An interview with S. I. Boroznyi
Last edited on 18.11.2007.
V.V. Ovsienko: April 9, 2001, in the city of Nikopol, Stepan Ivanovych Boroznyi is speaking. Vasyl Ovsienko is recording. Mr. Oleksa Krestianov is also present. Mr. Stepan Boroznyi is mostly reading from texts. I have made photocopies of them. He provides some commentary and additions, and I ask questions.
S.I. Boroznyi: I am Stepan Ivanovych Boroznyi, born in 1921.
V.V. Ovsienko: And the date of birth?
S.I. Boroznyi: July 7. In the episode I want to present below, there will be a brief story about myself and the tragedy of Galician Ukrainians in 1941. All that I have written does not claim literary significance, I did not strive for it, and even if I wanted to, I would not have had enough talent or learning to rise to the proper literary standard.
I want to tell the truth about Galicians and about myself, but against the background of the events that took place in Galicia with the arrival of the Russian-Bolshevik and German destructive systems. Soon my generation will pass away, and with it the living witnesses of the political cataclysm for our people during the Bolshevik and German occupations. For now, much is being written about this, but in a few more years, the eyewitnesses and those who were the object of bloody experiments will pass into oblivion, and much will remain undiscovered for history. Therefore, I think that the time will come when any record, more or less objective, will have more significance for history than can be predicted now. It is understood that much of what is written will have to be cleansed of the authors subjectivism, but something will still remain. And the more such material remains, the more opportunity historian-analysts will have to crystallize the historical truth by comparing facts and events. What I want to write about is the living truth without fantasy or fiction. I hesitated for a long time because for some reason I thought that this should be done by talented people. Perhaps what is written will not be relevant for today, but it will be useful for historical archives.
V.V. Ovsienko: Correct.
S.I. Boroznyi: I come from a line of peasants. My parents were Galicians, Ukrainian patriots. My father died in 1936, and my mother remarried. With the arrival of the Bolshevik horde in 1939, a terrible judgment began for the people of Galicia. Persecution did not spare our family either. My stepfather went into the Ukrainian underground. My mother remained on the farm. We had a little land, and this was a reason for them to abuse us as “class enemies.” Taxes were imposed several times in a row, and when my mother had sold everything on the farm to pay the taxes, there was nothing left to pay with, but the finance department demanded more. So my mother gathered her things and went into hiding in villages, among strangers.
At that time, I was in the town of Skalat, hiding from the local lumpen. On Sundays, I would come to the village to see my mother. Such meetings took place away from our home, because the local pro-Soviet riff-raff watched us and wronged my mother whenever they could. One day, having come home, I spent the night in my own house. In the morning, fellow villagers woke me up. A wagon with policemen was standing in the yard. I was ordered to get ready for deportation. I gathered some belongings, the villagers gave me something of theirs for the road, and we left. At the station in the small town, there was a long train made of freight cars.
V.V. Ovsienko: In which town?
S.I. Boroznyi: Hrymailiv.
V.V. Ovsienko: When was this?
S.I. Boroznyi: It was in 1941, it’s mentioned there. In all the cars, there were people from the surrounding villages. There were entire families with small children and old grandfathers, and there were also young, unmarried people. I will not write about the travel conditions, because that tragedy cannot be told in a few words. The echelon was formed according to all the rules of the penal system. There were 1,192 deportees in that echelon. I learned this only in 1995 from the Moscow KGB archives. In three weeks, they brought us to Tyumen. At that time, it was the back of beyond, from where people were transported by all kinds of transport throughout the native land. Before they started dispersing us, we sat in the “Club of Water Transport Workers” for two or three weeks, in complete filth and near starvation. And when the time finally came to disperse us, during the loading onto the transport, another gymnasium student from the village of Lezhanivka and I took advantage of the commotion and escaped.
The roads to Ukraine were not easy and lasted several months. We had to travel in all sorts of ways, but mostly on foot—it was the safest, because the stations were swarming with all sorts of informant rabble, just waiting to grab someone and hand them over to the police. The station police picked up all sorts of wandering folk, and there were masses of such folk—all sorts of criminals, escapees from transports, and God knows from where else.
When we reached the Volga, we heard that war with Germany had broken out. Several more weeks passed, and we arrived in Ukraine. The front was moving towards us. Near the city of Sumy, we crossed the front and ended up with the Germans. We thought we had fallen among friends, but it turned out not to be friendly at all, because the Germans added us to a column of prisoners and drove us across the steppes to some concentration center.
Only a lucky chance helped us get out of that scrape. It happened like this. We, the prisoners, were locked in some collective farm shed for the night. When the doors were opened in the morning, we saw German officers in the yard, two of whom were talking to each other in Ukrainian. We called them over, they approached, and we asked them to let us go, explaining that we were not soldiers, but from Galicia, gymnasium students, nationalists. One of them said: “You should keep quiet about being nationalists now, because major arrests of nationalists are happening in Galicia.” We were surprised and couldnt understand what was going on. Nevertheless, they let us go. In a few weeks, we reached the Zbruch River, and beyond the Zbruch, our villages were just a stones throw away.
After resting a bit and getting our bearings, we had to start fighting the new occupier. I went into underground work. In the town of Skalat, there was a German printing press where our boys worked. We, the underground members, contacted them and began printing anti-German materials. The Germans discovered those boys and shot them in Yahilnytsia near Chortkiv. A Pole who worked with them betrayed them. That same Pole also saw us when we went to the printing press, and for our safety, we were forced to move to another district. I say “we,” meaning my friend who led the underground work he is now in the USA.
So we moved to the Stryi region, to Chernytsia. There was an agricultural lyceum there, which for a time became a conspiratorial refuge for us, and we posed as students. However, the watchful eye of a Polish informant was not sleeping. He saw us in the town of Skalat and called the Gestapo in Ternopil, and they took us off the train. At that time, the Germans were raging, and arrests were in full swing. They put us in the Ternopil prison in different cells, and the interrogations began. And from our families, the power of rescue immediately went to work. My stepfather had a friend who had some connection to the Gestapo, and through him, I was snatched from the clutches of the Gestapo. They failed to free Stepan Protsyk, and he ended up in a German camp, I think it was Auschwitz. People say that every cloud has a silver lining—he escaped from the camps to freedom, remained in Europe, where he worked long and hard for Ukraine. Then he moved to the USA and continued to work for Ukraine there—he taught the children of emigrants in Ukrainian schools, and then until his death, he was the editor of the bulletin “Ukrainian Democratic Movement.” He died in 1997. After half a century, we met in Kyiv, in an independent Ukraine.
And now about that same episode I undertook to write about. Here I would like to speak more about the tragic fate of my mother and the similar fates of thousands of Ukrainian women and women who went to Golgotha with their husbands and gave their lives for Ukraine. When the Bolsheviks drove the Germans out of Galicia, the great-grandsons of the Mongol hordes flooded in to take their place. Galicians knew that an even more terrible monster had come than the one that had fled. There could be no “honeymoon period” now, as there was in 1939 when the Reds first came to Galicia. Because no one believed them anymore—everyone knew that repression and abuse would begin again. Everyone in Galicia knew that he was a potential martyr and condemned man.
It is understandable that every nation has its dregs: collaborators, informants, and so on. There was enough of this scum in Galicia, all of it drawn from local heathens and newcomers from the East. All over Western Ukraine, there were Soviet punitive formations, military garrisons of the NKVD, police, “strebky,” and a mass of informants. All these formations had a bloody mission—to fight the Banderites, or rather, to terrorize the Ukrainian Galicians. Under the slogans of fighting the Banderites, the red terrorist forces provoked, arrested, and deported the old, the young, the small, indiscriminately a genocide of the Ukrainian nation was underway. Siberia took in the most Ukrainians and Balts. There were also other peoples, but they were fewer. The goal of the communist Russian empire was to resettle the “younger brothers” across the vast expanses of Siberia, to assimilate them, force them to work for the empire, and to weaken and destroy the nation.
On the Stryi River in Galicia, there was a garrison, and not far from that garrison stood a solitary house at some distance from the village. It served as a dive for the soldiers from that garrison, because a prostitute girl lived in that house. The garrison was not idle but was doing its “extermination work.” The system of destruction worked as the doctrine of destroying small nations required. Open terror was carried out with the help of the local plebs, our own and foreign enemies. The prostitute girl loitered among the people, gathering news and passing it to the enemy. The villagers guessed what kind of bird this girl was, but they had no time for her when a terrorist whirlwind was raging all around. The girl tried hard and did not even try to hide her dark deeds.
The need arose to break up this vipers nest. The right time came, and a few boys went out to solve this task. It had to be done without casualties, without, so to speak, provocations that would boomerang, because very often innocent people had to pay for it. After all, the Bolsheviks were raging and taking revenge a hundredfold. The “red broom” swept up everything and everyone—the guilty and the innocent. We approached that house, knocked on the window, and the same girl opened it for us. We asked her if she had family in the village—she said she did. Then she was told to leave the house immediately and go to her family. Apparently, she understood the situation, quickly gathered her things, and left. One boy followed her to see where she would go. She left the porch and darted off, running towards the garrison. Without delay, we immediately began to leave the house. When we reached the porch threshold, they opened fire on us from the attic with a ten-round rifle. It became clear that there were soldiers in the attic. We jumped from the porch into the depths of the yard. From the direction of the garrison, shots could already be heard—the girl had raised the alarm. We had to retreat as fast as possible. We ran beyond the gardens.
After a few dozen steps, I felt my legs grow heavy and I was swaying left and right, and my right arm went numb and hung limp. A moment later, blood gushed from my mouth and nose, a warm stream flowed down my leg. I could not run any further, the boys sat me on their rifles, I put my arms around their necks—and forward we went. We ran another few dozen steps, and I lost consciousness. Then they carried me on a shelter-half, or maybe on something else, but I dont remember that. It must be said here that I was not the only one shot another was also shot through the lungs, but on the left side, the bullet passed right by his heart. The boys carried him too. He survived, but I dont know what became of him.
It was very difficult to retreat with such a burden along the river, through bushes and swamps. They carried me a few kilometers from the place of the wound. When I regained consciousness, I didnt immediately understand what had happened to me. I couldnt lift my head or move my leg, and I could barely see or hear, my lips were glued together with blood. I gradually realized what had happened to me, and I fainted again. And when I came to for the second time, as if through a sieve, I saw human faces above me and guessed that they were my own. From the presence of a person, from their words, my memory began to clear. They began to bandage me, sat me up, cut my stiffened clothes, and sprinkled some powder on the wounds. There were no medicines everything was done slowly and unskillfully, for where could one find medics. We had to hurry, because the “red broom” was raging in the village, the “strebky,” raids were underway, and who could know that a pack of rabid henchmen wouldnt decide to comb the willows by the river. After the bandaging, they laid me on a fresh spot and covered me with some rags. They told me that ten hours had passed since the wounding. My lungs were shot through, from top to diaphragm, and my arm was also shot below the elbow. Leaving me by the river, the boys promised that they would come for me if possible.
I was left alone with my thoughts and my memories. My clouded consciousness could not reconstruct any logical chain of memories. Memory snatched fragments from the past, mostly related to my family and my mother. I think it would be appropriate here to say something about my mother.
My mother lived with her sister in another village. There was no peace from the red gang, from the local communards and “strebky.” Just recently, I had come from Chernytsia, where I was studying, hiding from the Germans. Now these were the territories of my underground work. I came to my native home for a short time to see my mother and relatives. Enemies were lurking all around, and to live through a night and a more or less peaceful day could be considered good luck. After staying illegally with my mother for a few days, I had to return to my organizational duties. We had a little horse that the Bolsheviks had left us in place of our two well-fed mares. Now this horse was at my aunts, where my mother was hiding. The day of parting came, my mother and I harnessed the horse to the cart, I said goodbye to my aunt, my mother and I got on the cart, I tugged the reins, and the horse slowly moved forward. My mother was seeing me off into the unknown. I saw how she was quietly sobbing, looking at me, looking, whispering a prayer. We drove out of the village into the fields. It was such a quiet evening. The sun was already setting on the horizon, its yellowish rays shining sadly and gently on us.
We stopped the horse, got off the cart, my mother stood on the crest of the road, her hands crossed on her chest, I knelt before her, she hugged my head, pressed it to her, and her tears fell on my head and hands. We were crying. Our souls felt that this was our last meeting. And so it happened. The KGB men threw me into the Siberian lands for long decades, and the red executioners killed my mother in 1947.
With such thoughts and memories, I now lay by the Stryi River, bled out, dying. In my imagination stood the suffering, unhappy, forty-five-year-old guardian of our home, my holy mother, with her graying head uncovered, making the sign of the cross over me with one hand and wiping her tears with the other. When I was on death row, that farewell image of my dear mother often appeared to me. And there, on death row, images from Stefanyks novella “Sons” came to life in my memory, where the old father with despair and reproach says to the Mother of God: “You gave One, and I gave two.” That is, the Mother of God gave one Son to death, and the old man gave two for Ukraine.
My mother had only me, and she also gave me to Ukraine, and she gave herself to Ukraine. And she sent me off to fight for Ukraine, with her tears and her testament she gave me to Ukraine, and to me—her boundless love and loyalty to Ukraine. I went through all the fiery years and did not betray her testament. I cherish the memory of my mother throughout my long life. When the black wing of fate hung over me, she, my mother, was by my side. She was with me when the executioners read me the death sentence, and on death row, when I awaited execution, she appeared to me, my Guardian. The memory of my mother, of her tormented life and her terrible death, calls me to give my life to the last to Ukraine and to the faithful daughters of Ukraine. I saw the torments of Ukrainian women in the belly of the terrible Soviet monster in Norilsk and in other places of the vast prison of Russia. One of them was my wife, who spent ten years building the draconian empire in the permafrost of the Arctic. Let us pray to the Almighty that the future generation of Ukrainians will not give their lives in foreign lands for foreign interests.
I return again to the Stryi River. I was waiting for the boys to come get me. They came at night, ferried me across the river to the village on a boat, and then carried me in their arms to a kryivka. The kryivka was located in some barn. What kind of structure is a kryivka? Its an ordinary pit, about two by one and a half and two meters deep, covered with boards and piled with straw a kind of grave for a living person, unlit, lined with straw, without ventilation. The kerosene lamp was lit only when they changed the bandages on my wounds, and the wounds were bandaged, maybe once a week there was also a bucket for physiological needs. This was my intensive care “ward.” But was it only mine? How many sons and daughters of Ukraine passed through such “wards”! My health returned very slowly, I had lost a lot of blood, there were no medicines, no high-calorie food, and a lack of fresh air. There was nervous tension due to the raids. In a few weeks, by Gods grace, I recovered a little and at night I would climb out of the pit to breathe fresh air and, holding on to the wall, take a few dozen steps.
One day, the landlady ran into the barn, frightened and very agitated. She said that the “strebky” were running amok in the village, searching for kryivkas in every yard, and if they found one, they arrested the owner. She was afraid that the same would happen to her if they found me in the kryivka. The landlady helped me get out into the garden, disguised me as an old woman, and here I pretended to be working. In the neighbors yard, the “strebky” were already bustling about—probing the straw, the manure, the ground with wires, looking for kryivkas. They found nothing and left. This time, I was spared. I did not return to the pit, but moved to another place—the attic. Here I was under the care of two young girls who had connections with the underground. I accidentally saw one of these girls on the roads of the GULAG, after I had already been arrested. At some transit point in Siberia, a male transport was being marched, and I was in that transport, and a female column was being marched towards us. The men were made to sit on the ground, and the women were marched past under the barking of dogs and the shouting of the guards. In this female transport, I caught a brief glimpse of the girl Maria, who had once cared for me. My heart sank, but before I could process it all, the transport with the women disappeared like a ghost. The murderers drove the girls off to God knows where, and they made us get up to continue the march. Many years later, someone told me that this girl, Maria, had died in the camps.
So, when I had recovered a bit, though with great shortness of breath, I nevertheless went out into the field. Somewhere far to the West, battles were raging, the distant roar of cannons could be heard. In the territory of Galicia, the Bolsheviks fought with all their might, with all their structures, against anti-communist actions and sentiments. All military, state, and civilian structures were enlisted to intimidate the population, destroy old customs, and drive the people into collective farms. And since the OUN was still active at that time, the Bolsheviks organized provocations, set up ambushes, and in this they were helped by local turncoats.
A group of our people, moving through the area, fell into one such ambush. We were approaching the forest, suspecting nothing, when suddenly shooting started from the forest and at the same time NKVD troops began to run out and drive out in trucks. One of them shouted: “Dont shoot, take them alive!” From the tension, blood started coming from my lungs. The KGB man who saw the blood on me shouted to his men: “I told you, you sons of bitches, not to shoot, we need to show the bandits to Khrushchev!” And indeed, they showed us to Khrushchev in Kalush. He was there for some reason with his entourage. From Kalush, they took me to Ivano-Frankivsk, to the pre-trial detention center. Here they interrogated me, using all the achievements of Soviet criminology.
V.V. Ovsienko: Do you remember the date of your arrest?
S.I. Boroznyi: I have the documents, well look at them later. After a few weeks in this pre-trial detention center, I became so exhausted that when they took me to court and I had to go up to the second floor, I didnt have the strength for it. The guard helped, saying: “Come on, come on, old man, soon theyll fix you up good. They dont keep guys like you for long, they send you to God.” I no longer cared where they sent me. I knew that many people were being eliminated, and I had prepared myself for that.
They brought me to court. The tribunal consisted of a low-ranking officer and two young women. The sentencing procedure lasted a few minutes, the verdict—death by firing squad. I took it calmly, without any emotional outburst. It was not a surprise to me—Soviet justice applied the most brutal practice of genocide to Galicians. I left the court without pain or fear, thinking about my mother—I didnt want her to find out about this. They took me to death row. And from there began a long journey through prisons and camps.
Here I end this episode, which is but one link in a long chain of adventures in Moscows captivity.
I think it would be appropriate in this episode to tell how my mother died. It happened in 1947, when I was already in the Norilsk camps, in the third penal labor zone. My fellow villagers told me how my mothers life ended when, many years later, I was in Galicia and visited my native village. Our farmstead had been taken into the collective farm, and many things had been stolen by the local lumpen. The house is still standing today, but even then, my mother rarely stayed in that house, she lived and hid among people. My stepfather, Fostakovskyi, a young, energetic man, was in the underground. In the fields, between the villages, a kryivka had been made, where our underground members would stay from time to time. It was in that kryivka that the tragedy occurred, in which my mother died along with my stepfather and several other underground members. Perhaps on that very day, my mother was bringing food to the underground members, or perhaps there was another reason she ended up in that kryivka. The “Soviets” stumbled upon the kryivka. Whether they threw a grenade into the kryivka, or the underground members destroyed themselves—one can only guess now. Everyone who was there perished. Of course, the Soviets found this kryivka not without the help of our own traitors.
One way or another, people died at the criminal hands of the occupier. The bodies were taken to the town of Hrymailiv, where they were placed under a house for display, so that people and relatives could come and look at them. It is understandable that no one dared to approach, so as not to arouse suspicion from the authorities. These people were buried in a common grave, but no one knows where. They were buried so that no trace would remain.
Dear reader, the short episode I have told above is just a brief preface to the terrible tragedy that began and lasted for twenty years in Soviet and German prisons and camps.
I served my sentence in Norilsk, in the third penal labor zone. It was here, in 1953, that the prisoner uprising took place. I was a witness to all those tragic events. I saw how NKVD troops entered the zone and fired machine guns at the barracks where the prisoners were. Many were killed. I was in the columns that were later led out of the zone, laid on the ground in the tundra, and sorted according to their files, those prisoners, and then dispersed to camps throughout the . Much has been written about this by various authors. I was also in the camps of the Irkutsk Oblast, in Vykhorivka and Tayshet. In twenty years of wandering, I have seen and experienced much, but that will not be my topic today.
In a few sentences about myself. I was born in Galicia, in the Ternopil region, village of Monastyrykha, Skalat district, year of birth 1921. I studied at the Polish gymnasium in Ternopil, as well as at the teachers seminary in Sambir and at the agronomy lyceum under the Germans. I was a member of the OUN, and was imprisoned for political activity against the Germans and the Bolsheviks. Under the Germans, I was imprisoned in Ternopil for several months under the Bolsheviks—twenty years in the Soviet GULAG in many places, longest in Norilsk. After being released from the camps, while still in exile, I got married. My wife also spent ten years in Norilsk. After finishing our exile, we came to Ukraine in 1964, settling in Nikopol, where I live now. My wife died in 1996. I have a son.
V.V. Ovsienko: Please state your wifes name and her maiden name.
S.I. Boroznyi: My wifes name was Emilia Ivanivna Rekhlichka, my sons name is Orest.
V.V. Ovsienko: What year was your son born?
S.I. Boroznyi: 1961.
V.V. Ovsienko: When and where did you get married?
S.I. Boroznyi: I got married in the village of Suyetikha in Siberia, in the Irkutsk Oblast. When I was taken out after that “sabantuy,” so to speak, I was still serving my sentence there. Later I was released, and my wife came from Norilsk. She was already free by then and came to me there.
V.V. Ovsienko: And what year were you released? You say you were in captivity for a total of twenty years? Its important to recall these dates. [Dictaphone is turned off. V. Ovsienko reads on]. Almanac “Bil” (Pain), issue five-six, combined fifth-sixth issue, Lviv, “Poklyk Sumlinnya” (Call of Conscience) publishing house, 1995. The issue is dedicated to the memory of the publisher Ivan Tyktor on the centenary of his birth. Here on page 138, there is a text about Mr. Stepan Boroznyi. Stepan Boroznyi in a “top secret” report on the resettlement in the Omsk Oblast of families administratively exiled from the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR. This report is published in Ivan Bilass book “The Repressive-Punitive System in Ukraine 1917–1953” (Kyiv, “Lybid,” “Viysko Ukrayiny” publishing house, 1994, book two, pages 203-205). The head of the Omsk UNKVD, among other things, reported to the Deputy Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Chernyshov: “...the following shortcomings were noted: 1. In the city of Tyumen, from the Club of Water Transport Workers, where the newly arrived families of administrative exiles were temporarily housed, on the night of June 9-10, administrative exile Boroznyi, Stepan, born 1921, son of Fostakovskyi, escaped...”
S.I. Boroznyi: Fostakovskyi, thats a mistake.
V.V. Ovsienko: Fostakovskyi? “...a member of a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization, living illegally. Stepan Boroznyi arrived in Omsk Oblast alone, as his mother Fostakovska...”
S.I. Boroznyi: Fostakovska, Fostakovska.
V.V. Ovsienko: “...Fostakovska evaded deportation. Immediate local search measures have not yet yielded positive results, and the search for the escapee continues...” About his further fate, the author of the poems submitted to the almanac by his fellow inmate from the Norilsk camps, wrote: “...The road to Galicia stretched for several months with a wide variety of adventures. The Germans were already here. For underground work against the German occupation, I was arrested in Ternopil, but escaped. When the Bolsheviks came a second time, I was seriously wounded in the underground in the Stryi region and was treated in kryivkas. While moving from one station to another, I fell into an ambush, then—death row, commutation of the death sentence to twenty years of penal labor, Norilsk, Tayshet. Now I live in Nikopol. As for the ‘Autumn Sketches,’ they were written for a family album, not to be published anywhere—nothing interesting...”
“Certificate No. 020760, series No. BE, dated April 28, 1959, issued to citizen Boroznyi, Stepan Ivanovych, born 1921, nationality Ukrainian, native of the village of Monastyrykha, Hrymailiv Raion, Ternopil Oblast, convicted by the Military Tribunal of the NKVD troops of Stanislav Oblast on March 16, 1945, under Article 54-1a of the Ukrainian SSR to twenty years of imprisonment, with no prior convictions, certifying that he served his sentence in MVD places of confinement from January 19, 1945, to April 28, 1959, from where he was released by the decision of the permanent session of the Irkutsk Oblast Court of 09.04.1959 under the decree of the PVS USSR of 14.07.1954 on parole, with his sentence of 5 years, 9 months, and 10 days of exile replaced by time served.
Head of the colony (unit), prison (Signature)
Head of the department (section). Prison secretary (Signature).
And there is another certificate, called “Certificate No. 6. Department of Internal Affairs of the MVD of the RSFSR. Executive Committee of the Irkutsk Oblast Council of Workers Deputies. Issued to citizen Boroznyi, Stepan Ivanovych, born 1921, nationality Ukrainian, citizen of the USSR, native of the village of Monastyrykha, Hrymailiv Raion, Ternopil Oblast, certifying that he was held in exile from April 28, 1959, to March 3, 1964, from where he was released upon completion of his term of exile.”
S.I. Boroznyi: There is also a certificate of rehabilitation here.
V.V. Ovsienko: Ah, and there is a certificate of rehabilitation. We need to make a photocopy of it. A certificate from the Department of the Security Service of Ukraine for the Ternopil Oblast, dated June 30, 1993, on rehabilitation, signed by the head of the Department of the Security Service of Ukraine, V.I. Radchenko. The verdict of March 16, 1945, and the decree of the PVS USSR of April 23 on the commutation of the death sentence to 20 years of imprisonment “are annulled, and the case is closed due to the lack of proof of his participation in the commission of the crime, and he is recognized as rehabilitated.”