took it. But my father managed to hide grain in three pits. Two pits were in the yard, and they didn't find them, although they poked around everywhere with iron rods. And one pit was in the field. My mother said he used a very clever method: they would poke along the walls inside each building, but he had stepped back a meter and a half from the wall, dug the pit, and then tamped it down. And they didn't poke in the middle; they couldn't guess that the pit was right under their feet, not hidden under a wall. She said they poked dozens of times, poked all around the building—and didn't find it. It was a small trick that worked. That's how our deceased father helped us survive. It made no difference to him anymore, he was dead, but we had a very hard time.

We had to hide the fact that we were eating. Because the village was dying out, people were dying—but we weren't. This is what the activists were interested in. I remember a group of these bandits coming into our yard, led by a man named Hnat Makarovych Verhun, the first party member in the village. They all stood in a line, called my mother out, and questioned her. This Verhun posed the question like this: “Where’s the bread? Fedora, where’s the bread?” “What bread, uncle? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” “You’re not lying to me! Where is the bread? Look,”—and we were standing right there—“look: all her children are alive, and no one is dying. That means there’s bread. Where is the bread?” “There is no bread!” my mother answered. “You’ll go to the village council.” They took my mother to the village council. And that's five kilometers away. They kept her there until evening, threatening her, waving a Nagant revolver under her nose. She didn’t confess. And so it passed, they didn't bother her anymore. And they didn't find the bread.

And there was another episode. These bandits conducted an experiment, so to speak, to prove that we were eating something that was keeping us alive. It was obviously grain, hidden somewhere, that my mother didn't want to talk about. One of those activists went to the outhouse and, with a small stick, pulled out excrement in which you could see partially undigested grain. It must not have been ground well enough in the mortar, so it didn't break down in the stomach. He brought it on the stick and presented this visual, material evidence to my mother. They called everyone over: “Look, they’re eating wheat, here, look.” And again they terrorized and interrogated my mother about where the bread was. After that, my mother would hide from them, running off into the bushes when they came, or hiding somewhere in the house. And we would lock the doors. Fortunately, they didn't break the windows, because if they had, they would have found our mother and taken her to the village council again for locking the doors. We would shout that our mother wasn't home and that we wouldn't open up. Well, they would pull out the window panes and shout through the opening, but they didn't break the windows: “Open the door!” But we wouldn't open it. Because my mother had told us not to open it for any reason. We were terribly afraid, but we didn't open it. That's how we survived.

My grandfather didn't live with our family, but with my uncle, that is, his son, Denys Petrovych, who was older than my father. Uncle Denys, having no children of his own, fled from this violence. He left his wife, his father, and his mother (my mother, that is, my grandmother Lukiya, also lived there) and didn't show up for some time. During that time, Grandfather Petro died, and we buried him. I remember the funeral. He died at the age of ninety. He was an elderly man. He had something to eat, they had some food, they had hidden wheat, got it out, and ate it, but because of his old age, he couldn't endure that semi-starved existence. He couldn't take it—he died. There was no one to bury him. His daughter-in-law, my uncle's wife, who was at home, didn't want to bury him. So my mother took it upon herself to bury him, even though we lived in a different house. My mother called us older ones: me and my older brother Mykhailo, born in 1922. We had a handcart with two wheels. We wrapped our grandfather in some rags, also put two shovels on the cart to dig the grave, and wheeled him along the village street. There were no people. No one to turn to. My mother said, “Maybe we can ask someone to help us bury him, because we have to dig a grave.” At the edge of the village, a man was standing at his gate. My mother turned to him: “Uncle, come and help us with the burial.” “I’m not going anywhere—I’m looking that way myself. I’m barely alive as it is.” So we rolled the cart to the cemetery, dug a very shallow little pit, and laid our grandfather's remains in it. We buried him ourselves. It took us half a day because we were all very weak; we were busy with it for half a day, until evening. We barely managed it. That's how we buried our grandfather, who died of starvation. That's an episode from the famine.

In some neighboring villages, there was no cannibalism. But in my village, there was. It was a fact that, so to speak, resonated throughout the entire area: a woman slaughtered her daughter. And this is how it happened. The daughter was born in 1917. Her name was Yelyzaveta. She was a beautiful girl, sixteen years old. She used to walk to Kichkas once a week. Kichkas is what is now Zaporizhzhia. That's what that side of Zaporizhzhia was called then. A dam was being built there. This woman's husband and three sons, who were not much older than us, born around 1910, had all run away from home and were working somewhere on that dam. And they survived by working there, because they were given some small portion, some food, and something extra—a handful of groats or something else. The task of this Yelyzaveta (she was the only daughter, the rest were brothers) was to bring something from her brothers for herself and her mother, so they wouldn't starve. So she would walk to Zaporizhzhia—it's about 45-50 kilometers straight across the fields. She'd get there in a day, and come back in a day. Well, she was gone for a long time, several days. During those few days, her mother went mad from hunger. And when the daughter came back with some provisions, then, as they surmise, she attacked her and hacked her to death with an axe. She cut off her head, threw it into a well, and set about cooking the meat from her body. She put this meat into two cauldrons. As it later became clear, she ate her fill of the boiled meat and died right there. People noticed that she hadn't come out of her house for a long time. The neighbors called, as they say, witnesses, so as not to enter the house alone. They went in—she was dead. They saw that it was human flesh; all the signs were there. They looked into the well—and found the head there. One of those activists, who had previously gone around the village sweeping out the last scraps from every farmer who was dying of hunger, was now also dying of hunger himself, because he was no longer given any of those provisions; there was nothing left to take. The authorities no longer cared for him, he was perishing from hunger, and when he saw this boiled meat, he began to eat it right there, in front of everyone, out of that hunger. Then representatives of the authorities appeared, seized him as an accomplice to the crime, but he died before they could get him to the village council.

This was a man with the surname Kozynka. I even remember when this Kozynka, now a beggar, came to our yard and asked for something to eat. “But you,” my mother said to him, I remember this well, “you were the one taking things from people.” “I did,” he said, “I am guilty, but you see what I’m like now, give me something.” “What can I give you?” my mother said. “I’ll give you a handful of corn kernels—what good will that do you?” “Just give it to me, I’ll smash it with a hammer, cook it, and eat it.” My older sister, Yelyzaveta, appeared out of nowhere—she was already sixteen, and she well remembered who had come and how they had swept and taken everything from the yard, the cow, and everything else. My older sister said, “Don’t give him anything—get out of the yard!” And she pushed him out of the yard by the shoulders, that weak, hungry man. And soon after, he ate a piece of that human flesh and died.

These are the kinds of episodes I remember from the famine. My memory must have been working well because there was this very sharp feeling: what could one eat to keep from starving to death. So, we survived a very difficult time.

V. V. Ovsienko: And what time of year was this?

P. P. Rozumnyi: This was in 1933, starting in the winter and ending... My grandfather died on May 10, the famine was still going on, because in May there’s nothing to eat yet. Although the rye had already put out its ears, the activists would go around catching anyone who took the ears—they would beat the children terribly, whoever gathered the ears. They would beat the children terribly with whips. They were on horseback, like you see in the movies. And they even exiled two families to the Komi ASSR for picking the ears—on that pretext. Because there was a plan: two families had to be exiled from the village. They didn’t know who to grab, and then here you go: one woman cut some ears—they grabbed her with her two children and exiled them. And one man also sent his children to gather ears, and they grabbed him too. He was exiled with his wife and children. So two families were exiled then. Those two families all returned alive from that exile. They ran away from there. They were brought to the Komi ASSR and left somewhere in a wasteland. They wandered, stayed in some villages, someone fed them there, and so they walked, they reached Moscow and walked all the way here. They were walking through a warmer region. The people there were wealthier and gave them a little to eat, because they were small children and a woman.

So, from the winter of 1933, there was such a famine in the village that people began to swell up and die. Until the harvest, I'd say, until June, because in June some vegetation appeared that you could eat. From it, they made what we called motorzhenyky and lipenyky. In other villages, it was called something else. It was a kind of mixture of grass with something else. Maybe a grain here and there. They would mix all this, bake it, and eat it. They ate lamb's quarters, acacia flowers. They are sweet. And other things like that, that you could eat. Those episodes from the famine need to be described. I described a little of it in my biography, as the late Zinoviy Krakivskyi asked, but only briefly. But I didn't describe such details, because it wasn't appropriate for an autobiography.

I would also like to mention how I started going to school during the famine. My father always insisted, and my mother would say: “I will not leave my children illiterate. They will all be literate.” My father didn't achieve this, because they destroyed him, but he did help us, and we all indeed became literate. Four of us six received a higher education. My brother Ivan was an officer in the army, and my sister Yelyzaveta was a nurse. We all studied, we all had a profession—teacher, engineer, so my father's will was fulfilled without him.

I wasn't yet 7 years old when I started going to school. Our teacher was a certain Oles Potapovych Dergachov, a Ukrainized Moskal, I would say. One of those Moskals who were driven to Ukraine by convoy in the 18th century to develop new lands. They were, as they said in our parts, traded for dogs. “Those are the ones they traded for dogs.” Whether this came from literature or from stories, it was passed down: “He’s one of those they traded for dogs.” There was such a contemptuous attitude toward them. Because their part of the village was very different from the Ukrainian part. There, where the katsaps lived, whom they said were traded for dogs—there wasn’t a single fruit tree near the houses, only random trees grew: a maple that had seeded itself somewhere, an acacia—and a bare house. It's almost the same with them to this day. True, most of them have scattered to the cities. But those who remain—still, you might find two fruit trees by their houses—no more. Where Ukrainians live, you can see that they are masters of their homes, they know that children need to eat more than just cherries, so they plant trees. That’s how they differ.

So, my first teacher was from that cohort, and by the way, he is still alive to this day. (This account was recorded on December 11, 1998. — V.O.). He is 94 years old. I interviewed him a few years ago. I was afraid, or rather, I didn't dare to ask him the main question, although he partially answered it for me: does he not regret taking part in the expropriations in the village, helping those bandits go around the village and terrorize people?

How did he do it? He himself did not directly participate, let's say, in poking around the house with an iron rod, searching for those pits where the grain was supposed to be. He had a rifle and would follow this team of bandits. He knew who they were going to, because they didn't go to everyone in a row, but chose those who were alive, who, so to speak, looked like a living person, and that's where they would go, because there had to be bread there, otherwise he would have already died. That was the main sign: if all the children are alive, then you have to go and search there, because they have bread. So this Oles Potapovych Dergachov with his rifle would always stay about a hundred meters from the house where they were searching for grain, and there he would pretend to look up at the sky, at a crow flying by, and from time to time he would shoot: bang, bang. And with this he reminded them that they weren't going to stand on ceremony here—they would shoot those who didn't give up their bread. That was his method. So, if these bandits, this gang of grain seekers, were at work, Dergachov would accompany them from a distance, shooting into the air, or if he came across a dog—he would kill the dog. He killed our dog, by the way, in our yard. The famine was already on, and my mother put it to use: we ate that dog.

What other unconventional things did we eat—I didn't say why we survived: in early spring, on St. Yevdokha's day, the first gopher comes out of its burrow. My older brother Mykhailo was a good hunter of them. We would catch them and eat them. They are very tasty, I recall. I think you could still eat them today. They are animals that eat grass, grain. Completely clean, beautiful animals, rodents. And we ate them. It was a big event—when a gopher was caught, my mother would cook a whole cauldron of soup or borsch, which we ate with great benefit, because it was meat. That was one of the things that allowed us to survive. My older brother caught the gophers, and I was just the courier. He'd catch one—and I'd run home to bring it. My brother was a lucky hunter. He managed to catch them almost every day. It was hard to find the burrow where they lived or where they came out. That was the most important thing—to find it, and if he found it, he would hunt for three days, but he would catch it. The method was to flood them out, but it was hard to carry the water. People flooded them out later too, when it was no longer necessary to eat them.

SCHOOLING

So, I wanted to say how our teacher, Oles Potapovych Dergachov, taught us. These were the first lessons in how to behave under Soviet rule, what kind of citizens should be raised under Soviet rule. The school was in the house of an uncle who had been driven out and had gone somewhere to Kichkas (Zaporizhzhia). The first question was: “Children, who knows, who has heard any of your parents, father or mother, brother or sister, say anything against the Soviet authorities?” No one ever answered this question, because it was not clear what "against the Soviet authorities" meant. But he asked it every time. True, he never explained this question to the children with examples, but he always asked it. I now think he was obligated to ask this question. It was always the same, and no one ever answered it.

But the second question he asked was: “Who has seen, or maybe heard, any of your parents hiding bread?” Silence. Well, bread meant grain: wheat or barley, or something else. A boy named Myshko Mostovyi raised his hand—he later died of starvation, all five children died, and their father died too. “I haven't seen bread,” he says, “but I saw my parents hiding grain.” He told where. Then our teacher, Oles Potapovych Dergachov, latches us in: “Sit and read!” And he went to where the grain was hidden. Obviously, they called someone from the village council. An hour or two later, we see a cart coming, with some sacks on it. It means they found the grain. And they are leading the man behind the cart. The man is walking, escorted by two orderlies from the village council.

These were our daily exercises in "who saw what." Another time, the same Myshko told how his neighbor across the road, with the surname Llianyi (or Lnyanyi), was hiding a plow in a haystack in his garden. This was equivalent to grain—the plow had to be handed over to the collective farm. You don’t join the kolkhoz yourself—but hand over the plow! But he didn't hand it over, he hid it. Then our Oles Potapovych Dergachov also locked us in and went to the village council. The plow is being carried on a cart, and Llianyi is being led away. He walks behind the cart, followed by armed guards.

So Pavel Morozovs were being born everywhere.

In my interview, I asked Oles Potapovych: “Why did you take part in this? You could have refused.” “I couldn’t have refused.” “Why? Others didn't participate, did they?” I named some who didn't take part in all that, even though everything had been taken from them. “Well,” he says, “if I hadn’t participated, they would have taken me too.” That was his argument. “Well,” I said, “whether they would have taken you or not, you contributed to those people dying of starvation.” “Well, that was the time,” and he throws up his hands. “Because, I repeat, if I hadn’t participated in these campaigns around the village, they would have taken me. They would have destroyed me, because my father was declared a kurkul.”

But I didn't dare ask the main thing, because his daughter came in, and she was a big activist. She's a bit younger than me. She was in the raikom, or what was it called?

V. V. Ovsienko: Raikom or raivykonom.

P. P. Rozumnyi: Raikom—that's the district party committee. But there were non-staff activists, about ten people. That daughter came in, gave me a sidelong glance—because she knew about my sentiments. I didn't want to ask in front of her, because she might have pounced on me, she's sort of unbalanced. So I didn't ask the main question: does he not regret that he deprived people of their material means and that half the village starved to death? I didn't ask that. If I live and if he is still alive, I will go and ask him. I have to ask, because it is important to me.

That's a brief account of my studies in the younger grades.

We were transferred to a school in a neighboring village, and for the first time I saw that more people had died in the neighboring village than in ours. The neighboring village is called Krute—it's an old village, not a resettlement one, but an indigenous one. There I saw houses where people had died out completely or had been evicted.

It seems our village was lucky that only one family of katsaps was sent to us. They were called nothing else, only katsaps. Not Russians, not Moskals, but katsaps. The houses that were emptied of people who had died, fled the village, or were evicted, were settled by katsaps. Only one katsap family appeared in our village. But in the neighboring village of Krute, where I went to school in the 3rd and 4th grades—half the village was overrun with katsaps. I saw them for the first time. They were sort of lanky, in bast shoes, in some kind of terrible, pathetic gray coats. And most importantly—they all cursed loudly. It was the first time I heard these obscene words coming from people's mouths as if they were some kind of blessing. Because, I remember, in our village, before saying an obscene word, the men would look around to see if there were any children or women nearby. And only then would this curse be squeezed out, and in such a quiet voice. And here, I suddenly heard that a curse was something like “good day,” that is, a common word. We would stare at them and examine them up close, as if they were an unknown people, some unknown tribe that shouted a lot, cursed, and bustled about. Because, I remember, they were busy sawing trees, even black poplars that grew in the old villages, lengthwise into planks. They made some special devices, sawed, and constantly and always cursed terribly loudly. Their enterprise was in the schoolyard, so we heard all this during recess, and before and after school. It was quite interesting to see these newly arrived people.

In the following years, in the fifth and other grades, I walked to school in yet another village, even farther away.

V. V. Ovsienko: What is it called?

P. P. Rozumnyi: The village of Bezborodkove. I walked there until I finished school. A daily walk of 5 kilometers there, 5 kilometers back. It was a tough business. We were often half-starved, but we endured it because we wanted to study. I remember that the main thing I learned in school was from reading all the books in the school library. And there were, as I later assessed, looking at post-war libraries, quite a lot of good books. I remember reading Mayne Reid in Ukrainian, Jules Verne and Dickens in Ukrainian I read, though I understood little of it, only the plot. I remember reading Walter Scott in Ukrainian. These books, translated from English, from French, completely disappeared after the war. I no longer saw them in libraries.

I was an average student, so-so, but not the worst, I would say, I got fours. Back then, a four was marked with the word “good.” I think I was a solid B student. At that time, report cards had a column for “special aptitude for certain subjects.” The teachers always wrote for me: “For the Ukrainian language.” Obviously, I was simply well-read. The teachers knew this, and maybe it showed in my speech. I don't remember knowing grammar well. I also remember that when I entered the institute, I quickly familiarized myself with Ukrainian grammar, and it wasn't difficult for me. I revived that knowledge.

V. V. Ovsienko: When did you finish school?

P. P. Rozumnyi: I would say this: I left school in 1941.

V. V. Ovsienko: And how many grades did you complete?

P. P. Rozumnyi: I didn't finish the 9th grade.

V. V. Ovsienko: Why?

P. P. Rozumnyi: Because I quit. I'll put it this way: we had reached such poverty that my work was needed to help out at home—well, there was nothing to wear on my feet, nothing to put on. My older brother somehow finished school with great difficulty, with great hardship—a pedagogical technical school. He was assigned to a job somewhere in the Mahdalynivka Raion, to do something in the district education department. But he didn't go. I now understand why he didn't go. I would say that he was, in the full sense of the word, without pants. Absolutely ragged and tattered. He had nothing to appear in public in. So he conspired with one of his fellow students, with whom he had gone to school, and they ran away somewhere to the Caucasus.

V. V. Ovsienko: What is your brother's name?

P. P. Rozumnyi: Mykhailo. He is deceased now. They ran away to the Caucasus. Just like the homeless run away now. They saw that at home they would have to give up everything and work on the collective farm. He didn't want that. That's what he said later. But you have to live somehow. They set off—someone told them that life was easy in the Caucasus. They wandered somewhere, worked odd jobs. They picked citrus fruits, as he later told me. The war found him in the North Caucasus. And the Germans had already come here. And from the North Caucasus, in the fall of 1942, he walked all the way home. And I was already in Germany by that time.

So, I left school in 1941. Poverty had simply worn me down to the point where I had no strength to hold on. To go to school and eat nothing or... pants down to my knees, nothing to put on my shoulders, because my mother alone couldn't provide us with all that. We lived off the garden. They paid then 300 grams of grain per workday—if they paid. My mother didn't even earn one workday a day, like those who had permanent jobs did. And people like her earned what was called “50 hundredths,” half a workday, and 70 hundredths was already a lot. I immediately went to work with the calves. I looked after the calves with an older woman. That is, I mostly helped. Right away, I started earning workdays, they began to give some grain for the workdays. I'd bring home five kilograms of grain, we'd pound it, and eat kasha. The younger ones—my brother Stepan (born in 1928, later became a railway engineer), my sister Kateryna (born in 1930, later became a doctor)—went to school, but I quit. Somehow I guessed right to quit, because the war started in 1941, so no one went to school then. Under the Germans, the school was reopened for one month, but then it was disbanded and didn't operate during the war.

So I had already become the breadwinner in the family. This was a huge relief, because I was earning for myself and a little for my brothers and sisters, and my mother was earning for herself, so we could somehow get by. It became easier. I wanted to go to a trade school, because they were being created then. They wouldn't let me go, because they only let those who hadn't studied at all, and I was a B-student. The director wouldn't let students like me go. This happened later too, even after the war, that if you studied well, they wouldn't let you go anywhere. But if you studied poorly—go ahead to the trade school! They wouldn't let me go. I was disappointed by that, and it was one of the reasons I quit school. I would say that my mother encouraged it, and I didn't object.

THE WAR

My intuition didn't fail me, because that school ended two months later, and the war began during the summer break.

V. V. Ovsienko: When did the Germans arrive in your area?

P. P. Rozumnyi: They came to us in August. When the war started, I was already a full-fledged worker in the family. I was bringing income to the house, although there was no money—only workdays. But I had already quickly adapted to what the collective farmers had adapted to: stealing. If I could steal—I stole this, that, or the other. In short, I was learning to live by Soviet laws. I saw the older ones stealing—and I did it with them.

I gathered a gang of boys, and we went into the windbreak to play war. We see a horseman galloping toward us through the wheat, across the field. The horse was already tired, it seemed, galloping reluctantly from the neighboring village, straight across the wheat, not on the road. He galloped up to us. We were on the road at the edge of the village. Without catching his breath, he said: “The war has started. War with the Germans. The German has attacked.” And he rode on to the office to tell them. And we followed him. I told the boys: “That can’t be—we have a non-aggression pact with the Germans.” I was already reading newspapers. A neighbor of ours subscribed and let me read them, and we would philosophize: who was being bombed, where the bombs were falling, about London—the war was already going on there. In 1939, Poland was conquered. The war was already on. They reported on who was bombing whom. “That's not true,” I said to myself. I was such a philosopher then and was already into politics. “It can’t be, because there was a non-aggression pact.” They had praised that pact so much, there were drawings in every newspaper, handshakes: Molotov, Ribbentrop signed, friendship, treaty—all that. There was friendship. There was a non-aggression pact. And I didn't believe it at first, but when the horseman told the men who were hanging around somewhere, cracking sunflower seeds near the workshop, because it was a Sunday, I started to believe. Because the men started talking about it among themselves with concern: “The war has started. The war has started.”

Well, the war began. They are preparing for evacuation. First, the cattle. They send my uncle Denys to drive the cattle to the other side of the Dnipro—that's about thirty kilometers from us. A ferry crossing had been set up there, they would drive the cattle onto the ferry and transport them across. And they drove them there on foot. My uncle said he drove the cattle as far as Luhansk, and then the Germans caught up. He fled from the cattle and returned. He abandoned them because the Germans "covered" them there.

Meanwhile, the kolkhoz chairman, who was from a neighboring village, sends an orderly to me to take him, the chairman, home in a “bidarka.” It's called a “bidarka,” a two-wheeled cart. I took him home, because it was already late. I was so obedient. Whatever they said—I would do it. I was a reliable worker, I did everything I was told diligently. I remember as soon as the orderly arrived, I threw on my clothes, took a whip, and arrived almost at the same time as the orderly. The kolkhoz chairman praised me: “With people like this, we’ll crush Hitler!” That poor kolkhoz chairman went into evacuation with his family. He harnessed a pair of good horses, equipped the best cart, but when he drove onto the Zaporizhzhia dam, at that very moment they blew it up, and he disappeared somewhere in the Dnipro. Some survived, because they only blew up a part of the bridge—the machine section, and that’s exactly where he perished. His name was Hamzyn, the kolkhoz chairman. So he died without a war, without the Germans—at the hands of his own people.

There was an episode, after the Germans arrived. Our people had driven off the cattle, for us it was unnoticeable—they drove them off and that was it. But when they started driving cattle en masse from other regions, you can't imagine it, it's hard to describe! It was a solid, uninterrupted stream of cows, horses, and sheep, with no gaps between the herds. And they drove pigs too. The pigs quickly got tired, so they would drive them into a ravine somewhere, where they could drink water, and they would lie there. People stole them. And I was one of them, stealing while they were lying there. Then we started eating meat, because it was grazing around our village. This was a continuous stream of livestock that moved at a slow pace, on and on and on.

Just before this stream, when it wasn't yet so massive, they sent me and one of the men with the reserve horses. There was such a reserve in every collective farm, a dozen or more horses that were fed for the army; they were not allowed to be harnessed. These were real horses, beautiful. We broke them in, taught them not to be afraid of the collar, but they couldn't be used for any work. And suddenly they decided to take them to Verkhniodniprovsk—there is such a town on the Dnipro—and hand them over to the army, because they were designated for the army. We harnessed a pair of horses to a harba, and a harba is a long, ladder-frame wagon for straw, you know. And our harbas were so large, I've never seen such wagons anywhere else. You don't have such wagons in your Polissia. They travel easily. They are used to transport straw and sheaves—they load them full, and then two racks are raised, and the harba is three meters high. A pair of horses pulls it. So, to this harba we tied ten horses all around. Well, I was the assistant, and Uncle Luka Yurchenko wasn't afraid of horses, he rode those reserve horses. We arrived in the raion center, Solone. They direct us to Verkhniodniprovsk. At the kolkhoz, they didn't tell us where to go next. In Solone, they gave us each a loaf of bread, beautiful round loaves, and half a kilogram of melted butter—so they gave us rations as if we were already mobilized.

In a day, we arrive in Verkhniodniprovsk. The hitching posts are already ready, we tied up the horses, fed them, watered them—that was our job. The next day, they even sent us a concert—artists danced and sang. And these were horses from the entire district. I had never seen so many horses in my life, there were hundreds and hundreds. And all the horses were the best—reserve horses, they were specially fed, they were not harnessed, only for the army.

And here is an episode. The hitching posts were like this—a hundred meters, a hundred meters, a hundred meters. A colonel with "sleepers" [insignia], as I remember, a lean man, with a retinue of officers, some civilians walking around, inspecting the horses. There were veterinarians with them, looking at their teeth—the horse is free, and they are still looking at its teeth! This episode is interesting because there were two speeches by this colonel to us, because in one day he couldn't inspect all the horses, evaluate their teeth, legs, and everything else. But on the first day, he inspected a few, looked at the horses, and then gathered us together and told us: “We will crush the German! We will definitely crush him, because we have applied a tactic: we are letting the Germans in, then we will surround and annihilate them. In this way, the front has advanced a little this way, so to speak, to this side of the Soviet border, but that is because we are letting them in to destroy them later. In this way, we will annihilate them.” Some of the men, who believed this fairy tale, said: “Oh, they are doing it smartly—letting them in, and then surrounding and destroying them!” My uncle was not so naive. He was silent, he just waved his hand like this. And the front was still far away—the German was nowhere near. And I remember, planes were flying right above the ground, in a low-level flight, they didn't go up high, because up high the Germans could already see them, but down low they could somehow still hide behind the landscape, they were not visible.

But on the second day, after the colonel had inspected the horses, he said this: “These horses that you have brought me here for inspection are worthless, they’re no good for anything. These aren’t horses, they’re nags. Take them away, lead them home, feed them so that they are fit to serve in the army, and so that with their help we can crush the Germans who have treacherously attacked!”

And we, this crowd of people with hundreds of horses, tie them to the harbas and head back. And when we were driving back, we couldn't go on the road, because the whole road was filled with livestock, including sheep, and so as not to injure their legs, everything moved slowly—horses, cows, and sheep. We had to leave the road and drive more than a hundred meters away from it to avoid getting into this solid stream of livestock. We drove through the fields for a long time. We twisted and turned... We arrived home, the next day I rested, didn't go to work, because I had returned from a trip, and they didn't call for me. My younger brother Stepan and I are watching—planes are flying from the southwest. They fly slowly, buzzing like autumn flies, and they look something like our U-2s, biplanes, with two wings, clumsy. We started arguing about whose planes they were, because in the newspapers (and I read the newspapers and showed my younger brother) there were drawings of planes—German, Romanian—what they looked like. My brother remembered that such biplanes were Romanian. But I didn't remember. He says they are Romanian, and I say no, they are Soviet planes, the Germans didn't have that type of aircraft. While we were arguing, we suddenly heard a whistle—a whistle, bombs are falling on the road where the livestock is moving. And the evacuated people, who for some reason were fleeing through our village from Vinnytsia Oblast, from Moldavia, from Mykolaiv Oblast. These six planes decided to bomb this whole solid stream of livestock and people. And not a single bomb fell on the village—somehow they all fell across the road and at a sharp angle. As we traced, three bombs fell on the road, and the rest fell in a field where sorghum was growing. Each plane dropped only one bomb—that was their procedure.

From that day on, the movement of livestock and evacuees stopped, there was no one on the road. The livestock stopped moving altogether, scattered, and those who wanted to flee further no longer dared to travel on the road, but only through the fields and at night, and during the day they sat somewhere under the trees, hiding in the groves. And German planes flew, although they didn't touch us, they were conducting surveillance.

There was an episode of looting on my part, to use today's language. Someone said that somewhere in a ravine, sheep were grazing, abandoned by their shepherds. The three of us went—me, my younger brother, and another one—to look at those sheep, to see how they were doing. We each caught one and dragged them straight across the fields. We had dragged them quite a distance, we were approaching the village, when we heard some rustling. We looked around—a plane was flying straight at us. It was descending on us, you could already see its frame, through which it aimed, its long landing gear wheels. It was a reconnaissance plane, as I later identified it, it was called a “frame” in the newspapers. And it was flying straight at us. We froze, pressed ourselves to the ground, and it flew, well, maybe a hundred meters above the ground. We didn't even have time to get scared before it turned, flew up, and went away. And we didn't abandon the sheep. That is, it saw there was nothing worth shooting at, and didn't shoot. They say the Germans shot at everything they came across—but it wasn't worth shooting at this, because he saw three sheep and some boys. He came down so low to get a good look. That was an episode of looting.

We ate our fill of meat and bread, because the harvest was already gathered, there were no more Soviet procurements, and before the Germans came, we took as much bread as we needed—as much as anyone wanted, they took. There was so much wheat gathered on the threshing floors that it hadn't all been taken. They took it in moderation, or I don't know by what criteria—whether by earnings, or what. People stopped taking it. And when the Germans came, they put a seizure on that grain, but that was no longer a problem for anyone, because everyone had as much grain as they needed in their homes.

I would also like to tell an episode I hinted at earlier. It may not be a very good one. How I became a Ukrainian, how it all began. I remember on Sundays, members of my father's association would gather at his house with their wives. There would be 8-10 of them, and all ten of them would drink a bottle of horilka together, no more—they would drink one bottle of horilka. They were very cheerful, they sang and grumbled about the grain being taken, about everything being taken, because Ukraine was always... I remember one of them constantly quoted: "Ukraine the bread-basket, gave its bread to the German, and is hungry herself." They always talked on this topic, and it stuck in my head that Ukraine produces bread, and the German takes it. Which German, where were the Germans? But when the Germans were coming, I thought that it must be those Germans who were coming now.

For some reason, we went into the field one day—the men, I think, decided to see how the wheat was harvested or how the sheaves were lying. There were a lot of sheaves then. They had threshed a little, but the rest was unthreshed, but in stacks. And they collected leaflets. One, the most literate one, while everyone else was collecting, began to read aloud: “Ukrainians, residents of Kryvyi Rih! The defeated Bolsheviks, fleeing in panic, are destroying the fruits of your labor.” I have reconstructed this exactly or almost exactly, I had it written down somewhere. “Do not let them do this to them!” And they explained how not to let them: “Kill them, drive them away, remember that you are to remain on this land, you need to live on this land and enjoy its fruits. And without this, you will die a hungry death. Do not let them drive away the cattle, burn the grain,” etc. This is what struck me the most: “Ukrainians, residents of Kryvyi Rih!” I looked around at these Ukrainians—it only made such an impression on me, on no one else. From that time on, I remember that we are Ukrainians, even though we are not residents of Kryvyi Rih, but something separate. Like that.

But then the Germans occupied Dnipropetrovsk and came to our village to rest. The village was full of vehicles. And our village had many trees—trees by every yard, and a windbreak around the village. You could hide in our village—it was the only way to camouflage from planes. A whole division could probably have hidden there. There were about 150 vehicles in the village. There were vehicles, but no heavy weaponry, only submachine guns, machine guns on some vehicles, but no cannons or other equipment, and I didn't see any shells.

So these resting Germans—this also struck me—every morning and every evening they gather in the village square and they are praying. Their chaplain, as I now know, says something or reads to them, then they get down on one knee, stand there for a while, and get up. It was interesting for us to watch. So we knew: the Germans pray twice a day.

I already had some notion of this, because I remember my mother and father taking me to have the Easter bread blessed. This was in a neighboring village, there was a parish there. We had a priest from a neighboring village, and his wife, the popadia, was my godmother. So my father was a believer. This priest, by the way, was killed by activists, and his wife, the popadia, that is, my godmother, was also killed, and they even mocked their corpses: they arranged them in an obscene pose. And they killed them like this. We had a village council head named Petukhova, a katsapka from those who had once resettled from Belarus. They were called “Lytvyns,” they spoke a language like Belarusians do, some sort of half-katsap language. Obviously, they were Belarusians, but I still haven't figured this out to this day. They are called Lytvyns, and the village is called Sursko-Lytovske. But they spoke and still speak Russian. This Petukhova was always drunk, a pistol tied to her leather jacket, she cursed obscenely, would hit men with the handle of her Nagant when something displeased her. She was a real bandit. So she summoned the priest and put the question to him in such a way that he should stop celebrating the Divine Liturgy. They say the priest refused, said he would serve God, and that the law allowed him to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, and no one could forbid it. “I’ll do you in, priest!” she said, and her words were later quoted. Indeed, that evening three men came, killed the priest and his wife, desecrated their bodies—and that was it, after that no one looked for anyone. They knew who did it. Two of them quickly committed suicide. One drank himself to death—drank so much he burned out, and the other hanged himself. And the third, with the surname Lypka, was still a police chief somewhere on the left bank in some district even after the war—this can be verified, because it's known. His surname was Lypka. He earned the rank of police chief for such feats. And the priest was killed by these terrorists even before the war.

I think I started talking about the war. So the Germans came to rest, and it was interesting for us to watch them. One time a German calls me: “Komm! Komm!” He pulls out a small dictionary and reads: “Zoloma.” I can't figure it out, but another German comes up to him: “Soloma.” Straw. Where is the straw? So I show him where. We went, I showed him where the straw was. We had an unfinished club—only the clay walls, and that was it. They spread straw there and slept there. They didn't stay in the houses, but all slept on the straw—it was warm, there was no rain.

Then there was another episode. They went to pray, and we went to rummage through their parked vehicles. I found a long, straight saber—not a Cossack one, but a Budyonny-style one. I took it, we were a whole gang, and we took turns chopping at trees. A man met us, scolded us, and told us to put it back immediately, or the Germans would shoot us all. I didn't put it anywhere, but brought it up to my attic, and I don't even know what happened to that saber. I didn't look for it then, and the Germans didn't look for it either.

And another time, I remember, the Germans were trading—they didn't take anything from us, but they traded eggs for lighters, for flints for lighters. So we had to bring a certain number of eggs. If you wanted a lighter, you had to bring eggs. We brought them eggs, and traded.

The kolkhoz was still there, there was a small pig farm. I remember the first thing they slaughtered and brought to the kitchen was a boar. Not a castrated pig, but a boar they killed, and it went to the kitchen. Even the men were surprised and laughed at how they ate boar, because the men would never eat it, a boar doesn't have tasty meat, it has some kind of smell. So the Germans took from the kolkhoz, but not from the men—there was no such thing as someone taking something from someone. They say there were some Germans in the neighboring villages who caught chickens, they didn't want anything but chickens. But in our village, the Germans didn't do that.

The main mass of Germans left the village, not many remained. There was a repair workshop in the village, about twenty Germans, who, obviously, maintained communications, laying wire directly on the ground between villages. This was for telephone communication. They repaired machine guns in our village. There was a place there with an earthen mound, and they would shoot into that mound. They would draw some line there and shoot along that line. And we would gape and run around them to see how it was done, and every day they would offer us: go on, you shoot—you shoot, you shoot. Anyone who wanted to could shoot. Pressing the trigger and—r-r-r-r—it was so interesting to shoot a machine gun! They were so friendly—no one did them any harm, no one tore up those communication lines, and I don't remember any repressions on the part of the Germans.

A commandant's office was set up in the neighboring village, where the village council was, so we were obligated to send a person on duty there from each village. And they sent me, because I was the most obedient and sometimes the wisest. I was there every week with that commandant. He would send me with packages. I would take a package under my shirt and ride a horse on a makeshift saddle with stirrups to carry out this task. Once a week, I had to ride to the neighboring village to the creamery. There was a note that this commandant was to be given half a kilogram of butter per week. They would bring and hand over this portion. It wasn't a case of take as much as you want, but they took the portion that was allotted to them. I can just imagine how much a Soviet commandant would have sliced off for himself.

I remember the winter of 1942 was so severe that it was terribly hard for those Germans. These were obviously rear-echelon troops, not those at the front. They were dressed in their greatcoats, and they were simply perishing from the cold. At the slightest thing—they would run into a house. They would run into the first available house, warm themselves up, and complain that it was “kholodno-kholodno” [cold-cold]. The cold paralyzed them, because it was unheard of for them. And the winter was severe, and there was a lot of snow.

I remember one episode. We had started to have salo, of course. We hadn't had salo since before my father was gone. As I said, we were profiting from the livestock that was wandering around. Two Germans came to the house in the winter of 1942 and showed a roll of coarse fabric, like canvas, though it was somehow soft and quite thick. And they wanted salo for that fabric. My mother looked to see if anything could be made from it, figured there would be pants, which she later sewed for me. My mother opened a large box full of salted salo. The Germans said, three pieces. That was three slabs of salo. My mother only gave two. The Germans insisted on their price, but my mother wouldn't budge. They had to agree.

V. V. Ovsienko: Petro Rozumnyi. Cassette two, December 11, 1998.

P. P. Rozumnyi: They took me for work related to road maintenance. The roads were, of course, in poor condition, because they had been destroyed during the major troop movements after the start of the war. We were sent to the Dnipropetrovsk-Kryvyi Rih road to repair it, to add gravel, and they brought us sand. We were engaged in this, though on our own keep; the Germans only brought us water and supervised the work, but we brought our food from home. We worked as much as we could, no one tried to set a quota for us or demand that we do a certain amount—we just worked slowly without any coercion, and the work progressed slowly.

I think it was then that I first felt how lonely I was in the world. I remember I climbed into the reeds along a small river, and my heart felt so heavy. I thought that I was alone in the world with my problems, as they say today, and that no force would help me—only myself. A kind of sadness in my soul. I remember that episode as a feeling of a new life that had already begun for me, because I had grown up, a teenager—I was already 15-16 years old. I felt a kind of responsibility for the future and had a feeling that I was alone, all alone... A fear of the future... I would call it that I awoke within myself then, but it didn't last long.

OSTARBEITER

Suddenly, they let us go home, and as it turned out later, they let us go in order to mobilize us for Germany. A certain number of people were assigned to each village, and they had to be selected. They were selected by our own people; the starosta [village elder] selected them in consultation with others. I would say they selected fairly: they took into account how many children were in the family, they took into account how many boys, how many girls, because that was important, how many boys and how many girls. Later they took everyone, but in 1942 they still, one might say, counted and combined. So, it was decided to take four boys and two girls from the village, and the lot—it wasn't a lottery, but just a designation—fell on me, on three other boys, and two girls. We, one might say, calmly, voluntarily, we went to Germany. They took us in wagons, they saw us off as if on a long journey, the whole village came out to see us off. We packed our food onto the wagons. There was plenty of food, we baked so many flatbreads you couldn't lift them. We took what we could, and there was plenty to take. We packed good bags with us; the Germans encouraged it. Of course, we didn't have much in the way of clothes; we were half-dressed. They brought us to the station.

V. V. Ovsienko: What time of year was this?

P. P. Rozumnyi: It was June 22, 1942, exactly one year after the war began. They bring us to the station, and there they load us into wagons. In each wagon, two Germans are hanging in hammocks in the air, and we are lying packed together on the floor of the wagon. We had brought some things with us to put underneath us. The Germans were going on leave without weapons and were watching over us to keep order, so that no one escaped, for example. No one ran away, because the Germans were watching, and also there was no mood to run away, I recall. I wasn't planning to run away, I think I intuitively guessed that there was nowhere to run, that I had to go, because here, in the Kharkiv region near Lozova, fighting was still going on. True, in 1942 it had already moved further east, but in the winter, fighting was still going on. I remember a German even told us that there was fighting there, he pointed: "Lozova, Lozova..." He told us how the Germans didn't turn off the engines of their tanks and vehicles day or night, because you couldn't start an engine in those frosts. And when a Soviet army offensive came—you couldn't move, so the engines ran day and night.

They brought us to Dnipropetrovsk and on the same day took us in the direction of Piatykhatky. We were in Piatykhatky that same day towards evening. There they organized the first hot meal for us. They let us out of the wagons—the Germans stood aside and watched to make sure no one ran away. We were told to take our bowls with us. You held out your bowl, they poured hot food into it, it was some kind of soup. We ate it with the flatbreads we had. They didn't give us bread, because we all had our own bread. We ate on the very first evening, though few wanted to. On the first day, we hardly wanted any of it, because we had just left home, the mood—you're going somewhere, you don't know where, what will happen—it didn't give us an appetite. I remember that in Piatykhatky almost no one took advantage of it, almost no one; they got out of the wagons just to get some fresh air.

For the first time, I saw some boys who were either simulating or pretending to be crazy, abnormal. They walked straight at the Germans, stumbling, the Germans pushed them, the Germans beat them, they fell and got up again, like that. It was a very unpleasant sight—the first distressing sight I saw, of violence being done to a person for no apparent reason, because those people were behaving as if they were unable to think and control their actions. I noticed two such people. They got it good in the ribs. They offered up their ribs, and the Germans didn't hesitate to walk over those ribs with their boots, because they were walking in a straight line and wanted to leave, and the Germans wouldn't allow that. So, they were violating the established order—no one was going anywhere, everyone was going to Germany.

On the second day, I remember, they stopped us again and fed us hot food in Shepetivka. Some people started eating there, because not everyone had packed enough food, and there were those who, perhaps, hadn't been properly provisioned from home, or there was no one to give them anything. So more people were eating that slop there. On the fourth day... From Shepetivka to Warsaw, we probably traveled for two days, as I recall. And in Warsaw, they fed us the same way. It was somehow interesting that in Warsaw the cooks were already Polish women, who spoke some incomprehensible language and were dressed differently than our people—cleanly and nicely dressed. They had more wealth than we did, both before the war and during the war, obviously. I remember a very interesting episode where girls and boys, all young, got out of the wagons. And the Polish women were about 40-50 years old, no less, and they were enticing them: “Come here, let's run away,” “Idz tu – tiakaj ze mna!” I didn't see anyone take them up on it, but I think one could have taken advantage of such an invitation to escape, because the Germans weren't watching that closely, the supervision was already relaxed, and there were a lot of us, and the movement was so great that you could have separated from the group and escaped. I remember one Polish woman came up to me, tugged at my shoulder and said: “Where is your chest, where is your strength, why are you so weak?!”—I must have been small and didn't look strong. But it was clear, those were just words, that she was pulling me by the shoulder somewhere else, that is, pulling me away from the group under the pretext that she was concerned about my appearance, which did not satisfy her. Well, I sort of turned sideways to her, turned away, and that was the end of it. There was some kind of bargaining going on: those women, for reasons that are still unclear to me today, wanted to separate someone and take someone with them. I think it wasn't by chance, because young people were traveling, and among those who were doing this, as I remember very clearly now, there were no young ones. They were all women, therefore, perhaps, women without husbands, because the war had passed through, so many had already been killed and the killing continued. That was an episode in Warsaw.

Exactly one week later, on June 29, we arrived in Halle. Along the way, we were struck by something: at the crossings, the train would stop. People were waiting. We were struck by their, as it seemed to me then, festiveness: everyone seemed to be in festive clothes. All those women with carts... At first, I didn't understand what these carts were, but they were baby carriages. They looked us over like exotic animals, because we were a conquered tribe coming from there, from the East. What we looked like. They were probably interested in what these young, beautiful people were like, as I think today. There were people of different ages, mostly women—and young women with children, older women who were looking after their grandchildren, but there were so many of those carriages on both sides of the crossing... It was a spectacle—these people would gather while the train was stopped to look at us, and we would look at them.

Finally, we arrived in Halle. The boys are separated from the girls here. We had been together in the wagons, just as we left the village. I slept next to one girl, and we would cuddle and kiss affectionately, because it was sort of like at the vechornytsi [evening gatherings] back then—without any special intentions, but there was a kind of affectionate relationship. I had a child's imagination about all of it then, but still—I was a young lad... They separate us, we go through sanitary processing. They make us undress, smear the areas where hair grows with a foul-smelling grease. We had a good bath, a shower, and they started grouping us into small teams. We spent the night there, bathed, spent the night, and the next day they were already grouping us. They take forty of us and drive us forty kilometers to the west—to the small town of Eisleben Lutherstadt. I once told a German, here in Kyiv, that I had been in Lutherstadt—Eisleben Lutherstadt, and he said: “Ah, Lutherstadt... There are hundreds of Lutherstadts in Germany. Wherever Luther was, there is a Lutherstadt in his honor. It’s a German custom,”—that’s how this German explained it to me. In this Lutherstadt, the first thing we noticed were three huge chimneys, smoking—this was our enterprise, which, as it turned out, smelted copper ore into a semi-finished product.

They housed us right on the factory grounds on three-tiered bunks. Since we were already finishing our own food, they fed us slop and started giving us bread. Some were already quite hungry and ate it all. At first, I couldn't get used to that carrot soup, I couldn't eat spinach—I just couldn't, it was as disgusting to me as boiled lamb's quarters. I couldn't eat rutabaga, but hunger, it's true, forced me to eat all of it after a couple of days. For us, such food was so unpalatable that I felt you would die from it. I later appreciated that it was the best food I had in my life, wherever I was in a barrack-like situation, that is, in Germany, in the army, and in the zone—I was there for three years each. So here they fed us the best, that is, the most rationally. That vegetable food really sustained us. Vegetable food—not constant kasha or a kasha-based soup, as they gave in the army: a boiled grain floating here and there, and the rest just watery slop, but this—a thick vegetable soup, cooked in broth—was good food. Later we got used to it, it was better.

They sent us out, distributing us as they saw fit: where they were stronger, they sent them to unload coke from wagons with fourteen-tined forks. Such forks, a short handle, so you couldn't stand up straight, because if you straightened up, the Germans would shout: hey, get to it! You can't delay the wagons, unload the coke. The doors opened on both sides, we unloaded as quickly as possible. The wagons, it's true, were small, not like ours, and shorter, the largest being 22 tons, and there were some of 16 tons—these were relatively small wagons. So, if you swung the fork all the way to the corner, you could throw it all the way over here. Me, not being the strongest among them, but on the contrary, maybe the weakest, both in appearance and in condition, and having just arrived from the journey—they didn't send me there, because that was the hardest work, truly hellish. They sent me to the so-called Schortze. This was a slag heap outside the factory grounds, where they would bring molten slag and pour it out. It would solidify there, covering the railway track with its iron sleepers, and our task was to break off that slag that had fallen on the track and sleepers with a crowbar, down into the abyss. By breaking it off, we gradually extended this mountain, because the slag kept coming and coming, and then every three days they would move the track closer to the abyss, so the slag would pour down. That was our task: when we moved it with crowbars on command—the Germans called it zwiken. That is, when you put a crowbar under something and move it, that was called zwiken, they have such a verb.

So, the work was relatively easy, and it was in the open air. And the mountain was so high that you could see far, and below was the railway, with trains passing—in one direction they moved slowly, because it was uphill, and in the other direction quickly, because it was downhill. The terrain there was rugged, and it all depended, because steam locomotives were pulling them, and they weren't as powerful as they are now. When the echelons moved slowly, we could see what they were carrying to the East, because they moved slowly in that direction, and quickly to the West. So we would look: they were carrying all sorts of ammunition. One day, the Germans even said that Hitler was traveling on that line, because first came the draisines, then a couple of wagons, then another couple of wagons, then another couple of wagons—it was all so convoluted... And at the end of the draisines, there were machine guns. It all rushed by so quickly that we... And the Germans were whispering: “Hitler, Adolf Hitler…” or “Führer, Führer…”.

And supervising us was an old man, a disabled veteran, he had been an officer in the first war, without both legs, but on prosthetics, but he walked on his own without a cane, Otto Ulrich. He treated me well, because I had become, so to speak, the translator there, and they turned to me with all questions, because I remembered some words from school, then I had lived for a year under the Germans—I had remembered something. In short, I had a vocabulary that allowed us to communicate, so I was the translator, because there were no complicated conversations there. And they would send me for coffee. At a certain time, a couple of hours after the start of the shift, there was Frühstück—the Germans would sit down, eat their sandwiches, and we ate nothing, because we had already eaten the bread they gave us in the morning back at the barracks, and besides that, there was nothing, but we drank coffee. It was a black-as-night coffee, not real, but brewed from some grains, obviously from roasted barley. It was so tasty that you could drink it like beer. They gave it to us: drink as much as you want, just pour it into your own container. I would bring one such Kaffeekann—a tall coffee pot—they entrusted me to carry the coffee. On the way, I could have thrown trash in it... I would bring it, put it down, they would sit down and eat. There was a small hut, I didn't go into that hut, they didn't let us in. We had nothing to eat, so we had to drink coffee, whoever wanted it, whoever had a container, the Germans would pour it. The Germans watched us and sometimes secretly gave us extra food—one would bring a piece of a sandwich, another would bring a sandwich. They gave extra food primarily to me, because I was the smallest. That Otto Ulrich, who was in charge of this work, invited me to his home twice. And his home was visible from the mountain, he would show me. From the mountain, you could see the villages all around, the churches in every village. He invited me home, he wasn't afraid, it wasn't a big deal for them. He was obviously a member of their party, I remember he wore the badge of a member of the National Socialist party. He would invite me and there he would try to ask about our life. I told him what I could and how I could—later I was able to tell a little more.

Working with us in shifts were Frenchmen, Belgians—civilians. In 1943—British prisoners of war, when Sicily was taken. When the Duce was kidnapped on that pretext, it was at that time that the British prisoners appeared, who had been captured in Sicily, obviously. It was a small group, about twenty people, they wore their own uniforms, with a square drawn on the back. The French prisoners had a triangle drawn on their uniforms, and we had the "Ost" sign. Although we were not obligated to wear it to work, when we went to other places, they required us to wear the "Ost" sign, we would sew it on. I have a photograph with that sign.

Here it is interesting to say what our level of freedom was, this is very important. We were not in a concentration c we were in an Arbeitslager, as they called it, and it was a semi-free existence. After work, we could go freely to the city and into the fields. This was often forbidden, but our boss allowed it; he had some influence in his party in that city. He allowed us to go, only reprimanding us when someone stole something and got caught, or when someone broke trees instead of just picking the fruit, breaking branches—that was the kind of thing.

There was an interesting episode, worth telling, about how one translator, Stefan, a Pole, translated what the boss said—that's a separate story.

So, we worked on this mountain, and it was our salvation. It wasn't hard work there, it was beautiful, we could always observe what a beautiful German landscape there was in those places—these are low mountains, beautiful forests, such a blueness. For me, it was a novelty, because I had lived and grown up in the steppe, I had never seen such things, and for me it was an exotic experience to observe what beautiful places there are in the world. I hadn't seen forests, and I always wanted to go into that forest.

Since we led such an existence, where we didn't have official permission, but no one bothered those who went out. We would walk around the city, do odd jobs for the Germans, who needed coal shoveled... They would bring the coal to a small window leading to the basement, throw the coal inside, close the window, and it would be stored there. Coal was piled up there, and piled up there. If we were walking by, the Germans already knew: “Komm, komm.” For the work, they would give a piece of bread or even a whole loaf, or a ration card. A ration card, if someone had one, was used to pay money. I remember they paid me, as the youngest, the least of all, but it was 36 marks. With this money, you could buy a lot of bread, and if you had ration cards, you could even buy sausage. Later, we did buy it. When the Americans started dropping ration cards for bread and meat from planes as a form of economic, so to speak, sabotage, the Germans got flustered. They started to look very carefully at who was giving them. And we managed to redeem the cards even through Germans, because Germans were trusted, and we weren't—they see you're an Ostarbeiter, so where did you get it? And if it's a policeman, he might even beat you. So we had to give not a full sheet, but tear off a piece. So I say again, we worked on the side, and in season, we picked apples, picked pears. They would give us a bag of pears so big you couldn't lift it—take it with you. The only thing was, if you saw a policeman across the way, it was better to duck into an alley or hide somewhere. He wasn't catching you, not specifically chasing you, but if you were right in front of him, he might ask: "Ausweis?"—if you have a document. You had to have an Ausweis. The policemen didn't chase us, you just had to be careful: if one was coming towards you—turn into a side street or go behind some trees, or just get out of the way, and he wouldn't follow you, even though he could see that something was suspicious. And the policeman wore such a tall cockade that you could see it from far away—like the tall hat on Wilhelm II.

I got into a routine: every day, I would bring apples that I had earned to a grocer, Frau Kaufmann, who lived on Hindenburgstrasse, I gave her all of them, and she would give me groats, vermicelli, all sorts of things like that—for those apples. And she wanted me to bring them, because she would then give them to someone else. So for the Germans, everything was by ration card. Pears, apples—all that had to be on ration cards. And when they gave this to us, it was also a violation, but apparently, they had no other choice, because we were free labor—for those ten kilograms of apples, we worked for several hours and earned them. And then in the winter, I also adapted. The winters there are snowy, so you could go into the apple orchards and look for apples among the leaves that had fallen, unnoticed by the pickers. This was such a vitamin boost, you can't imagine. They don't collect those frost-bitten apples now. They are small, but completely edible.

And then we learned not only to earn, but also to steal. And the Germans turned a blind eye to this. In their fields, there were clamps everywhere with potatoes, carrots, beets, and in the barns, which were also located in the fields, sheaves of grain were stored, unthreshed. They somehow didn't hurry to thresh it, they threshed it all winter. On one side, full of grain, sheaves piled 5-6 meters high, and here stood a small thresher, and they slowly threshed it all winter. And we adapted to get into that barn, because there was a small crack. In a couple of hours, you could thresh it by hand, you just had to do it quietly. You'd bring a few kilograms of wheat—that was something, because wheat is groats. You cook it for a long time, but you could cook it for a long time, it was winter. In the middle of the room, where there were wooden bunks, there was a stove that burned constantly. We would crawl into the clamps, bring potatoes, hide them under the floor, and there was a double bottom—we hid them there. The Germans who supervised us knew this perfectly well, but they never looked there. They saw that we were cooking potatoes, so we must be getting them from somewhere, they saw that they didn't give us wheat, but we were cooking it. “Where is this from?” one Schutzmann would shout. “Oh, someone gave it to us...” He would shout and shout—it was just for show, they never searched. I would say the attitude was lenient.

One time I got caught with potatoes. We walked and walked all night, searching, we didn't want potatoes, we didn't want wheat—we'd had our fill, we wanted carrots. And we looked for carrots until dawn. We were returning, when it was already getting light, we were crossing the station, and a policeman caught us on the tracks. The tracks were below the camp. My older partner, Ivan Karpenko from the Kyiv Oblast, Makariv Raion, ran, and the policeman happened to be right next to me. I couldn't run anywhere, he had a pistol. The other guy ran, and he—bang, bang—fired twice into the air and stopped, and the guy stopped too. He grabbed him by the arm, put me in front, and we went. He brought us to the camp chief. The camp chief, Herr Trepler, listened, thought for a moment, held his cheek, then stood up—and the policeman told him how each of us had behaved, saying, this one ran, and this one didn't run. So he slapped the other guy across the cheeks, whap-whap! That was for running away, and nothing for me. He put us in the cooler for three days. In the cooler, they fed us the same as at work, but it was cold there. We sat in the cooler for three days for that deed, and that was it.

And another time we were caught with potatoes. We went to take potatoes from the clamps, and somehow it took a long time to get them out, to dig through: the ground was frozen, you pull and pull one potato at a time... We see, on the other side of the clamp (and the clamps are very long), some lights. A few people are coming, Germans. How did they notice us from so far away? Did someone inform on us, or did someone see us. There were four of us. They are walking along other rows and suddenly turn straight towards us, and—“Halt! Sonst werde ich schiessen!”—“or I’ll shoot.” We didn't run anymore. “Hands up!”—we raised our hands. “Hands down, let’s go.” They took us to their hut, it was warm there. An old man sat down, lost in thought. His rifle was standing nearby. “Well, why did you come here?” At this point I began: “Well, there’s nothing to eat, we’re hungry, so we decided...” “I’m hungry too, even though I live here. They give you food, and they give me the same amount, but I don’t go stealing,” the old man admonished us in that vein. Then he let us go: “Go home.” That was one episode.

But there was another episode. Some boys from Mykhailivka—there's a village here—attacked an old man who caught them, tore the rifle from his hands, threw it aside, and ran. If only they had unloaded it. And he, without thinking long, grabbed the rifle and got them, even though they had run quite far: he wounded them in the legs, I don't know if it was all of them or two, there were also four of them. Then for two days, they inspected all our legs, made us bare our behinds—to see if there were any signs of that wound. I think the Germans who inspected us for show saw it and kept quiet, but no one was arrested for taking the rifle and throwing it away.

The only one who was sent to a concentration camp was a guy who got mixed up with some girls, and either spent the night with one of them, or slept with her, or took her into the bushes. They put that German girl in a separate place, and sent him to a concentration camp for three months. Three months in a concentration camp was a terrible thing; few survived for six months. But this guy survived three months and returned alive. This concentration camp was equivalent to a death sentence during the war. We were in a labor camp, not a concentration camp. We had the best conditions one could imagine, because we were allowed to leave the camp during our free time, and the Germans turned a blind eye to us roaming the fields at night, and whatever we could pilfer, we did. Because those fields were full of potatoes, beets, carrots, even wheat, and some even found beans—those were the lucky ones, because beans are more nutritious than wheat and cook better.

This was what my life was like in Germany. I was in three places. One town was Eisleben, where they produced semi-finished products, the second town was Helbra, five kilometers away—also semi-finished products, and the third town was called Hettstedt, fourteen kilometers away, where they smelted pure copper, the purest copper, from these semi-finished products. They were cylindrical molds, a crucible, and they were filled with metal, copper. My task was to take molten metal from the furnace with a huge iron ladle and top off the molds to a certain level. You couldn't just pour it from the tap evenly; where the metal fell, it would create a small pit. To avoid overfilling, we had to top it off with this ladle. I did this until I burned my left leg. I burned it so badly that I was treated for three weeks. When that metal poured onto my leg—it was a terrible thing. Even though we wore wooden clogs wrapped in foot-cloths—it all burned through, and I burned my leg.

They transferred me to another job, called electrolysis. There, through electrolysis, they smelted silver from copper plates; it precipitated as separate small pieces, and the copper remained. These plates were lowered by a crane into a concrete bath, where there was some acid or a mixture of acids (we had studied electrolysis in school), and silver would precipitate to the bottom. This basin of silver was guarded by an armed Schutzmann, who watched carefully to make sure no one scooped anything out of that acid. It was hard work, it was terribly harmful. And I did other, easier jobs. Others worked in the cement shop, also a heavy Staub—a heavy dust.

Liberation found us there. The Americans came on April 14, 1945, and liberated our camp. We, I remember, on the morning of the 14th (it was a Saturday), saw a column of vehicles coming down from the hill. There were no columns then, because the Germans were afraid to drive a vehicle on the road—planes were flying around and literally hunting for anyone who appeared on the road, shooting them: whether it was a cyclist, a motorcyclist, or a car. The Germans didn't appear. And here we see a whole column coming—it must be the Americans, because the Germans had said the Americans were coming from the West. We see the Germans have disappeared somewhere. By the stream that flowed near the camp, the boys found abandoned pistols, ammunition, picked it all up, because it was interesting—the Germans had abandoned them, our Schutzmänner. And above us was a camp for British prisoners of war. We were in the middle, they were above, and below was a Polish camp. So they first opened the Polish camp, we saw the Poles come out, and then they drove up to us. We ran to the gate, wanted to open it, but an American said: “Get out of the way”—drove up to the gate and crushed it with his armored personnel carrier, smashed the iron walls. We shook his hand. There were eight men on the platform. It was a whole procedure, we shook the American's hand for a whole hour. The whole camp came out, 450 people, I think, were there—freedom!

The Americans drove off, and we immediately rushed across the ravine to the station—there was a small railway station there. There were wagons standing, we started opening them and appropriating, looting, what was inside. The boys discovered that there were two cisterns of alcohol. They started taking the alcohol, looking for any containers and filling them up. And there were already rumors that many had been poisoned by this alcohol, many had gone blind, it was called wood alcohol, some kind of unrefined stuff. I remember I didn't even want to hide that alcohol for a whole week. It was perfectly fine, people got drunk, and when drunk, they went to the German houses nearby, trying to rob them. The Americans put a stop to that. We caused damage to the Germans, of course, we even started to arm ourselves. I got myself a sport pistol—a long one, and it fired four rounds. It shot so beautifully, it was a joy. They were small-caliber rounds. They let us loot the station for a whole day. I got myself some shoes there, there were some things from evacuees being transported to another place. So I got shoes, because I was half-barefoot. I took some kind of beautiful greatcoat, lined with fur, some kind of coat, which later turned out to be a woman's. Everything that came to hand, because there was a lot of everything, and everyone was grabbing, I got what no one else took. That's how it was. And it was useless, because it was summer. They didn't think to take something like a shirt or whatever. I remember when I left the station, the German civilians surrounded us and looked at all this with such surprise and envy, because they wouldn't have minded either, but who would let them in—we would have been the first not to allow it. The American soldiers stood on the side, not even looking at us, while we were rummaging through all this. As soon as I came out with those things, I immediately changed my shoes, threw out my old ones, and as I was carrying this, a German woman ran up to me and said: “But that's a woman's coat, what do you need it for?” I looked: “Well, take it then,”—and gave her the coat. But I took that greatcoat with me, it was just my size, it must have belonged to a young officer. Later, Soviet soldiers took it from me. I didn't get to use it, because it was summer, it wasn't needed, but I carried it all with me.

The next day, the Americans forbade looting, there was nothing left there anyway, so our people switched to drinking. I say again, for a whole week I didn't touch the alcohol, I was just afraid, I wanted to see the consequences of that drinking. Then I started drinking too, because it was safe to drink that alcohol. The Americans started to feed us. They brought meat preserves right to the camp and distributed them. Whoever came up twice, got two cans. A black soldier was handing them out—there were a lot of black soldiers then—American soldiers. And the preserves were German. Whoever came up once, got one. They brought us baked bread, gave us one small loaf for the week.

The British prisoners of war were quickly sent to the airfield and flown home, the Poles were also taken away quickly, but we were there for a whole month. One day, a week or two after the Americans liberated us, they suddenly put us on “Studebaker” trucks. We sat down. I think about thirty people fit in each one. They drove us west, to the town of Nordhausen. Nordhausen was the town where they made the V-1 and V-2 rockets. There was an underground factory there. This Nordhausen—it was the first time I saw it—was completely destroyed, down to the last building. Any building that wasn't destroyed, they had apparently shelled it, deliberately dropped a bomb on it. You had to be inventive to ensure not a single building was left whole! I later learned from the newspapers that they destroyed the town to destroy all the specialists who worked on those V-rockets. The underground part couldn't be destroyed, but the specialists could be, because they lived above ground—their families and them.

So, that was the system. For some reason, they drove us to that Nordhausen—and suddenly they turn around and drive us back. It took a whole day to get to that Nordhausen. I thought to myself, how fast the Americans drive. The speed was about eighty kilometers per hour, the distance between vehicles was two meters, for your information. Two meters—it's unimaginable! And at a speed of 80 kilometers per hour. We thought there would definitely be an accident, but out of 50 trucks speeding along, no accident happened. That's how skilled the drivers were. Suddenly they turn around, bring us back, unload us—that's it, they didn't even say where they were taking us. Someone just turned us back for some reason. Later I guessed that it was Soviet army agents doing everything possible to get all our people to return to the Soviet Union, because, they said, they were Vlasovites, traitors. There were agitators in our camp too—a captain appeared, but in civilian clothes. He praised the Soviet Union highly, said that there would be no Stalin, no collective farms, so return home. Stalin is in charge now, while the war is on, but when the war ends, he has already secured his retirement, because he has the right to rest, let the younger ones rule—that's what he said. There will be no Stalin, so there are no obstacles, everyone return home, there will be a very luxurious life there, your relatives are waiting for you. And at that very time, they were endlessly playing Stalin's speeches on the radio in connection with the end of the war, on May 9th. And we were liberated on April 14th. I ask one captain: “How is it that Stalin rules a state that speaks Russian, but he speaks with such a Caucasian accent?” It was the first time I heard Stalin's voice, how he mumbled—mumble-mumble-mumble. The captain looked at me for a long time, as if to say, what an experienced son of a bitch, and says: “He won’t be in charge anymore anyway, new people, young people, will be in charge, and Stalin has already, you could say, lived his life, so let him sit and mumble, don't worry.”

By the way, I had an experience in Eisleben, when a stocky, red-headed German of strong build, with glasses and a ruddy face, came to our team at the slag heap. The Germans would point a finger at him: “Communist.” I remember his name: Otto Heinrich. To this day, I remember that interesting episode. This Otto Heinrich would watch us. He was a quiet man, but he would philosophize among his fellow Germans, and they would exchange glances and laugh at his philosophy because he was saying something anti-Soviet to them. He had come from a concentration camp. He had been released. He was about 55 years old, maybe more. He began to treat me with a certain kindness, bringing me sandwiches and apples and telling me that his son was serving in the air force in Paris, that he had a wife at home who was inviting me to come and work—to dig potatoes, or pile them in clamps, or perhaps plant them. So, he persuaded me to come to his place.

It was a village, maybe three kilometers from that heap. I went to his place once, and he showed me his beautiful garden—such narrow paths, everything so well-tended that his wife never stepped on the soil where things grew but walked only on those paths and reached the plants from there, so the earth was never trampled. She watered and tended to everything. Everything there grew so lushly—kohlrabi, spinach. Everything grew so thickly, so beautifully. There was lettuce, and other greens that they ate, grown in large quantities on small plots. His wife, a dark-haired woman—not red-headed, but dark-haired—showed this to me. And then she fed me: she gave me a whole pot of potatoes, seasoned with something, and I ate as much as I wanted because those potatoes were delicious. It was unusual food, since we only ever ate *balanda*. She complained that she didn't know what to cook because they didn't have much to cook with. I said, “But your potatoes are delicious.” “Oh, the potatoes,” she said, “we’re already sick of them.”

Otto Heinrich leads me into a side room, turns on the radio receiver, and tunes in to Moscow. I heard Moscow speaking in a muffled voice. The announcer was talking about how people at some factory in Moscow were producing something for the front, how enthusiastically they were exceeding their quotas several times over and refusing their wages—to fund the construction of tanks. He asks me, “What are they talking about?” I couldn’t properly explain it to him because these were complicated things for me: “to fulfill the plan”—this wasn’t the kind of vocabulary I possessed. But somehow I managed to explain it to him. He said, “Well, that’s not interesting.” And he never turned it on for me again. I think it was dangerous, because listening to foreign radio was forbidden. The receiver had to be registered. He was kind to me and invited me over again and again. I could see that he wasn't interested in any work from me—because I never refused any work—but he would just feed me and engage in all sorts of small talk.

One day he calls me into that little room again and says, “Petro, kanst du mit Pistole schissen?” In 1944, he told me that Lviv had been taken. Do you recall when Lviv was taken? That’s a reference point for when I had this conversation with him. It was in 1944, probably in the spring, wasn't it? He said, “Lemberg, Lemberg, Lemberg…,” and I didn’t even know what Lemberg was. When he showed it to me on a map, I figured it out: ah, that's Lviv. So, he asks me if I know how to shoot a pistol. I say, “No.” The Germans (back in Pshenychne) had let us shoot a machine gun and a pistol—that was the only place I could have learned, well, not learned, but I had fired one. “Good,” he says, “you will be equipped with a pistol, we’ll put you in a good suit, you’ll come to me one day, we’ll give you a ticket, and you’ll go with an assistant to a certain place.” I was supposed to go with some assistant somewhere, to an unknown destination. I didn't say anything to this; obviously, I didn't react to it, in his opinion, positively.

I returned to the camp. I had a good friend from a neighboring village; he is deceased now. I called him aside and told him everything. This was an unexpected turn of events for me: what should I do? I had no idea what to do—whether to agree or not. After that, it seems, came that campaign of killing the conspirators against Hitler. This was after July 20. The attempt on his life was on July 20. I can't say if it was connected. This friend advised me not to go to that Otto Heinrich anymore. And I got scared myself, I'll be honest. Why would I go? I don't know what they have in mind; am I supposed to shoot someone, where? There was talk of a pistol; he asked if I knew how to shoot one. It was already clear that I was supposed to shoot someone. How he wanted to use me, I have no idea. I didn't go to him anymore. I would greet him, but I didn't talk to him. The Germans usually greeted us, and we greeted them back, as was proper when coming to work, but I distanced myself from him, and he understood that I wasn't going along with his proposal. He was very sad, very quiet, and, I think, worried, but he feared me without reason. I only told one guy, and he couldn't tell anyone because he was as much of a coward as I was, maybe even more so. Definitely more, because he never went to steal beets or potatoes; he only ate what I brought and, so to speak, “serviced” me: he would cook, bring it, and say, “eat.” I was the provider of food, and he was just the consumer. He was afraid; he never once went out into the fields at night to steal, he was even afraid to talk about it, meaning he was a bigger coward. Since he advised me not to do it, saying they would kill me somewhere, and scared me, I promised to think about it. The next time the German saw me, he understood that I was not agreeing. I say again, he was very sad, very worried, quiet; we stopped talking to each other altogether. He stopped addressing me as before, no longer told me anything, and just avoided me, as if we knew nothing about each other. Well, it all blew over, because I didn't say anything to anyone. I saw him until the end of the war. I hope he didn't get into any more trouble.

So in Germany, I had a chance to become famous—and I refused. I wasn't a hero, I'll say it, under no circumstances was I a hero, but I wasn't a great coward either—I was average, someone who, perhaps, intuitively sought the golden mean, and maybe with some feeling unknown to me, I managed to navigate around those reefs.

And later in life, there were episodes where I didn't take risks. But here, when I was joining the Helsinki Group, I had already made a final decision and told myself that I was consciously risking my life, but I had to, because I couldn't go on like that any longer. I had to do it; I forced myself. It followed, so to speak, from my entire life; I had to join. I might not have been so convinced and might not have joined the Group if I hadn't regularly listened to the radio broadcasts of “Voice of America” and “Radio Liberty,” which essentially prepared me for it. You could say they prepared me ironclad.

I don't remember anything else from Germany that was particularly interesting or worthy of note. They were recruiting us for the mines in Belgium, in Austria, and whoever agreed was taken without a second thought by car to the airfield—and onto a plane. I didn't dare do it; I wanted to go home. I didn't want to go anywhere else; the German captivity had been enough for me. I imagined it wouldn't be any better there either. And I probably imagined correctly, because those people who went to Belgium, to England—I even know some of them—they didn't have it easy there. They were better off financially, but these were people taken to the mines, mostly to the mines. It's the kind of work I probably would have never agreed to do. I only went down into a mine once. Where we worked in Germany, between the factories, there were slag heaps of rock extracted from underground, where they mined copper ore. The copper ore in Germany was very low-grade. The Germans said there was only one and a half percent copper in it, and they still mined it. Whereas in the Congo, the percentage reaches up to thirty—that’s the kind of ore they have there. And here it was one and a half percent—and they still mined it. True, they used part of the slag, making it into shaped paving stones that they sold to Holland and France, apparently through some kind of barter operations, because it was during the war. We produced those stones—we poured hot slag into molds and loaded them onto railcars. So the waste from the smelting was put to good use; there were a lot of those stones, and they were very high quality. That stone, I think, will last for thousands of years. The roads and sidewalks were made from that stone; the sidewalk pavers were ten by ten centimeters, and these were twenty by fifteen, I think. They were beautiful, oblong stones, forty centimeters deep. You put them in the ground—they'll stand forever. It was a wonderful building material.

FILTRATION CAMP

So, they are preparing us to go home. We are returning home entirely voluntarily. It was possible to go to another city, but I didn't go because I didn't want to. Everyone was consulting each other, talking—“I don't want to, I want to go home, home, home.” We went home. They put us in railcars and transported us all day—it was a slow journey, this and that delay, long stops. They bring us to some river where a bridge had been blown up and make us get out—it was the Elbe, and on the other side of the Elbe were the Soviet troops. They ferry us across, that is, we cross a pontoon bridge on foot—and there, the Soviet authorities are already at work. Someone in a uniform without shoulder boards… These scoundrels without shoulder boards appeared before us so that—I understood later—you could think of them as either a high-ranking officer or a junior one. Think whatever you want, but he acts like a great lord. There were no shoulder boards; it was probably set up that way to intimidate us with their ranks, or maybe so that…

They began to treat us very disrespectfully. First, they made it clear to us that we were all traitors, scoundrels, and that they were going to investigate what we had been doing in Germany. The response to all these hints was this: mass escape. People fled, but most were caught. It was an unpleasant business—when they were caught, they were packed into railcars and taken to the Soviet Union, where they were tried as traitors, and they all ended up in the uranium mines. They were kept there for eight to ten years, and when they were released, they weren't given a passport—they were slaves in the full sense of the word, they were wretched people.

V. V. Ovsiienko: And when were you handed over?

P. P. Rozumnyi: I was handed over on May 16, 1945. It was one month and two days after the liberation. I emphasize: I returned voluntarily; I didn't have to move west. The Americans would have taken us to some camps for displaced persons; they were already setting up such camps. Displaced persons, “DPs” as they were called in English—displaced persons. If we had wanted, they would have taken us to those camps, but we were taken east because that's what we wanted. I'm telling you, the disappointment set in on the very day we were handed over to the Soviet side. There were already guards, there was already a border, our soldiers stood along the Elbe—you couldn't cross by car or on foot, unless someone… And people fled—they threw themselves into the water to swim across. The Elbe wasn't a wide river. It was swift, though; someone who could swim, who could flounder in the water, would be carried diagonally to the shore, and those who knew how to navigate the current and choose a spot fled by swimming across the river. And each of us had a bag, so first of all, they started checking our bags and taking whatever they liked. Five or six of those scoundrels in uniforms without shoulder boards lead about 50 of us out, as if they were going to… They lead us away from all the others, in different directions, line us up in a single row and: “Open your bags!”—and they frisk us. Whatever they like—aside, aside, aside. Then they make us pack it up and send it off somewhere.

In short, they took everything they could—from our pockets, whatever watches people had… We had acquired a few things, you see, because we had thoroughly looted the German houses. And some had set themselves up near estates, in villages and towns, where they lived in separate houses, searching for buried treasure. And the Germans did bury things—they had also been evacuated westward during the fighting, so they buried valuables they couldn't take with them, somewhere in the ground or in a shed. Our guys knew how to look and found all of it. There was silverware, some valuable porcelain items, beautiful dishes. Things that wouldn't spoil in the ground. All of this, whoever had packed it in bags and was hauling it with them—it was all taken away. There was no possibility of protesting, because the head searcher threatened to open “special files” on us, and then—“over there”—pointing toward Siberia. “They'll send you over there, so keep quiet.” So no one could protest, and they took what they wanted. They took that greatcoat from me. And it's a good thing they did, because it had become useless.

Every day they would summon us to the “Osobyi Otdel”—the OO (Special Department)—with a hundred questions: when were you taken to Germany, who did you travel with, from where to where were you brought, what did you do, where did you work? I think they were trying to catch people by asking the same questions each time, and anyone who got their story mixed up, who answered differently than before, was taken under suspicion. Well, those were people older than me, because I was still young, so young that I wasn't even old enough for the army yet. Those who were taken under suspicion were separated—aside, aside. They were clearly conducting background checks, because they sent letters to my village council several times, asking the local authorities there to report on who I was, what I was, where I was from—you know, everything, starting from my grandfather and great-grandfather.

IN THE OCCUPATION ARMY

So, they separated us, the youngest ones. Those born in 1926 were drafted into the army, right there on the spot. And this place was there, before the Elbe, a bit further east, in Silesia. It was near the cities of Wrocław, Legnica. This was an area that was already designated to be handed over to Poland. Poles had already begun to arrive there. We saw them traveling on open flatcars with their belongings, in roofless gondola cars—however they could manage. But they were on the rails; they weren't lugging anything on their backs. They were given houses here, abandoned by the Germans; entire villages were abandoned, and they had some things for their immediate needs—dishes, and the cellars were full of goods: potatoes, jars of canned vegetables, fruits, and everything else. The Germans' cellars were full of all this. I know that the places the Poles took over hadn't been looted, because there was no one to eat it all. The soldiers weren't hungry and didn't look everywhere.

I am mobilized into the army. By August, or the end of August, I am assigned as a private in a guard company. We guarded war trophies. Things that had been brought together, piled up—ammunition, weapons depots, especially with shells and bombs, and there were mines, mountains of mines, and property like pipes. So that no one would plunder these goods, so they wouldn't fall into the hands of the Poles, because Poles were settling there. We were called the guard company. Since these goods were scattered in various places, we lived, you could say, in contact with the Poles. The Poles were constantly coming and wanting something—pipes, or they wanted to take some bathtubs, or some other property, some wires—all the things needed for a household. Except for the mines. They didn't take the mines. And they brought us food, vodka. I remember one song: “Ми млоди, ми млоди, нам бімбер ніц не шкоди” (bimber—moonshine). “Ми п'єм його літрами, хто з нами, хто з нами?” It was a little song, not quite Polish, not quite Ukrainian, that was popular there, set to the melody of the foxtrot “Rosalinda.” This, by the way, was a melody the Germans often played during the war, because it was a very popular foxtrot, played by American orchestras, and when we arrived in the Soviet Union—the Soviet ones played it too. For me, the end of the war is associated with this very beautiful melody. I remember how the Americans played it; you could listen to it for hours—such a beautiful, lively melody. And the German women who were around the Americans would dance! They couldn't resist, they would come to dance—and the guys went, young and old. The Germans knew how to have fun: wherever an orchestra appeared, everyone would gather to dance. Even the Soviet musicians—they already knew this melody too, because it was very appealing. For me, this melody is associated with the end of the war, with that joy: I survived the war, so many died, and I survived, thank God—that was the feeling.

So we are guarding those goods, those trophies. Sappers arrive and blow up the depots with bombs, shells, and mines. Then we stop guarding the places that have been blown up, and where property still remains, we give it away, as much as we can—for a bottle, for a piece (*kawałek*, as the Poles said) of butter, for good baked bread that we didn't get in the army: “take it, just carry it yourself, if you can.” “And don't walk on the main road, but take the side roads, so our officers don't see us giving it away, because it was all off the books.” In short, we learned to steal. Later in the army, when I served in a repair battalion, we already knew how to steal. I knew it was a good way to supplement a soldier's ration.

V. V. Ovsiienko: The school of socialism.

P. P. Rozumnyi: The school of socialism. Later, it wasn't just us stealing, but the officers too. They encouraged us to do it, told us how to steal, where to get the best moonshine. Because they didn't make good stuff everywhere; there were sly ones there in Poland too—sometimes they made moonshine that wasn't very strong. Our guard duty at the depots ended in the fall. In late fall, they made us guard potatoes that had already been dug up and piled into mounds, but frosts were coming soon, so they were taking them away, distributing them to the regiments, and we guarded them because the Poles were constantly stealing them. I remember that we killed a goat while hunting. I even managed to kill a goat myself. I aimed with a carbine from a kneeling position, from far away. It was quite a distance, a kilometer at least, no less. We roasted it ourselves and ate it because, essentially, we were self-sufficient. Suddenly, they say that over there, a kilometer and a half away, thieves are stealing potatoes from the mounds. Our sergeant quickly ordered everyone to be issued carbines and to head over there—there was a rise in the forest near a church. And indeed, we looked through binoculars, and a few people were bustling about there. A kilometer and a half away. We took aim (we had German carbines, they shot well). When those people heard the whistle of bullets, they started running for a nearby grove, running with all their might, about six of them. They didn't come back, because it was a real volley of fire. We didn't hit anyone, but we shot. We shot without fear of killing anyone because it was so far away. That's how it was.

Our guard duty ended, and they transferred us to an automobile repair battalion. They brought in those wretched GAZ-AA trucks—they called them *polutorka*—and ZIS-5s, and we had to restore them: touch up the paint, fix the engines, the equipment. They told us that the land wasn't being cultivated, that all this was urgently needed, so we were carrying out a great mission. We carried out this mission diligently, constantly driving those vehicles. They were usually trucks that were still drivable; we knew how to get them started. We would drive through the checkpoint and haul out gasoline—the Poles were looking for tires, wheels, various spare parts, especially for American vehicles, all sorts of bearings, pumps, and other things. In short, there was such a trade going on that we, I would say, were pilfering a huge part of that depot's stock, especially gasoline. I was the “gasoline king” there—in charge of gasoline and all sorts of lubricants. There were barrels of gasoline standing there; I had to measure it out, issue it against invoices, and people would sign for it. But no one measured it; no one there knew exactly how much gasoline there was or how much had been used. Mostly, it was stolen, but the commander pretended he didn't know we were pilfering, because he also got a cut. What did he get? Probably vodka. I didn't steal myself, but I issued this gasoline for theft. Once it happened that they took me out too—I was feeling brave. We're eating sausage, white bread, paid for with Polish zlotys. Two of us drove out in a *polutorka*. I wasn't the driver; I was sitting in the passenger seat. We're driving down the main street, and from a side street, a Dodge 3/4 comes flying right at us from above. It's a medium-sized American truck, used for hauling cannons. It hits the truck bed. If it had hit the cabin, it would have struck me directly, because I was sitting on that side. The truck bed flies off as if it was never there, and we just kept driving. The driver looked back but didn't stop. Well, there was no point driving without a truck bed, because we had wanted to throw something in it, so we turned back. And imagine this: no one even asked what happened to the truck bed!

In short, I saw such pilfering there that it's hard to imagine. Everything: dynamos for cars, headlights, light bulbs, especially spark plugs—which were in very short supply—a significant portion of all this was stolen, because the Poles needed it all desperately. They would resell it in another city because they knew where it was needed. That's how they lived, and we got a considerable share too.

But that racket came to an end too. Our battalion is disbanded, and I'm transferred to a mechanized regiment. Theoretically, this mechanized regiment was supposed to be able to hook up everything in the regiment—with its cannons and ammunition, with all its personnel—to its vehicles (they were American Studebakers and Chevrolets) in three hours and relocate to another place. That's how mechanized we were. The regiment was commanded by an Armenian named Isakyan, who wore some kind of strange boots. He was very bow-legged and couldn't speak Russian properly. I later figured that some wheeler-dealers in the Caucasus must have caught him and made him a colonel. It was obvious that he couldn't speak, and what he did say was just hemming and hawing and some gesticulating. The only thing I remember is that every day before the evening roll call, he would stand on a platform, and each battalion had to march past him, render honors, salute, and shout “Hooray!” If he didn't like a particular one, he would make this gesture: “Eh.” That meant that battalion had to step aside and march past again after everyone else. So, the battalion that got the “Eh” sign wouldn't be getting to sleep for a long time, because they would be drilled on the parade ground to march correctly in front of the colonel. It was such a stupid and useless drill.

I once had a problem with him. They put me in charge of the warehouse. I wasn't officially appointed because I didn't have the appropriate rank: it was supposed to be a sergeant or a sergeant major. I later understood why they put me, a private with no accountability, in charge—to facilitate the pilfering of spare parts. These were now American spare parts, they were in very short supply, the Poles bought them, especially spark plugs—they were in such short supply, you can't imagine how the Poles begged: give us spark plugs. They were very expensive. Wheels. They took wheels right off of working vehicles. The theft there was incredible. The major who was in charge of the technical condition and signed the invoices was later removed from his post and sent to the Far East.

V. V. Ovsiienko: December 13, 1998, on St. Andrew's Day, we continue recording the conversation with Petro Rozumnyi.

P. P. Rozumnyi: I must say that service in the army was some kind of constant misery. I learned how a person is controlled in our country. I had heard about it theoretically, but I experienced it myself. Every week, we were summoned to the Osobyi Otdel in groups and individually and questioned about something. You enter through one door, leave through another… We had to assume that we could be called into the Osobyi Otdel for any reason and interrogated about what we did, where we went, who went AWOL and when. And this was probably connected to the fact that there were many soldiers who tried to escape to the West. Because the border on the Elbe was relatively close. They were caught and tried. Maybe some managed to escape, but we didn't hear about them. I remember how they gathered the entire division or regiment, and a trial was held for three boys, Ukrainians, who had tried to flee. There were three of them on trial; two behaved modestly, but one was quite defiant. The judge asks: “So explain why you were running away?” And this one, cheerfully and with a smile, so that everyone could hear, said loudly: “But we had a slogan: ‘Forward to the West!’” The whole division laughed, because it was a fitting remark. The judge winced and said nothing more. They were all sentenced to seven years, because that was the standard measure. Anyone who deserted got seven years.

One from our company ran away and lived with some German women for several weeks. He was also caught and sentenced to seven years. So the desire to escape was very strong, people fled very often, so they watched us very closely. Because that contingent of young men was mainly made up of those who had been in Germany, like me; they could compare the systems here and there, where they had been. And everyone knew that life in the West was better than in the Soviet Union, and that was probably the biggest incentive. That's why we were constantly monitored. Although the border was closed and escaping, as it later turned out, was difficult, because almost everyone was caught and it was reported in the regiment, but many were not reported—obviously, they managed to escape. The terrain there was also conducive: rivers, hills, where you could hide and flee. They fled with and without weapons. They usually fled while on duty, so only trusted men, those who were not expected to flee, were sent on duty. It was a constant topic of conversation: who had escaped and who hadn't yet. I remember that people were personally assigned to me to persuade me to flee. But I knew they were planted. One was from the Donetsk region, Prilepsky—such a cunning man, he always wanted to escape, but I could see from him that he didn't just not want to escape, he didn't even want to leave the barracks—he would just lie down, eat his fill, and lie down again—that's how lazy he was. I’d say: “Prilepsky, if you start to run, your legs will hurt, you'll fall down and just lie there—what's the point of you escaping?” I laughed at him like that, because I saw that he was provoking me. That whole spy business was launched there, intended to identify who was in the mood to escape, because that was problem number one. I think they called us to the special department for talks so often so they could determine a person's psychological state—whether they were inclined to flee, because the temptation was great. The border was close, a few kilometers, the Americans were there, if you escaped successfully—you were in another world.

One day, in the winter of 1948, the commander of our entire army (it was called the occupation army) arrives at the regiment—I think it was Rokossovsky, with a large retinue of generals, and inspects the regiment. He was such a tall and swift marshal that the generals couldn't keep up with him. He ran ahead by himself, and they were twenty meters behind. No one could keep up with him, he didn't wait for anyone. I happened to be at the warehouse near the workshop and was sitting by the door. He walked past me, I stood at attention, he stopped, called for the regimental commander, that is, Colonel Isakyan. This was a colonel they'd caught somewhere in the Armenian mountains and made a colonel. He couldn't speak Russian, only mumbled. For example, he meets a soldier and doesn't like something about him, so he gestures to the soldier: “To me.” He didn't speak, just gestured, because it was very difficult for him to talk. That's the kind of colonel he was. I remember all sorts of anecdotes they told about him, how he eats breakfast, how he has dinner, how he's shod—two soldiers would put on his boots, two soldiers would take them off—that sort of thing. The colonel comes running because Rokossovsky is calling him—this is all happening before my eyes, because I happened to be standing by the door of my warehouse of automobile spare parts, which I was in charge of. Rokossovsky waits for the colonel to arrive. The colonel pushed his way through the generals to the marshal and babbled something. The marshal didn't listen to him, he says: “Colonel, you've turned the regiment into a greasy spoon!”—because he had already run around the entire regiment and seen everything. He said: “Yes, sir!” Rokossovsky ran on…

SERVICE IN KARELIA

V. V. Ovsiienko: Petro Rozumnyi. Cassette three, December 13, 1998.

P. P. Rozumnyi: That same day we heard that our regiment was being disbanded and we would be sent to different units. And so it happened. They put us in a railcar and took us East. We traveled through Poland, then through Lithuania, stopped in Leningrad, then north through Karelia all the way to the Arctic Circle. They brought us to Kandalaksha, on the White Sea. For the first time in the army, I understood what hunger was—real hunger, which drains all of a person's strength. As long as I was in a regular unit, you could still get something somewhere. Jump over a fence, buy something, if you had money. But here there was nothing anywhere—a wasteland, hills, the sun moves along the horizon from hill to hill, spinning like a wheel, always visible, there is no night. They send our boys to the White Sea—it's right there—to catch fish to feed themselves. These are people who don't know how, unqualified. A good number of them drowned there. The small boats were operated by some careless people who didn't know how to handle themselves at sea. People fell into the water, no one rescued them. That's how we ate: if they caught fish, we ate, and if they didn't, we didn't. It was a terrible situation.

I remember, the colonel gathered us on the occasion of subscribing to a state loan: everyone had to subscribe for a month's, as they called it, allowance, including the colonel who gave his monthly salary for the loan. It was a well-known thing: every year they subscribed to a loan. And the soldiers had to subscribe for the amount of their monthly, as they called it, allowance, some number of rubles. The colonel announced that he was subscribing for 4,000 rubles—that was apparently his salary—and invited everyone to subscribe. The regiment was lined up around the colonel, he stood in the middle, explaining. The colonel was Ukrainian by surname and by speech. Someone from the crowd of soldiers shouted: “And when will we get decent food?” They looked around, I don't know if they found the one who shouted, but the colonel said it would come, because they had set up two more boats that would be catching fish in the White Sea and thus supplementing our food.

That's how I began my service on the territory of the Soviet Union. It was a feeling of some kind of physical collapse. There is no night, it's always light, always the sun—it comes out from behind one hill and sets behind another. It seemed that you had fallen into a world that was destroying you—that was the feeling.

But somehow they gathered us into a team and took us south through Karelia. The team was about fifty people. They took us south to “carry out an assignment from the General Staff.” We had no idea what that was—“an assignment from the General Staff,” but we found out later. They dropped us off in the Karelian forests and we walked on foot through the melting snow—it was already spring, the snow was weak, but there was still a lot of it. We walked for several days, spending the nights in abandoned Karelian houses. The villages were empty, except for some old man or woman here and there, and they were such unfriendly Karelians that they didn't even want to talk to us, didn't want to give us anything. We climbed into cellars ourselves for potatoes, for any provisions to feed ourselves. They fed us along the way, gave us a can of something for two men, but it was like a drop in the ocean.

V. V. Ovsiienko: And the Karelian villages weren't abandoned for no reason, I suppose?

P. P. Rozumnyi: Not for no reason, because there had been a war, and Karelia was simply trampled… The Karelians, as I later found out, supported the Finns, so they were simply evicted. Or they were killed or deported to Siberia. And from the territories where the Finns were, the Karelians left with the Finns. And so a few people were left in those empty villages.

V. V. Ovsiienko: What year were you in Karelia?

P. P. Rozumnyi: That was already in 1948. For the first time, I observed how war had devastated an entire people. I knew theoretically that Karelians had lived there, but they weren't in the villages. Only the sick or those who simply hadn't managed to go anywhere were left. Empty villages. And so we walked through those empty villages, spent the night in them, even dismantled buildings for firewood to keep warm. We walked for several days to some unknown place, which they didn't name, because it was a “military secret.” We arrived at some lake. There were abandoned houses there. They told us to chop pine boughs to make beds to sleep on. The walls of the houses were wooden, we laid the pine boughs inside and settled in. “Here we will cut down trees and float them down this lake,” the officer explained. “And when the snow melts and the ice breaks up, all this felled timber will float, and in this way we will fulfill the General Staff's assignment for timber rafting.”

Well, what can I say, the men didn't know how to handle those saws—and they mostly sawed by hand—and several were injured right away. There was some small mechanization, but we weren't allowed near it. We sawed by hand, some horses pulled the logs. It was so primitive that it was simply the extermination of people. People fell ill. Once, two officers went on a reconnaissance mission down the river to the south, and they took me and another soldier with them. The reconnaissance meant looking at the channel along which this timber would be floated. Along the way, I saw that there were broken-down tents where a few soldiers lived. They were supposed to accompany the timber. They had weapons with them, that is, carbines, and they lived on what they killed in the forest, because there was nothing else. It was some kind of savagery, in the fullest sense. We came to the first tent and saw a part of, I think, a deer or a moose hanging on a tree. They had killed it, were skinning it, cutting it up, and eating it—that's what they lived on. And we had dinner there, spent the night, walked a little further, walked all day along the river, because there was still ice, and then returned.

I obviously caught a very bad cold there, because it was a journey beyond words: completely wet, and it was already spring. I fell ill and lay with a fever, but they still didn't send me away. It was thought that the paramedic on site would cure me. They wouldn't send you to even the nearest settlement for treatment, so some soldiers just died. I saw that the same thing would happen to me, because it was clear that no one would take care of anyone: you got sick—well, just lie there, if you survive—good, if you don't—we'll bury you and write you off. But it had been announced that those born in 1925 were being demobilized in 1948, and I was born in 1926, so I wasn't eligible. I corrected my military ID book—scratched it out, erased it, and changed 1926 to 1925 in my book, and presented it to my superior, saying I was going to be demobilized, that I was sick and had a fever. Either he didn't look closely, or something—he sent me back to the regiment, all the way to Kandalaksha. Didn't I say that the town where we were staying was Kandalaksha?

V. V. Ovsiienko: You did.

P. P. Rozumnyi: So, I forged the number, and they sent me along with the others. In the regiment, however, they noticed and said that I had altered it. I said, “I don't know who altered it or didn't alter it—that's the book I have.” They figured out that I was born in 1926, and they didn't demobilize me, but they put me in the hospital; they didn't send me back, because I was sick, I had a fever. That's how I survived, because if I hadn't forged that paper, I probably would have been left there, because people were dying. I mean, what kind of help was there? They give you some pills, probably fake, because they didn't help at all. You just lie on pine boughs, with a fire burning nearby, wet, your feet always wet. There were no conditions there to survive. The food was from cans. It was some unheard-of abuse, which I had not observed either before or after. Obviously, such conditions only occurred at the front, when people were put in such a dead end. You died—you didn't die, what's the difference—no one was held responsible for it.

In this deceptive way, I managed to return to the regiment, and they put me in the hospital. And here, it turned out there was a female doctor—I think she was Ukrainian, although she never told anyone. She treated me with some sympathy, because I told her some of what I had seen, and she liked to ask questions. And she got me discharged on medical grounds. She wrote such a long medical history—I have it somewhere—and on that basis I was demobilized, although my year group served for another two, some for three years. I was supposed to serve seven years in the army. But I forged the year, and although it was done so crudely that it was later discovered to be a forgery, it worked in my favor. Then I came across a doctor who liked to talk to me. A young woman, she had some interest in me. She helped me get demobilized... She made me an invalid, or whatever it was formally called... When I recovered, they discharged me, and I went home.

V. V. Ovsiienko: When did this happen?

P. P. Rozumnyi: This happened in June 1948. It turned out that I left home on June 22, 1942, and returned home on June 22, 1948. So, I spent exactly six years in Germany and in the army—in youthful wanderings. Goethe calls this the journeys of a lifetime. These were my journeys of a lifetime.

At that time, my older sister Yelyzaveta lived in Moscow. She wrote to me. She had been through the war. But it turned out it wasn't Moscow at all, but Klyazma, near Moscow. I stopped by to see her, and she tried to enlighten me, to show me all the noteworthy places in Moscow, she dragged me to the Mausoleum. I didn't want to go, and she got terribly indignant, shouted at me, and stomped her feet. I said, “I'm not going in there, I'm not going and that's it! I'll go home right now.” She saw that she would get nowhere with me. I asked, “Did you bring me to Moscow just so I would go to the Mausoleum? What do I need it for? I'll look at the city.” I looked at the Kremlin, at Red Square, we went to the shops. Then she took me to some movie, so stupid, so pointless... I never went to Moscow again, I didn't want to go there anymore. I stayed with my sister for two or three days and went home. I arrived home on exactly June 22, the same day I had left home in 1942, and arrived in 1948. Such were my odysseys, my life's journeys.

STUDIES

A new stage began, that of civilian life. Everything was destroyed everywhere, there were policemen everywhere. Wherever you went—at train stations, at bus stations, on the streets—they were checking documents. It seemed abnormal to me. You arrive in Dnipropetrovsk—no fewer than 15-20 checks. Someone is always checking, checking, checking…

My older brother Mykhailo said that I should enroll in the institute of foreign languages; he showed me an announcement. I said, “What institute? I don't even have a ten-year school certificate.” I hadn't even finished nine grades. He says, “We'll make a document right now that certifies you finished ten grades, and we'll make the stamp from a potato.” I was not psychologically ready for any of this. Six years had passed since the ninth grade... So much time had gone by... It later turned out that the document went through. Obviously, they understood that it was a fake...

V. V. Ovsiienko: A potato one.

P. P. Rozumnyi: A potato one. That document worked, no one checked it. They gave it back to me later. It disappeared somewhere... It was in a Latin dictionary, and I lent the book to someone, and someone took it out. So, with a fake document, I enrolled in the institute without exams and graduated.

V. V. Ovsiienko: Which one, the Dnipropetrovsk one?

P. P. Rozumnyi: The Dnipropetrovsk Institute of Foreign Languages.

V. V. Ovsiienko: You enrolled in that same year, 1948?

P. P. Rozumnyi: In forty-eight, but classes began not in September, but in October. It turned out that I wasn't the worst student there, and maybe even the best. Only one young boy from Dniprodzerzhynsk, who had finished ten years of school after the war, was there, but everyone else was like me. It turned out that they had studied even less than I had, had also presented fake documents and enrolled, and no one checked anyone. The director, by the way, a relative of Manuilsky, Myronchuk Dmytro Isakovych, is still alive to this day and remembers me. He remembers because when the KGB was interested in me and came to the institute, they treated me leniently because he spoke positively about me. But at the institute, they had a dressing-down for me, such a dressing-down that the whole institute gathered, and they wanted to punish me.

So they pushed me into the institute. In the English department, there were only eight boys, and a total of 150 students—all girls. In the French department, out of 70 people, there was only one male student. At first, it was hard, because I had forgotten grammar and everything else. But I began to study better than the others, only one young boy from Dniprodzerzhynsk, who had finished ten years of school—he studied better than me, but the others were worse, some much worse. I graduated with honors. It wasn't something so difficult, because I wanted to learn, wanted to become someone.

So, in the French department, there was a student named Heyshtor, Volodymyr Kostyantynovych. He—imagine this!—came from China to study in the Soviet Union. There was a revolution in China then, and his parents were White émigrés who had settled somewhere in Manchuria and lived there until this Chinese Revolution. During the revolution, his father was killed, and his mother said they would go to Brazil. This Volodymyr Heyshtor didn't want to go with his mother. He was already a full-grown adult. He had read in books and newspapers that there was great freedom in the Soviet Union, that every person there develops according to their abilities, with no obstacles. “But my mother said it was a despotism there,” as he later told it, “that you couldn't live there. I didn't believe her, I had a big fight with my mother. She went to Brazil as an emigrant, and I went to the Soviet Union.” That's how he appeared in the Soviet Union. A whole group of White émigrés returned, among them a young Japanese woman who, as it later turned out, had designs on marrying him.

They were settled in the Urals. As soon as they arrived in the Urals, they were separated. That Japanese woman went off to some women's service, and he was sent to a mine. And so unceremoniously, he says, as soon as he arrived, before he had time to get settled, to arrange his things (and he had brought some things from China that had value in the Soviet Union in 1947, because everyone was destitute). So, having stored his belongings somewhere in the barracks, he went down into the mine that same evening. And when he came out of the mine, it turned out that everything had been stolen from him. All that was left was what he was wearing. So he was left there naked and barefoot. That's how he got his first lesson in the Soviet Union, how life is here, how a person who believed in those fables they spread around the world about a paradise on earth would feel. So, he was left with nothing, he started a new life. In 1948, he managed to break away from the Urals to Ukraine. I asked him why he came to Ukraine, and he said that everyone said and still says that if there's anywhere to live in the Soviet Union, it's in Ukraine—at least you won't be hungry there. Indeed, Ukraine had the greatest wealth, no matter how much they stripped it, the people worked, the land produced, and compared to other regions, it was better.

So, he arrived and enrolled in our institute in the French department, because he knew English. He knew it practically, because he had spent some time as a sailor on an English ship. I will say that this Heyshtor, no matter how much the Soviet authorities wronged him, remained a chauvinist from head to toe. He called me a separatist behind my back. We were very close, we even lived in the same apartment for about a year and a half. Because it was hard for one person to rent a room, but it was easier for two. So he called me a separatist, and at first, I didn't even know it. But when I moved from Ivano-Frankivsk to my village in 1979 to live here, this Heyshtor suddenly comes to visit me. I didn't invite him, I didn't correspond with him. He shows up out of the blue. I was surprised that he came to see me, but it occurred to me that he had been sent to find out why I had moved here, to Eastern Ukraine, leaving my house to my son there, because my son had gotten married. I didn't trust him, because I felt he had been sent as someone who could get information out of me. I knew he was anti-Soviet himself, he had good reasons for it, but he was a chauvinist and for a “united and indivisible” Russia, and that's how they hooked him. Lately, they had even given him a job at the Horlivka Pedagogical Institute, he taught French. Our institute was disbanded back in 1956. It was no accident they gave him a job there, because he was a trusted person, that's for sure. I questioned him: “How is it that they gave you a job at a pedagogical institute?” He couldn't say anything. But I'm getting ahead of myself... I want to tell you about him, because it's an important event.

V. V. Ovsiienko: Look, if we can fit it into the time. I have one more cassette.

P. P. Rozumnyi: Well, alright, I'll have to write about this. Because he is a person who considered himself a democrat, but wanted freedom only for himself, and he did not want freedom for others. He has been deceased for a long time. He spent time in prison, accused of espionage. That Japanese woman who wanted to marry him, but he didn't want to, slandered him, saying he was an American spy. But there was no proof, so he was imprisoned simply as an anti-Soviet. He was released under the 1956 amnesty. He wrote me letters, I sent him a little money in prison—you could still send it back then. He was in Kryvyi Rih, and then somewhere else. And after that, he didn't repent—he remained a chauvinist. That's why they took him at the Horlivka Institute. His last name was Heyshtor; his father was Latvian, and his mother was Russian.

V. V. Ovsiienko: We are interested in the collision of your life, specifically the dissident collision…

P. P. Rozumnyi: I'll talk about the institute, and maybe that's enough for today. We'll record another time.

I had an episode at the institute that could be called a whole trial. I noticed that out of the eight of us, besides this Heyshtor, everyone was compromised, except maybe for one, Shevchenko. One once even admitted to me that he had served in the NKVD, then he was transferred elsewhere, and then back to the NKVD. In short, these were people with whom you could never talk about anything. They were, in my opinion, compiling a dossier on me. One of them brought me books that had been brought from Western Ukraine. They dealt with the behavior of Muscovites during the occupation of Ukraine immediately after the Pereiaslav Council and later. I asked him where he got them, but he never said. I read them with pleasure because they were good books. Small stories, anti-Moscow, published in Galicia—I could tell by the language. Later I realized that these were provocations. This was a certain Mr. Honchar, he was the youngest among us. Now deceased. He used to hang around me and wag his tail. But I read those anti-Moscow booklets, returned them to him, and nothing happened.

But I also read other literature. I got acquainted with a lady from the library, a frumpy girl, and I think she was disabled. I used to visit her with this Heyshtor, she would open cabinets where there were books—she had stolen them from the library where she worked. Wonderful books! Including English ones—that was a real find! Through her, Heyshtor and I were invited to sort a library somewhere, where we had to separate the foreign books, that is, German, English, French, and make a catalog for them. I rummaged through those books and stole a good number of them. I stole them, because how could I not steal them when they weren't registered and had been lying around since the revolution. These were books from the nineteenth century, many of them English. There I stole a brochure—I still have it somewhere—a critique of Veselovsky, a critique of Bely. It stuck in my memory how they characterized Leo Tolstoy. I had read many books in the army, I read Tolstoy, including “War and Peace.” And Veselovsky characterizes Tolstoy as a windbag who, being a count, walked barefoot, and being a writer, walked behind a plow. I remembered this and began to promote such ideas, that his writing was not worthy of the great attention it received. And I also read in Franko that the novel “War and Peace” is very drawn out, spread all over the world, hard to read, to pull together.

So, I'm telling all this to my guys, and they need it to report on me. One fine day, Sydorenko, Maksym Ivanovych, a KGB man from my village—he never even looked at me, although he often visited my institute... He was in charge of our institute, the students. I liked how Veselovsky mocked Tolstoy. I told this to the guys as if it were my own discovery, because those guys hadn't read anything like it. Heyshtor was only interested in French, English, but I took Italian too. I also found there the works of Hryhoriy Kosynka, our writers of the twenties. We sorted that library for about two months, for free and voluntarily. I got a good education from those books that I stole. Or borrowed, in a way. We would choose books from that lady's collection, read them, and take them with us. That's how I read a lot of good books. She had Ukrainian literature, which she simply gave me, because she called me not a separatist, but an independentist. She'd say, read, since you love to read so much. I appropriated them. They somehow got scattered later, some I later gave to Yevhen Sverstiuk.

A dossier is being compiled on me about my incorrect behavior. I don't know how it was formulated. They call a Komsomol meeting, and I wasn't a Komsomol member. I was surprised why they never invited me to join the Komsomol. I was still young, in my twenty-third year when I entered the institute. They could have still invited me. But they didn't. This was already suspicious to me. I wasn't planning on joining myself, but if they had pushed, I probably would have.

So, they call a meeting where, it turns out, my case will be discussed. They gather only the first-year students of our English department. Before the meeting, this Ivan Honchar follows me in the corridor. I'm agitated: now they're going to tear me apart, maybe expel me, and he's following me. I had just read in Franko: “Judge me, judge me, judge…” I quoted it to him, and he later told the KGB.

So, the issue is that I, Petro Pavlovych Rozumnyi, do not like Russian literature, do not consider it an outstanding phenomenon of world literature, and, in particular, do not consider the luminary of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy, an authority. I couldn't say anything to that—I had indeed talked so much that I had forgotten who I had said what to, especially about Tolstoy. This was after the Zhdanov decrees of the Central Committee, so it was an attempt to simply scare me personally, and others. I was accused only of calling Tolstoy an untalented writer and not a great writer. The Russian students were very insistent, asking what I had read by Tolstoy. I explained to them that I had only read the short stories and the novel “War and Peace,” and nothing else. “You've read very little.” “Well,” I say, “maybe you've read more, I should read more too!” The director is sitting at the table, saying nothing. But the head of the department, a KGB-NKVD man—he was the one questioning me. They ask how I plan to live my life from now on. This surprised me. I thought they were going to expel me. “Well,” I say, “I will be a normal Soviet student, a Soviet citizen. I don't know what else to tell you.” And that was the end of it.

That was the kind of tribunal it was. From then on, I knew I was surrounded by informers, so I didn't say anything unnecessary. That was the only such episode. I remember when I was arrested in 1961 and taken to Ternopil, Major Cherezov said: “They really dealt with you there at the institute.” I say, “I don't recall what you're talking about.” “You people never recall anything.” And nothing more. That was the only mention of this episode.

They let me finish the institute. As I understood it, that KGB man, Maksym Ivanovych Sydorenko, from my village (he has long since passed away), obviously helped me. There were rumors that he had defended me somewhere, when they could have expelled me.

V. V. Ovsiienko: What year did you graduate from the institute?

P. P. Rozumnyi: I graduated from the institute in 1952. I'll have to write more about the institute, because there were interesting things there.

TEACHING

I was thinking about where I would go to work, but they decided for me and sent me to the Ternopil region. I was overjoyed, I thought this was exactly where I needed to go. I wanted to get a closer look at the Bandera movement, as it was called.

Back in 1950, I first traveled by ship to Kyiv on the Dnipro. I went to the Lavra, looked at both caves—the far and the near ones.

There, a handsomely dressed young man, a little older than me, from Galicia, from Lviv, attached himself to me. I didn't speak to him first, but he to me, and he very persistently told me that there is no God. I didn't listen to him very much, but he kept hovering around me. I think that was one of those suspicious episodes. Someday I will write about this episode in the Lavra.

I was glad they were sending me there, and I went. They sent me to Skalat in the Ternopil region, but when I arrived in Ternopil, it turned out I had to go to Pochaiv. It was God who sent me to Pochaiv: in Pochaiv, I meet Yevhen Oleksandrovych Sverstiuk, who had arrived there after graduating from Lviv University, with a degree in Ukrainian language, literature, and psychology—that was his specialty. I think our appearance there was like a breath of fresh air. Well, not me personally, but Yevhen, because that Yevhen was a sage from a young age. The first thing he did there was to organize the schoolchildren around him, who put on an evening at the school. All the teachers came to that evening. It was something that had never been done there before. The schoolchildren read something from literature. And then they organized a Shevchenko evening. It wasn't quite at the right time—in the fall of 1952. There was competition among the teachers there. So we tell some anecdotes about them... The headmistress was a bit dim-witted, and her sister—they ruled like despots. We ridiculed them so much that they were embarrassed to open their mouths.

At the very first district teachers' meeting, an inspector from the region, Smoliar, began to attack Yevhen. That some young teachers had appeared who didn't know how to behave. Where he got this from—he had heard it from the headmistress. He didn't say anything specific, but: they should be condemned! Yevhen was sitting in the front, and I was behind him. Yevhen then stands up and demonstratively leaves the hall. I followed him. This was before Christmas. At that time, all sorts of events were organized on Christmas Eve to prevent teachers from participating in Christmas celebrations. Yevhen demonstratively leaves, I follow him, and he says: “Let's go to my place.” “To my place” meant the Horokhiv district. We still managed to catch a bus. Late at night, we reached his village, Siltse. We even made it in time for the Christmas Eve supper.

So we left demonstratively. This, of course, caused outrage. Yevhen was fired from his job, sent to the regional department of education. They sent him to another school, but I remained where I was, nothing happened to me. So he only worked with me for half a year.

Here, in Pochaiv, I quickly connected with people who supplied me with literature that I didn't even suspect existed in the world. I read the chronicler of Volyn... what's his name?

V. V. Ovsiienko: Ulas Samchuk?

P. P. Rozumnyi: Yes. The trilogy “Volyn.” I read his novel “Maria”—these are all beautiful things. For me, it was, how to put it, a second education. There were people who trusted me, who gave me these books. They were usually damaged because they had been underground, as I guessed then, buried. They were being dug up in 1952-53. When Stalin kicked the bucket, things got a bit easier, so people started digging them up. That was my nationalist education, I would say. I maintained contact with Yevhen through letters, I visited him in Bohdanivka, in the Pidvolochysk district, where he was working. That same year he went to graduate school.

V. V. Ovsiienko: What year was that?

P. P. Rozumnyi: He entered graduate school in Kyiv in 1953, in the psychology department. And then I left Pochaiv with the intention of going to my home region. They let me go willingly, because they didn't really want me to stay there. At that time, the procedure was that they would dismiss you on the spot but send you to the regional department of education, because the regional department was in charge of personnel. I went to the regional department, and they sent me to the village of Velyki Khodachky near Ternopil, 12 kilometers away. It had once been a Polish village, but the Poles had been driven out, a large part of them killed. The village was populated by new settlers. They were from Lemkivshchyna. Where Mykola Horbal is from. So, it was populated by new people, and I was new. There was a school building, there was a Catholic church, in which a machine-tractor station was housed.

I continue to maintain ties with Yevhen. He is a graduate student, and he needs to do a practicum. He chooses my school, lives in the village of Velyki Khodachky, and gathers materials for his dissertation. We organize a tribute to the writer Tymofiy Borduliak, who was a priest in this village, died, and is buried in the village cemetery. This episode left a good mark on the village. The grave was well-tended. It was a kind of crypt with a cross. We found a brass shell casing, and the boys beautifully engraved an inscription on it, that it was Borduliak. We held an unveiling, brought the whole school to the cemetery, and honored Borduliak as a writer, a patriot. I remember his stories from my childhood. It was in an anthology published back in the twenties. Tymofiy Borduliak's stories are in the style of Stefanyk.

Yevhen stayed with me for several months, and those several months were a constant preparation and execution of some events—this evening, that evening... Things that were allowed back then, but no one was doing anything. But Yevhen brought such a divine spark that the teachers had to do it. Until then, I had no skill in doing such things, but from that time on, I also began to organize some things. That is, Yevhen taught me this. We lived in the same house, in the same room, he was busy with his business, I with mine. He was loaded with some ideas that needed to be put into practice. This made a new person out of me. That is why I consider him my mentor. That mentorship is confirmed by this episode.

In 1955, Yevhen—he is already in Kyiv—and I agree to go to Zakarpattia. He had not been there, and I had not been. He travels from Kyiv, I from my Velyki Khodachky, and we meet in Lviv, where we had arranged. And the year was like this one—it rained very often in Zakarpattia. There were such rains—three rains a day, it poured terribly. We were already thinking of turning back from Stryi. But we managed to get on a bus, went to Mukachiv. We arrived, but the rains did not stop, you couldn't leave the hotel. As soon as one rain passed—another rain. We wanted to walk through Zakarpattia, we had even chosen a route for ourselves—it was impossible. Then we stayed for two days in a hotel in Mukachiv and decided to return. But how to return? We went to Skole, and from Skole we would cut across to Bolekhiv. On the way, we decided to visit the Dovbush Rocks—there are very colorful rocks there, if you haven't been, I would advise you to go. These are tall stones among the trees, from which things have been carved: in one case it looks like a bear, in another, it looks like a moose. Oleksa Dovbush's men, or perhaps others, probably worked on those stones. But those rocks are called Dovbush's Rocks.

We decided to do so, because the weather did not allow us to move where we wanted. So, in Skole we turn back. The summer is warm, very warm, but the rains are drenching us, and we have to cross a river. The river in this rainy season is so turbulent that it's scary to look down. They are building a bridge over that river. They have laid four logs as a base lengthwise from bank to bank, and you have to walk on those logs. They are hewn flat, but you can slip and fall. Yevhen walked as if he had been walking on such logs his whole life. He walked easily and quickly, I see he is already on the other side. I glanced at him with one eye, but I look down. Then I taught myself not to look down, I started walking on one log, went about a third of the way—and it's about sixty meters in total, no less. And I sat down, I'm afraid to go further, because I'll fall into the water. And the water is so turbulent and deep that if you fall, it's definitely curtains. Yevhen looked at me from the other side and walks towards me in the same way—calmly walking and waving his arms as if he's on a stroll. He reached me: “Get up.” I got up, he took my hand—and I completely stopped being afraid. Somewhere in the middle of the river he let go of my hand, and I walked on as if some strength had appeared in me, calmly, I was not afraid. So I say that since that time I feel his hand, which has led me and leads me.

We went on barefoot, no longer paying attention to the rain that was drenching us. We reached the village of Polianytsia, from which we had to turn left into the mountains to the Dovbush Rocks. There we crossed another river, a smaller one, by wading, but you had to take a pole with you so the water wouldn't knock you down—the water was that strong. We crossed the river in the late evening. It was four or five kilometers to the rocks, so to return to the village and get settled for the night before dark, we ran. We ran for so long and so easily—as can only be in the mountains. In the mountains, everything feels easy. We ran, looked at the rocks, even tried to climb them. There are caves carved out there, big enough to turn a wagon around in. We returned to the village, spent the night, and the next day we arrived in Bolekhiv. Yevhen went to Lviv, to his Siltse, and I to Ivano-Frankivsk—it was still Stanislav then—to try to find a job there. I wanted to go there, to leave that place, Khodachky.

I arrive in Stanislav, go to the department of public education, wait several hours for an appointment. Two men came out onto the lawn to sit and rest. I look: Ivan Ivanovych Lysov, and I don't remember the other's last name. Muscovites from Pochaiv. I ask: “Where did you come from?” Such a little Muscovite, a drunkard, plays the fool, this and that. I understood that they were following me, where and why I went. This Lysov taught physical education at the Pochaiv school. There was an episode. We gathered at an apartment in Pochaiv—Yevhen was still there, this was in the fall of 1952, it was a Sunday. The teachers who had become friends—Nalyvaiko, Pavliuk (now deceased), Sverstiuk, and I. The four of us gathered, drank some wine, and were chatting. This Lysov comes uninvited, for no reason at all: hee-hee, ha-ha, da-da. We exchanged glances and understood why he had come. He sees that we are not accepting him, not taking him seriously. We wonder, what does he want? Let him talk. He chattered for a few minutes, and then—whoop—he jumped out of the house through the window. And the window was open. Through the window—jump, like a fool. Nalyvaiko—he taught Ukrainian literature—says: “This is a type of the new Soviet man, who overcomes all obstacles and for whom there is no barrier in anything.” We laughed at that.

And this Lysov is sitting in Stanislav, playing the fool, telling some jokes. I tried to get a job somewhere in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. They refused me and I went back. But in this year of 1955, I marry Zynoviia Tymofiivna Lytvynchuk. They won't let me go anywhere, and my wife doesn't want to go anywhere, she's from Zbarazh in the Ternopil region. They send us only to Pochaiv, because there's a vacancy there for me and for her—she was supposed to teach Ukrainian literature.

Well, if they send us, they send us. I didn't want to go at first, but then I think: Pochaiv is a good town. I went back to Pochaiv, and Yevhen would visit me. My wife and I live on the monastery grounds, they gave us an apartment in a monastery building. The old school, which was on the monastery grounds, is being turned into a madhouse, they are settling lunatics from all over the region there. And a new school was built in another place. The conditions here were a little better, because the monastery premises were not adapted for a school, such very high halls, it was always cold.

To this school, a graduate of the Kremenets Pedagogical Institute, a former political instructor in the army, Ivan Nykanorovych Starodub, from the Khmelnytskyi region, brings his team. For the first time, I was struck by what kind of people surround us, what an unfavorable environment had been created for a person's existence, let alone for work. They were all, to a man, scoundrels. That they were informers went without saying. They were some kind of immoral people, there were curses in the teachers' lounge, some obscene jokes. This Starodub, this Havrysh—it was an extra-intellectual environment. Imagine that now I, already marked, to whom the word “dissident” would later apply, am surrounded by such a pack of people. Constant provocations. In the class I'm in charge of, students ask such questions that are difficult to answer, but I try. They constantly assign me to lead some talks on atheistic themes. I refuse, I say that I am not a specialist. I say, give me a topic in philology. They remind me of how in 1953, when Stalin kicked the bucket, I went on strike at this Pochaiv school. I went on strike because according to the regulations at the time, foreign language teachers were supposed to be paid a full salary even for two hours, but they didn't want to pay me, and they loaded me with subjects I didn't want to teach, I think psychology, hygiene, something else. I'm not prepared for that, why should I be dealing with that? They don't pay me those 600 rubles, but pay me 450 for teaching English in two classes. I was outraged and didn't go to work for several days, I was on strike. This was unheard of at the time. Then the Komsomol leader, a certain Pohorielov, calls me and says: “Are you not coming to work or what?” “I'm not,” I say, “and I won't, give me my release papers, I'll leave this place. They're not paying me a full salary, as they should.” “So what is this to you,” he says, “Italy or something?” I say: “It doesn't seem to be Italy, but I'm not going to work.” I managed to get them to start paying me a full salary just for English. Not much work, but my salary was in accordance with the regulation, which required paying a full salary to those who didn't have enough hours, especially where English was being introduced. This strike lasted a month.

They bring up this strike. They send me with an inspector from the district education department to some school to check the teaching of German. I don't know German very well. To check “among other things, the German language.” We went. This inspector was a good drunkard. He was from the Kyiv region. They organized such drinking sessions for us that if I had drunk everything they offered, I would never have been able to look up and open my eyes—it was constant drinking. Some went to lessons, while others were drinking, then they came back—and you had to drink with them. They drank continuously. And that inspector endured it all. I drank a little, and then I stopped, I say: “You know what, give me some hot soup, or tea, because I can't stand all of this.” And this inspector says: “I can drink tea at home, but here there's wine, vodka…”—the boss yelled at me. I kept silent, but I stopped drinking. They did bring me some tea, though. I arrive at school and, by the way, I'm telling them that we were with Petro Volodymyrovych—Vasheka was his last name—at such-and-such a school and there he said that he only drinks tea at home. I just chattered like that, and by evening the first secretary of the district committee holds a meeting and says: “We have such an inspector of the district education department, Vasheka, and he doesn't want to drink tea, only vodka.” It turned out as if I had informed on him... So I had to be more careful with this...

The teachers of this school somehow unexpectedly elected me as the head of the trade union. Well, they elected me, so I began to perform my duties properly. I go to the director with this, I go with that. The teachers voice complaints—I report them and demand action. So they held another trade union meeting and re-elected, they kicked me out. It was such a team that I have never met anywhere else—they were some monstrous, disgusting creatures. One of them told me that he was in a team that guarded some dignitary in Kyiv, maybe Korotchenko, and they had the right to kill anyone they suspected, and he actually did kill someone.

That was the kind of team it was. And they all ended very badly: they died some sudden death—both Sandulivskyi and Havrysh. It's strange to me how quickly retribution came to people who behave in a completely indecent manner.

I became friends with a graduate of Lviv University, Kalishchuk (?) Petro Dmytrovych. Later I became so close to him that he became my son's godfather. The idea of creating some kind of organization began to mature. An organization that would fight…

V. V. Ovsiienko: Here Mr. Petro got tired and did not want to talk anymore. The conversation continued only two and a half years later.

V. V. Ovsiienko: April 29, 2001, Mr. Petro Rozumnyi continues his story, which he began on December 11–13, 1998. The circumstances are the same: in my apartment in Kyiv.

P. P. Rozumnyi: Mr. Vasyl noted that my story should be about how I became a convinced Ukrainian and everything connected with it.

I think I have already said that I was always a Ukrainian, from the time I began to think about myself—so it seems to me. My childhood was marked by the fact that the Bolshevik authorities took my father away in 1932 and he never returned. I constantly heard from my mother, from relatives, and from neighbors that we were ruled by a gang that was worse than those masters who were said to be bad, that this gang would not lead to good, that it was evil. From this, my dislike of the authorities arose. And the conversations that took place in our house between relatives and neighbors boiled down to the fact that Ukraine was being robbed, that it was giving away everything—first to the Germans, then to Moscow, and nothing was left for us. Such were the conversations. Uncle Denys, now deceased, particularly emphasized this.

Second—I was tempered by the very many books I read. From the sixth or seventh grade, I began to read Walter Scott, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne. Our school library was full of Ukrainian books. There was also Dickens, I remember. I came to love him for the steadfastness of his heroes, for the desire to protect those who suffer, especially in confinement, in a fortress. I experienced and sympathized with them. I think these books somehow tempered my will.

And later, as I have already said somewhere, the Germans came, who directly called us Ukrainians, that we were enslaved by the Bolsheviks. This strengthened my sense of being Ukrainian. For three years, when I was in Germany, I read weekly newspapers. There was the newspaper “Ukrainets” and, I think, “Nashe Slovo.” One of them was edited by Ihor-Bohdan Kravtsiv. I remembered this double name and such an unusual surname for me. Later he and, I think, {Ivasiv or Vasyl?} often spoke on Radio Liberty. These newspapers taught us that we are a people who must be liberated, that we are a people enslaved by Moscow. I think that the young generation that lived after the war, not having such information—they were deprived of the opportunity to become themselves. In this regard, I even consider the war years to have been a romantic backdrop to my life, which is always pleasant to remember. Although bombs were falling nearby, bullets were flying over our heads, somehow God let me survive, and I always think with piety about that time, especially about my stay in Germany.

But let me return to the chronology of my story. Pochaiv. I have already said that I was lucky. Even at the institute, I dreamed of how, after graduating and going out into the world, I would meet a person with whom I could not only talk, but also do something. God sent me an acquaintance with Yevhen Oleksandrovych Sverstiuk, who in 1952 also came to work in Pochaiv after graduating from Lviv University. We became friends, and I maintain a friendship with him to this day. This was also a great stimulus, because he told me many things that I did not know. For example, he told me the details of the murder of Yaroslav Halan. He told me that his brother was a participant in the insurgent movement. He told me how they, the insurgents, wanted to recruit him when he was already a student, they were looking for him, but it never happened that they could see him. When they came, he was not at home. And he doesn't know how it would have been, whether he would have gone with them into the forest. I told him that even today I am ready to go into the forest if someone would lead me and tell me what to do. Such a conversation took place in Pochaiv in the fall of 1952. He looked at me so attentively and said that that time had passed. It occurred to me that I had gone too far, my conversation could have seemed provocative.

I think I have told you how we demonstratively left the teachers' conference on Christmas Eve in 1953. On Christmas Eve in Pochaiv, a district teachers' conference was organized. An inspector, with the surname Smoliy, attacked Yevhen: here, he said, such a wise guy has come from Lviv. Whether he was taught, or not taught enough, or over-taught, or under-taught, and so there is trouble with him, he knows everything, he is smarter than everyone. Yevhen listened and listened to this, got up, and left. And I was sitting behind him at the edge. I also followed him. They didn't say anything to me. That same evening we went to his village of Siltse in the Horokhiv district of Volyn. We somehow managed to travel so well that we even made it in time for supper.

In this Pochaiv, the idea was born in me of how to create some kind of organization that would do something. Because any national struggle must be organized. I boasted about it to my friend Borys Skoroplias, I boasted to Vasyl Stuchynskyi, now deceased, and they approved of this idea. How to start? Well, let's start by collecting contributions and thinking about how to organize it. But when I boasted about this to Yevhen, he said that this venture was doomed to fail, and very quickly. “As long as there are three of you, it can still exist, but as soon as it reaches a fourth, a fifth—it's already a risk.” It dawned on me that this was true. I talked to my guys and we ended on the note that we would always tell people what was necessary, that is, to agitate as we could in these conditions, when a word could land you in a camp and in prison. This can be called passive resistance. I personally never supported the authorities, neither in word nor in deed.

The director of the school in Pochaiv was a wartime commissar, Ivan Nykanorovych Starodub. He is still alive—such a hefty guy. He incited some high school students to ask me provocative questions, while he himself walked along the corridor and eavesdropped on what I was saying. They asked about Stalin. Although Stalin was already officially debunked, he still lived in people's heads as a leader and teacher. This director took bribes for issuing fake diplomas. He was fired, and then he became terribly friendly with me, pestering me with his visits, always telling me how weak the Soviet government was, that if it weren't for the barrier troops during the war, we would have lost. This greatly surprised me, I asked him how it was. He told me that he was involved in disinformation, how disinformation was created in the Soviet Union, especially in the occupied territories and later, when the Germans were driven out of Ukraine. “You look for,” he says, “a talkative old woman who will go around the whole village and tell everyone. You tell her a direct lie and order her not to tell anyone. It is imperative, he says, to tell her not to tell anyone, then she will definitely tell.” I was amazed by this Jesuitical method. But he wanted to know my point of view. And he was so sorry that I didn't give him any material for him to warm his hands on me.

At this time, Ivan Tarasovych Honchar, with whom we studied together, comes to visit me. He was then working with his wife at the pedagogical institute in Kryvyi Rih. Why have you come? I didn't invite him. He says that he is going to Lviv to resolve the issue of entering graduate school. And he dropped by to see me because, so to speak, it was on his way. Well, he dropped by, so he dropped by. He stayed for two days. We talked a lot. I said two words to him about the possibility of an organization, but I did not suspect that he was an informant. I said that all matters are done through an organization. “What organization? How do you imagine it?” “Well,” I say, “how? The way we read about it in literature.”

V. V. Ovsiienko: Petro Rozumnyi. Cassette four, April 29, 1999.

P. P. Rozumnyi: “First a few people, then more. A program and so on.” Because I said this on the first day, he stayed for a second day, but I did not return to this topic. As it later turned out, he reported this to the KGB, and they tortured me for a long time, a whole day, when they arrested me in 1961, precisely on this topic: what kind of organization do you want to create there? I say: “None, I haven't heard of such a thing.” I did not confess, but I guessed who had informed them. This unfortunate Honchar died long ago. I am sorry that he went down that path. He was a better person on the outside than how he behaved.

He came to visit me later in my village, but I became convinced that he was an agent. I did not invite him, but he found my house (I lived on the outskirts of the village, so it was difficult to find). I see Ivan Tarasovych coming towards me. “How did you find my house?” He says: “By the street signs.”

I am surprised that this school director, Ivan Nykanorovych Starodub, brought with him to Pochaiv a team that consisted exclusively of informers and provocateurs. The physical education teacher, the biology teacher, the physics teacher—all despicable people... The Russian literature teacher boasted that his ancestor was a great Polish count—Horokholskyi. And they all eventually had to unmask themselves, because something happened.

ARREST IN 1961

In 1958, I moved to live in Kremenets, left my teaching job because I fell ill. I was hired as a museum employee. And around 1961, Borys Skoroplias, my friend with whom we planned to create an organization, but never did, and I went to Dubno to see a friend of his. We spent time chatting. That friend, as it later turned out, testified against Borys.

We went into a bookstore in Dubno. In that bookstore, access to the books was direct, and under the shelves there was a large sheet of glass that you couldn't see because it was completely transparent. Borys Hryhorovych somehow carelessly turned and broke that glass. A clerk came up to us and told us to pay for the glass. I said that we would not pay for the glass, because in a place where there is access to books, there should be no foreign objects. And if, I say, you had placed a bomb here with a fuse, and we had touched it and it had exploded, who would have been to blame?

V. V. Ovsiienko: Who would have paid for the bomb?

P. P. Rozumnyi: Who would have paid for the bomb if it had exploded? He saw that we were no fools, and that was the end of it. We went home, and Borys Hryhorovych spent the night at my place. In the morning, KGB agents appeared at our door with a search and arrest warrant. I think they were informed about this episode, that there were such people here who broke the glass and refused to pay. They saw that it was some kind of trip that they did not control. They were watching me, I already knew that well, but this trip to Dubno turned out to be beyond their control, so they immediately came to us with a search. We were still asleep when they came with the search. “And who is this you have here?” And immediately they went for the pockets. They showed a warrant—I already knew how to check their authority. Two majors, some lieutenant, and some unidentified person who knew English, because he was looking at the English books. During the search, he looked into the “Oxford Dictionary,” which my older brother (now deceased) had sent me from Poland. It had many examples on Soviet themes, and very interesting examples, as one might say today, anti-Soviet. They were interesting to me from the point of view of the English language. And he, the son of a bitch, knew English, flipped through this dictionary—and it was three hundred pages or more. He took it and even underlined things, put bookmarks in, and then: “And what is this, and what is this?” I say: “You see what's written there.” True, they did not incriminate me for the “Oxford Dictionary.”

Then they took some materials from me that were already being distributed as samvydav. I had the beginning of Volodymyr Sosiura's poem, “There is so Little Joy Around.” I had Pavlo Tychyna's poem “On Askold's Grave”—I recorded it from “Voice of America.” It took me several years to record it, until I got it word for word. I also recorded Olena Teliha's poem “The Night Was Turbulent and Dim.” I recorded it, I think, for three years, but I managed to get it down couplet by couplet, because you can't catch it all at once. One provocateur—a certain Lyasevych, I played chess with him—brought me an American magazine, “Time,” in English. On the cover was a portrait of Khrushchev. This was 1961. Khrushchev had just traveled to America and was photographed there. The portrait was painted by some artist named Shalyapin. Nikita looked so disgusting, so hideous there. I told this Lyasevych that he didn't seem very similar. He reported this, but left the magazine with me to read. This provocateur also brought a book called “One Hundred Thousand” by Tarnavskyi (?). I was reading it, they arrested it from me. At first, I didn't say where it came from, but when it occurred to me that he had deliberately brought them to me, then I said: “Lyasevych brought it to me.” They calmed down and didn't ask me about these books anymore. I had a book that he brought me, and even sold me—an “Illustrated History of Ukraine” by Mykhailo Hrushevsky. I bought it with joy, even asked him to sell it to me. At first he didn't want to, but the second time he sold it. Hrushevsky was already being read by academic circles in libraries then, he was not actually banned. This one-volume edition was published during the revolution, I remember.

Then they took many of my letters. I think they noted which letters they had read and which they had not. They questioned me about what I wrote there, why I wrote it. I was working in Vyshnivets at the time, and my apartment was in Kremenets. So they searched me in Kremenets, then took me to Vyshnivets to search there too. And my landlord was a gypsy-like subject, he was outraged that I had dared to be such a person in his house that the police came to arrest and search me—that I had disgraced him. I said: “Don't worry.” He calmed down, it's true, but later, when my wife came to him for my things, he gave her a piece of his mind, cursing me in my absence.

They took me separately from Borys Hryhorovych Skoroplias—in a “Volga.” We reached Zbarazh and the “Volga” broke down. So they transferred me to a passing car and took me to Ternopil. I remember this because when I was arrested in 1979, they also took me in a “Volga,” also squeezed me in the middle of the back seat, and again it broke down. I said to the lieutenant colonel who was escorting me: “This has happened to me before, they were taking me and the car refused to go.” He looked at me over his shoulder like that. But the car stopped moving altogether, so they transferred us to another one, leaving that car behind.

They brought me to the KGB in Ternopil and immediately began to interrogate me about what I had, because they had taken all my notes, all my excerpts from books. Yevhen had supplied me with philosophical literature: Montesquieu, Montaigne, Helvétius, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—I got all of this from him, their most important works. I read them, made excerpts that interested me. They took all of this—it was a whole pile—and questioned me. I said that I had found Sosiura's “There is so Little Joy…” on a train. “You all find things on a train,” he says, “but for some reason you don't say where.” “If it was on a train, it was on a train, what am I going to say…”

So for six days they kept me in such senseless and unnecessary interrogations. They blackmailed me, some thugs would come in, pull on some gloves, and wave their hands—intimidating me. And my interrogator pretended not to see them. The interrogator would phone several times a day: “When will you give me the disposition of the camps?” He said, “disposition of the camps.” At first I didn't understand, and then it dawned on me: he was scaring me, telling me where I would be imprisoned. There hadn't even been a trial, and he was already telling me the “disposition of the camps.” The prosecutor came, an old man with a mustache, not very developed, as I understood. “What is this,” he says, “that you write, that Dostoevsky spat out the word ‘revolution,’ he hated those revolutionaries so much, and yet he is published today, while Ukrainian writers who never even mentioned revolution are not published.” I say: “But that's how it is.” “Well, how can it be so?” By then, Dostoevsky was allowed to be read. The prosecutor argued that I was wrong. “I'm not saying I'm entirely right, but I think that Dostoevsky is published, but he is less useful to the Soviet government than those writers who did not oppose the revolution, who did not say, as Dostoevsky did, that the revolution would claim one hundred million victims.” He has such a maxim somewhere, I remembered it. The prosecutor came once, a second time... They kept me there day and night, fed me kefir and buns, and at night some KGB officer on duty would sit at the table and read all my notes. There were whole volumes, a normal person couldn't read them in one day, or even in two, I had written a lot. Where are they now? They returned part of them to me.

On the third day, an investigator arrives with a prosecutor. The night guard is next to me, and I’m sleeping sitting up on the couch, occasionally lying down—he lets me lie down. That investigator’s assistant, who is also my night guard, says, “He’s into philosophy.” The other man just grunted something and said nothing—after all, they gave you the book to read so you could see what he was into. On the next-to-last day, they take me to the Central Hotel and lead me into a room: “You’ll spend the night here, just don’t go anywhere.” He was trying to persuade me, as if I had signed a pledge. I said, “I didn’t sign any pledge.” “Still, don’t go anywhere.” My friend, Borys Hryhorovych Skoroplias, who was arrested with me, was there. They also brought in another one of my good friends, Petro Dmytrovych Kalishchuk, with whom I had christened my son Taras. They left the three of us to spend the night in one room. I realized they wanted to eavesdrop on us, so I said that we wouldn’t talk about anything important, just ask about each other’s health and how we were being fed. I said that this was my sixth day here, while Borys Hryhorovych said he’d only been here for three days, and the other man said he was brought to Ternopil specially for today. I said, “Let’s get a good night’s sleep. I’m tired of sitting there, staring at them while they stare at me. I’m sick of it—it’s better to get some proper sleep.” We slept through the night. In the morning, someone came and took me away but let them go. In other words, they put us together just so the three of us would spend the night together in one room.

They made me write my biography. At first, I wondered: should I write it or not? Then I thought, what could I write? I’ll write it, so to speak, in restrained tones, just the main milestones of my life. I focused mainly on my time in Germany, how an interpreter there named Stefan, of Polish origin, tormented us—the Germans didn’t torment us as much as he did. I spent the whole day writing slowly… I would like to get that biography back from them now. When you and I lived together in Borshchahivka, I wrote to the KGB asking them to return my papers. They told me that all the archives are on Askoldova Street. I never went there, but I should have. I plan to go someday and get all my letters; I’d like to get that biography, my notes… When I was arrested in 1977 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Major Kharchenko, who was in charge of the team that interrogated me, demanded that they immediately order copies of my files from Ternopil. They ordered them and showed them to me. So they must be in Ivano-Frankivsk as well. I have to get my hands on them.

I would say that they had no real grounds to hold me. On some days, they themselves were getting bored with me. There was a Major Smirnov, the most cultured among them, and another, Major Cherezov, who was a complete blockhead. They were the most senior ones. Shortly after I was released, I saw both of them—Majors Cherezov and Smirnov. My brother came to visit me in Ternopil, we went to the delicatessen, and they, apparently, showed themselves to me in the store on purpose. Both had already been promoted to lieutenant colonel. I thought, “You get your ranks cheaply—a lieutenant colonel for an operation like this. They were both majors, and a week later they’re lieutenant colonels.” That Cherezov was so malicious and loud; he would snarl at me and mimic me. I said, “You’re trying to out-brute me, which is rather undignified.” He stopped after that. Once, he came right up to me: “What, did you want to be a hetman?” I said, “How should I put it? Just as you want to be the General Secretary, I suppose I want to be a hetman.” But there was no General Secretary back then; Khrushchev was still the First Secretary, not the General. He fell silent and didn’t ask me any more questions like that. I would say this: the arrest was somehow absurd, unnecessary, and without any substance.

V.V. Ovsiienko: What year was this?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Sixty-one. It was March 25, during the school holidays. Borys Hryhorovych Skoroplias and I had a chance to go to Dubno, and they thought we had picked something up there—and that’s how they would have caught us.

How did this story end? Just like that. They released me after six days. I arrived in Kremenets on April 3 and continued my work as an English teacher in Vyshnevets. But no one wanted to talk to me anymore; everyone was on their guard. Except, perhaps, for the history teacher, Bezrohyi. He was, I would say, loyal to me, and I’ll talk about that a little later. In Vyshnevets, some captain summoned me and told me to leave, or they would exile me. I consulted with my wife, and we decided that I should submit my resignation and move from there to the Dnipropetrovsk region, to my home district, and try to find a job there. That’s what we agreed on, and that’s what I did. I resigned, left in the summer, and found a job. And Borys Hryhorovych fled all the way to the Zaporizhzhia region and didn’t write to me for half a year. He couldn’t be found. Maybe the KGB knew, but I didn’t know where he was living.

I made it to August 30 in Solone, Dnipropetrovsk region, where I had already found a job. I received a summons from the militia to report. I reported. They demanded that I immediately go to Vyshnevets in the Ternopil region. I said, “I don’t have any money, I’m not going.” “Then go to the Dnipropetrovsk regional KGB, to the KGB department; they’re summoning you there.” I thought, “Alright, I’ll go.” So I went. They told me the same thing: “You have to go.” “Why,” I asked, “do I have to go?” “There will be a public discussion of your conduct there.” I said, “Well, if I have to, I’ll go, but,” I said, “I don’t have any money.” They gave me money. It took them a long time to process it, signing for the money—apparently, there was a serious fight against embezzlement then too, but they gave it to me. I forgot to ask, what about the return trip? They only gave me money for one way, not for the way back. But I figured if they were giving it, they were giving it. The trip cost ten rubles back then.

I arrived—and what did I find? As I remember it now, on the third of September, a general meeting of all the teachers of the Vyshnevets district was scheduled, and they were supposed to discuss my case and Skoroplias’s; he also worked in the Vyshnevets district. A captain arrived with a team, two lieutenants, and they led the meeting. They sat me at the front. All the teachers gathered, a very solemn atmosphere, everyone looking somehow terrified, already knowing what was coming—Banderites or something of the sort.

First, the captain spoke and explained that people engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda had appeared among them. These were relapses of Banderism, which today manifests itself in various forms. “I’ll ask Comrade Doroshenko”—such a beautiful surname, but she was a typical Muscovite woman—“to explain what Banderism is, in case some of you still don’t know.” This was 1961; some people had already forgotten. And she spoke in that pathetic tone, as Muscovites know how, loud and shrill, about how her husband worked in the KGB department in Vyshnevets, how he fought for Soviet power, and how Banderites cornered him in a teahouse in some village and stabbed him to death with forks. What a death, I thought… You’d have to stab for a long time with forks, because they were aluminum; just try stabbing someone with those.

Another woman spoke, not a Muscovite this time, but someone more restrained. The history teacher, Bezrukyi, spoke up—by the way, I’d like to visit him when I’m in Vyshnevets, if he’s still alive. He’s younger, so he should be. I was surprised: he spoke with absolute tolerance and didn’t condemn me as the organizers would have liked. He only spoke about the moral aspects of the case, that history can be interpreted this way or that, and it’s not necessary to make such a big fuss about it—something along those lines. The school principal, whose last name was Potrydennyi, also spoke. I was also surprised that he didn’t speak in the vein desired by the KGB. He even told a story, to my surprise, about being at a gathering where Sosiura publicly read his poem “Love Ukraine” to a large audience, and nobody said a thing. But they had confiscated that poem from me and presented it as a condemned work. The poem had already been published after its condemnation. There had been party resolutions, but now, he said, was a different time, the Thaw.

Then they gave me the floor. I explained that everything they took from me—Hrushevsky, Tarnavsky—these are pages of history that we can’t just gather together and erase. I said that Hrushevsky is used today by our own historians, and I named the author of the *History of Ukraine* textbook that had just been published, Rybalko, or Rybalchenko. I said, this textbook can illustrate what I’m saying. Hrushevsky is used, utilized, and simultaneously banned. This, I said, is a strange practice. The captain interrupted, saying he should remind everyone that Rozumnyi did not behave… what was the word he used? …honestly, not frankly, during the interrogation, but answered direct questions with evasions, so that we wouldn’t think he was some kind of sage here. That was the end of the interrogations and speeches.

The district party secretary for ideology spoke up—I’d like to see him now, too. He got so worked up that the KGB man had to stop him; he was already foaming at the mouth like a horse. He forgot what he was talking about: “As it happens in history, maybe there are some offended people, but that doesn’t mean you have to hold on to those offenses forever.” He, too, spoke not aggressively, but in the style of a “morality play.” So I wouldn’t say they condemned me there, except for the Muscovite woman. But the resolution they proposed was this: to ask the relevant authorities to deprive Petro Pavlovych Rozumnyi of the opportunity to work in a school. This is ideological work, and we will not allow anyone to cripple the children. Such a teacher cannot provide a communist upbringing; we are not moving in the same direction as Rozumnyi… So, they “asked the competent authorities.” And that’s how it ended.

So, this was on September 3, 1961, just as the school year was beginning, when they summoned me, gave me ten rubles, and I went to Vyshnevets for this trial. “Where,” this captain asks me, “did that Skoroplias disappear to?” I said, “I don’t know, he didn’t tell me where he went.” “Well, we’ll get to him,” he said. He was also supposed to have come to this trial, but only I was condemned.

That was the end of it. The teachers scattered, and I went home. No one bothered me, but they sent new people to surround me. Out of the blue, a candidate of agricultural sciences from the Dnipropetrovsk Institute of Corn, a man named Hrynchenko, arrived, who, it turned out, knew English well. He somehow got to know me over a chessboard. Similarly, an informer named Lyasevych got to know me over a chessboard in Kremenets. And this one came up and struck up a friendship with me. I saw that he seemed like a pleasant person, that I could talk to him. He suggested that I write letters to him in English, and he would reply. I saw nothing strange or suspicious in this and wrote him a letter. He replied in English in perfect handwriting, with a very proper introduction and closing. It impressed me; I couldn’t have written like that. And most importantly—it was in a completely American script. Not even English, but American, because we were taught to write in English calligraphy. We were told it was significantly different from American. For example, the letter “I” is written as a capital. I saw that he was a very educated person. When he came to visit me, I asked him where he had studied. He told me he had studied at one school and then left it. It dawned on me: they were probably training him to be a spy. I wasn’t afraid of him after that. He didn’t summon me for any conversations. Apparently, the instruction was that you couldn’t get much out of me, because I wasn’t really doing anything, but I might have plans, because I had wanted to create an organization. Maybe I forgot to mention that in Ternopil they demanded for two days to know what organization I wanted to create. I told them I had never planned any organization. But I guessed who told them that—that Ivan Tarasovych Honchar, who had visited me.

This Hrynchenko visited me many times and wrote me good letters. I was even interested to see them: written in such calligraphic script that I was fascinated by those letters. I have them stored somewhere. I lost contact with him after 1969, when I was searched again and had another problem with the KGB, this time from Dnipropetrovsk.

So, I started working in Solone. A few times, a nice head of the district education department approached me and asked, “Why did you go to Vyshnevets?” I came up with a formula: as a witness, there was a case being conducted there. He didn’t believe me, because, I think, he had been informed, but he just wanted my comment on it. In Solone, I didn’t find any allies, apart from all sorts of scandals in which I was declared a nationalist. And why a nationalist? Because he never switches to Russian, never uses it. One woman said, “He’s a terrible nationalist.” This was reported to me, and I asked, “Tamara Yosypivna, why am I ‘terrible’? I mean, let me just be a nationalist. I’m already used to being a nationalist, but why ‘terrible’?” When I mentioned this to her later (she’s still alive), she thought I was still offended. She became very embarrassed. But I wasn’t offended at the time. I remember once, after the 1969 arrest, a tractor driver came up to me—I was drinking a beer in the cafeteria—and asked, “Is it true that you’re a nationalist?” I said, “It’s true.” “Well, you should be more careful, so that somehow…” I said, “Why?” I wrote this down; I kept a small diary. In 1977, in Ivano-Frankivsk, they read this and interrogated me about why I admitted to being a nationalist. What is a nationalist? I explained to them why I am a nationalist.

THE CASE OF IVAN SOKULSKYI

It was here that I met Ivan Hryhorovych Sokulskyi.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And when was that exactly?

P.P. Rozumnyi: I think it was in 1965, when I heard that Panas Zalyvakha, Ivan Svitlychnyi, and the Horyn brothers had been arrested. I heard this on the radio and from Yevhen Sverstiuk, because I used to visit him.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And where was Sverstiuk at that time?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Yevhen was in Kyiv then, working as a secretary at the Institute of Botany, I think, under the direction of Zerov.

In 1968, Oles Honchar’s novel *The Cathedral* appeared, which caused a great furor in the Dnipropetrovsk region in general, and especially in Solone. I managed to buy a copy. It sold out completely. I remember, as soon as I bought it, the district party committee people came running after me: one running, another from the committee—they all bought a copy. There was no persecution of Honchar yet; the novel had just appeared in stores.

V.V. Ovsiienko: It appeared in the first, January issue of the magazine *Vitchyzna*, and then around March the book was published in the “Novels and Novellas” series.

P.P. Rozumnyi: “Novels and Novellas.” I also bought a hardcover copy.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Yes, it was also published as a book with a white cover.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Sokulskyi and I quickly read the book and discussed it. I remember he wrote a very detailed, good commentary on it. We kept in touch. He would visit me, and I would visit him. I borrowed his typewriter and started to learn how to use it, as I had never typed before. It was an old machine, like yours, but a bit bigger.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Maybe a “Moskva”?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Oh, a “Moskva” type, that’s right. That type of machine, and it was quite heavy, I remember, I really hurt my hands on it. I borrowed it from him a couple of times, learned, and retyped a few things. In 1966, I filed for divorce from my wife and went to work in the village of Pishchanyi Brid in the Kirovohrad region. This village has been inhabited since the 18th century by settlers from Moldavia and Serbia; they are not Ukrainians at all, and what’s strange is that they are all Ukrainized, but they sing Moldavian songs, and every Sunday the orchestra in the House of Culture plays Moldavian melodies. But everyone speaks Ukrainian. That’s what the village was like.

V.V. Ovsiienko: I have some photos here of Ivan Sokulskyi’s grave.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I haven’t seen this cross; I’ll have to go there sometime.

V.V. Ovsiienko: I was there just recently.

P.P. Rozumnyi: When I divorced my wife in 1966, I didn’t know where to settle. I went to Yevhen Sverstiuk, and he introduced me to a young man named Valerii Illia. He was involved in gardening at the time: he guarded an orchard all summer, for which he was paid a little money, and then he was paid in apples. They would sell the apples and somehow make ends meet. So I went with Yevhen to his orchard. It was somewhere in the Yahotyn district. They hired me as a guard there, too, and gave me a dog, a young German shepherd. I stayed there all summer, but since my wife and I had divided the children—she took little Pavlyk, and I took the older one, Taras—I had to quit that job and find something permanent so I could live with my child, because you can’t live in an orchard all autumn. I decided to find a job at the end of the summer. I went to the Kherson region, and they gave me a teaching job in the village of Dudchany. It’s right on the Dnipro River. I chose a place on the Dnipro, not far from Nikopol. I would have stayed there, but I needed to move my things from Solone to Dudchany. I arranged with the school principal for him to transport them. He took my money but didn’t transport them. He just kept not transporting them. I got tired of it and said, “Give me my money back, I don’t want to work for you.” I saw he was some kind of crook. He gave me my money back, cursed me out with the foulest words, and as I was leaving, I said to him, “I forgive you for what you said to me. Look at your swans. I see you have swans.” He had swans in his house, a very primitive painting—swans kissing. It was the main decoration in his living room. He looked at me and understood that I was mocking him: “Marvel at your swans, just leave me alone.”

I got on a bus and went to Kirovohrad. They offered me a job: “Call the Dobrovelychkivka district.” I called, and the head of the department said, “I can’t see you, how can I hire you?” I said, “You can’t see me, but I was told to call you, not to come. If you need a teacher, I’ll come.” “Admit it, are you a drunkard or not?” I admitted, “Not a drunkard.” “Well, then come.”

They give me a job in Pishchanyi Brid. I’ve already said it’s a Moldavian village. My son Taras and I settled in an apartment with an old man and woman, who were quite elderly. I informed Valerii Illia and Yevhen that I had a job. I told them where I had met them, and also Mykola Kholodnyi, who was also there with his dog, working as a guard and earning money just like Valerii Illia. Since we had gotten to know each other—I had written him a few letters—he decided to come and spend the winter with me. I said, “Come on over. The room is big, there are two of us, you’ll be the third,”—I described the situation—“come on over.”

He arrived in late autumn, after he had received and sold his apples. Valerii Illia had made him buy a blanket for me: “Buy it,” he said, “maybe he doesn’t have a blanket.” He brought a nice new wool blanket; I still have it. It’s old now, but I still use it. This was in the autumn of 1966. Mykola Kholodnyi, whom I got to know better, started using my library subscription. They would send books for him. Not to him, but to the library, and he would take them home to read; they allowed him to.

Through him, I became acquainted with the works of many writers from the 1920s that I didn’t have, in particular, Mykhail Semenko. I became engrossed in Semenko, and Mykola loved to read him too. Later, this literature was considered forbidden. But the main thing, perhaps, was that the old man we lived with had gone to school with Nestor Makhno’s wife. He called her Odarka. I wonder if that’s true, that her name was Odarka, do you know?

V.V. Ovsiienko: I don’t know.

P.P. Rozumnyi: And I never checked, but I remember he called her Odarka, said she was the daughter of a gendarme, the daughter of an intellectual by the standards of the time. And that Makhno, when he was retreating, stopped in Pishchanyi Brid, her native village, and stayed for three weeks. And that Makhno had a disciplined army, that he severely punished disobedience and looting, that in his presence he shot two looters who had stolen and slaughtered a cow, wanting to devour it, but he shot them with his own hand. That’s what the old man said. When some army appeared at the Pomichna station—that’s seven kilometers from Pishchanyi Brid—(the old man didn’t know which army, two echelons arrived), Makhno set off in his *tachanka*, fired at those echelons with two machine guns, and those echelons vanished as if licked up by a cow’s tongue, they fled from Pomichna. And from Makhno’s side, only three men went—he was that daring. The old man told this as something he had seen with his own eyes.

And so Makhno decided to retreat further with his army—this was 1920—and he took the old man into his baggage train. Makhno mobilized peasants with their carts and horses to transport his goods and ammunition, and the old man was mobilized too. He said that partisans or some other army were constantly attacking. Makhno fought them off, maneuvered, and it became dangerous that a larger force might attack, so I, he said, would be killed too. So I, he said, decided to run away. But how to escape? One man, he said, ran away before me, but they caught him and shot him. Well, so I stopped thinking about escaping, but somehow it happened that this Odarka approached him on horseback—she commanded the cavalry in Makhno’s army. He said, I grabbed her stirrup and asked, “Do you recognize me?” She recognized him. He asked her to let him go. She gave him a note. He handed over his ammunition to others and spent three weeks making his way home through forests and ravines, but he made it.

This made such an impression on Mykola Kholodnyi that he decided to write a poem about Makhno. I haven’t read it. Have you?

V.V. Ovsiienko: No.

P.P. Rozumnyi: When we celebrated Mykola Kholodnyi’s 60th birthday (at the House of Writers in Kyiv on September 31, 1999—V.O.), we mentioned this poem, *Nestor Makhno*. I think the old man’s stories were the stimulus. The old man told many stories about Makhno; he was fascinated by him, the old man loved Makhno.

I only stayed in that Pishchanyi Brid for a year and decided to go back, because my ex-wife decided to get married, and I moved into the apartment we used to live in.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Mr. Petro, you once told a story about how you and Mykola Kholodnyi were at a pre-election meeting for the writer Vasyl Kozachenko.

P.P. Rozumnyi: That’s right, something like that happened. Spring of 1967. There were elections to the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine. We were taken to a meeting with a candidate for deputy, Vasyl Kozachenko. That’s when I first heard about him and his literary exploits. At that very time, the district newspaper mentioned his work called *Letters from a Cartridge*. Supposedly, in occupied territory, some great patriot of the Soviet Union writes letters and hides them in a cartridge so they won’t be lost, so that future generations can read about how heroically minded Soviet people were. In short, it was some kind of agitprop nonsense. And so when he was introduced to us as a candidate for deputy—this was by the first secretary of the district party committee and all the other officials—he was mainly referred to as the author of these *Letters from a Cartridge*, as an outstanding work of our time. I was sitting in the front, Kholodnyi was sitting next to me. I wrote a note to the candidate, saying that people like Svitlychnyi and Zalyvakha are sitting in concentration camps for nothing, so does he intend, when we elect him to the Supreme Soviet, to propose any legislative initiatives so that such arrests and convictions don’t happen anymore? I wrote a note like that and passed it to him. Kozachenko read it, sighed, and, as I remember, put it away. But after the meeting, there was a reception, to which Kholodnyi was also invited, because he knew him or somehow claimed to know him. Mykola told me: “As soon as Kozachenko had his first drink, he said: ‘Ugh, they’re here too—they’re in Kyiv, and they’re here too.’ And he showed my note to Kholodnyi.”

And there was another episode in Pishchanyi Brid. A lecturer from the regional committee came with a lecture on international affairs. He droned on and on with nonsense about the brilliant foreign policy of the Soviet Union, how respected it was, how the working people of the whole world love the Soviet Union. I asked him a direct question: “How should one understand this: the Soviet Union supports such nice guys as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana—these are dictators who rule single-handedly, who have created despotic forms of government, and you praise them as some kind of model?” How he snarled at me, that lecturer: “Those are hostile views! Gamal Abdel Nasser cannot be called a ‘guy’—he is a friend of the Soviet Union, and you speak of him so disrespectfully!”

V.V. Ovsiienko: He’s “on the socialist path.”

P.P. Rozumnyi: Right. “And Kwame Nkrumah is our hope on the shores of West Africa.” I fell silent and said nothing more. He yelled at me, remembered me, and pointed a finger at me: “There,” he said, “is a hostile view of our friends abroad.”

V.V. Ovsiienko: And wasn’t it in that village that the women congratulated you on the “holiday of all men”—February 23, and you later congratulated them on March 8?

P.P. Rozumnyi: I remember how that was.

So, Ivan Hryhorovych Sokulskyi and I became friends and saw each other often. He would visit me with Oles Kuzmenko (also deceased now). Sometimes he would come in a truck that Kuzmenko drove. We developed a good relationship and began to exchange samvydav materials. I would borrow his typewriter. I’d borrow it and return it, borrow it and return it. I was learning to work on it.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And what did you type on that machine?

P.P. Rozumnyi: I’ll tell you now. At first, I retyped Yevhen Sverstiuk’s “Ivan Kotliarevskyi Is Laughing,” and I retyped other works by Yevhen. I’d put in four copies at a time, because that machine didn’t print well on thin paper. It was sort of rickety, ancient, but it worked somehow, you could read it. The first two copies were more or less legible, but the third and fourth were very bad, though still readable.

In the autumn of 1968, I borrowed the machine from Ivan with the aim of retyping Ivan Dziuba’s *Internationalism or Russification?* and said, “I’ll give you all the copies, and I’ll keep two for myself—one for me and one for someone else, when I’ve typed it.” I kept it all winter—it was December, January, and February. I was working as a stoker then and had a lot of time: I worked for a day, then was home for a day. I earned a decent wage, supported my child and myself, because the work was more or less well-paid. Then, a huge snowstorm hit our region. A storm the likes of which I had never seen in my life. For about a month and a half, with small breaks—a dark sky, a dark sun. That eastern soil, lifted into the air, moved over Ukraine and maybe even reached Moldavia, but in our parts, it was the thickest.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Was that from Kazakhstan or the North Caucasus?

P.P. Rozumnyi: From the North Caucasus, they said, but maybe from Kazakhstan.

V.V. Ovsiienko: They plowed the steppes about which the prophet Muhammad said: “Do not dare to touch this land even with the tip of your boot.”

P.P. Rozumnyi: Yes, apparently, all the way from Kazakhstan. Under this cover, I typed three sets of four copies of the work *Internationalism or Russification?*. So, twelve copies. It was such hellish work for me, because I didn’t have much practice.

V.V. Ovsiienko: That’s a huge amount of work! How many pages was it?

P.P. Rozumnyi: I ended up with, as I remember now…

V.V. Ovsiienko: Probably one hundred—one hundred and fifty?

P.P. Rozumnyi: No—two hundred! It came out to two hundred, because my typing had such large margins. Two hundred and a little more, as I recall, pages. I only typed on one side, because the paper was thin. So, I typed it, and later I was surprised: no one noticed. There were informers all around; an informer, my former school friend Kabalchenko, lived upstairs. But that storm calmed everyone down, and under its cover, I accomplished this feat. I would say that this is the only great feat of my life. I beat up my hands so badly that I had to wrap them in bandages afterward. I only worked with two fingers. It was impossible—I thought my fingers would be ruined forever—they hurt so much that I couldn’t feel them anymore. At first, I beat them up bare, and then wrapped. I worked so zealously that I didn’t even want to sleep—I enjoyed the work that much. I’ll read it again, I’ll read it again… I gave Sokulskyi ten copies and kept two for myself. And I returned the machine, I remember, in a sack: I just threw the sack over my shoulder, as if it contained something formless, and took it. We agreed where to meet. And it was fine—he took the sack and carried it home. If they had caught us, we would have been arrested immediately, because an unregistered typewriter was a serious crime back then. But it worked out.

In the summer of 1969, I decided to go to the orchard with Valerii Illia, here in Vyshhorod, there’s a village called Petrivka. We were hired. Yevhen Sverstiuk was living on Andriyivskyy Descent at the time. I bought a dog, and then sold it just the same, because you couldn’t get a job as a guard without a dog; a dog was necessary. We were working, listening to Radio Liberty every day, and we heard that Ivan Hryhorovych Sokulskyi had been arrested and was in the Dnipropetrovsk prison. (Ivan Sokulskyi was arrested on June 14, 1969.—V.O.) I thought to myself that this business probably wouldn’t pass me by. And I was already worrying about what to do: should I go home or not? I had taken my son with me to the orchard for the holidays. They, apparently, didn’t dare to drag me back and forth with my son. The head of the village council came to me with two deputies, who were rather suspicious; they were probably KGB agents. He came and said that a complaint had been filed against me, that I had beaten someone here. “I didn’t beat anyone,” I said. “You didn’t? Well, write an explanation.” I said, “Why should I write one if I didn’t beat anyone? Let the person I supposedly beat write it. First, let him write. But did he,” I asked, “file a complaint? He didn’t file a complaint with you, so why should I write one?” And they left me alone. I later figured out that it was reconnaissance. That is, they knew where I was—I later heard from them that they knew where I was—but they didn’t touch me. And Ivan’s investigation was already in full swing. I came home—this was in October—and I felt that they might take me. Because I heard that they were holding Ivan, so it was self-evident that it wouldn’t pass me by.

As soon as I got home, I immediately hid my materials. I had photocopies there—Yevhen had given me—of Ivan Koshelivets’s book *Contemporary Literature in Soviet Ukraine*. There was something else—I can’t recall the other authors—it was a good-sized package. I had one copy of Ivan Dziuba’s *Russification*. I had already given one to Borys Skoroplias, and I had this one. What to do? I thought, hide it in the cellar? They’ll go there—and indeed, they did, and if I had hidden it there, they would have found it. What did I do? I decided to take a risk. I had three rooms there, a narrow little hallway just like yours, and a coat rack like yours. Old greatcoats were hanging there. There was no mattress, nothing—such poverty—I would put a greatcoat underneath me. So I stuffed everything I had—maybe five kilograms, not less—into the sleeves. And pushed it deep inside—there was a lot hanging there. And nothing.

And the next morning I get up and see that I’m surrounded. How did I see it? One informer is standing there, another one over there, both visible from the window. And they’re not going anywhere, just standing there. One worked at the newspaper office, the other was in charge of the sports department—such were their employees. I had an uneasy feeling. I started to go to the delicatessen. I had only walked about three hundred meters when two men came toward me, introducing themselves—one was Major Solomin, the other Lieutenant Kaliuzhnyi, I think—and said they had a warrant for a search. I said, “Show it to me.” “Let’s go to your apartment, we’ll show you.” They took me home, they already had witnesses prepared—a woman who lived upstairs and a neighbor, and they came too. They presented me with a document stating that, according to the testimony of the arrested Sokulskyi, I might have materials that defame the Soviet…

V.V. Ovsiienko: …state and social system.

P.P. Rozumnyi: …state and social system, so I should hand them over. I said, “I don’t have any such materials.” “Well, if you don’t, then we’ll start looking for them, here’s the authorization.” They showed me the search warrant. The two witnesses sat there, terrified. The lieutenant searched everywhere, while Major Solomin sat at the table. The lieutenant handed him books, and he leafed through them. In one book, he found a drawing of a blue-and-yellow flag—I had shown my son what our flag looked like, and he had drawn it. He found three pornographic photographs that I had brought back from Germany as a soldier. Nowadays, such photos are everywhere, but back then it was pornography. He found it, started a record, and wrote it down in the protocol. And he didn’t find anything else of the sort. I have a copy of that protocol; I should try to reconstruct what they took from me then. They went to the library first, looked around there, pulled out things that had no real significance, and were clearly disappointed. I saw them exchanging glances, because there was nothing, where could it have gone? I later found out that they had seen those materials. I’ll tell you later how I discovered traces of them having seen it. But then, when the lieutenant approached the place where the materials were hanging in the sleeves—you won’t believe it—I’m sitting on the bed, and if I turn my head to the side, I can see everything clearly—my heart started to pound—you won’t believe it—like a hammer. I thought, this Solomin is going to hear my heart pounding like this, because I can hear it—like a hammer striking, a hammer!—and he’ll guess that I’ve hidden something here. But that lieutenant just patted and patted the clothes, didn’t take anything off to inspect, just patted them. He ran his hands all over and didn’t feel the hard objects in the sleeves of that thick greatcoat. I thought, it’s over—a weight lifted from my shoulders. Then he took me to the cellar somewhere in the yard, inspected everything—and there was nothing there either. We went back, drew up the protocol. When we were drawing it up, there was nothing to write about. Then one of the witnesses, the one from upstairs, Varvara, said, “Listen, I don’t see why you came to this man’s home and what you found here.” The major was abashed and said, “And what about this? Look, he’s drawing a Petliurite flag.” I said, “That’s the flag of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. During the revolution,” I said, “it was used as the flag of the UPR.” “That’s a Petliurite flag!”

He shushed the woman, and she fell silent. And me—I thought they were going to arrest me, but no, they told me to come to the KGB tomorrow, wrote me a summons to appear. I said, “I have to work.” “We’ll notify your work.” “Alright,” I said, “I’ll come.”

The next day—it must have been October 29, 1969—I go to my appointment with them. They are already waiting for me, they lead me to an office. Two of them lead me, as if I were… True, they didn’t put handcuffs on me. They bring me in. This Major Solomin, who searched my place, and the lieutenant are sitting in the office, questioning me. At first, it’s about this and that, who I am, what my education is, general questions like that. And then they demand that I sign a statement that I will give truthful testimony. I looked at it and said, “Please write the protocols in Ukrainian, otherwise I won’t sign. I have never once signed a protocol written in another language.” He got indignant: “Do you know, do you understand…” I said, “I understand, but I won’t sign. You,” I said, “can write what you want, but I won’t sign it, even if it were acceptable to me.” And they were at a loss—they didn’t know what to do with me. And the office was bugged from the next room. A lieutenant colonel named Markin, the head of the investigative department, runs in. He doesn’t address me, but paces around the room: “We protect everyone: Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians. What’s the difference?” In other words, it was for my benefit, but he didn’t address me. I just sat there. He talked and talked, then left.

Then they put the lieutenant on it, because this Solomin couldn’t write in Ukrainian, he didn’t know the language. This lieutenant starts writing the protocol. I signed the protocols that were acceptable to me. The conversation turned to how I met Sokulskyi and what my relationship with him was like. “Friendly.” “What did you do?” “We talked.” “What, where, about what?” “About literature.” “And what did he say about the KGB?” I said, “I don’t know.” “Well, we know what he said.” I said, “If you know, why are you asking?” They summoned me like this three times. I looked at all those protocols. Half of what was talked about wasn’t even in what they wrote down in those protocols. I saw that they were empty protocols. The second time, they started reading to me what Ivan had testified, that his signatures were there, they gave me to read and read it out themselves. And the third time—the same thing: that I had taken the typewriter, and typed, and ten copies… Well, it was impossible… I was terribly shocked and surprised that Ivan had revealed such details that could have been concealed, because no one had asked about them. I think they must have completely demoralized him, I think maybe they influenced him somehow, as they now say, with psychotropic drugs, because it was impossible to understand why he talked about things that only the two of us could have known and did know, and he revealed it. It was such precise evidence, such details: when he came to my place by car, what we talked about, even how Kuzmenko pulled out a bottle of vodka that he wanted to drink, but only showed that he wanted to drink it, but would drink it later—all that kind of stuff. What was all that?

V.V. Ovsiienko: It was to be convincing.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Exactly. It struck me so much that I started to get scared: what had happened to Ivan? The fourth time they summon me—this is with intervals of several days, essentially, they’re not letting me live anymore—for a face-to-face confrontation. They seat me with my back to the door through which Ivan is supposed to enter. I, frankly, don’t protest; at that point, I can’t imagine how it will be. He told me not to turn around, just to answer questions when I’m asked, and otherwise to sit and look at him. But the door is behind me. I hear them enter. I jump up, turn around, and see Ivan in a quilted jacket, so tormented, unshaven, so pitiful… I quickly go up to him, offer my hand, shake his hand. Ugh, that Solomin jumped up: “You’re violating the rules established here, you’re violating my order, I’ll post a guard over you right now!” Well, I didn’t do anything more… I said, “Why did you put me with my back to him? Why should I have to answer when?..” Then they turned me sideways. I had protested being seated with my back to him. “How,” I said, “am I supposed to listen to a person with my back? What, am I deaf?”

Then it begins. Everything that Ivan stated in his testimony is listed. Ivan confirms everything, I deny it. I say, “I don’t remember that, I don’t know where you got that from, I think it’s a fabrication, incomprehensible to me”—I use words to that effect. Of course, I don’t scold him, but it excites me more and more—I think: why confess so much? Dziuba’s *Internationalism*, for example, couldn’t there have been fewer copies, say, at least two, but ten—that’s exactly how many there were! Then they stopped, went over all the points that I was supposed to confirm or deny. I denied all the points in which Ivan confirmed our relationship as being hostile to them, as being necessary for the investigation. Then Solomin asks me: “And how are we to understand that you deny his every statement, while he repeatedly says and confirms what he said? He wrote this, and he is saying it orally in your presence, and you don’t admit it? Why is he doing this, in your opinion?” I say, “It’s disgusting for me to comment on this, I don’t want to comment on it.” That’s what I said—“disgusting.” They didn’t write that in the protocol.

There was some more conversation, and then there was a lunch break. I went to a store and bought a book by Drai-Khmara, it had just been published then.

V.V. Ovsiienko: A little yellowish volume?

P.P. Rozumnyi: A beautiful book, yes, yes. I bought three copies, to give one to Ivan as well. I thought there would be a continuation. I wanted to give it to him. They had already taken Ivan away. Then he turns to me: “What kind of book is that? Come on, show me.” I showed them. “And why did you buy three?” “Well,” I said, “because I need them, that’s why.” “Who else are you going to give them to?” “Oh,” I said, “whoever happens to need one, I’ll give it to them.” And so our face-to-face confrontation ended. I went to see Oles Kuzmenko, told him all this, and wrote in the Drai-Khmara book about this episode of the confrontation as an ordeal I had gone through that day. A tooth of mine crumbled. After every arrest, one of my teeth would crumble; I almost ate it each time. And this time, I felt something was wrong in my mouth. I touched it with my hands—the tooth had broken into pieces, I pulled it out. So those nervous experiences were destroying my teeth. I went to Kuzmenko, told him, and gave him the Drai-Khmara. He said that the exact same thing had happened to him: all those things we talked about, he confessed everything, and I denied it—exactly like me. That is, I explained to him in gestures that the same thing had happened to me, because they were following me, listening, and I didn’t want that. Because Yevhen always said that it was self-incrimination—to speak loudly about such matters. It’s self-incrimination. That should be avoided.

This confrontation took place in October 1969. In 1970, I don’t remember when, he was put on trial. (Ivan Sokulskyi was sentenced by the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court on January 27, 1970, under Article 62, Part 1, to 4.5 years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps.—V.O.) Kuzmenko informed me when the trial would be. I went to the trial, they let us in, I was at the trial. At the trial, Ivan also behaved like a broken man, as if he were somehow mutilated, like a person for whom it was terribly hard to endure and so unpleasant to look people in the eye. I felt genuinely sorry for him. Against his background, Mykola Kulchytskyi looked… Mykola Kulchytskyi, you know him, from Poltava?

V.V. Ovsiienko: Yes, yes, I know him.

P.P. Rozumnyi: …well, like a hero, to be frank. He gave a very good speech. He said something like, when people in Vietnam are fighting for their independence, it’s heroism, but here, when people just talk about independence, or not even about independence, but about some literary freedom, about the Ukrainian word, which is not heard anywhere, it’s already a crime. It was well said. And the Vietnamese—they are heroes.

Viktor Savchenko was also on trial then. I had known him before that; his wife was an actress, and he would get us into the theater with complimentary tickets. He also didn’t say anything particularly special, only that he knew something about the things he was doing in Dnipropetrovsk. Sokulskyi, for example, communicated with students, gave them Dziuba’s work to read, Valentyn Moroz’s article “A Report from the Beria Reserve.” I once had it too, I retyped fragments, it wasn’t complete. When the sentence of four and a half years was announced, Ivan was surprised—I saw it in his expression. Kulchytskyi got, I think, two years, and Savchenko was acquitted and released altogether.

V.V. Ovsiienko: No, he was given a one-year suspended sentence.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Suspended, suspended. Well, I was struck… We went out into the corridor and saw Savchenko hugging his wife. His mother, someone else was standing there. He was rejoicing in a way… It was a scene, in my opinion, that was indecent… So the trial took place. I remember I then paid a visit to his mother, expressed my condolences. She didn’t receive me very joyfully, but she didn’t object to my visit. And that’s where our communication ended.

THE CATASTROPHE OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA, 1972

I was regularly traveling to Kyiv then, and in 1971 Yevhen and I became godparents—Nadiia Svitlychna was the godmother, and I was the godfather. Without any official registration, without a priest, but—godparents and that’s that.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And who did you baptize?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Virunia, Virunia, his daughter, Vira. I remember, his mood was already such… We went to Khreshchatyk, I recall, jumping over puddles on the asphalt. He jumped over one, stopped, and said, “Let’s go buy some milk.” I said, “Let’s go.” And then: “They won’t give us milk there.” At first, I was surprised: “Where?” “Where they’re planning to lock us up.” This was in October 1971. Later, I remembered this as a premonition of the catastrophe, of the arrest. And indeed, the arrest happened in 1972—that catastrophe of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, as they call it now. Such a premonition, one might say, was hanging over us, and Yevhen expressed it in that phrase: “They won’t give us milk there.” So today we’ll buy milk and drink our fill, but there they won’t give us milk… I remember that phrase as a tragic one.

I continued to visit Yevhen, constantly taking materials from him; he had them, photographic and others, retyped. Back in 1965, when I was on a month-long professional development course in Kyiv (our dormitory was on Pankivska Street), I would stop by his place every day. He was living on Franko Street then. And almost every day I would see someone: either Dziuba, or Svitlychnyi, and once, I think, Lina Kostenko was there. Lina Kostenko brought there, to his apartment, signatures on… But that was a bit later, I saw Lina Kostenko later, that was when she had collected signatures in defense of Svitlychnyi, Zalyvakha, and the Horyn brothers, where, I remember, even the director of the Antonov aviation plant had signed. She pointed him out to me with her finger, I recall, Antonov signed first, and after him, some of those big bosses signed. She had access to them and collected signatures there too.

I learned about the arrests of January 12, 1972, from Radio Liberty broadcasts and immediately went to Yevhen’s wife. She told me how it had happened. I went to his home. But before that, I stopped by Svitlychna’s—she was living somewhere in the district of…

V.V. Ovsiienko: On Umanska Street?

P.P. Rozumnyi: No, the exhibition center.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Ah, not Leonida, but Nadiia?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Nadiia Svitlychna. Svitlychna was living in the exhibition center district then. I remember I gave her a little help, because you could feel that she would be arrested too. They constantly summoned her after that. She said, “Only my child is saving me.” I feel very guilty before her. She invited me to come visit before Easter. I couldn’t, because I had some work—I was working in a hired brigade, I was the foreman there, and it was simply impossible to leave all that. It was possible, but I, apparently, chickened out, I didn’t go. Shortly after that, she was arrested.

V.V. Ovsiienko: She was arrested on May 18, 1972.

P.P. Rozumnyi: So Easter was around the time she was arrested. For a long time, I was ashamed—I still remember it as one of those moments in my life when I was ashamed of myself. If I had come, she had something to tell me. She already trusted me completely; there was no problem with any secrets.

LIFE BECAME DIFFICULT FOR ME…

I worked as a stoker, then a construction worker, then just anything. For any reason, they would fire me immediately. Once, because they didn’t provide respirators, I refused to unload cement from a wagon where it was poured in bulk. I said, “When there’s a respirator, I’ll unload it.” But they didn’t have any respirators. So my foreman says, “You’re being clever, you want a respirator, while they are working without respirators.” I said, “Let them work, but I’m not going to. Safety regulations are being violated,” I said. Well, they fired me. And another time they fired me for refusing to take a three-ruble bonus. They wrote themselves I don’t know what kind of bonus, but they gave us, the brigade of workers, three rubles each. I said, “I don’t want to take it, such a paltry bonus.” A short time later, they fired me.

I decided to swap my apartment and put up an ad. A Jewish man from Lviv, who lives on Kopernyka Street, comes and wants to swap with me for Dnipropetrovsk, invites me to come and see it. I went to Lviv, had a look: a one-room apartment, a garbage dump under the window. I would have swapped if they had let me. But they didn’t let me then. The head of the district executive committee, Momot, the one who now goes around praising the Soviet government, wouldn’t allow it. “Why,” I ask, “won’t you allow it, why, tell me clearly?” “I’ll tell you: I don’t need Jews here.” And this man I was planning to swap with was indeed Jewish. “First they don’t have enough bread, then they don’t have enough butter.” I described this episode to our head of administration. He was praising this Momot in front of us, who had supposedly written a history of his work as head of the district executive committee. I wrote him a note: “Please add this episode to that history.”

V.V. Ovsiienko: Petro Rozumnyi, cassette five, April 29, 2001.

P.P. Rozumnyi: When I went to see him about swapping the apartment, he said he wouldn’t swap it for me because “we don’t need Jews here,” because they either want butter or they don’t have enough bread. So I’m saying that Momot knew about the shortages back then, yet he praises himself for managing things well. But there wasn’t enough butter or bread. I reminded him, that liar.

I went to the first secretary of the district committee and said, “I have the right to swap my apartment and I want to swap it.” “But we are keeping this matter under control.” “Well,” I said, “keep it under your control, but tell me the reason why they won’t let me swap. What does your control have to do with it? Control all you want,” I said. They never told me why they didn’t want to swap. But then a client from Ivano-Frankivsk appears for an apartment swap. I would have swapped for Nikopol, or any other city, if someone had been interested, but it turned out that a former student of mine had gotten married in Frankivsk and wanted to move back. She agreed that she wanted to swap with me. She came to inspect my place, then I went to theirs, and with her, they let me swap the apartment. I went through the procedure and settled there in the same year, 1974—just when Solzhenitsyn was being expelled from the Soviet Union. It was either in February or January that I swapped and registered my residence there.

My son Taras is drafted into the army, and I am left alone. I got a job at a liquor and vodka distillery as an escort for wagons of vodka. It was a great luxury, a cushy job, I’m still surprised how they hired me. I had been looking and looking and couldn’t find a job. I thought I would starve to death. I sold my well-built brick cellar here in Solone, so I lived on that money for a while. I had a garage I had built—I didn’t sit around with my hands folded—and I sold that too. So I had a little money for the time being, but I saw that I would spend it, because there were no jobs, for the second month there was no job. I see an ad—for the liquor and vodka distillery. I went to the personnel department—a retired officer, a Muscovite, is sitting there, and he says, “And why do you want to get this job?” “Well, why—there’s an ad, isn’t there?” He says, “Unpleasant things happen in this job…” I say, “I don’t know what unpleasant things.” “Go and see what kind of work it is.” I had no idea. An escort for wagons of vodka—so what?

They let me onto the distillery grounds, I went and had a look. “How much do you earn?” I ask. “Sometimes one hundred and forty, sometimes more, depending on how many trips we’ve made, how many kilometers we’ve traveled, how many wagons we’ve dispatched.” It seemed like it would be a good job for me. I’d be earning that much, and I had to pay alimony, because one son was already grown up, but the other was still small, and life in the city is harder anyway. I decided to keep insisting that they hire me. The head of the personnel department says, “If you insist, I’ll hire you, but don’t you curse me for it later.” What a statement… “Go,” he says, “to the sales department, tell them I’m hiring you, let him give you a lecture.” I went to the sales department, asked, “Who’s the boss here?” I see everyone there is drunk, and one guy is lying on the table. “That one,” they say, “lying on the table is the head of the sales department.” Dead drunk, what kind of conversation could there be? No conversations today. I went back to this head of personnel, said, “He’s not there and they say he might not be there tomorrow either.” “Well,” he says, “talk to him tomorrow and then come see me.” I went in the morning, he wasn’t drunk yet, but his eyes were puffy, the poor guy, he already wanted a drink, really wanted one—and it was early in the morning. He looked at me suspiciously, sized me up, because they were all thieves there, so he thought they were sending someone to spy on him. One escort later asked me just that: “Aren’t you a police captain?” I said, “No, not a police captain.” Good. “Well,” he says, “if you want to, then get your paperwork done. The work is hard, you see, it involves travel, business trips all the time.” I asked how much they earn, he told me the truth, I went, they processed my papers, and I go to the director for his signature. The director’s last name is Mamontov—a heavy-set Muscovite type, speaks in a thick, hoarse voice. Clearly a heavy drinker. He looked at me: “Why are you getting a job here?”—and scratches his cheek. “Because a man has to work somewhere, right? I haven’t worked for two months, I found your ad, it’s all over the city. An ad inviting workers.” “You know, this is an unpleasant job. Some of them here sometimes abuse their position. If you’re thinking of abusing it, you’d better not take the job.” I said, “I’m not thinking of abusing it.” I didn’t yet know what “abusing” meant in that job. Stealing? How can you steal when it’s all counted?

Well, I got the job. My first trip was to Rakhiv. It was terribly interesting for me to go there: you travel at night through the highlands, there’s the Yablunivskyi Pass… A different land… I heard the Hutsuls singing at night, and I was reminded of Stefanyk’s words: “They sang like this in the time of the Great Prince Volodymyr,” and I thought to myself: “They sang like this back in the time of Prince Volodymyr.” With a guttural voice, somehow mournful and at the same time so close and understandable. Such a Hutsul manner of singing with fluctuations. It impressed me. We went there once. Delivered the vodka. I had a separate wagon, but the escort who was training me was responsible. I came back, told the department head: “I still don’t quite understand how all this is done, I want to go one more time as a trainee.”

They send me to Moldavia with another escort. And here I found out what the deal was. It turns out that they ship 20,000 bottles—a thousand crates fit into that covered wagon. That’s 80,000 rubles’ worth, if you convert it to money. This is “Extra” vodka, and if it’s another kind, it’s cheaper. It turns out that they unseal the bottles, pour out 100 grams from each bottle, top the bottles off with water, and seal them again. This new escort of mine says, “I don’t know if you’re a police captain or not—they say you’re a police captain—but now we’re going to ‘spiritize.’” I think: “What is ‘spiritizing’?” I think, they’re stealing alcohol… Then I see: a rubber bag, they called it a “pillow.” I thought he was going to drink—no, it held about thirty liters of water, three buckets, at least. And all this water went into the bottles, and right in my presence. I was horrified, my hair stood on end, I started to be afraid of all of it. I thought, someone’s going to come… But I kept quiet, thinking, let him do it, because it’s not my responsibility, it’s his. He works all night, I doze. In one night, he spoiled that many bottles with three buckets of water, topping off maybe two hundred bottles. And they do it like this. They open the more expensive vodka, the “Extra,” it’s so pure, forty-percent vodka. Into this bottle, they pour cheaper vodka. He traces around the cap with an awl once, then a second time, removes the cork, and places it so it’s visible—the very same cork will later go back into the very same bottle. Everything is topped off, and he twists it shut with a string.

The deed was done, he gives me about three bottles of vodka to take home, real, unprepared vodka. I take them and we go our separate ways. Since I wasn’t a police captain, I didn’t report it to anyone. I started to travel by myself, but I didn’t engage in this, not a single bottle, although people came into my wagon and offered. One time—we were going to Moldavia—one guy spoiled about a dozen bottles, but I didn’t allow any more. I said, hide them, spread them out in different crates. I didn’t want to get involved in this. They watched me very closely, and if I had done it even once, they would have certainly caught me in the act. And I didn’t know how to do it anyway. It’s a complicated job, it’s like being a locksmith—you have to open it precisely and not ruin it, close it and not ruin it. I was earning a decent wage as it was.

I worked there for a little over two years. One day I’m reading *Literaturnaya Gazeta*, and there on the last page, the sixteenth, there was a column called “Write a Caption.” Some photographic collage, or a caricature, or some special photograph—“come up with a caption.” There was a photo: some hovel, on which was written in Russian “Wine-Vodka,” and next to it a slogan about the fight against alcoholism. I think: here I’ll write a caption as a specialist. I think I made three versions of the caption, one I remember very precisely: “The Two-Faced Janus of Socialism.” It sounded serious. And what do you think? About ten days after I sent that letter, they call a trade union meeting and announce that three escorts need to be laid off. It turns out that I need to be laid off, and two others. I ask, “For what reason?” “We have to make cuts, because production is being reduced.” “And why me? Maybe we should hold a competition or draw lots?” “What lots? The trade union’s decision is already made.” He shows me the trade union’s decision to lay me off along with two others. Interestingly, I was laid off and fired, but the other two were hired back three days later—that’s how they disguised the matter.

Then I got a job at the philharmonic. There was also an ad posted: wanted, philharmonic administrator, concert organizer. The director called me in and tried for a long time to persuade me not to go there, because, he said, it was dirty work, the administration was very corrupt. I told him, “I was at a job where they also sometimes (‘sometimes’—every day!) were corrupt, but I wasn’t, so here too,” I said, “I think I won’t be corrupt either.” He was older than me, had been a priest during the German occupation, was from Kosiv himself, but now he was the director of the philharmonic. He hired me, in a fatherly way. I didn’t engage in corruption there either, that is, I didn’t steal, didn’t make deals with the directors of cultural centers for them to give me money. The audiences in the Frankivsk region were quite cultured, they went to concerts. We traveled to villages, and the villages there are large, have very decent cultural centers, so many people came that they couldn’t all fit.

On March 17, 1977—my son had already returned from the army—they show up at my place with a search warrant. What are they going to look for? According to some information, I’m supposed to have anti-Soviet materials. I then remembered: I suspected that some unknown people were breaking into my house when I was on business trips. My son was already home, but he worked at night somewhere, so they would break in. How did I notice? I would tie thin threads, like spiderwebs, that they would inevitably break without noticing. I saw it once, a second time. I think, who’s breaking in? I thought it was them, because I already had experience. They break into the house, don’t take anything. But what was there to take—besides the library, there was nothing. I had already collected a considerable package of materials: there were Yevhen’s things, *Internationalism or Russification?*, something else from foreign authors… I have the search protocol.

They search my place all day. They brought my son, so he could also see, and they brought witnesses. When they confiscated something from me, one of them said, “Well, it’s obvious that this is an enemy.” He hadn’t read what was there, but it was obvious to him that I was an enemy.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And what led to that conclusion?

P.P. Rozumnyi: They brought a witness like that, who said that from all appearances, I was an enemy. I said, “I have to go to the philharmonic, I have work there right now, I didn’t inform the director.” And how did they search secretly? The director summons me, and they had already searched and confirmed that I had the materials. They already had experience that they might not find things, because I hid them well. I had noticed that they were secretly searching, and now they hadn’t visited me for a long time, so they wanted to visit and inspect in detail what I had.

The director sends me to Kosiv. And I have the concert schedule for the month in my hands. I have to book a concert a week in advance. Kosiv is still two weeks away, and he’s sending me to Kosiv. I don’t want to go, I say, “I have a closer concert in Tlumach.” The director, his last name was Barchuk, listened and listened, and then slammed his fist on the table: “I’m telling you, you have to go!” And he’s angry at me. I say, “Then maybe you’ll fire me for this? I don’t want to work like this. I still have time for Kosiv, I have a schedule.” “You have to go to Kosiv immediately!” So, they forced the director to send me away from home. I go to Kosiv, clenching my teeth, and I want to return on the night bus; many buses ran back then. But what do they do? I went to their house of culture, and the director sends me to the department of culture—that had never happened before. And the department of culture looked at my schedule: first, you have to book concerts in the villages. He sends me to the village of Khymychi—and that means I’ll be spending the night there, I won’t make it back in time.

When I returned from there, they came to my place the next day with a search warrant. I had just woken up—and there they were with a search warrant. All my concert activity comes to a halt; I have to endure these ordeals once again.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And what was your position called?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Philharmonic Administrator. A serious position, but it was very thankless, hard work. I earned a little there, because I would place a concert, lots of spectators—I didn’t steal, but I still earned about a hundred or more.

So, in the morning they come with a search—and it immediately became clear that they were the ones who had sent me to Kosiv, so they could search everything in detail at night and catch me with what they had seen at night. And they did see it, they found it, because where can you hide things in a house? They took a whole package of materials from me. There were three of them: the senior one was a captain, two lieutenants, and two witnesses. They write me a summons to come for interrogation at the KGB in Frankivsk tomorrow.

I went. They assign me a young, inexperienced guy, clearly a trainee. Dark-haired, clearly from the east, speaks Ukrainian poorly. He gives me a tour of the KGB building, two floors. And there the walls are hung with such tragic scenes: Banderites killed so-and-so—with a caption, on such-and-such a date, in such-and-such a place. Killed, tore apart some family. He tells me and shows me, I keep silent and walk behind him. He doesn’t ask me anything, and I don’t say anything. What am I going to say? I didn’t allow myself to say anything, but he understood that for me to speak would mean entering into a discussion, and a discussion was not part of his plans, as I understand it. I say, “I don’t want to comment, that’s your business, you comment on it. You told me, now I know.” He didn’t even ask me. He leads me into an office and does it all so ineptly—that is, he was learning on me. I need to sign a document stating that I will not engage in anti-Soviet propaganda. “Look here, at the materials we found at your place,” he said, “this is anti-Soviet stuff. Who did you give it to?” “I didn’t give it to anyone.” “Where did you get it?” “I was on a train. I,” I say, “was talking to some person, I don’t know where he lives.” Slowly, another one approaches, then another.

They summoned me four times. The fourth time, they assemble a team. I’m sitting in the middle, and they are somehow around me, the table is strange, so that I’m surrounded by no fewer than six people. The one presiding is sitting there—as I later learned from Panas Zalyvakha’s wife, he was the son of a priest, I’ve forgotten his name now. Some kind of vulgar, local Galician. He threatens me, points through the window to where the temporary detention facility is, says he’ll put me there, that I’ll be hungry there, that I’ll be feeding lice there. I think, “What an idiot.” I say, “I don’t want to talk to you on that level. That level is not suitable for me.” Then they removed him—someone must have been listening in somewhere, or what. The fourth time, they say, “The only issue is for you to sign that you will not engage in this.” I say, “But I’m not engaged in it. What I had—there’s no ban on that. Is there a ban on my profession? No. Well, so I’m working.” Then I hear them all quiet down, they’re sitting there stunned, not asking anything, and I’m just sitting.

Suddenly, a terrifying-looking man enters the door, red-haired, with high cheekbones. And what’s terrifying about him? The way his hair is styled on his head, he looks like some kind of devil, not a person. I think a hairdresser must have worked on him. I genuinely felt a bit scared. I had gotten used to the others, let them chatter, detention facility, so be it, that’s your business, I say, you decide. But this major sat down, taking his time, so I could get a good look at him, and takes charge. I say, “Introduce yourself.” “Major Kharchenko,” he introduces himself. Well, I’ve never seen hair like that anywhere else! I think it’s a wig they put on him—you know, some kind of gypsy mane that’s terrifying to look at. I feel that I’m not scared of him, but of his painted, styled mane.

He started in the same way, but somehow firmly, without particular pressure, saying that if I don’t confess, it will be very bad for me. I say, “It’s not very good for me as it is. This is the fourth time you’ve summoned me, I’m missing work, I’m not earning anything, so things aren’t good for me.” “That you are engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda is clear from the materials we confiscated, and the fact that you don’t want to confess shows your insincerity,” he began, trying to persuade me. I say, “Those are different assessments of my activity, that is, of my life.” He began to read to me my notes from various sources that I had made in Frankivsk. I think they had been slipping me various nationalist publications from the thirties. There were little poems, sayings—I copied them out. I wrote down one saying I heard on the “Voice of America” or “Radio Liberty”: “We will all go to battle for the power of the Soviets and, as one, we will die in the struggle for it.” The conclusion: “Why then go into such a struggle where everyone will die? And who needs this struggle?”—that was my comment. He latched onto this. “You write that you are a nationalist—how do you understand that?” I say, “I was called a nationalist—I admit that I am a nationalist. That question was put to me a long time ago. But I am a patriot, and every patriot is a nationalist.” He swallowed that, said nothing.

To make a long story short, they summoned me those four times—and with no consequences, they left me alone.

THE UKRAINIAN HELSINKI GROUP

Meanwhile, Ivan Sokulskyi returns from his imprisonment (12.14.1973), and comes to see me with Miss Orysia Lesiv, who was already his fiancée at the time. I had sent a message through Kuzmenko that if he returned (and I already knew his release date), he should feel free to come see me—I had forgotten everything, so he shouldn’t think I remembered anything. And he did come, said that he had behaved very badly, and I had behaved in the best way. I thanked him for the praise, we talked. We began to communicate again. He was often here in Frankivsk, we would visit Panas Zalyvakha, our acquaintance was restored in full force.

I already knew about the formation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (11.9.1976). Every year I went on vacation to my hometown, or rather, to my mother’s, and on these trips I tried to get in touch with Oksana Yakivna Meshko, who was listed as a member of the Group—her address was public. With the intention of joining. I had already decided to join, but how to do it? You can’t just tell anyone, only Oksana Yakivna Meshko. I hadn’t seen her and didn’t know her; I saw her for the first time only in 1979. No, in 1969 I saw her. That’s right, I saw her, but I didn’t get acquainted with her, only saw her from a distance. Near St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, she was walking with a group of people, and I was waiting for Sverstiuk. I wrote about this in my memoirs about her. At that time, she noticed our group—there were three of us: “Who are those people?” They circled the cathedral several times and kept seeing us. Then I said, “We are waiting for Yevhen Sverstiuk.” He lived nearby, on Franko Street. That was the extent of our acquaintance; I only remembered her face.

And so in 1979, I decided to go to her home. I found that Verbolozna Street, 16. I had also visited her in 1977 and 1978. In 1977, I went, either on my way to my mother’s or on the way back, more likely on the way back, and some little girl came out and said that Oksana Yakivna had gone to Moscow. A year later, I go again, the same little girl comes out and says the same thing, that she has gone to Moscow. I became doubtful, thinking, what is this, this Moscow is always in my way. But there was some movement behind the curtain. I was standing on the left side of the gate. Later, when Krasivskyi explained to me that she had seen me, but since we were not acquainted, she didn’t want to meet with me. That is, she didn’t want to let me into the house—that’s how I later constructed it. In 1979, I wanted to visit her again, but then Yaroslav Lesiv—Orysia’s brother—arrives. He comes to visit Sokulskyi, so I went to see them, because I always went when he came, and I invited him to my place. And he, Yaroslav Lesiv, may he rest in peace, even invited himself to come visit me in the village of Pshenychne.

One day we went for a walk in the fields, because Yaroslav didn’t want to talk at home. It was dangerous; they were watching him, perhaps more than me, but they were watching me too. All my neighbors were, well, not informers, but they facilitated informing, because they housed those who came with listening devices. They told me later. We walk a kilometer and a half or two from the village, and he says to me, “Look,” he says, “Zinovii Krasivskyi,”—I didn’t know him then—“has a new idea regarding the activities of the Helsinki Group. When you come, we will tell you about it. Would you consider joining the Group?” “I will join,” I say. “I went to see Oksana Yakivna twice—in 1977 and 1978—but I didn’t even manage to see her.” “Well, you,” he says, “will learn more about this issue when we meet.” So we talked, and I gave my principal agreement to submit an application.

I then went to Morshyn. Lesiv happened to be there. He was constantly there, almost all the time. Krasivskyi took me to the park. I first met him at the New Year’s celebration of 1978 at Olena Antoniv’s apartment. Mykhailo Horyn was there too—that was the first time I saw Mykhailo Horyn and Zinovii Krasivskyi.

Krasivskyi said, “Let’s go, we’ll talk somewhere on the side.” He said, almost verbatim: “The Ukrainian Helsinki Group is currently in its death throes. Those who had declared themselves members have been arrested, and Oksana Yakivna is not recruiting new ones. She doesn’t accept new people—one’s a Jew, another’s suspicious.” That’s what he said: that one’s a Jew, and that one’s suspicious—he said it so expansively. “Therefore, there is a need to bypass her and create a parallel group, so that the Group doesn’t die. It is dying because it is tied only to Oksana Meshko, but it needs to expand its activities. If you agree,” he says, “to submit an application, and Sokulskyi also agrees, then I accept it, and your application will go, you know which way, and will be announced.” I agreed. Krasivskyi says, “Then go to Sokulskyi and report this conversation, so that he also writes an application; he had previously agreed as well.”

Somehow it happened that I went there again. Sokulskyi gives me his application. I don’t write mine, but I go to Frankivsk, so they don’t catch me with my application. I write my application there and somehow secretly return home. I unexpectedly delivered the applications to Lesiv’s apartment—he lived in Bolekhiv—and from him they got into the hands of Krasivskyi. That’s how Sokulskyi and I joined the Group through Krasivskyi; I delivered both applications.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Do you remember the date? At least the month.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I can’t say the date now, but it was at the end of August—early September 1979, no other time—it was still warm. Not only did I bring the applications, but then he gives me a task: to go to Vasyl Stus, who had already returned to Kyiv from exile (I knew this from radio broadcasts), to Yevhen Sverstiuk in Buryatia, to Viacheslav Chornovil, to propose to the first two that they join the Group, and to Chornovil that he lead the Group.

V.V. Ovsiienko: But Chornovil was already in 1979…

P.P. Rozumnyi: In 1979, he was in exile in Yakutia. Krasivskyi gives me 400 rubles—that was a lot of money then. The trip to Irkutsk alone cost over a hundred. I took it. I start with Stus, because that’s what he said: “First to Stus, then go to Yevhen, and after Yevhen to Chornovil, so that they give their principal agreement to join, those first two.” He asked in detail about Yevhen—who is this Yevhen Sverstiuk? Is he one of those poets who gets all sentimental and whines? There are poets like that.

Maybe we should stop our conversation for today?

V.V. Ovsiienko: Why? Look, I’m ready to listen until morning.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I think this is an important question for history. I am telling the absolute truth here, as it was before my eyes and in my ears. Krasivskyi gives me 400 rubles and tells me how to find Stus. “Go,”—he gave me the address of Vira Pavlivna Lisova. “She will tell you where Stus is, she knows.” Because he also didn’t know where Stus was—whether in Kyiv or Donetsk. I arrived in Kyiv, spent the night at Ivan Benedyktovych Brovok’s place. I trusted him completely and informed him that I had a task to see Stus, but I didn’t tell him more, because that would have been too much. How to get there, where is that street? He explained everything to me, and I quickly found Vira Lisova. I went up to her door, she was just seeing her children off to school. She was saying, “Go on, go on”—and then I appeared. I asked her if she was Vira Lisova. She said, “Come in.” It seemed to me that she trusted me right away, there was no mistrust. I say that I’m from Krasivskyi, he asked me to find out where Stus lives. We didn’t talk for long, because, frankly, I didn’t know much about Vasyl Lisovyi, I probably hadn’t seen him among the dissidents who were being talked about. I learned more about him when I went to see Yevhen in Buryatia. He told me that somewhere nearby, in Buryatia, Lisovyi was also serving his exile. Having learned Stus’s address in Donetsk, I go to Donetsk. I go to Stus in Donetsk with the same proposal. The proposal was to join the Group, to say that Oksana Yakivna was letting the cause fail, that the Group was ceasing to exist, and this cause could not be allowed to fail, it had to be supported. In fact, it was said that Oksana Yakivna had stopped admitting new members to the Group. It was also said this way: she is so surrounded that any material that reaches her falls into the hands of the KGB. That’s how firmly he told me, and that’s what I relayed to Stus. I relayed this phrase to everyone. It was in my memory, I didn’t write anything down.

Stus wasn’t at home, so I came back in the afternoon. I told his mother and I told Valentyna… Is her name Valentyna?

V.V. Ovsiienko: Who, his sister?

P.P. Rozumnyi: His wife.

V.V. Ovsiienko: His wife is Valentyna Popeliukh.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Valentyna was there. She was somehow displeased with my visit, and didn’t really talk to me. I’ll tell you frankly, I myself felt uncomfortable. I always had trouble with those women when I went to visit some man. The women were always angry at me, but I needed to talk to the man. The women saw that I was one of those who are dangerous. It happened more than once in Volyn, and it happened in Dnipropetrovsk. I already had such experience. So I didn’t worry too much about it. In short, she was not very pleased, but Vasyl’s mother also talked to me, about this and that, and then she asked me directly, “Why did you come to see Vasyl?” I say, “I’m an acquaintance of his, I know him.” And I had indeed seen him once with Yevhen Sverstiuk, Yevhen introduced me to him—that was all. At that time, Yevhen lived on Pushkinska Street or maybe Repina Street. The street where the Botanical Garden is… I remember there was a conversation then. A tiny, miniature book by Andriy Malyshko had just been published, beautifully designed. Yevhen pulls it out of his pocket, shows it to Stus, and says something ironic about it: “Such a small-caliber thing, yet so beautifully designed.” Stus says, “Yevhen, don’t say things like that about Malyshko,”—something like that. And the conversation ended. I remember this episode and nothing more. So, I tell his mother that I know him, I want to see him. “Well, why do you want to see him?”—his mother. I felt that I wasn’t very welcome here, so to speak. I said, “Well, then I’ll go outside the gate and wait there. I want to see him. If,” I say, “I’m in the way here, I can leave.” “No, don’t leave.” They agreed, because they saw that I wasn’t giving up easily.

V.V. Ovsiienko: I’ll remind you, this is 19 Chuvaska Street, in Donetsk, and Vasyl’s mother is called Yilyna Yakivna, her maiden name was Synkivska.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I don’t remember the address anymore, but it was his mother’s house, she was there and Valentyna was there. This was in early September, not earlier and not later, because from there I went straight to Yevhen Sverstiuk in Buryatia. Maybe the tickets are stored somewhere, I can confirm exactly when I went to see Yevhen, I need to find them.

So, his mother, so to speak, left me alone, because she saw that I wasn’t going to give up and wasn’t going to explain why I had come. Vasyl came, I got acquainted with him. I told him that we had met once before, if he remembered. I don’t know if this had an effect on him, but he considered it… I said that Yevhen and I were godparents, that I had been friends with him for a long time, since 1952, and showed him a photograph. He took it, looked at the photograph, it was already a prisoner’s photograph. He didn’t say anything, we went to have dinner. They prepared for us, I think, mashed potatoes, we ate well, and it was already late afternoon. I hinted to him that I had something to say. But I didn’t say anything, just general conversation, but somehow everything was silent. I ask, “Why are your women unhappy with my visit?” And so it turned out that this visit was, if not fatal. I know that he would have joined the Group without me, but when everyone went to sleep, I began to tell him, and he began to listen, by writing. That was the only way to talk—by writing. I made a small introduction, asked if he knew Krasivskyi—he didn’t know him. I say that I only recently met him myself, but when I found out what kind of circle he was in, Stus then believed me. Horyn was there when they celebrated the New Year of 1979 in Lviv. I briefly explained the situation, just as I’ve told you. And I asked if he would join. He said he would. He was constantly chewing apples with his weak teeth, as I understand it now, because I had the same thing, where your gums are weak and you can’t bite an apple properly. But he sucked on them: he’d cut off a slice, put it in his mouth, and suck. Apparently, the acidity was pleasant on his gums, or maybe it helped as vitamins. He chewed and chewed for a long time, held it in his mouth, and swallowed. He was doing this all evening after that dinner; the apples were ripe then, it was autumn.

It was a slow conversation: by the time you write, by the time you get an answer—it took a long time. I asked him, as Krasivskyi had instructed me, not to write an application now, but to remember that his promise was already made. When I came again, then I would collect the application from him. And in the meantime, I am going… I told him where I was going: to Yevhen Sverstiuk and to Viacheslav Chornovil. After I returned, saw Krasivskyi, I would then visit him and pick up the application—that’s how it was arranged. So I never saw him again after that.

I went to Yevhen’s. I went from Dnipropetrovsk to Irkutsk: I was trying to throw them off, I got to the airport in a way to escape my pursuers. I thought I had escaped. There was no ticket to Novosibirsk. There was one to Ulan-Ude. I went to Irkutsk. I knew it was close, planes fly—I just had to fly over Baikal. I bought a ticket to Irkutsk, then to Ulan-Ude. From Ulan-Ude, I already knew which plane flies, so that was easy for me. I arrived at Yevhen’s and I see, Yevhen—this was without warning—frowned a little that I had come. I felt it and said, “A mission.” “Why did you come?”—he asks with his eyes. There was no conversation right away, you couldn’t talk there. We went up a hill, there was a *sopka* not far from his place.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And what is this place called?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Bagdarin. It’s in Buryatia. It’s 600 kilometers northeast of Ulan-Ude, a gold-mining town. It has a primitive airfield, covered with pebbles. An Il-14 used to fly there—it’s a military aircraft converted for passengers. It was so cramped that you couldn’t straighten up: once you sat down, you could touch the ceiling—you’d bang your head on the ceiling! A very uncomfortable, cramped plane. I told Yevhen about this.

Have you read his explanation anywhere, why he didn’t want to join the Group? He wrote about it.

V.V. Ovsiienko: I don’t recall right now.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I don’t recall where he wrote it, but he said categorically then that he would not join. He considered it a needless sacrifice. The very act of joining meant immediate arrest and return as a recidivist to captivity, to rot in the camps again.

V.V. Ovsiienko: That’s true…

P.P. Rozumnyi: It was the truth, the absolute truth. It turned out to be true. I told him that I had already submitted my application, that I was going to see Chornovil. He did not approve of my idea to go to Chornovil and thus confused me. I felt that my mission was losing its meaning. I would tell Chornovil that Yevhen wasn't joining, so what could come of that? I turned back. I figured that Chornovil was no less informed than I was, that he already knew this and would probably join. But I didn't go to see Chornovil. I don't know how it would have ended if I had gone. I can't imagine how I would have looked for him in that Yakutia.

V.V. Ovsiienko: It is recorded in the materials that Chornovil was a member of the Helsinki Group from May 22, 1979.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Where did he join? In the camp, right?

V.V. Ovsiienko: No, he was already in exile in Chappanda, in Yakutia, by then.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I would say that Krasivskyi was not informed. It could have been that he was not informed, couldn't it? He gave me the task of seeing him. More than that—for Chornovil to lead the Group. You know, when I was traveling from Stus to Yevhen, I felt such an association... An analogy arose with the situation of the nationalists abroad. The split that occurred among the nationalists. It was called “Bandera's rebellion.” This term “Bandera's rebellion” appeared in those anti-nationalist, anti-Ukrainian brochures. Cherednychenko, Yevdokymenko, the great professor Rymarenko wrote fundamental works on this topic. Everywhere— “Bandera's rebellion” as a schismatic. So I thought that we were stepping over the head of Oksana Yakivna, who is the head of the Group, and taking upon ourselves—well, not us, but Krasivskyi—the initiative to replace her. That's how it was. You can write this, or not, but I say again, how could I have acted differently? Oksana Yakivna never asked me how or why I joined the Group, she did not bless my entry. She found out on the radio that I had joined, but she did not accept my application; the application went through Krasivskyi—both mine and Sokulskyi's. Do you understand the situation now?

V.V. Ovsiienko: Yes, yes.

P.P. Rozumnyi: I would like you to understand, because this is the truth that I do not want to be left unlit. It was like that. I say again that in the plane at an altitude of 5,000 kilometers or more, this analogy with “Bandera's rebellion,” as the Melnykites called it, came to my mind. One of the Melnykites wrote a book, *Bandera's Rebellion*, about the split.

This is a history that needs to be known accurately, because we still have problems with this today.

V.V. Ovsiienko: When was this trip to Sverstiuk?

P.P. Rozumnyi: It was early September 1979. I submitted my application in 1979.

So, I was, of course, bewildered. I immediately go to Krasivskyi, tell him how it was. He says that connections with Stus are already established, and as for Sverstiuk, he says, we’ll leave it. I want to return the money that was left over from the trip, I didn’t spend it—he didn’t want to take it. He gifted it to me, so to speak. I had a hundred and something left.

V.V. Ovsiienko: But that was your second trip to Yevhen Sverstiuk?

P.P. Rozumnyi: The second.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Because the first one was around Easter?

P.P. Rozumnyi: The first was in April, for Easter. I think Easter was on April 14th that year, and I went to see him with Illia Valeriy.

V.V. Ovsiienko: With Valeriy Illia? You didn’t tell me about that. What was the first trip for?

P.P. Rozumnyi: A courtesy visit, to a friend. I had been planning it for a long time. I knew when his term was ending, and as soon as I received a letter from his exile, I went.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Was that when they took your knife?

P.P. Rozumnyi: No, they took the knife the second time. But let me finish this first. So, I returned and informed Krasivskyi of the situation. He wasn’t pleased, but he said, “Everything with Stus has been arranged.” I didn’t need to go to Stus again. As for how and when he joined, I can’t say now. That is, I don’t remember the date he joined.

I’d like to say a few words about my first trip to see Yevhen.

I decided to go to Yevhen for the first time in April, before Easter. But before that, I went to Yevhen’s mother in Volyn. I saw his mother, and I think his sister-in-law was there—a relatively young relative. We exchanged thoughts, and that was it. I didn’t dare say that I was going to see Yevhen; I wanted to do it secretively. I was such a coward that I was afraid to admit to his mother and that relative that I was going to Yevhen! Yevhen later reproached me for it: “See,” he said, “a Jew would never have done that.” I said, “Maybe so, I agree, but I wanted,” I said, “to do it in absolute secrecy.” I was afraid they would detain me somewhere, arrest me—after all, it was a gang we were dealing with. I didn’t even bring greetings, because I hadn’t said I intended to go to Yevhen. I simply went to them to see the situation and tell Yevhen about it.

I go to Kyiv and visit Yevhen’s wife, Valeriia Andriievska, and tell her I’m planning to go. She gives me some advice. Then I go to Valeriy Illia and tell him. He wasn’t being watched; he wasn’t considered dangerous. At that time, he lived on Tychyna Avenue on the other side of the Dnipro. We were talking and talking, and I said, “I should go see Yevhen, but I don’t have a partner, that’s how we live. And I don’t know who to ask to go with me. It’s hard and a bit scary to go there alone.” This shook him to the core, and he immediately agreed to go. In other words, I provoked him, to be frank. I don’t know if Valentyna was happy about it—probably not very, because I saw no enthusiasm from her. But the next day, we were already on our way to buy tickets.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Valentyna—that’s his wife, the poetess Otroshchenko? We studied together at the university...

P.P. Rozumnyi: His wife. The next day we go to buy plane tickets. He finds money somewhere... And I don’t remember where I got the money. It was my own money; no one gave me money for the plane. What to buy to take there? Apples. “We’ll buy apples,” I say, “in Moscow, there are no good apples here, they have good ones there. We’ll buy onions here, onions are cheap here.” We bought onions, garlic, and some other vegetables. In Moscow, we bought more apples. I’d like to mention that when we were buying the tickets, his wife Valentyna accompanied us and was clearly unhappy. But it was too late, he had already decided: we were going.

We flew into Ulan-Ude. The next flight would be in about a day because it didn’t fly every day, I think.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And where was the flight to?

P.P. Rozumnyi: To Bagdarin. And Valeriy—what do you think?—orders us to hitchhike. I say, “It’s madness to hitchhike through this Siberia! Look at the map,” I say, “it’s to the northeast, the roads aren’t even properly marked, just dotted lines.” But he was stubborn and that was that. He was already somewhat, I would say, dissatisfied with this trip and wanted to get it over with quickly. Just like when I was on trial: sentence me quickly, it’s already terribly hard for me to go through all this, announce the verdict quickly, then I’ll calm down—that’s how I felt at the trial. And what do you think? We ask people which road leads to Bagdarin. We get on that road and start thumbing, like idiots. It was getting dark, in the afternoon.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And it must be hundreds of kilometers there, right?

P.P. Rozumnyi: Six hundred kilometers! It’s madness! I say, “We’ll have to hitchhike more than once.” And so it was. Some “boby” [a Soviet-era van] picks us up. Where is he going? He stops at farms along the way. The farms, true, are by the road. And why is he stopping? The workers there got their pay and haven’t watered the cows for three days.

V.V. Ovsiienko: They’re drinking themselves, but not giving the cows any water.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Drinking, that’s exactly right. They drink all the water. We drive around these farms, and late at night we arrive in some village called Romanivka, where the plane to Bagdarin makes a stopover. We look for a hotel there in the twilight. We found a two-story wooden building—it turned out to be the hotel. We spend the night there until morning. In the morning, it’s back to hitchhiking. We go to a river that was frozen so solid that cars were still driving on it. In April, cars were still driving on the ice—that’s how frozen to the bottom that little river was. They showed us that if we got across the river, there would be cars heading to Bagdarin. A KamAZ truck picks us up and lets us in the cab. The driver is young, glancing at us... Valeriy looks like a Georgian, so the driver keeps looking at him, wondering if he can get a lot of money out of him, because Georgians have a lot of money, that’s a known fact. We had very little money—just enough for the tickets back and that was it. I already feel that we’re doing the wrong thing, that we’ve gotten into a mess. We drive and drive, another three hundred kilometers to go, and the day isn’t that long there. We drove until night, we’re driving at night. A car is coming towards us, flashing its lights. Our driver gets out, talks for a long time with the driver of the oncoming car. We exchange glances—something is wrong, we could get robbed here or something else could happen, because it’s a wasteland. But somehow, it turned out okay. And I have that little knife, my only weapon, the one they later took from me. Mykola Kholodnyi gave me that knife when he visited me in Pishchanyi Brid in the Kirovohrad region. I asked Kholodnyi for it myself. So, with great fear, I would say, we finally reached Yevhen late at night and found him—or maybe it was already morning, I don’t recall now. We drove all night and arrived in the morning—I think that’s how it was. We spent the night on the road several times. Well, Yevhen was very happy, it was Easter. He was very happy about the whole thing. We spent the whole day relaxing, drinking tea, he was telling stories—well, it was a great joy for us and for him. He didn’t expect us—because we came without warning. Endless conversations and more conversations.

The next day, the conversation somehow turned to what could come of our trip, what punishments our “mentors” would write out for us. Yevhen said with some emphasis, “Oh, that,” he said, “they won’t write anything out for you—it’s more likely I’ll get something for this. And along with me, they might write you a prescription, so to speak, as conspirators.” I see my Valeriy turn green, then yellow, and fall silent, completely silent. What do you think? We wake up early the next morning, and we don’t see Valeriy. Valeriy is gone, Valeriy has vanished. The airfield is a stone’s throw away. It turns out, Valeriy had already flown away.

V.V. Ovsiienko: And how did you find out he had flown away?

P.P. Rozumnyi: One moment, it was a bit different. Yevhen went to work, and I was still sleeping. Yevhen comes back for lunch and discovers that Valeriy is gone. I say, “He’s not here.” We go to the airfield and find out that Valeriy has left. They register who leaves, you see. “How could this be,” Yevhen says in such despair, “how can one just leave like that, how?” And I say, “Maybe it’s related to the bold suggestion you made yesterday about our shared future in connection with this visit.” He simply ran away without saying a word. Yevhen was terribly bewildered and nervous. I stayed for another day or two and then left. That’s how my first visit ended. Well, I’ve already told you about the second visit.

(The second time?) Yevhen passed on a note for Ivan Dziuba (I still have it to this day, written in a notebook, without an address or anything. I’d like to give it back to Yevhen someday, I still have that notebook) and asked me to visit Dziuba, and he asked me to visit Sakharov in Moscow. I didn’t go, and I wasn’t planning to—I had no reason to visit Sakharov. If I’m carrying out such a mission, why should I go to Sakharov? And I didn’t get to see Dziuba then because I was arrested soon after. I then went to Krasivskyi, traveling here and there. I return one day—there’s a summons for me to report to the police. “They can do without me,” I thought, and went on my way. I went to Sokulskyi, told him that the police were summoning me for some reason.

But before that, I’ll tell you how I got this knife. I had two knives. I went to a small town near Bagdarin, I think it’s called Malene. It was somehow more cultured there, with relatively large stores. I went into a hardware store and saw that they were selling hunting knives for seven rubles each. I ask if I can buy one. Yes, you can, for seven rubles. No one asks for any documents, no permits. I bought it. I brought it and showed it to Yevhen—it was still greased. He looked at me as if to say, what a child, playing with knives. He didn’t say anything special.

Yevhen prepared a package that I was supposed to hide. In Ulan-Ude, while waiting for the plane, I went into the city for the whole day. It was maybe fifteen kilometers from the airport. The bag was heavy and inconvenient, why would I carry it around for a whole day? I checked it into a storage locker. They must have searched it in advance, because during boarding they pull it aside: we need to look in your backpack. They look and immediately find—they didn’t have to look long—those knives in the backpack pocket. They knew where they were. They drew up a report right there, with witnesses present, and they delayed the plane for about two hours because of it. They give me back the hunting knife but take the pocketknife. It was written down that way in the search report, and the witnesses signed that it was so.

I’m heading home, I stop in Ivano-Frankivsk to see my son Taras, and I give him that knife, thinking that since I already have a police summons, I’ll give the knife to my son. I think, so they don’t take it, I’ll take it to Taras. I hid it there behind his books on a shelf—they later found it there, they searched Taras’s place too.

ARREST ON OCTOBER 8, 1979. THE INVESTIGATION

They asked for that knife when they searched my place. They showed up at my house on October 8th. That morning I had gone to the field to gather walnuts—we have a walnut grove there. I came back, brought a bag of walnuts, and I see a blue car near my yard, a car by the neighbor’s, and another car by the other neighbor’s. I think, “What’s with all the cars?” I still don’t guess that they’ve come for me, it still seems to me that the police are joking with me. I go into the yard—and a lieutenant colonel, tall as the ceiling, about two meters, is walking towards me. “Are you Rozumnyi?” he asks. “Yes, I am,” I say. “Well, let’s go.” And in the house, a search is already in full swing—they’re already turning things upside down, they’ve thrown out the firewood, my mother is standing there terrified, with two witnesses. I say, “What is this robbery? I’m not home, you could have waited, or what.” Robbery—that’s what I called it, they remained silent, no one was outraged. “Get your things, we’re going.” I say, “What? They’re searching my house, and I have to get my things?” “Get your things, we’re going.” Well, I start getting my things, but I say, “You have no right to take me from my house until the search is over.” “We do.” And he’s pulling me—come on, come on, he says, hurry up. I say, “Is this a search? This is a mugging.” Nothing, they swallowed that too. I said “robbery” and I said “mugging.” And my mother was terrified for life—that I wasn’t speaking to them very politely.

They took me to the police station and assigned me to a Captain Tkachenko. He was soon promoted to major; during the investigation, he showed his friend in front of me that he had been promoted to the rank of major.

So, the date of arrest is October 8, 1979, I remember it exactly. I told them: “Just yesterday we celebrated Constitution Day, and today you are violating the Constitution.” Back then, Constitution Day was on the seventh. I think it was a Sunday. This Tkachenko—not a very high-caliber investigator, as I understood it—started writing reports. I say, “Why are you speaking to me in Russian? I want to be spoken to in Ukrainian. You,” I say, “have been dragging me around my whole life for the Ukrainian language, so at least speak Ukrainian to me.” He thought for a moment, took his papers, and quickly walked out and disappeared somewhere, without even leaving me in anyone’s charge. He was gone for a long time. He reappeared and began to write the report in Ukrainian and speak it as best he could, but still, in Ukrainian. From then on, the reports were only in Ukrainian. He questioned me all day until evening, writing reports, doing it all slowly. It was unusual for him to write in Ukrainian.

Then in the evening, they take me somewhere. They brought me to the regional prosecutor’s office. The deputy prosecutor is sitting there, they introduce him to me—Obikhod, or some name like that.

V.V. Ovsiienko: There was some Obikhod...

P.P. Rozumnyi: And now Obikhod is the Deputy Prosecutor General.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Ah, maybe it’s the same one? (Mykola Obykhod, a native of the Zhytomyr region, did not work in the Dnipropetrovsk region. —V.O.)

P.P. Rozumnyi: A short Ukrainian surname like that. He first asked, “What are your complaints about the search?” “What complaints? I was arrested before the search was even finished.” “The law allows it.” “Then,” I say, “allow me to see the search report.” I was very interested in what they had found at my place. He had the search report at hand—he gives it to me. I read it—there’s nothing there to make me worry, everything is in order. Sitting around the perimeter of the room are a lieutenant colonel, a colonel, a major, and my captain. They are all terrified in front of the prosecutor—it surprised me that they were like children before him. I was the only one there who wasn’t afraid of anyone, it seems to me, I sat there calmly. Well, not that calmly, but at least without any outward fear. The prosecutor reads me the arrest warrant. Well, what, I wasn’t about to thank him. They led me out.

They led me out and are taking me to prison. They drove and drove—a big gate, about five meters high, made of iron. When that gate slammed shut behind me, I felt my soul sink into my heels—it wasn’t just fear, it was bewilderment, some semi-abnormal state. But I quickly came to my senses, thinking: fine, I’m going to be afraid of them now... But my whole life I’ve done nothing but trip them up, and now I’m going to be afraid of them? Weren’t they bound to catch me sooner or later? And that immediately dispelled all my fear, and I became almost cheerful in prison.

These were my first impressions. Well, and those experiences—they are not interesting.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Were you taken to a cell right away?

P.P. Rozumnyi: No, they took me to some floor and, imagine this, took me into the room where the guards are, and at the table sits someone who looks familiar, smiling at me: “Well, Petro Pavlovych, you’ve arrived?” I say, “I think I remember you.” I had a student in Solone with the surname Tolmachov. Apparently, one of those Ukrainized Muscovites, but I never heard him speak Russian, he was just an ordinary student. Now he works in the prison and, so to speak, treated me with some leniency, as I understood from his words: “Well, where should we put you? We’ll probably put you in the ‘obizhenka’.” And what is an “obizhenka”? Do you know what an “obizhenka” is?

V.V. Ovsiienko: Yes, I know, I know.

P.P. Rozumnyi: Well, I found out then too. So, how do you know?

V.V. Ovsiienko: It’s the cell where they throw the raped, the beaten—the “offended.”

P.P. Rozumnyi: The raped, beaten, broken for some reason... I didn’t yet know what it was, and that guard couldn’t find a normal cell for me. It turns out, normal people sit in the “obizhenka,” they don’t beat each other, because they’re beaten themselves. They were constantly showing off in that “obizhenka”—cell number 90, I think—their bruised backsides. Blue, completely blue, not a spot of healthy flesh on them, a beaten back... Not to me personally, but they would show each other. And I ended up there. They get food parcels, and these “offended” ones feed me. They give me a piece of salo, some bread. I was there for a few days, and then they move me to a regular cell, number ninety-two, which is supposed to hold 18 people, but there were 28, I think, and more.

V.V. Ovsiienko: Wow.

P.P. Rozumnyi: There was a second tier... People were lying all over...

V.V. Ovsiienko: And all in smoke, right?

P.P. Rozumnyi: In smoke, it was terrible, and the stench. The toilet, the slop bucket, was right there... Not a slop bucket, but a water closet. The slop bucket was in other places... It was all wild and unfamiliar. They take me to the “pakhan” [cell boss]. The pakhan, lying down, as if in a daze, doesn’t even really look at me, because as I saw, the guards treated him with drugs at night; he was their trusted man there. He questions me about where, how, what, which article [of the criminal code], and immediately gives a verdict that it’s article 222—not what they wanted, I had something else. And then: “Which cell were you in?” I told him. Oh, they all ran over to look at me: “Oh, he was in the ‘obizhenka’?” The pakhan calmed them down. He had been warned, I understand, because the people in the “obizhenka” are those who are despised, who are beaten and killed, but I had no conflict with anyone. They put me in the “obizhenka” on the first day. I’m telling you, as soon as they brought me in, they put me there.

They admit me. The next day they take me to be fingerprinted. I saw for the first time how it’s done: that evening they only took my index fingers, one and then the other, but here they took my whole palm. Some gloomy sergeant brought me in and was telling the doctor, or whoever he was in the white coat, how yesterday they had gotten so drunk at a restaurant on such-and-such avenue that today... He shook his head. “What a crew,” I thought. Then, referring to me, he said, “People like that should be killed.” I remembered how Yevhen told me, when I first visited him, how when he was in the transit prison in Irkutsk, the prison warden came to him and said, “People like that should be killed!” And Yevhen told him, “If a pig had horns, it would have gored all the people.” And I, without turning around, say, “If a pig had horns, it would have gored all the people.” He lunged at me with his fists, but the other guy said, “Stop, stop, stop”—and didn’t let him. I escaped without a beating. “If a pig had horns, it would have gored all the people”—just like Yevhen, so I said.

Well, I was “blessed,” and I sat in that cell throughout the investigation until the trial. I saw the system, understood it. How this pakhan goes somewhere as if for treatment, how he eats his fill, how they give him marijuana or something somewhere, and he comes back and gives orders. And everyone carries out his orders: who to beat, who to spare. How they squeezed the life out of those people, how they beat the young men who wouldn’t confess to the investigators. They were tortured not only by the investigators but also by their cellmates. Once they caught some brothers from Crimea who were involved in theft, but they never revealed what they stole or where. One of them was in our cell, and the other was somewhere else. They beat him so badly that I can’t imagine how he lived after those beatings. They beat him like that several times, and he didn’t appear again; I think he went to the hospital.

I won’t tell any more about prison life, it’s boring to listen to. I’ll describe it someday in more or less detail, naming some names. But here’s one more episode. They brought in a young man, handsome, with a beard and mustache—well, you could have painted a portrait of Jesus Christ from him. He had broken into the “Slavutych” department store, hidden somewhere before closing, put on a couple of suits, and wanted to walk out in the morning—they caught him. He was such a handsome, attractive man that they decided to rape him. You can imagine a big bull of a man, a young punk—they sent him up to the second bunk, and that bull silently committed this outrage under the blanket... The young man resisted, but they beat him with their fists from both sides, so he could no longer struggle, or they would kill him on the spot... He was carried out of the cell, shocked, half-alive. I never saw him again.

And they also put me in a cell with a drug addict. We sat there, just the two of us. A cell for four, the prison was overcrowded, but there were only two of us. So they deliberately put him with me. He was on the top bunk, I was on the bottom. At first, I couldn’t even sleep because I felt he might attack me. He was some completely degraded drug addict, this wasn’t his first conviction. But then I looked at him more closely: he ate almost nothing, only drank water. I think I can handle him: if he attacked me, I could overpower him. Well, he didn’t attack me, but I was uneasy.

Then they moved me to another cell with a murderer—a man of mixed Georgian and Estonian descent, as he told me, with the surname Peder, because his father was Estonian and his mother was Georgian. But he had Georgian mannerisms, a Georgian accent, Georgian cynicism. He had been visiting his lover, who was married, and her husband was killed. Supposedly the husband attacked him, but he killed him. A taxi driver was paid 700 rubles to transport the body. Well, they were caught, and she was too. From this cell where we were sitting, he would tap messages through the pipes to his wife, who was in a cell below. They were probably placed like that on purpose so they could talk to each other. And this is strictly forbidden, it’s a serious matter. He said that the woman would get out because she was innocent of everything. She’s a pediatric dentist. She would wait for him. And when he gets out, they would go to Riga and live happily there. I say, “How can you live happily after you’ve killed a person?” “But I’m not guilty!”—and he glares at me like that. He told me a hundred times how that man attacked him, how his whole life flashed before his eyes, as if in a kaleidoscope. Because supposedly that man was going to kill him, but he killed him instead.

I think that’s enough for today.

V.V. Ovsiienko: It’s 12 o’clock.

Thus Mr. Petro Rozumnyi finished his story on April 29, 2001, and promised to record the rest on cassette himself.

I won’t tell any more about prison life, it’s boring to listen to. I’ll describe it someday in more or less detail, naming some names. But here’s one more episode. They brought in a young man, handsome, with a beard and mustache—well, you could have painted a portrait of Jesus Christ from him. He had broken into the “Slavutych” department store, hidden somewhere before closing, put on a couple of suits, and wanted to walk out in the morning—they caught him. He was such a handsome, attractive man that they decided to rape him. You can imagine a big bull of a man, a young punk—they sent him up to the second bunk, and that bull silently committed this outrage under the blanket... The young man resisted, but they beat him with their fists from both sides, so he could no longer struggle, or they would kill him on the spot... He was carried out of the cell, shocked, half-alive. I never saw him again...

I think that’s enough for today.

V.V. Ovsiienko: 12 o’clock, midnight.

Thus Mr. Petro Rozumnyi finished his story on April 29, 2001, and promised to record the rest on cassette himself.

P.P. Rozumnyi: So, after a long break, I will try to continue the story of my past. November 25, 2001, village of Pshenychne.

My investigation is proceeding very slowly, my Captain Tkachenko calls me in for questioning once a week, speaks rather listlessly, is picky about my words, often asks me to repeat myself. It’s obvious that he has nothing to talk to me about, there is no subject for conversation. But the investigation continues. One time, the summons for questioning was even accompanied by the arrival of another officer, and they, my captain and the captain who came, started a conversation about their military promotions. And they talked about it for so long that they forgot about me. My captain promised to have a new uniform made for his major’s epaulets. And with that, he let me go.

That’s how my investigation went. In cell No. 92, where I was initially held, no one bothered me and I bothered no one, I didn’t get involved with anyone to the point of conflict. But then, for some reason, they decided to move me to a cell in the so-called “fork.” In the Dnipropetrovsk prison, “forks” are what they call the wings extending from the main prison building, which form the shape of the Moscow letter “E,” because the prison was built during the time of the infamous Empress Catherine, and in her honor, such an important building was designed by architects as the letter “E,” or the Ukrainian “Е.” On these “forks,” there are separate cells for two, for four, and even for one. So, they move me there to a cell for four, but there are only two of us.

Some young man of indeterminate age, somewhere in his early thirties, immediately showed a terrible interest in me. He latched onto me and didn’t give me a chance to tell him anything about myself. Although he didn’t ask anything, he told an incredible amount about himself. It turns out his surname is Peder, his mother is Georgian. He has some kind of green eyes, ash-colored hair, and the predatory, I would say, snarl of an Asian. He recounts his story to me time and again. He insists that he supposedly went to visit some woman, but her husband came home and a fight broke out, and supposedly they wanted to kill him, this Peder, there, but he anticipated the intentions of his lover’s husband, a hammer appeared from somewhere, with which he killed this man. And having killed him, he called a taxi, paid the driver 700 rubles, took the body of the murdered man, and threw it somewhere into the Dnipro. Since his lover, that is, the wife of the murdered man, was also a participant in the murder, she was also in prison. What’s interesting is that they were in cells from which they could tap messages through the iron pipes. They regularly tapped messages or talked through a mug at a certain time every day. The most interesting thing, in my opinion, in this episode was that after each conversation, he would recount to me in detail what she was telling him, how they would build their future life. She, it turns out, is a pediatric dentist—a rare profession. This rare profession would provide them with great material security and they would live happily after this whole saga, which, in his opinion, would end very favorably for him, because he didn’t kill. That is, he killed, but out of necessity, supposedly in self-defense. He recounted this to me for a long time and many times. A kaleidoscope of past events was spinning in his imagination, as happens to people on the eve of death—this is known to psychologists. And he would recount this kaleidoscope to me, shaking his head, repeating the same thing over and over, and it was obvious that he had memorized it to tell the investigators and judges. This argument was too weak, as he kept hinting that his mother lived in Georgia and would come to Dnipropetrovsk to meet with the right people who could influence their fate. They would be happy together when this was over. If his lover was released and he was not (she допускає that he would be sentenced to some term), she would sit at the prison gates day and night and not leave until he was released. And when he got out, they would go to Riga and live happily. I listened to this story, listened, and then I say, “But how do you think you can live happily after such a murder? After all, no matter what, you have the murder of a person in his own home on your conscience, under very unfavorable circumstances for you.” This Georgian grinned widely, looked at me predatorily, paced around the cell, as much as it was possible to pace in a cell, gesticulated, and fiercely argued that this murder on his part was absolutely forced and that this forced step could not be a crime.

That’s how our days passed with that Peder. I no longer touched upon or bothered him with those moral questions about his bright future in Riga, as he imagined it with his lover. This went on for about two weeks, and then they move me to another cell. Again in the so-called “fork,” in a four-person cell, but again there are only two of us. A young man, completely pale, somewhat frail-looking, his surname is Chornoivanenko, and his “klykukha” [nickname], as he tells me, is “Chorny” [Black]. He is a drug addict, a first-rate drug addict. He injected himself with a decoction of poppy straw and saw the happiness of life in this. He had been imprisoned twice, and this was his third term on the horizon. He earned it on purpose: he wanted to go back to the zone, because there was nothing for him to do on the outside. In the zone, he had very good conditions, straw was constantly delivered to him in various ways, they would cook it and inject it—or whatever else they did with that straw. But they were completely happy there, because the work was not burdensome and the food was sufficient for someone like him. He didn’t need vodka—drug addicts don’t drink vodka, and he was quite well off there. He decided to go back for a third time. Moreover, he told me how they even earn money on this straw in the zone. This straw comes to them already as a decoction. They buy it. And money circulates in the zone. They have good money in the zone. Obviously, he was driven on one hand by the desire to be pumped full of this stuff, and on the other, by the desire to earn money from it. So, for these mercenary reasons, he decided to return to the zone. How did he do it? He went to his sister, who lives in a private house somewhere on the outskirts of Dnipropetrovsk. There was a large refrigerator in the yard. He opened it and threw out the meat and other products that were inside. His sister and brother-in-law called the police. The police came, took him away, and so he sat there waiting for his few years for petty hooliganism. “Why,” I ask, “did you go to your sister, and not someone else, if you decided to provoke a new sentence for yourself?” He says, “In another place they could have beaten me, but here it’s my sister and brother-in-law, they didn’t try to beat me, it was peaceful.” That’s how easily he went for a third term.

At first, I was very anxious about my cellmate, because he was a drug addict. He had a pale face, bulging eyes, a nasal voice—his body was quite weakened by those drugs. For example, he wouldn’t eat the watery soup or kasha they brought us. He mainly drank, and he had nothing to drink but water, so he drank water and lived on that.

I think this was one of the attempts to have a drug addict get even with me. Because in his aggressiveness, which they sometimes experience—they don’t give him the substance he needs to lift his mood—he could have attacked me, injured me in some way, or even strangled me. From the very beginning, I felt that he might have such intentions and that he was capable of it. He lay on the upper bunk diagonally, and I lay diagonally below. I could see him and he could see me constantly. I often woke up at night and saw him looking at me. This, of course, did not contribute to a peaceful sleep. I lived in anxiety for about a week, and then I calmed down. I felt that if he did attack me with some evil intentions, I could handle him, despite the fact that he was young. But he didn’t demonstrate his strength—he simply didn’t have it. He was constantly planning how to deceive someone. He was always engaging the inmates who brought us the soup in some scheme. And indeed, one time they brought him boots, for which he promised to give 50 rubles. He took the boots, didn’t give the 50 rubles, and that was the end of it, because there’s no one to complain to about such a matter there. They took these boots from someone and wanted money for them, but they would be punished for such a deal. So they kept quiet. He even befriended me—I felt that he was well-disposed towards me. He listened to my stories, my biography, and this impressed him. So much so that he wanted to give me those boots when I was going to the zone. But I refused the boots: I thought, someone might recognize them or something. Then he asked me to buy him as many cigarettes as possible with my own money. I did him this favor, got some cigarettes for myself too, although I wasn’t an active smoker then, just occasionally. It was allowed to buy things with your own money.

That’s how I passed the time until my trial. There was another interesting episode. They gave us literature from the prison library. All the books were surprisingly shabby. I had never seen such books anywhere in my life: each one was torn, tattered, with gnawed and ripped-out pages, all sorts of inscriptions—but they were still books. I came across some magazine without a title, without a cover, which talked about the American-British convoys that supplied the Soviet Union with equipment, ammunition, and food during the war via the North and Barents Seas to Arkhangelsk, to the ports on the White Sea, even to Novaya Zemlya. And one interesting episode caught my attention. A certain captain of a warship, a Mr. Smith, sank a German submarine, and when the crew members of the sunken German submarine surfaced, according to international rules of conduct at sea, this British warship should have picked up these people floating on the waves of the North Sea. Captain Smith ordered that none of the German submariners be picked up and sailed on his course. This ended with the Admiralty, upon learning of this episode, summoning the captain, relieving him of his command, and appointing him to a transport ship, which was being convoyed while carrying food and ammunition for the Soviet Union. So, Captain Smith was severely demoted: he was one of a dozen ship captains sailing in the so-called seventeenth convoy. This convoy was literally destroyed by German aviation based at Norwegian airfields. Only two damaged ships somehow miraculously survived. One docked at Novaya Zemlya, and another broke through to Arkhangelsk—somehow it managed to evade the attacks of German aviation. For every ship sunk, German aviation paid with one Junkers-78 bomber. These were suicide pilots who went to certain death, but in return, they dropped their bombs precisely on target, and the ship would inevitably sink. This prompted a remark from one captain of the British flotilla who survived: “Something new is happening in the methods of warfare, completely new.” But what struck me most here was the episode that followed. Almost all the ships were sunk, and many sailors were saved on rafts. They were picked up by German submarines that were nearby and small surface ships that had come into the area. When they had picked up everyone they could, it turned out that among those picked up, one captain was missing—Captain Smith, who had once failed to pick up the German submariners who had been saved after their submarine was sunk. This struck me so much that I had to share this news with my cellmates. My cellmates listened attentively and commented something like this: “Serves him right, that Captain Smith.” That was the comment.

THE TRIAL IN SOLONE

My Captain Tkachenko, and now a major, informs me that the trial will take place in Dnipropetrovsk. They even set a date: December 14, 1979. But a day or two later, they call me in and announce that the trial will be in Solone, again on December 14. So, on December 14, early in the morning, they take me in a special “voronok” [prisoner transport van] to Solone. When the vehicle stopped, it was strange for me to see through a crack in the window the legs of citizens crossing an intersection. I remember even having the thought: aren’t these citizens ashamed that their compatriots are driven around in such closed vehicles, transported like cattle? And I remembered myself: was I ashamed, did I think about it? It seemed to me that I did. I wanted to hear an answer from others—there was no answer.

They bring me to Solone and put me in a cell. Here are all the familiar policemen, all so official and incorruptible, although I didn’t approach them or try to talk to them. There was no conversation with me at all, everything was dry, unfriendly, and harsh. They brought me to the courtroom. But before that, I had somehow managed to let people know that there would be a trial. I don’t even remember how it happened, but I think my son Pavlo and my ex-wife came for a visit and I told them the trial would be on such-and-such a date. They came, and some acquaintances came: Ivan Sokulskyi, Fedir Klymenko. And that was all, no one else was there. But managing the corridor, as I was later informed, was a certain Harkusha—a former head of the education department, a scoundrel of the first order. He was chasing away those who wanted to get into the trial, he wouldn’t let them in. For example, he told my niece, Nadiia Mykhailivna, point-blank: “There’s nothing for you to do there, don’t go in.” She says, “Why do you say there’s nothing to do? They are trying my uncle there.” “So what?” In short, he didn’t let her in. That is, he was doing the policemen’s job, so the police wouldn’t have to do it, because that would be a violation of the law. The party functionary Harkusha was engaged in violating the law.

So, they are trying me. At the table sits the well-known judge Danylchenko, some district committee floozy Yarymenko, and the former judge Yaremenko—a man without principles or morals. These are the “people’s assessors.” Well, there was nothing to hope for from such a court, and I decided to use my trump card by challenging the court. I declared my non-confidence in Judge Danylchenko. I had three points of non-confidence—I had composed them beforehand, because I thought that Judge Danylchenko might take on the case—he was the chief judge there and the main confidant of the party and the government.

As my first point, I recalled the following. I was once fired from my job at a bakery with the help of foul language. I presented my statement with the signatures of witnesses and demanded that the bakery director, Tretiak, be punished as a scoundrel and a hooligan who had insulted me. He, Judge Danylchenko, said that it was petty hooliganism. I say, “If it’s petty hooliganism, then please punish him for petty hooliganism. Such things cannot be ignored, because they compromise a person and the authorities.” Judge Danylchenko said, “If you continue to be a smart-aleck, I will call the police.” I decided not to be a “smart-aleck” any further and left him. This was the first argument for why I could not trust such a judge. The second point. I appealed to the judge that our brigade had not been paid enough for our work. We worked under contract for over 6 months, so we should be paid extra according to the law as permanent workers. We filed a lawsuit with the same Danylchenko. That Danylchenko considered our case and made the following decision: since the brigade earned as much as metallurgists, i.e., 300-400 rubles a month (it was contract work, we were building wooden duck houses), we had no reason to be paid extra, because we were already earning at the level of metallurgists, so we should be completely satisfied. To my remark that his decision did not take into account the letter and spirit of the law, he said that he would like me to stop being a “smart-aleck” and listen to what the judge says. Who was in charge here—he, the judge, or the plaintiff? So, he denied our claim, and even argued in such a primitive way. This was the second argument why Judge Danylchenko was unworthy of deciding my cases—because he had already decided unfairly twice, not according to the law, but contrary to the law and the rules of human conduct.

Judge Danylchenko was troubled by these arguments; those present listened to them attentively, and they seemed absolutely justified. Therefore, he became very worried. He whispered with his assistants, that is, with the so-called people’s assessors. But contrary to my arguments, he decided to continue the court session and addresses me as if nothing had happened. I stand up and say again, “I refuse to participate in such a session where the judge inspires no confidence whatsoever. And please, do not address me anymore. This is my legal right—to challenge the court, I have provided arguments that are more than sufficient.” This completely shocked my judge. He jumped up, took both of his assessors, they went into the deliberation room, sat there for at least 30 minutes, came out, and announced: “To postpone the court session to December 21 due to the need to summon additional witnesses.” “Well, I’ll be,” I thought. Instead of telling the truth: due to a lack of confidence in the judge, he invented an argument—“additional witnesses.”

And so it happened: the trial was adjourned, I was taken back to prison, and I wait for the court session on December 21 in Solone. In Solone, I was placed in a cell. In the corridor of those cells, some gentleman from my village “accidentally” meets me. He had moved away a long time ago, but he was originally from my village. Smiling, he asks what I would like to pass on to my family. There was no shortage of provocateurs and informers anywhere, but such a primitive method surprised me. I said that everything was already known, there was nothing to pass on.

On December 21, they again selected an audience—these were district committee members. When I looked, half of them were my former students. I say, “I taught you well, that you’ve come, so to speak, to be extras at my trial.” These are representatives of various services. There were three or four KGB men, at least. At least, one such man was sitting next to Fedir Klymenko, ready to twist his arms back immediately. Another one sat down next to Ivan Sokulskyi as if by chance. My niece, Nadia, was also there, and they brought my son, Taras, supposedly as a witness. Well, such a witness was necessary, because I had indeed left that ill-fated knife at his apartment, I put it between his books. When they searched, they found this knife. That is, Taras could act as a witness because the knife was indeed found in his home.

That trial was the most boring spectacle one could observe. There was no material, but there was a trial. They appointed a judge I didn’t know from Dnipropetrovsk, a Galician by his accent, fluent in Ukrainian. But the assessors were the same as in the previous trial. I didn’t challenge them this time, because I had no such reasons. This judge, with the surname Leon—a pale creature, exhausted from anger or malnutrition, or for some other reason. His appearance was such that one could expect nothing good from him. He was somehow angry in and of himself, because he was suffering physiologically—obviously, he had a stomach ailment or something else. The prosecutor sternly demanded punishment for such an offense as carrying a weapon. And the lawyer, whom I had not requested but was appointed to me—a slippery creature who also asked for punishment, but to mitigate it because the knives were not used in practice. If they had been used, then punishment would have been necessary, the lawyer noted, in a proper manner. No one said a word that there might be no punishment at all.

They gave me the last word—I wrote it down, I will publish it separately. I didn’t read it properly, but in bits and pieces. The gist was something like this. The knife in question is a small pocketknife and could not be an instrument of crime in any way. The second knife is a hunting knife. It is indeed a cold weapon. But a weapon, I explained, is any object that can cause harm to a person, animal, or property in the hands of a certain person. Therefore, a knife in the hands of a loyal citizen is not a threat to anyone. For example, the peoples of the Caucasus, who are part of the Soviet Union, wear knives on their belts and no one has any complaints about that. But here in Ukraine, this matter is taken so seriously that carrying or possessing a cold weapon or a knife is a major crime. This is already a form of discrimination. I expressed myself something like that. That’s one thing. Then I asked to see the small knife. The judge showed it at my request—and it caused a sort of sigh, like a gasp, in the hall: what kind of knife is that, what is there to even talk about? This knife was recognized by the Kharkiv expertise as a cold weapon.

At the end of my final statement, I posed several rhetorical questions.

“What is this,” I said, gesturing towards the knives, “a Crusader’s sword, a Damascus saber, a domakha, a Cossack curved saber, a Turkish yataghan, or a samurai sword?” This question of mine caused a certain murmur in the hall. “This is just an ordinary frog-sticker. Such a knife,” I say, pointing to the smaller one, “was called a frog-sticker in my childhood, and no one suspected anyone of any crime. If we,” I concluded, “declare at every step that we are building a just society on the basis of developed socialism,”—here I paused—“then I am sure that this very evening, acquitted by this court, I will be drinking coffee at home.” With that, I finished. I did not drink coffee: 20 minutes later, they announced a three-year sentence in a general-regime colony. They took me back to prison...

MY LAMENT

before the judges, the prosecutor, and the lawyer—all these people formed a single whole, and that whole demanded my blood.

Sometime in February 1977, at a bus stop in the village of Pshenychne, I found a knife. It is a small, handmade creation, the handle made of colored plastic—a real souvenir knife, its place on the shelf of a souvenir shop. Made of good steel, with a tapered blade at the end—this nice little knife served well for opening tin cans, and in general, this knife performed the usual functions of a kitchen knife well. Sometimes I carried it with me. For example, when going to the field to bake potatoes. You take this knife to cut salo or peel potatoes. Or to the melon patch—I never went without this knife.

I, of course, have a rough idea of what can be called a cold weapon, but I had no suspicions about this knife. Besides my own objective understanding, this was facilitated by the fact that police officers of officer rank had seen this knife on me twice. Yes, on March 17, 1977, a search was conducted at my apartment in Ivano-Frankivsk. The head of this operation, Sr. Lt. Panylo, took this knife out of a desk drawer, examined it, and put it back. In his testimony, he does not deny this, stating that having a knife at home is not a crime.

The second time this knife was seen on me was on April 12, 1979, in Kyiv before boarding a plane to Moscow. A police lieutenant examined the knife and returned it to me.

These two inspections of the said knife further convinced me that it was an ordinary table knife. After all, one would think that at the slightest suspicion of its belonging to the category of cold weapons, the police officers would have certainly taken an interest in it.

But when boarding the plane in Ulan-Ude on April 24, 1979, during an inspection of my belongings in my backpack, they paid attention to this knife, confiscated it, and drew up a report. A month and a half later, I was informed that the knife had been expropriated and that no criminal case would be opened against me. This notification was signed by a police captain named Bernstein. But after some time, another captain, with the surname Koliadenko, decided to open a criminal case against me, as a result of which I am now before you, forced to make desperate efforts to prove the most obvious truth: this pitiful creation of an ordinary locksmith’s imagination is not a criminal object.

The Kharkiv expertise recognized this mini-knife as a cold weapon on the basis of precedent: knives of this type are classified as cold weapons. This recognition is completely unconvincing because it is based on the principle of so-called similarity. After all, it is perfectly clear that for such a determination, there must be a legal document—I will call it a code—where the parameters of the object would be specified and described, which would provide a legal basis for such a conclusion. To my great surprise, I discovered that no such code exists in this state and that in each case, investigators resort to the services of experts. Such a practice, allow me to note, is capable of allowing arbitrary interpretation in determining the nature of an object and, of course, contains the danger of arbitrary decision and determination. After all, with such an approach, with such criteria, one can go into any house, find knives, and classify them as a socially dangerous category of cold weapons.

The expertise defined the disputed knife as being of medium size. This definition can be supplemented with the epithets pitiful, meager, miniature, souvenir. Metaphors that very accurately characterize the conclusions of the expertise come to mind: if it’s gray, it must be a wolf, or fear has big eyes. In my childhood, I remember, similar creations were called frog-stickers. The characteristics of the Kharkiv expertise, that the knife “stabs and cuts,” cannot be convincing for the court, since any and every knife both stabs and cuts.

It turns out that the issue here is in whose hands such an object is found. The investigation, for example, did not establish that I have a tendency towards hooliganism or that I planned to stab anyone with this knife or commit a criminal slashing. To consider the question of carrying a knife in the abstract is—without any doubt—to go against common sense and not be in tune with the spirit of the law, which is created for man, not against man.

After all, from the time when man in the Stone Age learned to make knives from hard flint, from that time, therefore, the knife became and to this day serves as an object of primary and daily necessity. The appearance of the knife in Stone Age man left an imprint even on the very structure of man. It was no longer necessary to tear at prey—meat or plant roots—with claws; this was done with a knife. The human hand became more elegant, instead of claws, nails appeared, which look so attractive on ladies after a manicure. I am even tempted to know whether the flint knife of the Paleolithic era would also have been recognized by the Kharkiv experts as a cold weapon and whether Article 222 Part III of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR and accordingly Article 218 Part II of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR could have been applied to my ancestors who lived in caves and carried flint knives, and whether they could have been locked up in jail.

Our great poet wrote a poem on the subject of cold weapons:

Ой виострю товариша,

Засуну в халяву

Та й піду шукати правди

І тієї слави.

Ой піду я не лугами

Та й не берегами.

Ой піду я не шляхами,

А понад шляхами.

In such a context, the talk is, without a doubt, of a cold weapon. By quoting T. Shevchenko, I am hinting at the conditions under which one can speak of a cold weapon. After all, knives are the eternal companions of man throughout his existence, which cannot be said, for example, of firearms.

Thus, a rhetorical question arises. What are we actually talking about in my case? Is it the sword of a Roman warrior, a Cossack saber, a Turkish yataghan, or a samurai sword? Neither the first, nor the second, nor the third, nor the fourth. We are talking about a real frog-sticker, which so frightened the Kharkiv experts and caused, in the society of the 20th century, in a mighty world power that has atomic and hydrogen bombs, supersonic aircraft, powerful technology in its arsenal, thus, in a superpower, caused the preliminary arrest of a peaceful person, threw him into a terrible prison, and finally, put this person on trial and faced him with the prospect of a long deprivation of freedom, which in its essence is an unprecedented act in the civilized countries of today. How can one not repeat the assertion of pessimists that human morality lags behind progress! I will allow myself to state with complete certainty on the basis of literary and historical evidence that in Ukraine of the 18th - 19th centuries, no peacefully-minded and loyal person was punished in any way for carrying even a cold weapon, not to mention such a primitive knife as lies before the eyes of the judges today.

And if we take into account the circumstance that millions of people living in the USSR, in particular, the peoples of the Caucasus, generally always and constantly carry solid dagger-knives on their belts, it becomes quite obvious a clear paradox: a peaceful and loyal citizen in the very same state is brought to strict responsibility for carrying an object of primary necessity—a kitchen knife.

They say that in the 20s and 30s of this century—I myself remember one episode—in some houses, curved Cossack sabers and Turkish yataghans were hung on the walls—objects of pride for citizens, a reminder that the ancestors of the owners of these objects were Cossacks or Chumaks. Now these objects have been transferred to museums. But the point in this case is that at the time mentioned, possession of such objects was not a crime, because, I emphasize, in the hands of peaceful and loyal citizens, such objects were not considered a threat to society in any historical era, except ours.

But in my episode, the police authorities framed the matter with this ill-fated knife as if it were about a dangerous robber who did nothing but cut and stab everyone around him with this caricature of a knife. On October 8, 1979, a whole detachment of police led by a major arrives in two cars, they jump on me, push me out of the house and take me to Dnipropetrovsk, and the search in my house and among my belongings is conducted without my presence. O tempora, o mores! Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!

In April of this year, while in Buryatia in the town of Bagdarin, where my friend Yevhen Sverstiuk lives as a political exile, I went into a hardware store, where for seven rubles I bought a hunting knife. I must say that I had long been planning to join the society of hunters and fishermen. An opportunity arose to acquire a hunting knife as a piece of equipment. When they conducted a search in Ulan-Ude, they returned this knife to me after the search, and I brought it home. I recognize this knife as a cold weapon, as it has all the characteristics of such a weapon. The claims of witnesses from Ulan-Ude that I supposedly stated I had a hunting license are false.

I was going to register this hunting knife as soon as possible, especially considering that this knife was recorded in police documents.

We have the honor to live, as is known, in a state of all the people, in a state of developed socialism, where a new constitution exists with its, as is known, most humane principles. I very much hope that the judges, in deciding my, let’s be frank, problematic case, in which a crime can be seen only with a very strong imagination and with the help of a very powerful magnifying glass, will be objective. Thus, the judges in deciding my case, I hope, will fill with full-fledged content the words that characterize the most democratic state in the world.

Such filling is more than enough for my complete and total acquittal both before the law and before the unwritten moral code, and I will be drinking coffee at home this very evening.

December 25, 1979, village of Solone, Dnipropetrovsk region.

To be honest, this last word is rather listless. I couldn’t manage to speak in legal language. Even when I quoted Cicero—O tempora, o mores!—the prosecutor did not stop sleeping. He was not even moved by such an orator.

An addendum to the trial process. Somehow during the trial, I recalled that December 21, 1979, was the centenary of the birth of the monster, the embodiment of Satan and the devil, the tyrant and despot of all times and peoples, the product of the Moscow-Asian despotism, Joseph Stalin. And I will add that the verdict stated that 66 rubles should be deducted from me for the translations of papers from the Moscow language into Ukrainian. I had demanded this during the investigation, they did it, but at my expense, it turns out.

THE CELL FOR THE CONVICTED

Now I was placed in the cell for the convicted, and I had a certain freedom: I could go out into the corridor, and nowhere else, through two or three doors. Then they gave me the task of distributing food on the floor, that is, bringing it to each “embrasure,” as we called it, pouring it, and serving it into the cells. I didn't do the pouring, I just carried the vat, another guy poured. From the first day, we practiced giving everything away. Before that, we were instructed that whatever was left could not be given out as seconds, because it was strictly forbidden, and we would be punished for it. But we gave everything away. I said, “Give it all away, scrape the bottom.” My partner agreed. If there was bread left over, we gave that away too. After a while, they noticed, someone must have informed on us, and they kicked me out of there as someone who violates the rules.

They placed me in a cell with the right to go to the shower in the next room. And this was a great privilege, because they didn't take us to the bathhouse. There was no soap, but I bathed and thus eased my existence. So, we wait for the transport.

At the end of the year, someone informed me (we had no newspapers, of course) that the war in Afghanistan had begun. “How did it begin?” I ask. “Just like that: Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.” “Into Afghanistan?” I immediately explained what Afghanistan is, how one can wage war there, and what the result would be. In the 12th century, the Tatar-Mongols tried to conquer Afghanistan—they failed. Genghis Khan made an agreement with the tribes for permission to pass through Afghanistan to the Caucasus and Crimea and return. That is, he bought such a right for money. He passed without war through the routes of Afghanistan to the west, in the direction of Europe. “But,” I say, “later the British tried to establish themselves in Afghanistan—it didn't work. If they stayed longer in India, they were quickly driven out of Afghanistan. Thus, no one holds on there for long.” I say, “This is a dangerous war, it can be endless, because there is no large army there, but there are great natural fortresses—mountains, which allow one to hide and shoot from behind every rock.” My listeners listened to this attentively and one of them reported my thoughts about Afghanistan. The so-called “oper” (operative worker), a man with a Chinese face, summons me. He sat me down, squints his eyes, shakes his head, flashes the whites of his eyes, saying that I am conducting unfavorable propaganda in the cell. I say, “What propaganda? I don't understand what you're talking about.” “You were saying something there about Afghanistan?” “I was talking,” I say, “about the history of wars in Afghanistan.” And I repeat to him in somewhat smoothed-out tones what I said in the cell—what kind of territory it is, what kind of people live there, and what “successes,” in quotation marks, those who tried to go there had. He listened to this, advised me “not to talk so much,” as he said, and let me go. That was my first Afghan baptism.

THE TRANSPORT

They are preparing us for the transport. They herded us into a huge room on the ground floor. In the corner stands an overflowing slop bucket, it’s leaking, and no one cares to take it out. I care, but you need permission. In my naivety, I approach the first guard who appears to ask if we can take out the slop bucket so it doesn't stink so horribly, and so there's a place to relieve oneself. How he snarled at me, how he stomped his feet, how he promised not to take out the slop bucket, but to take me out feet first! Then I stopped bothering about that slop bucket, so it just kept flowing—a long stream across the room. People stepped over it, relieved themselves right there, and all this was in an atmosphere of stench, unpleasant to the extreme. I became convinced that these transports, the preparation for transports—are the most severe form of torment against a person that can be imagined. This is a Moscow creation that, I think, is not used anywhere else. Nowhere is such an inhuman atmosphere, such inhuman relations, allowed. Everywhere there are some rules, even among semi-savage peoples there are rules that do not allow a person to be abused in this way.

They lead us out to the “voronok” to be sent off in wagons, in the so-called “Stolypins.” Is it really necessary to herd people in with dogs? There's a line, everyone grabs the handrails, steps on the footboard, and gradually climbs up. But the convoy guard has to specifically rush them, he’s having fun, he sets the dog on them, the dog is almost biting from behind. He doesn't let it bite, but everyone jumps up on their knees, everyone bangs their knees, bangs their hands, before they can get into that wagon, because it's crowded all around, inconvenient. Well, they put us in the wagons. In the wagons, the same order. “Be quiet. Anyone who makes noise—we’ll take them out, we’ll beat them,” the guards warned. They would only take us to the toilet at certain hours. Either in the evening or in the morning, and that's it. Where we are going, no one says—it's a secret. But the experienced ones, who are not serving their first term, have heard that we are going first to Pyatykhatky, then to Zhovti Vody, then to Kryvyi Rih, then to Nikopol, then to Zaporizhzhia, and then to Dnipropetrovsk. Once a week, such a circuit of prisoner transport takes place. They are distributed to the zones in these districts, and taken from the zones to the prison—either for a new investigation or for transfer somewhere else. All this is done through the prison. And these wagons are just so that the prisoners are in them and don't escape anywhere.

So they brought us to Pyatykhatky. They put us on a siding somewhere. We were only allowed to relieve ourselves in the evening and in the morning. In the morning, we begged, we yelled, but no one paid any attention. Some prisoners had stocked up on plastic bags and relieved themselves in those bags. You can imagine what the situation was like in our “compartment.” Finally, they took me to the toilet, and I couldn't do it at all, because I had been sitting for too long, lying down, hadn't drunk any water. The guard yelled at me to hurry up, I asked him to wait a bit, because I hadn't done anything yet. I addressed him in such a way, he pricked up his ears: “Bandera, are you?” I say, “No, I'm not a Bandera, I'm a Vlasovite.” He thought for a moment, and while he was thinking and asking his partner what a Vlasovite was, I managed to relieve myself. That helped me. A Vlasovite helped me.

ZHOVTI VODY

They took me to the Zhovti Vody zone. “Well,” I thought, “there is nothing more vile than to think of creating a zone for 2,000 or more people in Zhovti Vody.” A concentration camp in Zhovti Vody—it’s a hint that a reliable barrier has been placed on our freedom, for it was in Zhovti Vody that Bohdan began the war for Ukraine’s independence 300 years ago. According to the Muscovites’ plan, we should remember that Zhovti Vody has ceased to be our hope. Zhovti Vody is our eternal prison, it’s a concentration camp without a term, forever. That’s how I felt in Zhovti Vody. A plain all around—you could see a little when you went up to the second floor. They housed us in barracks. There were quite a few of them—for 2,000 prisoners, it seemed. But they put three thousand of us there. They were constantly packing us in like that.

I immediately found acquaintances, they came up to me, recognized me, and started conversations. One of them, maybe I hadn't even seen him, but for some reason his face seemed very familiar, it was somehow very typical. This gentleman was from Bereznehuvate, who ended up in the zone for killing someone in a car accident; he was given seven years. He immediately began to tell me how he used to go to the district and how at every meeting—and he was the chief engineer at a collective farm—they would mention me. “How did you find out about me?” “Well, I looked at the list, it said Rozumnyi, so I remembered.” It turned out, he was in charge of all the zeks in the zone, a zek boss, so to speak (the work assigner): he distributed work, assigned people to brigades. He had already been tasked with starting negotiations with me. I seemed to recognize him—I had seen him somewhere, and more than once. I used to visit my acquaintance, Hryhoriy Ivanovych, in Bereznehuvate, maybe I saw him there. He promised to do me some favor. Well, I didn’t count on any favors, but the favor, it seems, was that I was assigned to a brigade that did electric welding. From the very beginning, I refused to take the welding equipment in my hands as something that wasn't suitable for me. For a day or two, this was at the level of a scandal with the foreman of the 22nd brigade and the head of the detachment, or whatever it was called. But then I still got my way: they assigned me not to weld, but only to grind down the nodes that form during welding with a special hand-held emery tool. The work was not so hard. I was always not up to snuff, there were always some nitpicks against me, but somehow I did the work. I had to lift iron boxes—not alone, but with four people, and stack them in piles. And by boxes, I mean these box-like structures with special lugs that had to be welded exactly to standard. They went to factories and plants to pack iron products in them, say, bolts, nuts, brackets. Those boxes were of a rather complex construction, they were of different sizes and had to be absolutely precise. This was revealed at the end of the welding. Whoever did it inaccurately received punishment in the form of a ban on parcels, or their wages were not paid in full, or they were deprived of visits, or they couldn't buy products in the camp store for 9 rubles, but only for 7. And we were punished. But in the end, it turned out that about a third of these boxes were non-standard, incorrect, and they were rejected. This required diligence and attentiveness, and, perhaps most of all—specialization. And who were these welders who worked in this brigade? They were people who had never seen or known this yesterday, and in a week or two, they learned to do something so-so, so their products were so-so. So, every third box had to be rejected after it was fully welded. It would turn out that it was welded incorrectly—either smaller, or larger, or crooked, or had some defect. And that rejected box was cut up. That was no longer our job, but another brigade’s—the scrap metal brigade.

It was an “iron zone,” as I first called it, or a world of metal. It was metal, metal, metal, there were stacks of sheet metal of various thicknesses, from which they cut, chopped, welded, stacks of channel bars, various blanks—what is called rolled metal. It was an incredible amount of metal. You look—warehouses, hundreds and thousands of tons of metal. And all this had to be turned into some kind of product. That’s how this transformation took place, this spoilage of material. I immediately determined in a conversation with our guys that such work was unproductive and unprofitable—we were doing significantly more harm than good. The metal is expensive, and we are spoiling it. We have to cut up our work, take it to be remelted. This is unproductive labor. But there were also experienced welders, they were entrusted with making more complex “containers,” for example, for tank batteries, which were then loaded onto wagons and taken all the way to Siberia. In Siberia, they put tank batteries in them and took them somewhere to the tanks. Some of the boxes were for export. They were painted accordingly. The best specialists welded them. The inspectors had higher standards for those boxes, they had to be made better.

There was also a painting shop, a metal cutting or shearing shop, a press shop. That’s where the highest number of injuries occurred—due to carelessness, inexperience. Young people who were put at the machines had to cut iron of various thicknesses. Every third person there walked around injured, every third became disabled—one without an arm, one with half an arm, one without fingers, something hits another in the shoulder and he becomes a cripple. It was a workshop where one-third became disabled. It was the worst workshop. As everywhere, they cut haphazardly, and half of all the products they cut from the metal went back to the blast furnaces, they were turned into scrap metal. That was the kind of work it was.

There was also a brush-making shop, a wooden box shop. What’s interesting is that as soon as a good pile of those boxes accumulated, about ten meters high, they would for some reason immediately catch fire and burn to the ground, completely. It took two weeks to build that pile, and then it would burn down. The same thing happened with the painting shop. They paint, they paint for a week, a second—and suddenly the whole shop catches fire. Everything burns—the wiring, the paint. It all burns with such black smoke, people flee. Then they repair it for a week or two, touch it up, install new electrical equipment, and start all over again. A month passes—the painting shop catches fire again. And so on, endlessly. From this, I concluded that this zone was extremely unproductive, it caused more losses to the state than benefits. This and all other remarks, as I found out, reached the ears of the special officer, whose surname was Shesterikov. And the name of the zone chief was Kharitonov.

Life in this select society of thieves, embezzlers, liars, murderers, alcoholics, and drug addicts was quite difficult. The only people with whom it was pleasant for me to communicate were seven or eight Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, and other believers, who were mostly tried for refusing military service, for not wanting to take up arms. I met with them on occasion every week, we drank tea together and talked. For some reason, they had quite a bit of money, they could buy and drink tea, even treat me. They had a small-format Bible and would hide it whenever necessary. I even copied the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ from their Bible. So this was a society with which one could communicate. However, I was surprised that, for example, a Baptist from Dubno traveled to Zakarpattia to agitate for his Baptism (he had an accident on the way, for which he was tried), but all of this was in Russian. The songs he hummed were in Russian, but he himself was Ukrainian, and his wife was supposed to be Ukrainian, and his parents were Ukrainian. I remarked, “How can you carry a faith you are convinced of in a foreign language?” But they didn't know what to say on this topic, they just denied it, answered evasively, and didn't want to talk about it. As a rule, that’s how it was.

And in general, this contingent of prisoners was interested in how to deceive one another, how to buy or beg for tea somewhere, how to evade work, how to get through today—all the problems of existence were tied up in this. What were they interested in? For example, once a whole delegation came to me and wanted to find out, from an educated person—that was my reputation there—how many generalissimos there had been in the world. This question surprised me very much, but I thought to myself, what could an average zek be preoccupied with? I said I knew of only two generalissimos—Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin, and I didn’t want to know any more, I had never been interested in that. This disappointed them, and as a group, they wrote a letter to some newspaper. After some time, a response came with the number of those generalissimos, their names, and even where they had been. This greatly pleased the prisoners, they walked all over the zone showing and telling, and this caused, so to speak, a sensation.

There was another question for me—again a whole delegation came: how many state posts did Father Stalin hold? I say that Stalin ruled the entire state, in essence, all posts were his, and someone else nominally seemed to rule. Stalin ruled everywhere. They didn't like this either, they had to write to the newspaper.

The brightest thing in the camp was that you could subscribe to some books. Catalogs would arrive. I, admittedly, didn't subscribe to much, because I didn't have much money, but I acquired some good books, especially dictionaries.

In our zone, there was a dispatcher from Kharkiv, accused in the crash of a plane carrying a football team, which perished somewhere near Dnipropetrovsk. He insisted that he was not to blame, but, like a scapegoat, he was serving his time. He assured us of this, but did not say who was guilty.

The general situation was more than difficult. They gave us no soap or very little. It was impossible to wash your hands well, there was nothing to wash them with. Soap was such a deficit, it was simply incredible. You couldn't receive soap in parcels and packages because they suspected that some drug, weapon, or other undesirable item could be hidden in the soap. Bathing was also, as a rule, without soap. For the entire shift—that was about 500 people, no less—there were no more than five bathing stalls where one could wash. But the big shots and their friends had those showers, and ordinary zeks couldn't wash their hands in hot or even warm water, or wash themselves. I made the determination that we were building communism with dirty necks, dirty hands, and lice, which also appeared. We were regularly checked... Not checked, but we ourselves had to declare that we had lice. So everything was sent for disinfection. And still, it didn't help, because there was always a shortage of soap and hot or warm water.

On warm, fine days, the zeks would go out into the yard and play chess. I played chess there with great success, I would have been the champion of that fraternity if such a championship had been organized. But I didn't want that, there was simply no need. Instead, they would bet on me: that I would win. And they would win on me. It got to the point that the special officer, Shesterikov, summoned me and asked, “Why are you playing for stakes and organizing such sensational games around chess?” I say, “I don't play for stakes and I don't take anything. They are the ones who bet, but that's their business, not mine.” He didn't ask anything more on this topic, but he did ask, “Why don't you like the singer Alla Pugacheva?” I say, “She doesn't appeal to me. She sings some kind of licentious melodies, and the lyrics of these melodies are at the lowest level, I don't remember a single lyric that was attractive to me.” “You call her song,” he says, “a ‘dur-opera’ [stupid opera].” I say, “Not her songs, but this one that you play every day, over and over and over without end, that you can go crazy from that melody—‘The Woman Who Sings.’ Every verse ends with ‘the woman who sings’... It’s some kind of operetta in a modern style, but it’s already giving us a mental breakdown. I called it a dur-opera because it adds to people’s stupefaction.” He clicked his tongue, didn’t comment, it’s true, but after that, they stopped playing that dur-opera on the camp’s loudspeakers. They played, it's true, other such junk, but no longer Alla Pugacheva.

Once, it was announced on the radio in the zone that the prosecutor would be visiting. Whoever wished to meet with him should submit their question to the department, and they, they said, would summarize them and allow meetings with the prosecutor. I quickly wrote down my question: why are we deprived of the right to parcels, the right to visits, the right to letters—my letters never reached anyone. In short, deprived of everything. And most importantly—the constant violation of the laws they themselves created. Before the prosecutor's arrival—and he really did arrive—I was summoned to the special officer's office and kept there. Some unfamiliar officer came in—and chitchat, all sorts of chitchat—this, that, and the other—he was just rambling, with nothing to talk about. Finally, after some time, it dawned on me that they were simply holding me so I wouldn't go to talk to the prosecutor. I said this to the officer, but he acted as if he didn't hear, paid no attention, and continued on. And only when the prosecutor finished his speech to the zeks was I released.

To say that the food was bad is to say nothing at all. It was simply unbearable. Suffice it to say that neither in winter nor in summer did we receive fresh vegetables, even the cabbage was sour. Who made it sour? Sour cabbage, all those soups were sour, the borsch was sour, and it was such a pathetic slop that it's impossible to describe. Once a doctor, an elderly woman named Tamara, came for a tasting. I saw how she did it and asked her how she, a doctor, could tolerate such slop. Had she ever tried to protest against people being fed such inedible food? She became terribly indignant and called a guard: here, she said, this one is engaging in propaganda. The guard, it's true, listened and went away, but she remembered me. They said that the guards stole pieces of meat that belonged to us by the norms all night long, ate it fried by morning, and we were left with some kind of broth from the bones. But on top of that, the cooks would give the better pieces to their friends, and cook separately for themselves and their friends. That’s how we were fed.

These guards were so insolent. I remember, one was accompanying me when my brother came to see me. The conversation was by phone through glass. At the end of the conversation, I see that my brother is handing over a package of some food for me, which included sausage. By the time my brother left, by the time I went through another door, by the time the guard came to me with that bag of food, the sausage was gone. I asked him where the sausage went. He barked at me, pushed me in the shoulder, and showed me where to go. Such were the thieves.

In general, I would say that I spent 9 years of my life in slavery. And this slavery turned out to be the worst. The food here was the worst. Three years in Germany, three years in the army, and three years imprisoned—that's nine years of life in slavery. But about the food, it must be said that it was best, after all, in Germany during the war. Why the best? Now I know exactly why. Firstly, because the portion that was supposed to be given to us was always given, the Germans did not steal and simply did not entrust our people to cook and distribute the food. The Germans cooked and distributed it themselves—both the bread and the slop. They gave everything out personally, exactly by weight, according to the norms. In the Soviet army, it was generally a horror. The hunger there was much worse than in Germany. And even worse in the zone. So of those nine years that I was in slavery, the three years in Germany were, from the point of view of nutrition, the most prosperous. This is my conclusion.

What else was particularly difficult in that zone? The language. The language, of course, was neither Ukrainian nor Russian, it was the slang of criminals, the language of the social dregs, which had developed its own jargon. It was always disgusting. I always had to ask for clarification, and if someone explained, I didn't pay attention, because he just blabbers on and on, and wants me to understand him without explanations. That happened more than once. There were even scandals on this topic. But some of the older guys who ended up there adapted to this language and tried to imitate it. I made a mockery of this. One fellow from the Mykolaiv region, whom I got to know, told me that he had a grown-up daughter who went to school. His crime was that he cut down three trees in a field and brought them home with a tractor—he was a tractor driver. At first, he had agreed with the foreman that these trees could be cut down, but when the foreman saw that the trees were already in his yard, he got angry, filed a report with the prosecutor's office, and this man was arrested as a destroyer of a windbreak, although it was not a windbreak, but three separate trees, as he said, in a field. So, this fellow used the slang word “prodrochiv” instead of the word for “was late.” This somehow got to me, and I ask him, “What are you saying, what is this word ‘prodrochiv’?” He answered something. I waited until more people became interested in our conversation, and I say, “Now, when your daughter, say, was late for school, did you ever tell her that she ‘prodrochyla’?” “No, why would I say that, can you talk to a child like that?” “And why,” I say, “do you say it here? Is someone forcing you by the tongue to say ‘prodrochiv’ instead of was late, missed, didn't make it?” He became ashamed and actually stopped using that pathetic jargon.

And one more feature—this spitting. Wherever two or three of them gather, they immediately spit all around themselves—there's no stopping it. Everything is spat on—the floor, the road, where they stand, where they sit, the bench—it was simply disgusting to interact with them.

“KHIMIYA” IN NIKOPOL

I’ve been in the zone for 13 months, and I’m eligible, as someone who has served one-third of his term and has not violated the regime, to go to “khimiya.” (A form of “conditional early release” introduced in the Khrushchev era for the “chemization of the national economy”: after serving 1/3 of their prison term, in the absence of regime violations, prisoners were sent “to the construction sites of the national economy,” mostly in the chemical industry. —V.O.) I am assigned to go to “khimiya” and they are already preparing me for it. This is another transport. Well, “khimiya” is something attractive, because it’s a certain freedom. But the transport is something terrible, which you think about with great reluctance to get into. The transport is the same—the transport train describes this circle from Dnipropetrovsk through Kryvyi Rih, Nikopol, Zaporizhzhia, and back to Dnipropetrovsk. So, I’m going on the transport. They took everything from me that could be taken—my hat, warm clothes—those cold, hungry kids, saying, you’re going to freedom, you’ll have everything there. I gave away my hat, I gave away my warmer clothes, because the prisoners really had a problem with this.

On the new transport, they brought me, it’s true, very quickly, because it’s not far—to Nikopol. There they unload us and settle us in the so-called command posts. A command post is a building near the station, guarded by the police, with three or four floors, and we began to live there.

They give me the hardest job of all they could give—it’s work at a brick factory. This is picking out bricks after they are finished. It’s heat, it’s dry hot dust, it’s so terrible, you can’t breathe, it’s the pace of work, a heavy shovel, a trolley. I did what I could, I couldn’t keep up, as much as I managed was as much as there was. They hurried me, but it didn’t help. I somehow adapted and worked there.

My relatives and some friends came to see me, helped me financially, with some clothes. I worked myself to the point where I had an unpleasant illness—radiculitis. I lay there for three weeks like a log, without use of my hands, without anything. Later, they didn't count these days toward my sentence, I had to serve them out, no matter what. Such was the “flexible system.”

I can recall a few episodes about conflicts that arose at the command post in Nikopol. One time I come back from work and see that my things have been thrown out of my nightstand, my books and newspapers are lying on the floor. Everything is scattered as if on purpose, like children scatter things. I was outraged, but when I came back in the evening, there was no one to talk to, the management wasn't there. In the morning, I wrote a statement and waited to see what the decision would be regarding this. After some time, a captain with the surname Proletarskyi summons me and says, “What are you writing there?!” In such a small room, I see about fifteen policemen sitting around the perimeter, looking at me with great interest. I say, “You have violated the most fundamental right of a person—their right to property.” As soon as I said “violated the right of a person,” they all jumped up as if on command, and this Captain Proletarskyi, who was leading this group, jumped out from behind his desk and rushed at me as if to fight. But it didn't come to a fight, because I behaved non-aggressively, I didn't make any movements. Here he read me the riot act, saying, you listen to radio broadcasts where they talk about human rights, all that nonsense. This was a clear example for those policemen, as I understood it, of how to educate the zeks under their authority. There were no consequences of that statement, he simply cursed me out and told me not to come with such statements to anyone anymore. I promised to write to the prosecutor. I did write, but it didn't help, no one paid any attention.

The second episode was like this. I had a shop foreman at the brick factory where I worked—this brick factory was located in the middle of Nikopol. He loved to lie and greatly praise what a blessed Soviet government it was, and how some people slander it and lie about it. He meant, of course, me every time he ideologically processed his workers, who were grimy from that brick dust. For some time he was not at work, and then he appeared and tells how he went to Bulgaria on a tourist trip. He tells so cheerfully how good it was there. And the main thing he talked about was not the architectural structures or customs, but how he and his friends, with whom he traveled, cleverly deceived the customs officers and smuggled a corresponding amount of vodka—they had little money—sold that vodka in Bulgaria and from that got some benefit: they bought some items that they would not have been able to buy if the vodka had not been sold. He told it so deliciously that he even interested me. I suddenly, without even wanting to, somehow raised my hand. He immediately noticed, “What do you want?” I say, “I want to go to Bulgaria.” It was like a small bomb exploded! Everyone was speechless at first, and then everyone burst out laughing in chorus, with such laughter that they were holding their stomachs. “I want to go to Bulgaria”—it was so humiliating for that narrator, how he went to Bulgaria, how he hid that vodka from the eyes of customs officers, that he, of course, began to hold a great grudge against me and soon organized my dispatch back to the zone.

One day, a tormented-looking teacher was brought to our commandant’s office. She was supposed to give us a lecture. She spoke in Russian, of course, about this and that, but mostly about what a scourge it was in Nikopol that people were cracking sunflower seeds everywhere, littering and spitting, creating unsanitary conditions, and what a very harmful habit it was to crack seeds. The listeners yawned and dozed off, but I asked the lady: “And what if we assume”—upon hearing Ukrainian, the lady glanced questioningly at the lieutenant, as if to say, what is this you’ve got here?—“that cracking seeds is a national trait for us? In Germany, they say, people eat roasted corn on the street—and it’s fine, no unsanitary conditions. And one must also consider that when people crack seeds, they are adding calories to their daily ration.” My lecturer snarled: “Not national, but nationalistic!” And she glanced at the lieutenant again, as if to say, deal with him.

From Nikopol, I began a correspondence with Iryna Kalynets. She and her husband were in exile in the Chita Oblast. Somewhere nearby, Vasyl Lisovyi was serving his term. He was in danger of being returned to the zone, but she settled the matter with her diplomatic intervention. (Oh, no! A case of “parasitism” was indeed fabricated against Vasyl Lisovyi during his exile in Buryatia, and he was imprisoned for one year. Vasyl Semenovych Lisovyi, b. May 17, 1937, in the Kyiv region, philosopher, imprisoned on July 6, 1972, for 7 years of labor camp and 3 years of exile under Art. 62, Part 1. Released in July 1983. Iryna Onufriivna Kalynets (Stasiv), b. Dec. 6, 1940, in Lviv. Arrested on Jan. 12, 1972, imprisoned under Art. 62, Part 1 for 6 years of labor camp and 3 years of exile. Served her sentence in Mordovia and the Chita Oblast. – V.O.).

My son lived near Nikopol and still does, and one day I decided to visit him, intending to return the same day. Without permission, of course, because they wouldn’t grant permission. They tailed me and saw that I had left, pulled me off the bus somewhere near Ordzhonikidze, brought me to Ordzhonikidze, and put me in a preliminary detention cell (KPZ) at the police station. (Kamera predvaritelnogo zaklyucheniya—in Ukrainian, “kamera poperedn'oho uv'yaznennya,” or KPU. – V.O.). They came from Nikopol to get me and put me in the KPZ in Nikopol. I sat there for two days, and then they let me go. There was no problem here: they weren’t prepared to process me in this way and send me back to the zone. Because that was the greatest punishment—to be sent back to the zone. I had no right to leave the confines of Nikopol without permission, and I had left.

One day I write an application—some time had passed, three months it seems—to be officially allowed to go to my village, to my home. They grant permission, and I’m already getting ready. They show me the route. They took so long drawing up this route that I began to suspect they wanted to delay me so I would arrive home at night. I didn’t like that; I started to get nervous and said that I didn’t want to go anywhere today. They changed their minds and let me go. They no longer specified the route in the accompanying document. I could choose my own way to travel. I decided to go to Apostolove to my son’s place to dress appropriately, because I didn’t want to go to the village looking so shabby. I was allowed to stay there for two days.

I went to Apostolove. There, on the highway, a bus meets people who need to go to Apostolove, because it was a walk of several kilometers. They drop us off near the hotel. As soon as I got off the bus, two lieutenants cross the road towards me, take me by the arms, lead me to the Apostolove police station, and put me in the KPZ.

So, I’ve already been in Apostolove for a whole week awaiting trial, and I already know what the verdict will be: escape from the commandant’s office, escape from custody. The punishment for this is, at a minimum, a return to the zone. The judge, whose last name was Halushchynskyi, arrived in the afternoon. He had eaten a very tasty and very hearty lunch, as I observed, and he was so sleepy after his meal that the poor man, during the court session, yawned so openly that one wanted to help him: take a break, man, from this court case and try to deal with the defendant. The judge himself said little, asked me little, but he delegated this task to the lay assessors. Some inveterate communist type interrogated me. I insisted that I was following the route, that I needed to go to Apostolove to get to the Yelyzarovo station, from which I could walk home. I insisted that I had not violated anything, that this was a provocation not worth a damn. Then this lady started to teach me geography and showed me on a map that the Pavlopillia station was supposedly a more direct route than Apostolove. I explained that my son, where I could change into better clothes, did not live at the Pavlopillia station, and that was why I had to travel this way. But that didn’t help, and they sent me back.

I was on a prisoner transport again, sent on a transport train along the same circuit from Nikopol to Zaporizhzhia, from Zaporizhzhia to Dnipropetrovsk. I was back in prison. It was an interesting transport. For two whole days, they gave us no bread, no prison soup—absolutely nothing. Since I hadn’t brought anything with me, hoping I would be on so-called freedom—I had a few rubles, so I could buy myself food along the way… This was a form of savings, as I later found out. Experienced zeks explained to me that they save a lot this way. There were about 150 men on the transport, so they write off food for all 150 for two days, but they give no one anything—not even bread, nothing. Just drink water and that’s it. I endured that too. Again, I was sent by transport to Zhovti Vody.

So, I was back in Zhovti Vody. The very day I was brought in, a special department officer named Shesterikov summoned me and said with a sly, emphatic tone: “Well?” I said: “Well, what? I was sent back because of a provocation.” He said: “I’m not interested in how you assess it. I’m interested in how you plan to live from now on. Do you intend to help us educate the young people, among whom there are some who behave inappropriately, have money, and get drugs through some channels? We need to know all this to establish order.” I explained to him that I had not been involved in that business, am not involved, and will not be involved, because that’s not my business. And he left me alone. He had summoned me to show how much power he had and who he was.

Another time he summoned me for I don’t know what reason. I knock on the door, he allows me to enter. I see a long table in front of him; he is sitting at the far end. He obviously holds some meetings at this table. At the end of the table, right by the door I entered, a pickpocket from Dnipropetrovsk (he said so himself) is on his knees. On his knees, bowing to the ground, touching his forehead to the floor. I thought he wasn't allowing me to enter. But I had just heard him grant permission. But this was deliberately staged for me to see how others bowed before him, and so that I might try to bow myself—or so I assumed. In my presence, this Shesterikov throws a packet of tea to him across the table. The way that little thief snatched that tea with both hands, the way he began to thank him! The officer pointed a finger at him—“get out, get out of here”—and he left. This is how the “kum,” as they called him—that is, the one who recruits snitches or informers—behaved with his subordinates, who helped him “educate” other people.

TRANSPORT TO SIBERIA

A transport to Siberia is announced, more precisely to the small town of Khor in the Khabarovsk Krai. This was known in advance. They packed us into a full railcar. I look around: I am the only “patriarch” there—the oldest among them all. The rest are all kids who were sent to Muscovy so they could later find friendship among the Muscovites and stay there. But that’s not what I’m talking about now. They gave us a few loaves of bread in a sack and said that some money had been allocated, and they would buy us food for the road with it. They bought the food in Kharkiv—that’s what we were told—because if you travel beyond Kharkiv with money, you can’t buy anything except sprat and rotten herring. So, our escorts knew this and bought provisions for the whole journey in Kharkiv. The car was closed, a so-called Stolypin, with compartments. It was as muffled as in a tank; you could only hear the sounds drifting from the stations. One evening, we heard endless sounds of “a-a-a-a.” Then it dawned on us that we were already in Asia. An Asian language. Indeed, it was Ufa. In Ufa, I heard this Asian “a-a-a,” like a battle cry. But it was just station chatter.

We traveled for 12 days. It was impossible to lie down, only to spend the night sitting or standing somehow. The journey was unbearably difficult: 12 days of such torment as I had probably never known in my life. Some climbed up to the top, where there were some shelves, but only the young and the very well-connected thugs climbed up there, and they didn’t let anyone else up. And even there, you couldn’t lie down the whole time. They would come down and have to sit here, because the air was cleaner here, and it was like a little walk. We were taken to the toilet only once a day, so you had to be very careful with yourself. I, in truth, ate very little and drank even less, thereby, so to speak, preserving my health. It’s a hard thing—to hold on for hours without being taken to the toilet.

So, after 12 days, we arrived in this Khor—a small town by the railway. In my opinion, in the Far East, and in Siberia in general, all life is situated along the railway. As our car was being shunted towards Khor, it derailed, and many of us got a bit injured, bruised as a result. The speed wasn’t high, but when the car derailed and suddenly stopped, people fell from the shelves, hitting one another. In short, it was a small accident. I thought: even the iron couldn’t stand that abuse and went off the rails.

This was a town of “chemists.” They made some special industrial alcohol here and shipped it out daily in many tanker cars. It was made mainly from wood, if I’m not mistaken.

In Khor, we were housed in small wagons and awaited our fate. I noticed that the zeks drank that alcohol. They got it every day and consumed it, although I was assured it was very harmful. But that didn't stop them from drinking it. The atmosphere there was very heavy. We saw people who were drunk like beasts, secondly, hungry like beasts, and thirdly, people with some kind of disordered psyche. It was even frightening to think of living there.

BIKIN

I was terribly lucky: they kept us in the wagons for two days, and then loaded us into buses and took us further south in the Khabarovsk Krai. They took us to the small town of Bikin, which stands on the Bikin River. We were placed there in a commandant’s office for “chemists.” We were supposed to do construction, so I became a construction worker.

The town of Bikin had a population of about ten thousand and ten thousand soldiers, who lived separately, it’s true, but could very often be seen on the streets, especially the officers. They occupied the only restaurant—day and night, the restaurant had no rest because the officers stood in line for it. You could clearly see how they behaved.

In the evening, you could see the lights of Zhaokhe—a settlement in China. China was eight kilometers west of Bikin.

We arrived at the end of November 1981, and the temperature was already 30 degrees below zero Celsius. In the summer, the temperature was also 30 degrees, but of heat. It was a place with a pronouncedly continental climate. The town was in a hollow—a deep valley surrounded by the taiga. A very poor area. The land was cultivated only near the river. They scratched at it a bit there and planted cabbage, mostly by Koreans. The collective farms had some cattle that grazed near the forest in the summer and took refuge from the horseflies in the Bikin River. But overall, the area was pleasant, the nature was very rich—beautiful forests, trees, and mountains, surrounded by mountains. We lived surrounded by mountains.

There was a certain freedom here; we could even go somewhere outside of Bikin to visit someone after work. We were even invited. No one caught us or threatened to return us to the zone. A return to the zone in those parts meant a very serious matter. The zone was in Russia, a Muscovite one, harsh. Our people knew this and feared the very words “return to the zone.” And they didn’t oppress us too much there by restricting our movement. You could calmly go into the taiga, pick berries, some herbs—they gathered all sorts of herbs there. Or walk along the riverbank, collecting beautiful pebbles.

The work was like everywhere else in construction. They paid little money, just enough to feed yourself—no more.

Here I got in touch with all of our people who were in exile in Siberia or were simply in Siberia. This was, first of all, Yevhen Oleksandrovych Sverstiuk, who was in exile in Buryatia at that time. Second was Zinoviy Krasivskyi, who was serving his exile term in the Tyumen Oblast. (Zinoviy Krasivskyi, Nov. 12, 1929 – Sep. 20, 1991, political prisoner in 1948-53, 1967-78, 1980-85. Founding member of the Ukrainian National Front (1964–1967), member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. – V.O.). But I was most connected with Oksana Yakivna Meshko, who was then in exile in the small town of Ayan on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk. (Oksana Yakivna Meshko, b. Jan. 30, 1905, in Stari Sanzhary in the Poltava region – d. Jan. 2, 1991. Imprisoned on Feb. 19, 1947, for 10 years on charges of intending to assassinate Khrushchev. Founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Arrested on Oct. 13, 1980, and sentenced to 6 months of imprisonment and 5 years of exile. Her memoirs were published by Prof. Vasyl Skrypka in the journal “Kuryer Kryvbasu” in 1994. – V.O.). We were, so to speak, in the same region, in the same administrative unit—the Khabarovsk Krai, and I immediately called us fellow countrymen. She liked that. We corresponded very actively and had active telephone conversations. We talked almost every week—if I didn’t call, Oksana Yakivna did. It wasn’t very expensive. We could communicate—and we did. Such active communication was somehow encouraging and gave hope that we would somehow survive, that we were not alone in the world, that we were remembered and known, that we were not forgotten. And that we were not forgotten was proven to me tangibly, so to speak: a package was sent to me, which came, I think, from Berlin—with coffee, with some spices, with tea, and with all sorts of products that were expensive and sometimes unavailable in that Bikin. The store there only had fish—about ten varieties of all kinds of fish, but almost nothing else. I never saw meat there once, despite the fact that the district supposedly produced meat, and there was even a meat-processing plant in the town. All the products from that plant were shipped somewhere; they were never for sale.

So, we were living in the conditions of the Far East. I have already mentioned a certain freedom. It consisted in the fact that we could go in an organized manner into the forest to gather ferns—the so-called bracken fern. The Japanese bought that fern right on the spot. It was exported to Japan. The Japanese are very fond of this stuff, it’s a delicacy for them, and they bought it all up. It was salted in barrels and exported to Japan for sale. We could also go on an excursion—just to see the forest. In the summer, we went far to pick berries—all the way to the Primorsky Krai, where we gathered berries. It was a very useful and interesting pastime.

Zinoviy Krasivskyi warned me against any excessive behavior for which I could be put back in prison, and he strongly disapproved of those people who, to some extent, provoked their own re-sentencing. “We,” he hinted, “don’t need you to be in prison; we need you to be free.” That was, so to speak, the indirect instruction. He was very supportive of me on this issue, and I understood that he gave similar advice to others. And so it was. He would simply say that right now Yaroslav Lesiv is rotting in a colony among common criminals. We don’t need that; we need Lesiv and those like him to be free. (Yaroslav Lesiv, b. Jan. 3, 1941, in Luzhky, Dolyna raion, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. Member of the Ukrainian National Front (1964-67), Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Imprisoned on March 29, 1967, for 6 years, served sentence in Mordovia. On Nov. 15, 1979, accused of drug possession, 2 years in Sarny, Rivne Oblast. In May 1981, drugs were planted on him again, 5 years imprisonment. One of the initiators of the revival of the UGCC, a priest. Died in a car crash. – V.O.). It sounded quite convincing. He even sent me some food and some clothes that I needed there a couple of times. Because he already had experience and knew what was needed. Thus, I was clothed, shod, and more or less provided for materially.

When half my term had passed, I tried to appeal to the prosecutor’s office to be released as someone who did not violate order and did not violate the regime. But they did not release me, they refused, and so I had to stay there for the entire year that remained until the end of my term.

In Bikin, we were building a five-story building. The foreman was a young German man named Wagner. He was so gentle, never argued with us, and turned a blind eye to how cement, lime, or something else was being stolen. But one day he spoke with me. He says: “I understand what they are in for”—and he meant the others—“but what were you sentenced for? It’s,” he says, “unclear to me.” I told him: “For nationalism.” “What do you mean?” he asked. I said: “Ukrainian nationalism.” He thought for a moment, and then: “And what’s that for?” I wanted to say something, but he sensed that his question was inappropriate and dropped the conversation. He then started talking about how we were building this five-story building, and the water would never reach the top, all the way to the fifth floor. And that bichi would live here—those people who go into the taiga for the whole summer season, fishing and picking berries, and return to the city in the winter. We are building this for them. One day he even demonstrated what kind of people come to Bikin. He says: “Over there, go take a look, your compatriots have arrived in that wagon.” “What compatriots?” “You’ll see, go ahead.” I went to that wagon and greeted them. Some shaggy head pokes out, an unkempt woman, unwashed children. I ask: “Where are you from? I was told you are compatriots.” “From the Zaporizhzhia Oblast.” Aha, from the Zaporizhzhia Oblast. “And how did you get here?” And it was a freight car. “We are resettlers, we are moving here to live.” One of them asked me: “Where can we turn in empty bottles here?” These were the types of people who came to settle there, in the far, far east, and it was for these types that we were building a five-story building.

In general, this word “bich” is very common there. Women, for example, standing in line and mentioning their husbands, say “my bich”—“my bich went out, my bich came home, my bich” did something else—for them, it’s a normal word.

Once a week, a young KGB officer would come to my room. He said he was from the security service, but he was interested in how people live here, how they work, and all that. But for some reason, he always came to my room and sat for a long time, listening to all sorts of stories and stealing glances at me. I sometimes intervened in the conversation. Once, a driver from Dniprodzerzhynsk, who was imprisoned for theft, told a story about an incident where the police were beaten up for treating some arrested individuals harshly. He told it so vividly, even with relish, how they beat up the police there. The KGB officer listened and listened, and then said: “That’s impossible here, we would never have allowed that.” And he fell silent.

In this same Bikin stood a huge building called a tobacco factory. But it never produced any cigarettes or tobacco; it was just built and then abandoned as unnecessary. They built it, but then it turned out there was nothing to process, no tobacco itself.

When the unshakable ideologue of Muscovite Bolshevism, Suslov, was buried, Yevhen Sverstiuk wrote to me: “He was buried very modestly, so inconspicuously, as if he weren't a big shot”—something like that he wrote. But soon the leader Brezhnev himself dies. I remember how he was buried, how they threw that coffin into the grave, and it rumbled. This made a cheerful impression on everyone—for days they recalled how he was thrown to hell, as they said, into the ground, so that he would not be here. The guys hoped for an amnesty, although, to be honest, we no longer needed an amnesty, because our “chemistry” sentence was practically over—no one had more than a year left.

My personal informers started visiting me more often. One such young boy from Zakarpattia kept pestering me to express my opinion on Brezhnev’s death. What do I think about Brezhnev’s death? “What do you mean, what do I think?” I say. “It’s a pity for a person who has died. We don’t mention his sins, we don’t say anything bad about him.” This turned out to be not enough for him; he approached me again and again—what did I really think about Brezhnev, about his death? This same boy insisted that I tell him how I planned to travel home. That is, whether I would go by train or fly from Khabarovsk, or maybe by car somehow. Until the very end, I never said that I was planning to travel only by plane. That was my plan; I had a small reserve of money, and it was enough for a plane ticket. I never told this interrogator how I wanted to travel, but he desperately needed to know what mode of transport I would be using.

I reached Khabarovsk by train, got a plane ticket there, and had to spend the whole day in Khabarovsk, looking around the city. The city gives the impression of some kind of desert that inappropriately pretends to be a city. No order, wretched sidewalks, no lawns, not a single tree growing anywhere that looked like a real tree—in short, it was some kind of desert, like a neglected Russian backwater village. That’s what Khabarovsk looked like. The central restaurant of Khabarovsk—I thought it was such—turned out to be a very revered place: it never closed, day or night, it worked continuously. It turned out that the permanent clients of this restaurant were gold prospectors. They panned for gold somewhere nearby, came to Khabarovsk, and right there drank away all the money they had earned. So that they could drink it away, so to speak, thoroughly and to the last drop, the restaurant never closed, working day and night. I saw them being carried out feet first from there more than once, taken away, those who had apparently drunk themselves to death.

“TO CLEAR STARS, TO QUIET WATERS”

I said goodbye to Oksana Yakivna by phone. I sent several telegrams saying that I was already heading “to clear stars, to quiet waters.” I informed Fedir Klymenko, because I corresponded with him. I flew to Moscow, because there was no flight to Kyiv, and from there to Kyiv, and finally got home on December 1, 1982. My mother was already 87 years old, she was immobile and needed care, and without any hesitation, I stayed to live in the village, in my parents’ house, looking after my mother. I got a job at the collective farm—they always hired people there, because there was always some work, there was no unemployment.

I worked, listened to broadcasts from various “voices,” particularly “Radio Liberty,” and was up to date with all events. I found out that Bohdan Rebryk was somewhere in Kazakhstan (b. July 30, 1938, imprisoned on Feb. 6, 1967, for 3 years under Art. 62, Part 1; a second time on May 23, 1974, under Part 2 of Art. 62 for 7 years and 3 of exile. Member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Returned from Kazakhstan in the summer of 1987. People's Deputy of Ukraine of the first convocation. – V.O.), they passed on his address, and I wrote it down. They also gave Myroslav Marynovych’s address—and I wrote that down too. (b. Jan. 4, 1949, founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, arrested on April 23, 1977, sentenced to 7 years imprisonment and 5 years of exile under Art. 62, Part 1, served sentence in the Perm camps, in exile in the village of Saralzhyn, Aktobe Oblast, Kazakhstan. – V.O.). I got in touch with these people, and this connection was productive. They told me how they were doing, and I even sent them a few things.

There was even an episode when Bohdan Rebryk asked for help, and I sent him that help. He was in a critical situation. He sent a letter describing how he, Bohdan Rebryk, had wanted to raise the standard of living of the people he worked with. He proposed that they go to the director and demand a pay raise, because the salary was very low. They grabbed pitchforks and chased him for half the day, threatening to stab him for such audacity—demanding a pay raise. I, he said, stopped trying to raise the standard of living of those people and, so to speak, resigned myself to their misfortune.

Most intensively, of course, I corresponded with Mrs. Oksana Meshko, even running small errands for her, constantly sending her things. I corresponded with Yevhen Sverstiuk, with Zinoviy Krasivskyi, with Yaroslav Lesiv. Yosyp Terelya wrote to me (b. Oct. 27, 1943, political prisoner 1962-66, 1966-76, 1977-82, 1982-83, 1985-87. Currently lives abroad. – V.O.), I replied and corresponded with him as well. All this constituted a continuation of my contacts with the community, both from the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and outside the Group.

Needless to say, “Radio Liberty,” “Voice of America,” the BBC, “Deutsche Welle,” the Italian program, even the Spanish program—all these were communication satellites through which I learned about who, what, where, and when. The information was active, voluminous, full, and extensive. Thanks to this information, everything was known, what was what. The jamming of these broadcasts did not help, because with persistent searching on the airwaves, these stations could be found. These stations somehow managed to avoid the jamming, and next to the jammer, next to the roaring sound, you could hear the words clearly.

Borys Skoroplias came to visit me—we were arrested together in 1961. He had moved, basically fled, to the Zaporizhzhia Oblast, then to Crimea with his child, a girl, and struggled here. He went all the way to Kazakhstan, because there he felt, obviously, safer; he could peacefully survive the hard times. And now he returned to Crimea, and I invited him to my place. I told him that a tight circle was forming around me. The neighbors were actively questioning me, actively spying on me, actively expressing all sorts of suspicions. There were rumors that I was a spy, that I listened to radio stations, and that I served America, and the Germans, and someone else... I said that there would be more searches, there would be arrests—it is our fate, we must endure it all. Borys agreed with this; we had to live in these conditions.

One evening around nine o’clock, there was a knock at the door. Calmly, suspecting nothing, I went out and turned on the light. I see a typical Muscovite standing before me—you could tell by his face, his posture, his speech. He didn't even say hello, but wanted to spend the night at my place. Spend the night at my place? It flashed before my eyes like a kaleidoscope: there were such “overnight guests” for Mykola Leontovych (Outstanding composer, murdered in 1921 in the village of Markivka in Podillia. – V.O.), there were such “overnight guests” for Levko Platonovych Symyrenko (Outstanding pomologist, murdered on Jan. 6, 1920, in the village of Mliiv, now Cherkasy region. – V.O.). To be honest, I was afraid of him—he had the look of a murderer, a common criminal—so cruel. He tilted his head to the side and listened to what I would say. I said: “But I have people staying here, there’s no place for you to spend the night.” He took a step back and very surprised—he even staggered back—said: “I didn’t know it was like that.” I ask him: “What transport did you take to arrive so late?” Because there were no buses at this time. He had hitched a ride and came specifically to my place to spend the night. Fortunately, I somehow managed to lie in time that someone was staying with me; fortunately, he believed me and left. I think he was a messenger of Satan to my house.

Various provocations of this type were carried out. I would chase the neighbor's chickens out of my garden. The KGB organized it so that about twenty collective farm chickens were brought to the neighbor, and this neighbor was forced to drive them into my garden. I would chase them away and possibly start a fight, and he would photograph it and I would be charged with hooliganism. At least, that's what this neighbor later told me. The neighbor apparently went along with this trick reluctantly. When I saw such a flood of chickens coming into my garden, with the neighbor driving them, I approached and said: “What are you doing, why are you doing this?” He had a frightened look on his face, he says to me: “Careful, careful.” I say: “What do you mean ‘careful,’ I’m asking you, why are you driving them here? Turn them back.” He stopped, the chickens stood still, and I chased them away from the property line. The provocation failed because my neighbor did not show the activity that was demanded of him. He was supposed to drive them towards me, I was supposed to push him out of my yard, and that would have been enough to convict me as a hooligan. Apparently, that was the plan.

The neighbor later told me how they showed him recordings of what was happening in my house. That is, they had recorded my entire evening on tape: what I listened to, which broadcasts. Allegedly, he listens to all those “voices,” conducts anti-Soviet agitation, and is anti-Soviet-minded, a nationalist, and what not. This apparently did not impress him; he did not provoke me any further. He told me that his mother had forbidden him from getting involved in any provocations, because it was a great sin.

And how did they record my life and being? They needed to find out how this man spends his time. Were there any facts, documents, or what? They made an arrangement with a neighbor across the road and placed a box in her house, one that needed two people to carry. And that box was brought. I didn't see how the box was brought, but I happened to see how it was taken away. In that box were some listening devices. In this way, they had evidence against me that I was actively listening to the airwaves, and that's all, because they couldn't know anything else. Such was my life and being. But since I spent a lot of time caring for my mother, who was almost paralyzed, and since I was at work every day, it was difficult to charge me with anything. I didn't make any long trips. Because one person was in exile, another arrested, and another far away—it was a difficult situation.

But then Yevhen Oleksandrovych Sverstiuk invites me to Kyiv and says that there is a need to help Oksana Meshko come home. Her term of exile was ending. This was November 1985. She was asking for someone to come to Khabarovsk, meet her, and escort her home. This was understandable to me, because they could have done anything to her along the way. Such a plan did indeed exist, as it later turned out. Even before Khabarovsk, somewhere in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, I think, they took her off the plane at an intermediate stop, and only her persistent character made them not leave her at the airport. She jumped back on the plane and flew on. Later they planned to take her off the plane, and who knows what they wanted to do with her.

The Kyivans gave me money, because I didn’t have that kind of money, and I flew to Khabarovsk. I managed to fly to Khabarovsk, although it wasn't easy—I barely got the ticket. I think someone even secretly helped me, because I traveled from the airport to the center of Moscow to the ticket offices, here and there, and couldn't get a ticket anywhere. But then I arrive at the airport, maybe for the third time—and they give me a ticket without any obstacles. I think it was the KGB agents watching me, and they decided to give me a ticket after all, to see what would happen next.

Back in Kyiv, I was told that some Lonya Vasilyev wanted to go meet Oksana Yakivna. “Well,” I say, “I don’t know him, haven’t heard of him, but if he plans to go, let him, that’s his business, but my business is to go myself.”

In that Khabarovsk airport, practically no one gives any information. If a plane arrived from Moscow or somewhere else, they might announce it, but they announce absolutely nothing about local flights. I felt that I wouldn't know when she would arrive—if she arrived from Komsomolsk-on-Amur. My efforts would be in vain. Somehow completely intuitively—and I was sitting on the second floor—as if not wanting to, I went down to the turnstile for the umpteenth time to see what was happening on the airfield. Because they didn’t let you out there, you could only look through the door and through the window. Suddenly I see: a group of passengers is walking, in a line—and among them is Oksana Yakivna! Such a preoccupied, anxious look, her eyes darting everywhere, looking for someone, but fortunately, I recognized her. She, obviously, did not recognize me, because she had seen me maybe once in her life, and I had also seen her once before, but out of fear, it was easy to recognize. And just as she came out from behind the turnstile—I approach her and introduce myself. How happy she was, how she started to hug me, how she started to praise me for meeting her so successfully! She felt a sense of relief, she even cried from the joy of having some support. But then another man approaches, who introduces himself as Leonid Vasilyev from Moscow. Oksana Yakivna asked who he was. “I am a friend of Ukrainians,” he said. “What kind of friend is this?” said Oksana Yakivna. “Well, alright, let’s go.” “Where?” “Let’s go to the hotel first,” because it was cold and we had to—it was November—think about moving on.

But we are met not only by this Vasilyev, but also by some Vasyl Ivanovych from the post office, and some swarthy young woman of about 40, I think, named Nadya. Vasyl Ivanovych, it turns out, is an acquaintance of Oksana Yakivna; he had come to Ayan on postal business, on telephone business, and they met there. He was also meeting her, although she had not warned him that she would be traveling, had not told him or written him letters about when she was leaving and when she would arrive. So, he got this information from some other sources. Such were our greeters. So if I hadn't made it in time, these people would have met Oksana Yakivna anyway. They came to the turnstile, sent by who knows whom; there were no announcements, nowhere could one find out when the plane was arriving. And I accidentally and completely intuitively felt the need to go downstairs and accidentally met Oksana Yakivna right where I needed to.

So, we go to the hotel and get settled. And this Vasyl Ivanovych and this woman—well, you absolutely can’t get away from them—they want to give Oksana Yakivna a tour of Khabarovsk. I say that she doesn’t need a tour, let her rest, let us have lunch and rest, we don’t need a tour. We need to get tickets for the next leg of the journey. This Vasilyev also agrees to go on the tour. I had to agree too. We got into one car, drove around Khabarovsk, visited a few streets, looked at that desert through the car window. We barely managed to get away from them.

I said that was enough of the excursions, we would attend to our own business. We got a ticket to Moscow; it was impossible to get one to Kyiv. We had to wait a whole day in the hotel. There was joy, there were conversations, but Oksana Yakivna did not forget to question this Vasilyev, who he was, what he was. The only recommendation he gave for himself was that he loved Ukrainians, that his son was serving in the army in Ukraine, and he was glad that he was serving in Ukraine and not somewhere else. Oksana Yakivna was not satisfied with this explanation, questioning him not once and not twice about whom he knew in Moscow from among the well-known people, for example, Sakharov, Orlov, and others. He didn't know these people, but he had heard of them. He did not name a single acquaintance who could convince Oksana Yakivna that he was one of our own. So, Oksana Yakivna gave him an unambiguous assessment: an unreliable person.

Fortunately, they didn’t bother us anymore. We strolled along the bank of the Amur, collected beautiful pebbles, watched the fishermen catching fish. The water was already frozen near the bank. We looked at the river—it is wide and beautiful. That is the only beauty that could be seen in this city of Khabarovsk.

And so we are flying. I am sitting next to Oksana Yakivna; that Vasilyev doesn't stay away and keeps pestering her with some conversations. She brushed him off. In Moscow, we are already heading to the Kyivsky railway station, and this Vasilyev repeatedly says: “They’re following us, they’re watching us, there are two of them, they’re about to be right next to us.” Oksana Yakivna stopped and said to him: “Stop trying to scare me, I’ve been through all of this. Goodbye. Thank you for meeting me.” That’s how she dismissed him. He didn’t leave then; he escorted us all the way to the railcar, but he didn’t scare us anymore with the idea that the KGB had surrounded us and who knows what they wanted. They really had surrounded us, because they knew we were traveling and they had to watch us, but they didn’t touch us if we didn’t pay attention to them, that’s also for sure.

Mykola Rudenko is in the Altai with his wife; news from him arrives via the communication satellite, and we know something about him. (Mykola Danylovych Rudenko, b. in Luhansk region on Dec. 19, 1920 – Apr. 1, 2004. Writer, philosopher, human rights activist, head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (Nov. 9, 1976), arrested Feb. 5, 1977. Laureate of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, full member of the Ukrainian Free Academy, Hero of Ukraine; Raisa Panasivna Rudenko (Kaplun), b. Nov. 20, 1939, in the village of Petrivka, Synelnykove raion, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Arrested Apr. 15, 1981. 5 years imprisonment and 5 years exile. Camp ZhKh-385/3, Barashevo, Mordovia. From April 1986 - in exile in the village of Maima in the Gorno-Altai. Released from exile in December 1987. – V.O.). Oles Berdnyk writes a letter of repentance and invites Mykola Rudenko to join his opinion about renouncing so-called anti-Soviet activities. (Oles Pavlovych Berdnyk, Dec. 25, 1927 – Mar. 18, 2003, outstanding science fiction writer, artist, political prisoner in 1950-55, founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, arrested Mar. 6, 1979. Released Mar. 14, 1984, his statement of repentance was published in the newspaper “Literaturna Ukrayina” on May 17, 1984. – V.O.). I was terribly worried: if Rudenko agrees, it will be a catastrophe, it will be such a misfortune, such a compromise of our movement! But Mykola Rudenko turned out to be a tough nut to crack; he never faltered and testified with his whole life what a steadfast Ukrainian he was.

The authorities are living in convulsions. They feverishly make decisions that are meant to somehow fix things. The country's economy is in decline, people don't want to work, there is inflation, a catastrophe is approaching, which the Kremlin finally began to feel. As an example of their convulsive leadership was Andropov's decision to check people who were wandering the streets, why they were not at work, to check their bags if they bought something in a grocery store—what they were buying, why they were buying during working hours. They nicknamed him “Bag-Snatcher.” I even told one party official-boss: a convulsive government and bag-snatchers. It seems he didn't report me, because I was never asked about it.

Rumors started that Andropov had been killed or, at any rate, helped to die. And when Chernenko came to power, it became clear that the decline of the state was moving at a seven-league pace. When that gentleman kicked the bucket, the arrival of Gorbachev, his speech at the congress, his idea of perestroika and new thinking—it was a ray of hope in the darkness of our existence, which became a lifebuoy for all the peoples inhabiting this terrible prison of nations. It became calmer in the soul; correspondence and communication became more reliable and bolder. And we still had to solve material issues, which were always on the agenda, but that was not the main thing. The main thing was that we were slowly gaining freedom of communication, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and this helped and encouraged us.

The jamming of foreign broadcasts weakened, and then stopped altogether. It was now quite accessible to listen to the news and get acquainted with what was happening in the world. Jews are being sent from Moscow to the West, from Ukraine they are sent to concentration camps, Russians are timidly joining the restructured movement.

Levko Lukianenko is in exile. (Levko Hryhorovych Lukianenko, b. Aug. 24, 1928, imprisoned Jan. 20, 1961, sentenced to death under Art. 56 and 62 Part 1 for creating the Ukrainian Workers' and Peasants' Union, served 15 years; a second time on Dec. 12, 1977, under Art. 62 Part 2 for 10 years and 5 of exile as a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Released from exile on Dec. 8, 1988, left the Tomsk Oblast in January 1989. – V.O.). I got in touch with him by letter. We started a correspondence (I will have to find these letters). He informs me that in our oblast there is a certain Volodymyr Zabihai who has contacted him. He gave him my address. I didn't have time to contact this Zabihai when suddenly one day I see: some man stops by my yard, enters the yard and introduces himself as Volodymyr Zabihai. I asked him why he didn't turn to our organization that is here, to our Group, to Sokulskyi, for example—but instead went straight to Levko Lukianenko. He didn't give me any coherent answer to that. This person was never fully trusted by us; he evoked some suspicion, or perhaps distrust. There was a certain uncertainty about him. He described his campaigns, his patriotic deeds, too eloquently and beautifully, although he had never been connected with anyone anywhere. And this is the worst thing, in my opinion, that he did not go to an organization that already existed, but directly to Levko Lukianenko.

One day a man comes to me who introduces himself as Pavlo skochko (Journalist, political prisoner. – V.O.) and informs me that he is authorized to ask me if I will sign the Declaration on the formation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union instead of the Ukrainian Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. I, of course, agreed, gave him some more money for the road, which he later registered as a charitable contribution. (“The Appeal of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group to the Ukrainian and world public” about the renewal of its activities was published on March 11, 1988. It was signed by 19 members of the UHG who were already free or in exile. – V.O.).

A new life began for us. We transformed the Ukrainian Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords into a new structure—the Ukrainian Helsinki Union. (The Declaration of Principles of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union was announced at a 50,000-strong rally in Lviv on July 7, 1988. – V.O.). The founders of this Union were Viacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Horyn, and others.

That same year, 1988, I went to Dnipropetrovsk to see Mrs. Orysia Sokulska, whose home was the center of all our gatherings, and Chornovil happened to be there with his wife. I got to know him well there, and we agreed that I would arrange a tour for him of our oblast, in particular, to Zaporizhzhia, to Khortytsia. Chornovil and his wife spent the night in my house, and we took such a tour in my brother Stepan’s car. For the first time, we wrote in the guest book at the museum on Khortytsia that we were members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union—no less.

The interview was prepared for publication by Vasyl OVSIYENKO for the program of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

Published in the journal “Kuryer Kryvbasu” in 2006, issues 196, 197, 198.

And also on the website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group http://museum.khpg.org (Museum of the Dissident Movement).

Petro ROZUMNYI on November 9, 2001, at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy at a conference on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Photo by Viktor Zilberberg.