KOTS, MYKOLA HEORHIIOVYCH

I n t e r v i e w w i t h M y k o l a H e o r h i i o v y c h K o t s

December 26 and 27, 2000.

Last corrections on August 10, 2007. M. Kots’s corrections were not received.

V. V. Ovsiienko: December 26, 2000, in Kyiv, at Vasyl Ovsiienko’s apartment at 30 Kikvidze Street, apartment 60, we are having a conversation with Mr. Mykola Kots (Mykola Kots).

M. H. Kots: My last name is Kots, which is quite rare. My first name is Mykola, and my patronymic is Heorhiiovych, though in some documents it’s Yuriiovych, because they are one and the same. Priests and the administration would get them mixed up, writing Heorhiy in some places and Yuriy in others. This confusion even occurred within the family: some family members have Yuriiovych in their passports and documents, while others have Heorhiiovych.

I was born on December 4, 1930, into a peasant family. The village, Husha, is on the Buh River, a border village, now in the Liuboml Raion. Under Poland, during Piłsudski's time, it was in the Liuboml Powiat of the Volyn Voivodeship.

My father.

Our family consisted of my father, mother, and five children. I was the middle one. There was an older brother, Ivan, born in 1921; a sister, Hanna, born in 1925; me, from 1930; a younger brother, Andriy, born in 1933; and the youngest sister, Halyna, from 1935. My grandparents had died before I was born, so we don’t know them. We know who my grandfather was, but we don’t remember them personally. Perhaps only my older brother did, because my grandfather died in 1926, but even he couldn’t have remembered him, as he was only four years old at the time.

What was our family like? I’ll say that my mother was an orphan. My father also came from a large family. There were seven children, or something like that. He was the youngest. He married my mother in 1919 and they started their own farm. According to him, they started with half a desiatina of land.

V. O.: And please state your mother’s name and her maiden name.

M. Kots: My mother was Daria Kharytonivna (maiden name?), born in 1897. My father was Yuriy Yakubovych Kots, born in 1899. My father was two years younger than my mother. Their inheritance was half a desiatina of land from their parents. Well, what could you do with half a desiatina? It was a miserable existence. But my father was resourceful: from the time he married in 1919 until 1939, until the so-called liberation, he managed to get on his feet. This was his undoing—and not just his, but our whole family’s.

What was the matter? While others didn’t want to know anything—sow, reap, that’s it, sitting there under the fence—my father often said that they would sit under the fence and tell tall tales. But he looked for other sources of income. What sources? He would leave the farm to my mother, and since he had horses, he got into the timber business—he bought forests, hired sawyers, they cut it into beams, and after cutting the beams, he became a contractor: if someone needed a house built, they would turn to him. And he became skilled at this, had craftsmen he knew, and would make a deal with the owner: do you want to build a house? For such-and-such a sum, I’ll build you a house like this. If it worked out, it worked out; if not, then not. According to him, he built some forty houses in about 20 years in his own village and in neighboring ones. And this surprised some people: “What, should we let him get rich? I’ll build it myself.” So you had two neighbors: my father took the contract for one house, and the other guy built his own. And because he built it himself, it ended up costing him more. That was one of my father's activities—he worked as a contractor.

Second, there was a lake in the village. It’s still there today, with an area of 40 hectares. It was always considered communal, and the community would lease it to someone. Who leased it? Mostly Jews. And so my father, and two other men, thought: why should we have Jews here? Let’s lease it ourselves. And the three of them entered into the bidding. The lease was for three years. After three years, the lease would be renewed. And so the three of them took it on. A bidding competition was announced—whoever offered more would get it. The three of them pushed out the Jews and began to run a fishing business. Gradually, the other two dropped out, and my father remained the sole lessee of the lake. So, besides these contract jobs, he was involved in fishing. A contract was drawn up for the leased lake, stating what you had the right to do, what you were obliged to do—not so that after you, not even grass would grow. It specified that you had to stock it with fish, you had to protect it, you had no right to catch small fish of a certain size, you had no right to fish during spawning, and so on. These were the conditions regarding the use of the lake, and the others were about payment. The contract was made by the community, and the community needed a church in the village. It was old, so they agreed to cover the church with sheet metal. My father undertook the obligation to cover the church with sheet metal. Furthermore, there was a fire brigade in the village, and they needed some kind of building for the firefighters—also at the expense of the lake lease, in a year or two, he re-roofed the church and built this firehouse-guardhouse.

That’s how my father managed his affairs until 1939; everything went well. In any case, he gradually accumulated money and bought more land, and he ended up with up to 10 hectares of land. Of this, about three and a half hectares were arable, and the rest was hayfields and meadows. But he didn’t go all out keeping a lot of livestock. We had the opportunity to keep 10 cows because the meadow was good, there was hay. But my father didn’t consider it expedient because there was nowhere in the village to sell the milk. He sold the hay to a military unit, and with the rest, he kept 2-3 cows for our own needs. The military units would make arrangements, they would come, and he would sell the hay for a certain sum. This allowed him to get on his feet. And this bothered some people: look, he’s already bought so much land, and he has the lease too! Some people’s eyes bugged out, thinking he was the owner of the lake, not allowing outsiders to fish. He didn’t object to fishing with a rod, but with other gear, no. Because I pay the lease, stock the lake—and please, go and fish wherever you like? Of course, he didn’t allow them to soak hemp, because it poisons the fish.

And about two years before the war, he even ordered eels—a rare, quite interesting fish. They sent him about 2 kilograms from somewhere in Gdańsk, Danzig. They were as long as a needle. To release the eels into the lake, witnesses were needed, the police were present—you see, they’re alive. These eels grew quite quickly, but we hardly got to benefit from them, because this was around 1937, and they need to grow for 8, 10 years. They grow into a sausage-like thing, you can’t hold it in your hands. And it’s a problem to keep an eel in a net: it doesn’t break through the mesh with its head, but pushes with its tail. I had to help catch them. When you pull out the net and see there’s an eel, you’d drop everything and try to wrap it up. It was considered a precious fish, so that it wouldn't escape. We would wrap it in several layers of the net, then hit it on its navel, breaking its spine. Then it would lose its strength and couldn't escape.

My father also stocked the lake with bream from the Shatsk Lakes, maybe you’ve heard of them? There was some lady there who bred bream. My father made an agreement with her and bought them—they also grow into a good fish.

Well, he was engaged in such economic activities. This is the economic side. On the eve of the war, the old house was still standing, and there were five children, so he had to think about where they would live. He had bought a little land and started construction. I could show a photo of our house, but I don’t have it with me. It was what they called a *dwupiętrowy*, that is, a two-story house. In Polish, that wasn't considered the second floor, but the first floor—the ground floor and the first floor. It was a wooden house, roofed with sheet metal. And this caused discontent in many. The fact that he didn’t let people fish in the lake, didn’t let them soak hemp, look at the house he built, and, you see, he wore a tie and didn't go barefoot—that was like he was some kind of gentleman or associated with gentlemen. This provoked malice in some, and when the Soviet authorities came, they began to accuse him of exploitation... Well, of course, when you fish with a dragnet, one person can't handle it. One person pulls one wing, another pulls the other, a third hauls it out—you needed a minimum of 3-4 men. So he hired people, paid them—how else could you attract them? Only with payment. These people came voluntarily. So, that meant he exploited other people, profited from it, was a big contractor for whom people worked, a kulak…

1939. Brother Ivan.

And in 1939, it began... Ah, a few more words about my brother. My brother Ivan was born in 1921. He had a peculiar character, not very obedient: if I don't like it, I won't do it, because I want to do that. He was fascinated by radio technology. He first built crystal radios, and then even started making tube radios as an amateur. And in the village at that time, around 1937-38, this was a rarity. I’ll just say that it came to conflicts, my father would throw out these radios because they cost money. You didn’t get it for free; you had to buy the parts. There were conflicts between my father and him—you know, we need to build a house, and you’re here with this... And for Ivan, radios weren’t enough: “I need a bicycle.” And a bicycle wasn’t cheap back then, depending on the brand. Ivan insisted and got his bicycle. He didn’t earn the money for it, being 17-18 years old. “Father, I need a bicycle and that’s it—give it to me.” And he bought it for 180 zlotys, and 180 zlotys—you’d have to sell a good cow for that. The brand of the bicycle was “Metro,” 3/4 balloon tires, colored red tires, a peculiar, curved handlebar. Back then, you didn’t just buy a bicycle by walking in and taking it or leaving it; you went to the warehouse and said: “Put on tires of this color for me, put on a handlebar of this shape, a seat of this color, and pedals like these.” And the shop owner would assemble it to your order. So, there’s the bicycle. He had a few friends, they would ride to visit girls in the villages across the Buh, particularly near Chełm, they rode to Chełm. These boys were 18-19 years old. And for Ivan, the bicycle wasn’t enough: “Next, I must have a motorcycle!” Such were his fantasies.

But the fantasies about the motorcycle were cut short by the war; 1939 arrived. Soviet troops come, they establish a border near us, our house was about 1.5–2 km from the border. They were building fortifications there. Soviet political officers and military officers started visiting my brother. I'll tell you, at that time, a Soviet officer didn't even know how to ride a bicycle. Not to mention the soldiers. They were interested that my brother had a bicycle, a radio, and had started studying English. They would come, silently watch him. One officer told him: “I wouldn’t recommend you live here.” He hinted that here was the Buh, and he should scram over there. “What, is it bad where you are?” “No, but…” Ivan told our father about this conversation.

Our family was classified as kulaks, and they started imposing double and triple taxes on us. I remember my father coming home—a two-thousand-ruble tax! And where were we to get that?

That was one thing. The second was passports. They were issuing them to others, but not to our family. And these were, so to speak, symptoms that Siberia awaited you. My father was already thinking about how to flee, because eventually we would end up there—rumors were reaching us about what they did with “kulaks.” I remember this issue being discussed at home. But my father didn’t want to leave his family and run. And fleeing with the whole family was not an option. It was the same with my brother—he began to think that things smelled bad.

In our village, many started to flee. In those years, 1939–1941, up to two dozen young people scrammed—successfully or not. To Germany—they crossed the Buh. Some escaped, some didn’t. Ivan discussed this at home and with someone else, a man named Kravets. And someone informed on him, that he was planning to escape. Not only that, an NKVD officer started pestering him: give me the bicycle, saying it was a war trophy. “What trophy? It’s mine.” “You have a weapon, you…” When Poland was defeated in 1939, there were trophy weapons around. And he carried one around, I remember. Because what does a 19-year-old know? Let's try shooting it. So they’d set up a bucket—let’s see if the bullet pierces it. However, when the order was given to surrender weapons, Ivan surrendered his and showed the receipt.

There was also this episode. The Germans were the first to come to us in 1939—few people know this.

V. O.: Did they go a bit further than agreed upon in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

M. Kots: They went as far as the outskirts of Volyn, penetrating beyond the Buh, in some places by 20 km, in others by 10 km. The Soviet troops hadn’t yet crossed the border on September 17 when the German troops came to us, around September 14. Some motorized mechanized tank unit arrived; people counted up to 40 tanks. These were light tanks, but who knew the difference back then? A tank, it runs on tracks. People even laughed at the Poles: those damned Poles made everyone sweep the street in front of their house every morning to keep it clean, and then the tanks drove by and nicely harrowed everything. This was a mocking joke about Polish orderliness. Because the Poles maintained order. Our village had a *gmina* (municipality), so cleanliness was especially demanded. You were not allowed, if a cow or even a dog died, to bury it in your own yard—you had to take it to a specially designated animal cemetery. The house had to be whitewashed, and the fence by the house too. If you made a fence from good wood, you didn't have to, but if not, then whitewash it. Not only that—even the chimney on the house had to be whitewashed if it was smoky. And you had to have a toilet in your yard, not just go behind the barn and drop your pants—only a toilet, and the toilet had to close, and also be whitewashed. People joked about this—look what the masters demand! But when the Soviet authorities came, no one demanded this anymore—you could drop your pants anywhere, even in the middle of the street.

When the Germans arrived, a tank unit rolled in. They positioned the tanks in various places. They drove in early, just as it was getting light, at dawn. In the morning, people rushed to the German tanks to look and examine them, gathering in whole groups around these tanks. I was there too; I was about 9 years old at the time. I remember two tanks were parked where I was. Some people had been prisoners of war in the First World War, so they knew a little, but the rest didn't. Well, we were milling around, the tank crews showed us various instruments, their razors; they didn't know the language either and used gestures to show things, demonstrating some items. And we climbed on the tanks, peeking inside to see what they were.

And another episode. We had surrounded these tanks, and we see two Polish soldiers walking. They were at a distance of maybe 200 meters. “Oh, oh! The Poles are coming!” But the Germans hadn’t noticed them. When all the people started looking and pointing in that direction, the Germans noticed too. One started whistling; the Poles didn’t hear, or something. A German jumped off the tank, ran to intercept them, and fired into the air. Then the Poles heard and raised their hands. He shouted something in German. They would run a certain number of meters, then lie down; he would give another command, and they would run again. They came to him like that, and he brought them to the tank: sit down. They sat, were given food, and were kept by the tank.

After some time, the tank crews needed some food supplies. And these two tanks were stationed outside the village. They drove into the village on the tank, bought milk, and came back. The two Polish soldiers, taken as prisoners, were already sitting there. The Germans brought the milk and gave some to the Polish prisoners of war as well.

So, when these tanks were once again traveling into the village and back to their parking spot, my brother Ivan also got on the tank and rode through the village. He was later reminded of this episode: “Aha, you rode on a tank with the fascists!” “But they were your allies, you were with them...” And the Germans, by the way, said when they arrived: “We won’t be staying here—the Russians will come to you.” And when the population looked at the technology with such excitement and praised it, they said that the Russians had even better, bigger tanks. Well, we hadn’t seen them yet.

This episode was also a stain on my brother Ivan’s biography. When they were about to arrest him (this was on July 31, 1940), they first summoned him to the village council. There, an NKVD man, the head of the district NKVD, whose last name was Krolevetskyi, demanded of him: “Give me the bicycle!” “And why should I give it away? It’s my bicycle.” “Give it! We’ll take the bicycle and you.” And when he pressed my brother, he bolted from the village council and ran home. He runs home, wanted to get on his bicycle (wherever he planned to go…), but they were right behind him, surrounded him in the yard, three of them, and didn’t let him break out of the yard. He ran into the hallway, grabbed the bicycle, pulled it outside, but they had already blocked his way. Then he grabbed a pole, pressed the bicycle against the pole—he was physically strong. They tugged and tugged at him, couldn’t pull him off. Then two more border guards on horseback ride up. They call them over—five men against one! My brother saw that they would take him from the yard. They dragged him and the bicycle to the border command post.

We didn’t know then—a cleaning lady told us later—that they held him in the command post for three days, as if in a cell, and then sent him to the border detachment in Liuboml, where they held him until the 6th, and on August 6, they sent him to the Lutsk prison. He was in the Lutsk prison until almost the New Year, and then a special council sentenced him to five years under Article 54, Point 13. That’s how he was arrested, and the other one—Ivan Hryhorovych Kravets, who was older. They established that they had been communicating; someone informed on them. The accusation was that he communicated with the Germans, that he had a radio receiver, that he broadcast to the fascists… But it was a crystal radio, what could you broadcast with that? And that he had a weapon, that he was planning to flee abroad. Practically, the charges of having a weapon and communicating with the Germans were dropped, as they couldn’t be proven, leaving only the one about planning to escape. Why? He said he didn’t have a passport, so he saw that things looked bad, which is why they talked about needing to escape. Well, they hadn't escaped yet; they were caught at home. Ivan was sent from the Lutsk prison to the North, to where the cosmodrome is now—the Plesetsk district of Arkhangelsk Oblast, post office Navolok. And within a year, they sent him to the next world. He didn’t live to see the amnesty of August 12, 1941—he was already gone, there was no one to amnesty. That’s how my brother’s fate ended, at 20 years old.

And later, under Khrushchev, in the 60s, I wrote to the camp there, then I wrote to the General Prosecutor’s Office to have the case reviewed. The General Prosecutor’s Office forwarded it to the Carpathian Military District. The Carpathian Military District forwarded it to the Lutsk Oblast Prosecutor’s Office; they reviewed the case and passed it to the oblast court for review. And they overturned the verdict—so to speak, he was rehabilitated. He lived for 20 years, and was rehabilitated 26 years after his death. Such was my brother’s fate.

November 1940. Eviction.

Well, my brother is gone, and we, the “kulak family,” are awaiting the same fate for ourselves. My parents expected day by day that we would be picked up and taken away. The talk was about how to save the children. We heard that they were taking children from their parents and sending them to orphanages, changing their last names, changing their first names, so that the parents wouldn’t know where their children were. The parents perish, and the children don’t know whose they are. My father constantly instructed me to remember where I was from, my address, and my last name. Well, I was already in my tenth year: “You are from the village of Husha, on the Buh River, Volyn Oblast, your last name is so-and-so, remember, because the situation is…”

And they hoped to save us in another way: by hiding us. They knew that the “black crows” came at night and took entire families. So at night, they would take us to relatives. My younger brother and I were taken to the khutir (hamlet) of Snyptsi, to a man named Ostapiuk Yakub—it was about two kilometers from our house. My sisters were taken to our aunt, our mother’s sister, for the night, so that, if they came, they would take the parents, and the children would remain.

But it was not to be. In mid-November 1940, they descended on our house at night—only our mother was home. My father was not at home at the time. They found my father, brought him back: “Where are the children?” “I don’t know, they’ve scattered.” But if it weren’t for our own scum, the activists, the head of the village council, the secretary… Well, where could the children be? With relatives. They sent carts, came to this khutir of Snyptsi, woke us up in the middle of the night, threw us on a wagon, and brought us to the village. They found my sisters too, brought them back. They threw six souls onto a wagon. It was my father’s horses and wagon. They threw our rags onto another wagon, and under convoy—forward. We were escorted by NKVD border troops.

They are taking us in the middle of the night. On one side, a guard with a long rifle and bayonet is walking, on the other side too. They silently drive us east. They drove and drove, and then we had to go through a forest, 5 kilometers of forest. It’s night, dark, and suddenly we look—the guards are gone, they disappeared about four kilometers from the village. What to do? You can’t go back—we’ve been expelled. We drive on, passed the neighboring village of Borova—no, no sign of the convoy. We drive further, to the next village—a Polish village, the Poles called it Ostrówki, and the Ukrainians called it Ostrivky, in the same county. There, at dawn, my father drove into the yard of a Polish acquaintance and said: “At least let the children spend the night!” And it was November, the weather wasn't warm.

He allowed it; we went inside and spent the night. What to do next? No home, no property… My father started looking for a place to stay. He walked around for several days. Everyone was afraid to take us in—an enemy family! Then, after maybe five days, he found a Polish man—a cripple, blind in both eyes, without a wife, with only a son named Stasik. His name was Stefan, last name Gracz. He took the risk: since I’m a cripple, maybe they won’t repress me. And he took us in because he would have someone to do his laundry at home, to help with the farm, because what would you pay with? So he took us into his shabby little hut—it was enough that the room where the six of us stayed also housed another woman with three children—nine souls in one room, you can imagine! And he lived in the kitchen with his son.

This began in November 1940. No matter where my father went to petition—“Ah, a kulak! We’ll establish order!” They set traps. My father was quite far-sighted in this respect, regarding provocations. Border guard officers would come: “Come to the command post at the outpost tomorrow!” And this was in our own village. The command post and the outpost were there. And this was already a restricted zone. My father doesn’t go—he gets on his horse, goes to the district NKVD and writes a statement: “I request a pass to travel to the village of Husha.” The NKVD—“No, we won’t give you one, and that’s that!” “So what should I do?” “Do what you want, but we won’t give you a pass.” Well, since they don’t give him a pass, my father doesn’t go to the village.

After a while, these provocateurs come again: “Why didn’t you report to the command post?” “Because I don’t have a pass.” “And why do you need a pass? We know you.” But that trick didn’t work on them. So it dragged on until the beginning of the war.

The German Occupation.

1941, June 22—the war began. And this was about 10 kilometers from the border. The Germans arrived on the first day. By noon, I already saw Germans in Ostrówki. For about three more days, there was shooting, there were battles. When the front moved on, we returned to our village after about 4 days. The Germans, by the way, took our horses and gave us a receipt, but that was the end of it—a pair of horses, gone.

So neighbors and relatives came, took us, and we returned to our own house. A nursery and a kolkhoz office had already been set up there; new masters had found their place: they gathered a couple dozen morons, all sorts of crooks, and founded a kolkhoz. But when the Germans came, it all fell apart, and everyone farmed their own land until 1944, until the second coming of the Bolsheviks.

The time of the German occupation was also peculiar. They offered my father: there are those people who sold you out—you can deal with them. There was a police post, a *posterunek*, in our village. But for some reason, he didn’t go for it—he would just grit his teeth but didn’t say to get rid of them. In other places, they did such things, where the victim would come and settle scores, but my father didn’t do that. And under the Germans, it turned out that in the first year, they even erected a monument to the victims of Bolshevism, built a mound, and consecrated it.

And then what began to negatively affect people? It wasn’t without communist propaganda doing its work quietly. They incited: you have to pay taxes, you have to meet quotas. But in what country do people not pay taxes? And also the fact that the Germans demanded labor for Germany. They sent one group, then a second—it wasn’t enough, and more, and more. And the village heads and secretaries—they liked to drink. If a family had few able-bodied people, they didn't take them, only those where there were five or more able-bodied people, but only 3–4 hectares of land. The Germans demanded: let them go to Germany to work, what will they do here, lazing around. Because how many people do you need on a farm? Nothing to do—go there. But not many wanted to go. Well, they would ply the village elder with drinks, and the elder would appoint someone else. This caused friction between the village elder and the people, who saw that it was possible to buy their way out or simply run away and hide. The German administration demanded results from the elder. The elder says he can't force them—he went, and the person wasn't home. Then the administration ordered the police to deliver the labor force. And where did the police come from? Not from Germany. They were our own—in our village, they were from neighboring villages, and our fellow villagers served as police in other villages. And they turned a blind eye to it: they were ordered to bring so-and-so, they come—he’s not home. So they take someone else. They gathered a certain number, sent them to the county center, to Liuboml. There was an assembly point there. When they gathered a certain number of people from the whole district to take to the train, few were left: whoever didn’t want to flee, didn’t flee. It was said that for this, the Germans imposed such penalties on the police: they put forty kilograms of sand in a bag and made them run.

Regarding the Jews. I would say, between us, that not many sympathized with them then. But the dispatch of people to work in Germany and the collection of quotas began to anger people. Then the police also began to waver—what to do? And suddenly, in March 1943, I’m going to school, and there’s no one at the police station, the doors and windows are open. Everyone had vanished, gone into the forest. The entire police force, organized, practically throughout the entire region, went into the forest, that is, into the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army). In our village, there were 20 of them. Among them, too, there was ferment: where to go? The propagandists convinced them that they had to fight for the independence of Ukraine, that this is an enemy, and that is an enemy, we need to fight both this one and the other. Some took this as a given, while others looked askance: with what and what can we do? With what can we go against such a machine?

When the police joined the UPA, the Germans posted an appeal. They wrote that you have been deceived by the communists, return to your posts, no one will have any claims against you. And if you do not return, you and your families will be punished. That was the first appeal. Some returned; there was a police station in the county town of Liuboml, so they returned there and served. But it was no longer possible to restore the police in the villages, because the majority had remained in the forest. After two weeks or a month—a second appeal. The Germans did not mince words. They appealed once, they appealed a second time, they warned, and then they began to carry out their warnings. What do they do? They send a punitive detachment to this or that village from which the police had gone into the forest. There were also those who remained with the Germans; they knew those houses. They arrived in the village of Zapillia—a politically quite active place. They found many people at home whose sons had left the police. So they did this: if they found someone in a house, they didn't let anyone out, they set it on fire and burned them. That's how they dealt with the families in Zapillia. The next day they went to another village, then to a third. Because they couldn't cover all the villages in one day.

Well, so they're coming to our village. Two "Willys"-type vehicles are driving, four men in each, open top, machine gun, automatic rifles. Seven kilometers before my village, they run into an ambush by the insurgents. There was a ditch there, alder trees came up to the road, and some had taken position under the bridge. The first vehicle drives in—they throw a grenade, blow it up, set the vehicle on fire, and destroy it with a machine gun. The second vehicle turns back towards Liuboml. They drove in, reported the incident. Then the Germans dispatch 7 such vehicles and 2 motorcycles with sidecars. A group is now on its way: 7 vehicles with 4 men each—that's 28, plus 2 on each motorcycle, one driving and the other in the sidecar with a machine gun—that's 32 men. And there were only a few of those insurgents. Of course, the Germans had weapons with which one could fight. Whereas this one had pulled some sawed-off shotgun or machine gun out of a swamp, didn't always have cartridges, and the boys were green. So the Germans pass through the point where they were fired upon without much difficulty and arrive in our village. We heard the explosions, and panic broke out in the village. About an hour later, this team enters the village. Five policemen from our village had gone into the forest. They go to those houses—but the families had fled, because they knew what was coming; the houses were empty. The Germans set those houses on fire, but they didn't touch any outsiders.

From our village, they went to the next one with the same purpose. That village was called Opalym, now Vyshnevka, 2.5 kilometers from ours. They were driving along a meadow. Well, people were already afraid of the Germans because they were killing, shooting, destroying families. Some boys were grazing cows in the meadow, about 300 meters from the road, and had a fire going. When they saw the German vehicles coming—it could only be German vehicles—one of them jumped up and started to run. A German cut him down with a machine gun. He was fifteen years old or so. But they didn't shoot the other one, who didn't run. They drove into the village of Opalym; there, about 2 men from the police had gone into the forest—they also burned their houses. One had remained with the Germans, his last name was Moldakhovskyi. The Germans returned and drove to Liuboml. Well, those whose houses and families were destroyed now harbored resentment against those who remained with the Germans, for serving the Germans, coming with them and killing our families. At night, the Banderites come and put his family to the knife, slaughtered them, burned them...

Such enmity began: aha, you serve the Germans—we kill you, and whoever went to the partisans—we kill you. From my village, a quirky fellow named Mykhailo Dudych served in Liuboml. He was arrested in 1940 for crossing the border. He and a man named Kozak crossed the Buh, stayed there for a few days, and came back. When they were returning, they were arrested: “You were recruited there.” A military tribunal of the 5th Army of the Kyiv Military District sentenced them to 20 years each. At that time, the Code provided for only 10, that was the maximum, or execution. Why did they give them 20 years? This was on the eve of the war; they hadn't managed to transport them from the prison before the war started. And during the executions, Dudych survived. But about Kozak, to this day I have no information about his fate—whether he survived or not. Dudych returned home and, under the Germans, joined the police, got married in the town of Liuboml—so what could he do, if he left his wife, the Germans would kill her, and you can’t take a wife into the forest. So he stayed there, but the boys from the forest began to terrorize his parents: “Who does your son serve? Go to him and tell him to quit.” The parents go to him in tears, passing on notes with warnings. This Dudych floundered about, then leaves the Germans and flees home to the village. And our village was 20 km from the county town; it was completely under the control of the UPA. He stayed with his parents and didn't go anywhere else. It was said that the Germans killed his wife in Liuboml. The front passes through—he is drafted to the front, and he died there. So he wasn’t executed—he died defending that regime. Incidentally, his younger brother joined the UPA, he was even a *roiovyi* (squad leader).

But I have deviated from my own biography. In our family, there were no suitable candidates for one service or another. My brother Ivan's generation found themselves here and there—some in the police, some in the UPA. But by this time, he was no longer alive. My sister Hanna was younger, she was 15-16 years old, and the others were even younger. My father had a family; he didn't serve in any army—it was considered that he was unfit for service. So he didn't go anywhere. He cared for the well-being of his family. He had 3 years of education, but he could run circles around some people with a secondary education in practical matters, in calculations, in what was expedient to do and what was not, what would bring some benefit or not. In particular, he could appraise timber—it might seem, let a 3rd-grade student determine the cubature of some felled tree, but he could do it. And he could do other calculations as well.

By the way, there was such an incident. My father came to visit me when I was already working as a teacher. I was a bachelor, living with a friend; our salary was up to 100 rubles. It seems I had graduated from university, already a “professor,” as they said in Galicia. I invited my father to go to a teahouse for lunch. We had lunch, got some beer. Well, he looks at the bill: “So what’s your salary?” It turned out that if we ate like that, my monthly salary wouldn’t be enough. He says to me: “Eh, your education and everything is for naught—though I was barely literate, I could have managed better.”

But I'm getting ahead of myself. My father was very practical: if he was going to do something, he would first calculate, recalculate several times, whether it was expedient. If it wasn't, then: “No, this doesn’t suit me, I’m not taking it on.” He had great respect for education, even though he himself was barely literate. He stood up for education like a rock: “Oh, that’s an educated person.” And he forced us to go to school. While my mother was indifferent to education, my father didn’t let us children just play around. When my father wasn’t home, we would play cards or checkers, but as soon as we saw him coming home... “Here’s a book—take it and read.” He even subscribed to newspapers before the war. Even when we were driven from our village and had taken refuge in a Polish village, he immediately said: “Go to school! Or you’ll be vagabonds, like gypsies!” And I went to a Polish school, and my younger brother too. My older sister had already finished 6 grades, and there was nothing more in that Polish village.

By the way, in 1940, in Polish villages, there were Soviet schools with Polish as the language of instruction. There was only one subject—*jȩzyk ruski* (Russian language), and everything else was taught in Polish. Soviet textbooks were translated into Polish.

In this way, I found myself in a Polish environment. In the third grade, there were about 20 students, and I was the only Ukrainian; the rest were Poles. My younger brother went to the first grade; he started not with the Ukrainian but with the Polish alphabet. Under Poland, I had studied in the first and second grades—I started school in 1937, and in 1939 I was moving to the third grade, but the war started, and under the Soviet authorities, they demoted us by one grade; I was forced to finish the second grade again. And in this Polish village of Ostrówki, I went to the third grade. The teachers were mostly Polish, they didn’t have a good command of Russian, but they managed to read it somehow.

As I said, my father didn’t care about the conditions: “Go, go and study, and that’s it.” Even under the Germans. The first year the Germans came, I went into the fourth grade. In 1941-42, there were six- and seven-grade schools open in the villages, but in 1942-43, an order came to leave only primary schools in rural areas, while seven-year schools were to be in the district centers, in the cities. So I was supposed to move to the fifth grade, but there was no fifth grade, it was closed. So my father takes me to the district center, to Liuboml. He brought me there; you had to rent an apartment, pay someone for room and board. He didn't have the money for it. So he makes me go to the fourth grade again, maybe in a year something will change.

I go to the fourth grade again. And then this struggle ignited, the UPA appeared. Fires started—it was no time for school. In the autumn of 1943, under the auspices of the UPA, schooling was introduced in the villages, but the situation was getting worse and worse, tensions were rising, red partisans had infiltrated, and the school stopped functioning altogether.

1943. The Enmity.

The summer of 1943 was quite hot. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists managed to take control of the rural population to a certain extent. One could say, universally. It introduced military training; a training commandant was appointed in the village, and people from 18 to 40 (or 45) years old had to attend military training. The younger generation more often, the older generation twice a week. For drills, for formation, they studied tactics. Well, what kind of weapons? Everyone was obliged to carve a wooden rifle to master the techniques. In the summer, the conflict with the Poles began, and the situation escalated into horrific events. That village of Ostrówki, where I studied, was wiped off the face of the earth by the UPA. Those boys I studied with… I was 10-11 years old, they were my age and older, they would invite me to their homes, they didn’t distinguish that I was Ukrainian, that I was some kind of opponent of theirs, they treated us well and helped us, sympathized with us as a suffering family.

I recall this episode. I go to the store—and back then, some goods were sold only to co-op members. For example, if sugar was delivered, a member could buy half a kilogram of sugar, but a non-member could only buy matches. My parents sent me, I don’t remember for what. I enter this Polish cooperative—there’s a line for sugar. Well, I got in line to buy matches, or salt, or something. The older people exchanged glances, led me to the saleswoman, she weighed out half a kilogram of sugar for me without asking if I wanted it or not, and told me how much to pay. This shows that they weren’t such scoundrels as some try to portray them.

And so it was with these boys. As boys love to play war, I would go with them, hear their thoughts, their dreams. What did they dream of? Of Poland: there will be a war, we will fight for Poland, to restore it here. Well, they restored it—almost all of them were annihilated for no reason at all. But as I say, they treated us quite sympathetically. They would invite us over for holidays, for Christmas, for Easter—as victims. And even the teacher who taught me in Husha in the first and second grades, in 1937-39—they drove her out of the village. “What, a Polish woman will teach us!” They replaced them with Soviet teachers, people who had three or four years of education. But she did have some education, at least a secondary one. They drove her out of Husha. So she moved with her husband to Ostrówki and taught there. I happened to meet her there; she continued to teach me in the third grade, and her daughter Danuta studied with me both in Husha and in Ostrówki. Such are the stories from that time.

As for the fight against the Poles, they began to organize retaliatory actions. We had to hide, to conceal ourselves wherever we could in the forests, to organize self-defense. Our village was quite large compared to the neighboring ones. The self-defense group was sizable. The Poles were afraid to attack our village. They attacked the neighboring village of Rivne five or six times, burning it down. Then they burned Peredirka. They took advantage of the moment—our people love to celebrate, and on a holiday, you can have a drink, so the Poles, knowing the customs, knew they were celebrating the end of Carnival, surrounded the village and burned it, killing some 38 souls. Despite the fact that there was a guard. They were caught napping.

We were waiting for our turn. But we were spared; the Poles did not dare to attack our village. We made it to autumn.

The Red Partisans.

I believe it was sometime in December that the red partisans broke through to our area.

V. O.: So this is 1943, right?

M. Kots: Yes, forty-three, December, I can't name the exact date. There was a rumor that the red partisans were approaching, and we were warned about how they behave. People tried to hide all their property, bury it, because they looted everything they could think of. They behaved like a classic gang. Even those who sympathized with the Soviet authorities didn't believe these were Soviet representatives—they didn't want to fight, but just roamed around like a gang, robbing people. But later they became, oh-ho, national heroes! And they are still glorified to this day.

We hid everything. And suddenly they burst into our village. And the people had hidden wherever they could. They entered our house—it was empty, no one there. Something was cooking in the kitchen. There was a bag of dried berries—so one of them just dumped it into the pot of borscht. They rampaged for an hour or two and then left. That was the first episode with them. They stayed in our area for about a week. They set up camp near a neighboring village, about ten kilometers away. During the day, they would ride in, rob—and then back. And they rob everything they see.

In the village, a fraternal grave had been erected for the victims of Bolshevism. Aha, a grave—they go to the first house, grab one fellow by the scruff of the neck, another, put a saw in his hands: “Cut the cross.” They forced him to cut down the cross. And for a believing peasant back then, cutting down a cross was something terrible. But under a gun, they cut it down. When the reds left, the insurgents came and raised the cross. They didn't bury it, just propped it up. It stood there.

Then the reds broke through to us a second time in March 1944. And what did they show? Well, a robber is a robber, and then there was a skirmish, a firefight. They killed three insurgents. They would rush into the village, like a gypsy camp, stop—and then go through the yards, the storehouses, the attics. They knew that people had hidden everything, so they went with pikes. They had experience from 1933, they knew how to look for where things might be buried. And our people didn't have that experience yet—just covered it with a bit of earth, thinking it wasn't visible… They cleaned you out to the last thread, whatever they liked. Not that they needed, say, a jacket or boots because theirs were torn—if they came across something feminine of value, they took that too: headscarves, skirts. They would empty out the *kufry* (as we called the chests for clothes). He'd go up to a kufer—and everything into the bag, into the bag. They specialized—some in clothes, some in other items, some in storehouses for lard, some searching for... Well, for example, one came to the house: “Where's the razor?” “I don’t have a razor.” “Where's the razor?” “I don't have one.” He pestered me: “Where's the razor?” “I don’t know.” “What does your father shave with?” “I don’t know.” He terrorized and terrorized me, but got nothing. He rummaged everywhere; whatever he found was his. Another specialized in horses. They were all cavalrymen. The local population laughed that he would tie a trough to a horse and call himself a cavalryman and ride off.

And so one such “cavalryman” arrived—I don't know where he got that nag. He rides into our village—and from yard to yard, checking what kind of horses the owners have. He found one he liked better than the one he arrived on. He shoved his own into the barn, led this one out, and tied the trough to it. But he wasn’t satisfied with that and continued through the barns. He came to our place. He looked in—he liked our horse better. He shoved that one into our barn, led our horse out, saddled it, and rode on. And so in one day, he switched his saddle six times and rode out of the village on the sixth horse—he arrived on one and left on the sixth. That was his specialization.

Here’s another episode. One came to my father. He looked around and around, under the tables. My father was mending shoes. He was still wearing tolerable boots. “Take off your boots!” What can you do? “Take off your boots!” He pulled the boots off my father, threw his own torn ones down, and left.

They walked around and around—it bothered them that we had a decent house. But there was nothing left to rob. Well, we had hidden some things, made a hiding place that they didn't find. They demand: “Empty your house!” What, how? “By tomorrow, I don’t want to see a single window left!” “Why? And where will we…?” We started to plead with them to let us leave at least one window in the kitchen. Well, they relented, said we could leave one in the kitchen, but the rest—not a single window should be left. What could you do? My father takes me, and we start removing the windows from their frames. We had six windows on the first floor. We took them down, placed the windows inside the room against the walls. We cut some boards and boarded up the window openings. No windows—we satisfied their demand.

And German reconnaissance planes—a “frame” as it was called—flew over, taking photographs, and detected that red partisans were milling about here. A day or two later, ten planes fly in. And just at that time, they hadn't come to rob. They “ironed out” two villages—ours and the neighboring one, bombed, bombed, bombed. And here’s an interesting thing: the boards with which we had boarded up the windows all fell off from the shock waves, but the frames, which were standing inside the room, slid to the floor, maybe one or two broke, but the rest of the glass survived. We later laughed that if God wants to help, He'll do it even through the enemy. During the bombing, almost all the windows in the village were blown out—but in our house, the glass was preserved in this way.

Well, they “ironed” us out, and then visited the village again. At that time, my father and I were up early, hiding a few more things so they wouldn't be taken. And suddenly we see—a reconnaissance party rides by. They would first send out reconnaissance to see if anyone was around, and then the whole horde, the whole camp, would arrive. The reconnaissance party went to the edge of the village, from where the road led to the county center. They set up guards at the crossroads. The main horde had not yet arrived, but the Germans had sent 10 armored cars from Liuboml. The village is situated a bit lower, and the forest is higher. It was spring, the fields were clear, there was no greenery yet. The Germans emerged from the forest half a kilometer away and opened fire. I could see they had bracketed the village—they were landing shells on either side, shrapnel was bursting overhead, but they weren't shooting at the houses. There were only craters left from the shells outside the village. And of those six red partisans, not one escaped—as soon as they started to run, they were cut down by machine guns.

The Germans were driving through the village, one vehicle after another. They were expecting to be shot at, because if anyone looked out from around a corner or from a window, there was an immediate burst from an automatic rifle, drrr. While driving through the village, they killed another man and wounded eight. Whoever looked out the window saw an automatic rifle aimed at them and ducked away, which is why most were wounded in their arms.

So they drove through our village and went on to the next one. After a while, they returned. As they were passing by our house, a refugee from the neighboring village was riding by on a cart, and they fired a burst at him. He was riding a mare, and a foal, just a few days old, was walking alongside. They wounded the man in the leg and wounded the mare—she fell.

When the Germans were advancing, we heard artillery fire and hid in our cellar. I was eager to see what was happening, because my mother had seen some vehicles through a crack that were shaped like haystacks. I really wanted to see what kind of machines they were. But my parents wouldn’t let me out. I said I was hungry. “Then go to the house quickly, eat—and come right back!” Oh, I thought, good, I managed to get out. I went into the house—not to eat, but to see those German vehicles. And then some kind of miracle happened. The road went right past the window, and I stood there. I heard the armored cars approaching. As soon as the first one appeared, it was as if someone grabbed me by the back and sat me down on the floor. I heard the first one pass, the second pass, the third pass. I sat on the floor, my desire to watch gone. I heard the last one pass. Then I went into the other room and looked after them. And that last one stopped by the cart and finished off the mare. The Germans drove to the end of the village, and the villagers took the wounded man, carried him behind a barn, and bandaged his wound. The Germans had stopped at the edge of the village, at the exit. Did someone tell them? Two of them walked toward the cart, then into the yard. They found the man, bandaged him themselves, and returned to their armored cars. And there lay those dead Reds; they checked what they had—sacks with headscarves, with skirts. They laid it all out around them, took photographs, got in, and drove back to Lyuboml. Such was the work of the Red partisans—these modern heroes.

Spring of 1944 was approaching, the front line drew near, already positioned in the Kovel area, not far from us, about 60–70 km away. The Germans were already preparing fortifications along the Bug River. And among these German units were Galicians. The commander of the squad was a German, but there were ten Ukrainians. I saw them myself. When the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) found out that there were small units of Galician-Ukrainians among the Germans beyond the Bug, they began to negotiate with them—asking who they were fighting for and urging them to come over to our side. And so on Easter of 1944, on the third day of Pascha, there was a rally in the village, and after the rally, the UPA gathered boats from around the village without saying why. But even a fool could see they were for the water. They had planned something. They took those who could row and, at night, brought them to the Bug. These Galicians, with whom an agreement had already been made, shot some three Germans or so, took all the weapons, and with their full equipment, approached the Bug. The insurgents ferried them to our side and led them through the village—the crossing was about three kilometers from my village. They were marching in German uniforms, laughing, speaking Ukrainian, carrying two heavy machine guns, and each had his personal weapon—a carbine.

As soon as they were led through the village, the Reds burst in. A battle ensued, a firefight in the homesteads. One Galician was killed, and the rest scattered.

If a German was killed somewhere, they would carry out a punitive action. A German unit would come, surround our two villages, and drive everything living—people, livestock—out into the fields. But there was only one company for two villages, that’s about fifteen hundred people in mine and a thousand in the neighboring one, plus many homesteads. It wasn’t such a tight cordon that you couldn’t hide. Even before this, some people had hidden in the forest. On average, each household had, say, one and a half horses, and with 400 households, that’s 600 horses, and there were up to 1,000 cows in the village. Imagine the force needed to drive out such a herd. And cows that weren’t in the same herd would fight each other. They drove the livestock and the people: “Forward! Forward! Forward!” But where to, for what? They said everything here would be burned, destroyed. We thought they were driving us to Germany.

Our family also got caught in this misfortune. “Harness your horses, take what you want, because nothing will be left here.” So they captured us and drove us to the Bug, to the crossing. They set up a ferry. The command: take only what you can carry in your hands. At this, everyone’s heads dropped. They transported us to the opposite bank, drove us to the neighboring village of Hnisha—it’s in Poland now, just across the Bug. They herded us to the commandant’s office, made lists, and quartered us in various yards. Over 80 souls were crammed into the yard where we were placed. They posted a guard. We were allowed to walk within the yard. Well, maybe 50 to 100 meters beyond the yard. In the morning, a roll call, like in a camp. They did a roll call two or three times a day. We spent the night—then again. We sensed that trouble was brewing, that it would end with them shooting us. But there was a Pole there, an acquaintance of my father’s, a man named Belinsky; he was a head forester. He spoke German well. Father appealed to him, saying, “Talk to them, these people are innocent of any wrongdoing.” Although there had already been a conflict, Poles had been beaten, and Belinsky himself had fled from our village to the neighboring one, he still stood up for us. The Germans held us in Hnisha for three or four days. At first, they allowed us to walk within 100 meters, then they let us walk throughout the village, then they allowed those who had relatives to visit the next village. And after about four days, they let us go—“Go home.” We returned home, to desolation.

V.O.: The village wasn’t burned down?

M. Kots: No, they hadn’t burned the village yet. And so we returned. The Germans had driven off some of the livestock, but some had scattered and returned home. About a week passes—another roundup, they surround the village again. There are almost no people in the village, maybe you’d meet an old grandmother, but the young people were in hiding. The Germans are burning everything in sight. They took a radius along the forest—house after house, house after house. What to do? A fire started there, another there, and who knows what was happening to the people—it looked like they were killing them. What to do? Hide. Where to hide? We had our own decent bunker, but it wasn’t safe from fire. If everything burned, we would burn in there too. We could survive there without a fire; small bombs weren’t a threat.

In the cellar.

We knew that our neighbor had a good bunker, but the neighbor had fled to the forest. We knew the entrance to it, but we had never been inside. When we saw the fire approaching us, we went there. The entrance was from the manger, in the cowshed. We opened an iron hatch and entered the cellar. From there, there was an underground passage, and on top of the bunker itself was a haystack. Then another underground passage, and the exit was covered with boards and sprinkled with earth. We rushed in there. There were four of us, plus my father’s sister with her husband and son—seven souls in total. We waited to see what would happen. We heard a roaring sound. The houses were burning. The house was burning, the cowshed from which we entered was burning. The flames lit up the hole we had crawled into, but for now, we could bear it. But when the walls started to collapse, it was as if someone had turned on a pump and started forcing smoke inside. The smoke pressed down on us in a wave. Father rushed to block the passage into the trench. But with what? Well, we had grabbed some clothes, but that’s not a wall, you can’t seal it hermetically. He held it, held it, but couldn’t hold on, the smoke seeped in more and more. Father shouted, “Find a way to the surface, or we’ll die here!”

I moved from this dugout into the trench to get to the surface. Let them shoot us, rather than suffocate in the smoke. I got to the board—oh no, there was a thick layer of earth on it, the earth was packed down, compacted—and it wouldn’t budge. What to do? Father: “Get out, or we’re doomed!” He let go of the barrier, and we all huddled in the passage. He asked, “Why aren’t you getting out?” “We can’t open it!” Father blocked it again. We were trapped a second time. And the smoke kept choking, choking, choking us. What to do? No matter how my mother struggled—the wall was like iron. More and more smoke, the screaming began. Especially my younger cousin: “Oh, it’s choking me, it’s choking me!” Father yelled, “Cover yourselves!” You can’t cover yourself from smoke. We started digging with our hands to make a hole. Ha, we tore our fingernails off, but we couldn’t break through the earth. Screams, our hands dropped, we all sat down—well, this is it, the end! But I kept looking for a way out. And I found that the ceiling of this trench was made of poles, with straw on them, covered with earth. In the dark, I began to feel the ends of the poles, found a thinner one, pulled once, pulled a second time, and broke off a piece.

[End of cassette 1]

V.O.: Mykola Kots, cassette 2.

M. Kots: I broke a hole through. Air came in, and the smoke began to escape upward through it. We would survive. But we sat in the cellar, afraid to come out because maybe the Germans were still walking around, hunting. We waited for dusk. In the evening, my father started to look out to see if anyone was there, and my aunt, who had been hiding in the garden, was walking around looking for us, calling out. Well, my father heard her and looked out, “What’s going on?” The Germans were gone.

Then we climbed out of that cellar. A burnt-out wasteland, the remnants of houses smoldering. Not so much houses as posts, because the houses had long since burned down. And then we saw it—our house was standing! Scorched, charred, resin dripping from the walls, but it hadn’t burned down. This was the second time: when there was shelling in 1941, the houses around us burned, but ours didn’t. Back then, in 1941, a few other houses survived, but this time not a single building was left. What saved our house? The fact that it had a tin roof saved it, and the flames from the neighboring house didn't catch it as much, although the neighbor's house was quite close.

Well, what then? We went to the house. We had spent the day sitting in smoke, suffocating, and now we needed to eat something. It was already dark, so we decided to cook something in the kitchen. We started cooking, but we heard planes roaring. The city of Kholm was 25 kilometers away from us. Searchlights were shining there. Soviet planes were flying, and German anti-aircraft guns were firing at them, shells were bursting, tracer bullets were flying. And suddenly, out of the blue, one bomb, then another, slammed into those burnt ruins. There were two craters there, about 8 or even more meters in diameter. The rest were about three to four meters. Well, people laughed then, saying that the pilot was afraid to fly where they were shooting, so he dropped his bombs here, on the ruins, and flew away.

This was just before the front line arrived. About a month later, the road was already overgrown with grass, the Germans began to retreat. Around July 16, 1944. For three days, German units were withdrawing.

July 1944. The Red Occupation.

And on the night of the 20th to the 21st, everything fell silent for an hour or two, and suddenly a Soviet reconnaissance unit appeared. That was the second time Soviet troops came to our village. Around the twentieth of July.

Well, what can I say about this second arrival? Another tragic episode. Among the retreating Germans were Vlasovites, and among them were also Ukrainians. There was a mix of everyone there, including Russians, Georgians, Uzbeks. So, a few men decided: where are we going to retreat to? Let's go back to our own people. They approached some women: “Could you hide us somewhere while the Germans are retreating?” And the women said, “Well, if you want, we can take you to the forest.” And they led them, seven men with weapons, to a forest far from the roads. These seven former Soviet soldiers, then German soldiers, wanted to return. In the forest, there were quite a few dugouts where our people were also hiding, waiting for the front to pass. They stopped near those dugouts, saying they were Ukrainians, from the Vinnytsia region, I think. One was a blacksmith, another a collective farmer. They were discussing what they would do after the war, what occupations they would have. Three or four days later, the Germans had passed. Then UPA underground fighters came and suggested they surrender their weapons. They hesitated, hesitated, and gave them up. And as soon as the front passed, someone pointed them out—“There are the Vlasovites.” The Reds came: “Line up!” The women raised a fuss: “What are you doing!” But they were taken about 100 meters away and mowed down. They didn't ask who they were, what they were, where they were from, no investigation. Just like that, people who were discussing how they would live after the war had their lives ended.

And just before the war, Soviet pillboxes had been built along the border. On the outskirts of our village, there were two pillboxes. One was about 250 meters from our house. How did they destroy them? A unit was formed from former Soviet soldiers, the so-called “black-skins”—Caucasians or Uzbeks, and from the Germans, there was an engineer and another, an interpreter. The village was already burned. For several days they placed explosives in the pillboxes, sealed the entrance with wood, covered it with earth, and then lit the Bickford fuse. They went around the village: “Run, or nothing will be left for a kilometer around, there will be such an explosion!” But we could see it clearly from our place—well, while you’re busy digging, there’s no need to run. When you start running, we’ll run after you. We set up a watch: as long as you’re still digging there, there’s no need to flee.

We watched as a German in a white tunic drove up in a carriage. We saw the Bickford fuse start to smoke, the cart turned around, he got in and drove off. And then all the soldiers scattered, each in their own direction. They were also curious to watch. Two of them headed in our direction. Well, while you’re still closer to the pillbox, there’s no need for us to run; if you run further, we’ll follow. They came into our yard, went no further, climbed into the attic, and were going to watch the pillbox explode through the window. Aha, and I followed them. They stood by the window and watched. “Look, look, it’s about to blow!” I stood next to them. They stood and stood, and one said, “It’s not gonna blow!” The other: “It will!” We stood and stood—the pillbox was silent. The first one again: “It’s not gonna blow.” The second one was quiet now. And suddenly it blew, everything turned to fog, the pillbox was blown to pieces. They ran there, and I followed them. The engineer in the white suit and the interpreter arrived, measured the thickness of the concrete—the top, the side, the front. The front part, I think, was one meter eighty of reinforced concrete, the side about one meter twenty. The walls were lifted up and thrown out. The interpreter, who spoke Russian, said: “That’s how it is with a person: he lives, he lives—and then, poof, he’s gone.” They got in and drove away.

Well, I’ve gone back a little. I’ll continue. In the morning, the Soviet troops were already there. Would there be a battle on the Bug or not? We had seen that the Germans were fortifying the Bug. We started to flee, but the Germans practically failed to organize a defense on the Bug. The Soviet troops crossed the Bug, then advanced all the way to the Vistula, near Warsaw. Such a horde pushed through for about three or four days—a mass of troops and equipment.

We met old acquaintances. Immediately, mobilization. Well, who wants to go and fight? People looked for various ways to evade it. Some saw that there was no getting out of it, they would be taken anyway, what excuse could you give? Some went, and some went to the military commissariat with moonshine, salo, and butter. They’d get a deferment for a week. They’d return, and a week later, bring more. What a sweet deal that was for the workers of the military commissariat! They began to restore various structures—the district party committee, the district executive committee, the police. And the district officials needed to repair their houses, because everything was devastated. They needed to look after horses, they needed drivers. They gave out deferments. Whoever brought a bribe would get one for a week, or two. And so they milked it, and milked it. Some sat out the whole war on such deferments, and those who had nothing left to bring—well, you’re a deserter. They’d grab him by the scruff of his neck and send him to the Kemerovo Oblast, or to the North.

My cousin ended up in this situation. They had no right to take him because he was not a Soviet citizen. Before the war, under Poland, the Poles had drafted him into their army, and there he was captured by the Germans. He had never even seen the Soviet authorities. In 1942, he escaped from Germany and came home. And here come the Reds—aha, you’re evading, you don’t want to go to the front. They gathered at least a dozen and a half like him—some to Vorkuta, some to the Kemerovo Oblast, to the logging camps.

That cousin of mine, Dmytro Romanovych Stremyholovka, had already been taken to the morgue. He was lying in the morgue, and in the morning, an orderly comes in to check on the bodies, and Dmytro says to him: “I want to eat.” The orderly runs to the doctor: “That one’s still alive.” “How?” “Well, he’s lying in the morgue and asking for food.” A man from the Baltics, also a prisoner, was the camp doctor. He said, “Bring him back to the ward.” They brought him to the ward, the doctor took him under his care and nursed him back to health, brought him back to his feet, and he survived until the end of the war. After the war ended, there was an amnesty for deserters, and he was released without a trial. He returned home, swollen from hunger. The doctor said he was one in a thousand, to be brought to the morgue as dead and then revived.

That’s how people went to fight at the front. My father was not subject to mobilization. There was a cutoff: those born in 1899 were taken, and those born later were not. He didn’t end up at the front. While the war was going on, there was less talk about class affiliation, but when the war ended, the old song started again: the organization of collective farms. Aha, this one is a kulak, that one is a saboteur. They began to impose taxes, logging duties, timber transportation. They deliberately imposed them so that one couldn’t fulfill them—it would be a pretext for repression…

Father’s Arrest.

They established a collective farm in our village in the summer of 1947. Who established it? Various scoundrels—a vagrant who had drifted to us from the east and settled in the village; another, a prisoner of war who had attached himself to some woman, joined the partisans, played the partisan for a bit—and now he’s a hero, building a collective farm. They began to prepare the ground for a crackdown. After the founding of that collective farm, suddenly, in broad daylight, the house of the first chairman of the collective farm caught fire. He didn’t live in his own house, because he was a newcomer, but in the house of a Pole named Yasinsky, who had fled across the Bug. Who set the fire, it’s hard to say. It was during the day, on a Sunday, toward evening, around four or five o’clock, a fire broke out. When there’s a fire in the village, everyone runs to put it out. And I went to put it out too. The house didn’t burn down completely because it was plastered. The roof burned, but the walls were saved. I came home, my father was somewhat alarmed: “There’s going to be trouble, there’s going to be trouble.” Well, it was Sunday, you were sitting with the neighbors in the yard, talking all day. What claims could they have against you, when you—the house was about 300 meters away—have witnesses you were sitting with. But my father sensed trouble. About three days later, the head of the MVD from the district, Liubchenko, arrived. They summoned my father to the village council. He went, his head bowed. Why, I thought, is he so downcast, well, they’ll ask him something... What they said to him there, I don’t know, but I stood on the street, waiting for my father to return from the village council. The village council was about 400 meters away, the street was straight, I would see him when he came out. He didn’t come out, my father didn’t come out. But, I saw that Captain Liubchenko came out and was walking in our direction. He came into our yard and said to me, “Harness the horse, we’re going to Holovno.” At that time, we were in the Holovnyanskyi district. Well, I harnessed the horse, drove up to the village council—they brought out my father, sat him in the back, a policeman sat on one side, another on the other, and three more—and we drove off. So I was driving my own father to prison. But I didn’t think he was arrested. I thought, well, they’ll take him to the district, ask him some questions, and let him go, there are no grounds for anything.

We arrive in the district center. I was there for the first time, didn’t know where anything was. They stop near the police station. They take my father into the police building first, and after about 20 minutes, they bring him out into the yard. I didn’t yet know that there was a holding cell in the yard. They don’t tell me anything. Well, I think, they’ll ask him some questions, my father will come out, get in, and we’ll go home. I stand in front of the police station for an hour, two. A policeman comes out and says, “You can’t stand here. Move along.” Well, how can I move along, my father won’t know where to go, where to find me. I moved about 50 meters away, stopped again, and waited. I stood there and watched for my father to come out. I wait and wait—no father. Another policeman comes: “You can’t stand here, move along.” “Well, where to?” “Go over there.” There, behind the mill, there seemed to be a parking area. I drove behind the mill, parked the cart, and from there I couldn’t see the police station, so the cart and horse stood there, and I went out to the road. I stood and stood—something wasn’t right. Evening, dusk—what to do? I dozed through the night on the cart and understood what was what. In the morning, I drove home alone. Father was gone, I had taken him to prison...

They held my father for about two weeks. Well, there was clearly no pretext to pin this sabotage, this arson, on him. They released him and imposed a timber transportation duty and taxes on him. In October, they arrested him a second time and held him until January 1947. No arrest warrant, nothing. Sometime in January, they issued the arrest warrant, but he had already been sitting in the holding cell for three months. On January 8, 1947, the district court delivered the verdict—10 years of imprisonment in corrective labor camps and 5 years of deprivation of civil rights. There you go! They sent my father to the Kovel prison, and from there they took him to Kyiv. He worked here in Kyiv, on construction sites, for about two years. From here, he was sent to the Urals, he was in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, then transferred by transport to the Tomsk Oblast, then moved to the Saratov Oblast. And then Stalin died. There was an amnesty after Stalin’s death: those who had up to 5 years were released, and those with more than 5 had their sentences cut in half. And my father had already served more than five years. They cut the rest of his sentence and released him.

They released him—but to where? They had thrown all of us out of the house, kicked us out, took absolutely everything. Where to live? What to do? In the spring, they threw us out of the house. We spent our nights in a neighbor’s cowshed, in the barn with the cattle, until the harvest. Then the grain needed to be brought in, the neighbor asked us to vacate the cowshed—so where could you go? So I built a hut—a “Lenin’s shelter.” Autumn came, it got cold—you can’t spend the winter in such a shelter. So I started digging a dugout. I dug it about 50 meters across from my house. We settled in—my mother, myself, and two sisters. My younger brother had already finished seventh grade and managed to get into the Volodymyr-Volynskyi technical college. So the four of us were left in this dugout. Well, a roof over your head is still a roof. But what was there to eat, when they had taken everything we had—the potatoes, everything else. We had to gather mushrooms, berries, acorns, catch fish, and live on that. Then I found myself a job at the station—as a loader, a watchman. I spent the whole winter of 1948-49 at the station. There was a tank car that had been derailed during the war. I filled this tank car with straw and slept there, warming myself by a fire. I worked as a watchman and a loader. I earned a little, but I ruined my health, got pleurisy. They barely managed to save me in the hospital. I got back on my feet a little.

1950–1952. In the Army.

And then they declared me “fit for service.” They drafted me into the army.

V.O.: When were you drafted?

M. Kots: In 1950, on October 1, they drafted me into the army, leaving my mother and two sisters at home. And no support, nothing to lean on. Practically starved, my mother died in March 1951. And they sent me to the Far East for my army service. My older sister got married, and the younger one stayed close to her and still continued to study. Before I left, I tried to support her: “Keep studying, go to school.” No father, mother destroyed, no home, no property… While others received benefits—because secondary education was paid then, you had to pay 150 rubles a year. Some had benefits, but from her—pay up. No father, no mother. Debt for the eighth grade, debt for the ninth grade…

While serving in the army in the Far East with this pleurisy, I contracted bone tuberculosis. It affected my hand, my hand started to swell, I went to the medical unit, they looked at it and advised me to apply a hot compress. They applied compresses and more compresses, and then they said, “This will help you as much as a poultice on a dead man.” And they sent me to the medical battalion. There, they looked at me and gave me a referral to the army hospital in Shkotovo. They sent me for an X-ray there. And what did I know—I was just a snot-nosed kid, even if I was 20 years old—what did I understand? They told me to come back in two days when the X-rays would be ready.

I went into the X-ray room. A male and a female doctor took the X-ray and looked at it. They sized me up with a look, and gave me the X-ray: “Take care of this, keep it with you.” But they didn’t tell me anything else—just lie in the ward.

Rounds. I think there was a Lieutenant Colonel Shinder there, a surgeon or a therapist. He would come: “Well, how are things?” They said he didn’t like it when you said “bad.” So everyone said things were good. He came, looked once, a second time. And then he didn’t even look in on me—he just came and went on.

After about two weeks, they gathered the hopeless cases like me, formed a team, and sent us to the district hospital in Manzovka, in the same Primorsky Krai. The war in Korea was going on then, and they took us from this army hospital to the station—one guy bandaged, another with a hurt leg, another a hand, another his neck. They brought us to the train station, people looked at us: “Those are the wounded from Korea, coming from Korea.” They took us to Manzovka, handed us over. They examined us—“Well, alright, we’ll see in a day or two.”

Rounds. A Lieutenant Colonel Severin came—I remembered his last name. He looked at me: “Well, how are things?” I said, nothing special. “Where are you from?” “From Western Ukraine.” “Well, when you go home—the climate is different there, you’ll get better.” I waited to be discharged for medical reasons.

About two weeks passed while they processed the documents, then they handed them to me—here, go to your military unit. I arrived, they put a cast on me there—all the best, off you go! They gave me something like 127 rubles for the road—all the way from Primorsky Krai to here. Where are you going, when you have no home, no property? And in a cast. Before leaving, I asked them to at least remove the cast and put on a splint. They did that for me, removed the cast, because my arm had been burning from that cast for about two months. They wrapped it on one side, like a splint. And they warned me that wherever I arrived—I must seek medical treatment.

1952–1957. In Pursuit of Knowledge.

I arrived—where? The dugout was still standing. No home, no property, and I still had to live on something. I didn’t even admit what I had, I said it was a fracture and would heal soon. A fracture is one thing, but bone tuberculosis is something else entirely. It was a miracle that it went away on its own.

What to do? On the recommendation of surgeon Severin, I went to the district polyclinic. But I was tired of wearing that splint, so I took it off. I submitted my medical history. They looked at it: “What, they sent you off like this?” “No,” I said, “I took the splint off.” “You shouldn’t have taken it off. We’ll send you to the regional hospital.” “I won’t go.” “Why?” “I don’t have the money for it.” And I had been traveling for some 14 days to get home from Vladivostok. Back then, the train took 11 days just to get to Moscow, and I had waited near Vladivostok for a day or more before I could get on a train.

Well, what next? “Well, then go to Lyuboml and get an X-ray.” Because there was no X-ray machine in the district. I went to Lyuboml, got the X-ray, but I felt that my arm was aching less. I waved my hand at everything and started looking for some kind of work.

Someone there recommended I take a course for accountants. But I couldn’t even write yet...

V.O.: Was it your right hand?

M. Kots: Yes, the right one. But I already felt it was a little better. I went to Lutsk for a three-month accounting course. Over those three months and the summer, I felt even better. After finishing the course, I managed to get a job in the district consumer cooperative as an accountant. I worked for a while and felt that I was getting better. My father was also released in 1953, about a month after Stalin’s death. I had arrived in 1952, after finishing the course. My brother had finished his technical college and had already been sent to work as a mechanic at an MTS (Machine and Tractor Station). So we were slowly getting back on our feet. And my sister was finishing the 10th grade—but there were debts: “We won’t give you your diploma, and that’s that.” By then, I was earning something, so my brother and I pooled our money and paid 450 rubles for three years. My sister got her diploma—but there was no money for further education. My brother and I told her to go study, and we would help her. She went to Lutsk, took the exams for the pedagogical institute, and was admitted. She had a small scholarship, and we would chip in something—sometimes my brother, sometimes me. So she studied for five years, because just then they switched from a 4-year to a 5-year program. She graduated with a degree in physics and mathematics. My brother finished technical college. And I, officially speaking, had a 4th-grade education. So how could it be that my sister and brother should know more than me?

V.O.: Please remind me of your brother’s and sister’s names.

M. Kots: My brother’s name is Andriy, and my sister is Halyna; I mentioned them at the beginning. And somehow it ate at me, so I sat down with their textbooks and studied. I was fascinated by mathematics, physics, chemistry. So when my sister was finishing the seventh grade, I was consulting her on how to solve this or that problem. I didn’t have a document, but I knew the material for 7 grades perfectly—I mean mathematics, physics, chemistry. I wasn’t interested in literature, less so in history. When I finished the accounting course, a night school opened in the district. I went to the evening class, attended for about two months. I was, so to speak, a consultant there, and I received a certificate for seven grades. And seven grades back then was considered pretty good. At that time, you could only study by correspondence in the field you were working in. But I didn’t like accounting. I wanted to get into some technical university. So I was forced to enroll in the eighth grade. But in the Holovnyanskyi district, there was no night school yet. There was an inter-regional correspondence high school in Lviv. I submitted my documents there, completed the coursework for the eighth grade, and they assigned me to take the exams at the local high school.

So I finished the eighth grade. They transferred me to a correspondence school in Rivne. There I finished the 9th grade. Then they opened correspondence schools in the regions, and I finished the 10th grade in Lutsk, based on the coursework they sent me. But I wasn’t confident that I knew everything. I did the coursework myself. You sit down with the textbooks, you solve problems, but this one doesn’t work out, and that one doesn’t work out. So I started talking to the boys who were studying full-time. They told me, “You should go to the night school in Lyuboml.” And Lyuboml was 14 km away. They told me that even if I went every other day or twice a week, it would be good.

I didn’t drop out of the correspondence school and went to the night school. I asked if I could enroll. “Where are you from?” “From Holovne.” They looked at me—it’s 14 km, are you crazy or what? But they didn’t object: “Well, come on in.” I had a bicycle, so in the evening, I would ride to Lyuboml. I attended regularly for the first quarter. At first, they didn’t even put my name in the register—they thought I’d hang around for a bit and then quit. But in class, I noticed—my classmates were reviewing material from the 9th grade (and this was the 10th) and couldn’t solve problems with arithmetic or geometric progressions; it was a problem for them. The teacher would call someone to the board and prompt them. She gave me an example—I solved it in a flash. Everyone sat and looked at me: “What, you solved it?” “I solved it.” “Let me see.” And then one, then another started copying from me. The teacher noticed that I had solved it. “Perhaps you’ll come to the board?” “With pleasure.” I went to the board, and she read the problem to me. It was about arithmetic equations and geometric progressions. The teacher dictated it, and before the other students had even written it down, I had solved it in my head and was writing down the result. She looked at me and smiled. The students asked how and what. The teacher asked me to explain. I explained how it was done. She saw that I wasn’t traveling all this way for nothing. From that time on, they put me in the register, and I became worthy of more attention.

But I had bad luck again: I got sick, appendicitis got me, I had an operation, it was a complicated case. I lay in the hospital for 54 days and barely made it out alive. I thought for sure they had kicked me out of night school, because it was already spring. But, I thought, I’ll drop by. I did, and there were still about 20 days left until the end of the term. They said, “Come on, you can make up what you missed.” I agreed and passed all the exams. The teachers saw it, like when we were taking the physics exam, those blockheads came to me: “How do you solve this problem? And this one?” They sat me in the corner, and I solved all the problems. The teacher smiled. I solved one for a student, gave it to him. There were two blackboards there. He copied it from the cheat sheet onto the board and went to find the equipment to demonstrate. Another student came up to the board and erased it. The first one returned: “Oh, he erased it for me!” The teacher smiled: “Well, maybe you can explain it just like that?” “No, no, I solved it on the board!” So he gave him a C.

The same thing happened in math. We took the exam in two shifts, half the class at a time. They brought me in, sat me in the corner, and a conveyor belt of exam tickets came to me; I solved them and returned them. I went last to take my own exam. I took a ticket—I had already solved this problem. I asked if I could answer right away. “No, no, sit down.” But I already knew it by heart. I sat for a bit, then went to the board—zip, zip. Someone from the district education department was there: “Oh, you really know your stuff!”

After that, I got my diploma—and what was I to do with it?

V.O.: What year was that?

M. Kots: That was already 1956. I finally got my diploma, although I felt poorly after the operation. I was afraid that my knowledge was still insufficient. I thought: I’ll work on myself for another year. I worked for another year, and in 1957, I went to Kyiv to apply to university. The Polytechnic Institute appealed to me; I was drawn to electrical engineering. But there, you had to pass a medical commission. I hesitated, wondering if I would pass the medical commission, because of my operation and my hand. And there, you had to pass the medical commission first, because all students were liable for military service and attended the military department.

What to do? I rushed over to the Agricultural Academy. The medical commission there was somewhat superficial. I submitted my documents to the electrical engineering faculty. I passed, although the competition was fierce: 320 applications, they were accepting two groups, there were 17 medalists, leaving 33 spots. The instructors had been told to “cut down” the applicants, and then you had to prove yourself: you just didn’t pass. After the exams, about 50 people who had passed were left.

And then the interview. It came to my turn: “Documents? Oh, you work in accounting—so what brings you to electrical engineering? No, no, choose—the economics faculty might suit you.” And I was faced with a choice: they were refusing me for the electrical faculty because I hadn’t worked in the field. And for the economics faculty—the subjects didn’t match: you had to take chemistry, but we had only taken math, physics, and an essay. However, the exams for the economics faculty were in the second round. They directed me: go, maybe the dean will accept you? I went, but I had to take an additional chemistry exam. And I hadn’t prepared, so I thought: that’s it, it’s a failure. I wrote a request to the dean’s office: I ask to be enrolled based on the entrance exams I have already passed for the electrical faculty. I wasn’t 18 or 19, but 27. And what happened? They deliberated and decided to enroll me in the economics faculty.

The secretary showed me that I was already enrolled. Finally, I had achieved some goal! I went home, quit my job, and waited for the official notice. I waited and waited—nothing. But I had already quit my job, so I went to Kyiv. I arrived (it was a Saturday), went into the corridor—no one was there, because it was a non-working day, no one to talk to. But the doorman—he’s the highest-ranking official: “What do you want?” “Well, I’ve arrived...” “Do you have a notice?” “No.” “Well, if you don’t have a notice, then...” You walk around, dejected—what to do?

Later, I found out why there was no notice. The local officials: “Whose son is this? We’ll make sure he’s not there.” And, probably, the notice was sent, but it was never delivered to me. But the next day, on Sunday, when I went in, the same doorman said, “There, the lists are posted—take a look.” I went to the lists—and I nearly jumped for joy: oh, I’m on the list, I’m enrolled! Well, then, that was it.

1957. Student Life and Dissidence.

From that, my student life began. As for my dissidence, what can be attributed to it? I believe that any step, however small, was a protest against the existing regime. First—teaching in our native language. I often had to argue with students and, to some extent, push the instructors. This was resistance to the Russification of universities.

Next. They fooled us, saying that the fascists had attacked Western Ukraine, and the Soviet troops had rushed to save it from fascist occupation. An instructor is lecturing on this. Well, I say, how can you say such things when I personally saw that German troops had arrived on September 14, and the Soviet troops had not yet crossed the border. It doesn’t add up. I said this in a mild way. “And where are you from?” “From here and there.” Well, he said, “There was resistance there, they tested their strength...” “Where,” I ask, “in what place?” And who knows, somewhere on earth under the sky.

The student body was mainly from the eastern and central regions of Ukraine. They didn’t know what was happening in Western Ukraine. And so the conversation would turn to—“bourgeois nationalists, bourgeois nationalists.” I’d ask one, then another. People with pretensions, who had finished school with silver and gold medals. I would give events a supposedly pro-Soviet characterization. “Well, look, he knows...” But more than once, when this topic came up with students, I had to say quite risky things, that it was a struggle for independence. Surprisingly, none of the students sold me out.

I noticed that the Agricultural Academy didn’t satisfy me; I was interested in engineering subjects. And I saw the primitivism of the teaching. I decided to change my field of study. How? I had to take the high school diploma exams again as an external student and, with that diploma, enroll in the university’s Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics.

V.O.: Here in Kyiv?

M. Kots: In Kyiv. I had already finished my third year at the Agricultural Academy, and I enrolled in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at the university.

V.O.: In the first year?

M. Kots: The first year. I didn’t reveal that I had been a student. I presented myself as just a worker. They enrolled me in the first year, full-time. I thought, what should I do? Should I drop out of the academy, or transfer to the correspondence program? I hesitated and hesitated and decided: I only have two years left at the academy, and what if I fail—I’ll be left with nothing. I went to the dean’s office of the Mekh-mat to ask to be transferred to the correspondence program. “Why?” I said my age was such... “So what, we have older students.” I said I didn’t want to anyway. “Submit an application.” I did, and they transferred me to the correspondence department. So, during the day, I attended lectures at the Agricultural Academy and went to lectures for evening students to listen to various subjects.

There were clashes, so to speak, of a national character. At the university, most of the instructors in the department of differential equations, surprisingly, taught in Ukrainian. It was pleasant. There was an instructor named Valentina Volkova, who taught us “differential equations.” The students there were mostly from Kyiv and nearby villages. Those from the villages—children of cleaners, janitors—they demanded everything in Russian. There were many Jews—they also wanted Russian. When Volkova lectured, they would start: “Lecture to us in Russian, because we don’t understand!” And she would say, “That’s your business, I will lecture in Ukrainian.” And she spoke in such a good language. Good, I thought, well done. And then Sidliar came to lecture us—he, by the way, was the party organizer for the Mekh-mat. He comes to the first lecture and declares: “I will be lecturing on aerohydrodynamics. Please write down the program and literature.” “What, how?! We don’t understand!” He didn’t react. He dictated it, read the introduction. “We will complain to the dean, we’ll go to the rector!” He finished his lecture and left.

A week later, the second lecture. Out of the blue, Sidliar starts lecturing in Russian. It was clear they had complained about him and he had been told that if the students demanded it, he should lecture in Russian. He crossed the threshold and began to lecture in Russian. This bothered me, I thought, you son of a... But what could I do—I saw that the environment was such that I wouldn't get any support. The Ukrainians—"Oh, what’s the difference, let him lecture, as long as he doesn’t bother me." But I couldn’t stand it. I stood up demonstratively: “Tell me, please, how will it be with you—one lecture in Ukrainian, the second in Russian, and the third?” Everyone misunderstood my purpose, but he understood instantly. Without saying a word, he switched to Ukrainian. Everyone turned on me: “What do you want, what do you want!” “What do you mean,” I asked, “am I going to write one lecture in Russian, the second in Ukrainian—what is this?” They couldn’t bite me. The instructor needed support. He taught the course in Ukrainian. It was a minor episode, but still, it was characteristic. That I wasn’t afraid…

Back at the Agricultural Academy, they were denouncing the “cult of Stalin’s personality.” The instructors were somewhat bewildered, so we turned those seminars into a complete, so to speak, demolition—what kind of party is this? It was an opportunity, taking advantage of the moment, to expose its crimes. Why this, why that? The instructors had to find justifications.

I was lucky enough to get acquainted with Hrushevsky’s book at the academy. To see it back then was a problem, but one student brought it, and I had the opportunity to look through it for a few days. I didn’t read it all, but at least I held it in my hands, got an idea of it, because the word “Hrushevsky”—even the name itself—was forbidden then. You couldn’t even find it in an encyclopedia. In the library, I didn’t ask for the volume of the 1930s encyclopedia with the article about Hrushevsky, but rather: “Give me the volume for ‘H’.” “What do you need in it?” “Well, just give it to me.” They fidgeted, fidgeted—we don’t have it, or... So I never got that 1930s edition of the encyclopedia. But later I found out from people where Hrushevsky was buried, found his grave, and photographed it. I showed it to close friends, told them who he was.

In 1962, I graduated from the Kyiv Agricultural Academy. Ternopil region called to me. Not just the Ternopil region—Galicia. It was the center of the movement. I wanted to meet those people. I had an assignment to the Zhytomyr region, to Cherniakhiv, but I went there and talked to them: “If I go to another place, will there be any major objections?” A woman was working in that position; she wasn't a specialist, but, she said, where would I go? I said: if I don’t arrive in two weeks, consider me not coming. I went to the Ternopil region, a colleague there, Roman Hnatiuk, I visited him, we discussed where I could get a foothold. We drove around here and there—I got a job at the agricultural technical college.

That was in 1962. But until 1966, I continued my studies at the university. So for another 4 years, I came to Kyiv. I had to meet people, I asked about the underground. Those who were close, who knew something, had been taken away. I sought out information about events, I questioned people.

Here’s an episode, for example, concerning the church. According to the Constitution, you can believe if you want, or not if you don’t want. But an instructor, Oleksiuchka, comes in with such disappointment: “Oh, what am I going to do!” “What’s wrong?” “I have a student—she’s a Baptist.” I said, “So what?” “Well, how can a student?..” I said, “The Constitution allows it: believe if you want, don’t believe if you don’t.” No, this didn’t convince her: how can a student be a Baptist? It didn’t sink in for her: what are you protesting, if the Constitution allows it?

Second. A graduate of Kyiv University (he’s now a doctor of economic sciences) came to teach us political economy, Borys... (I’ll say his last name later). So wise, graduated from the university's economics faculty and such a great communist patriot that he starts lecturing in Russian. The deputy director, who was, by the way, from somewhere in the Yahotyn district, cut him short: “Young man, all subjects here are taught in Ukrainian, and be so kind as to lecture in Ukrainian yourself.” He made a face: “But that’s a dead-end language, you’ll all be...” So I cut him off: “What do you mean ‘dead-end,’ on what grounds?” This is despite him being from the Vinnytsia region, his mother fled the collective farm, found a place somewhere, and he doesn’t even want to speak Ukrainian anymore because he graduated from university—“it’s a dead-end language.” We pressured him. He grimaced, but was forced to switch to Ukrainian. There were many such episodes concerning the language of instruction. This was on the linguistic front.

On the religious front. A meeting, a pedagogical council, the party organizer speaks: “We need to work! Our students are going to church, we need to make sure this doesn’t happen!” I said, “So what if they go? Do they go there to pray or what? I, too,” I said, “go into the church. A person should see for themselves what it is.” “Well, you’re an adult, but they are children, they perceive things differently.” I said, they should see for themselves what it is, and then you can lecture them, tell them stories. So, as much as was possible, I took the students under my protection, so they wouldn’t be terrorized.

Or religious holidays. My students would go home for Christmas or Easter. But they couldn’t get back from home on Sunday, so they’d arrive on Monday and ask me not to mark them absent in the register. I’d say: well, okay… In short, to the best of my ability, I unofficially protected the students.

Economic issues. You see everything collapsing, and suddenly in February, a newspaper comes out with indicators of achievements for the year. What achievements—growth: this much, that much, that much! I put the word “triumph” in quotation marks, wrapped a book in this newspaper, and went to class. I taught economics. I placed the book on the first desk, a student, a girl named Lida Halyulko: “Ha-ha, ha-ha!” “What is it?” “What’s this, ‘triumph’ in quotes?” Without commenting, I turned the book over. That was my mistake.

I went with the students for practical training. There, the students invited me to talk. Well, let’s. We sat down. “Why don’t you have a car?” In their eyes, I was something. I said, “I’ll get one eventually.” And another said, “Well, how can you, it’s a luxury item.” I couldn’t stand it, I said, “What kind of luxury item is it? When your grandfather needed to get to town five or ten kilometers away, he didn’t walk—he harnessed his oxen or horses and went. He needed to go to town a few times a year to buy something, salt or something else. But he didn’t walk. We are now flying into space, we have to work tens of kilometers from home, there’s no other way to get there but by car, so what kind of luxury item is it? It’s absurd. Just as for your grandfather, your father, horses or oxen were a primary necessity, so today a car is our necessity. It’s not a luxury item at all.” They agreed with me. They went to a class with Shcherbakov, who taught political economy. He kept hammering on that it was a luxury item. They said to him, “You say it’s a luxury item, but Mykola Georgiyovych says it’s not a luxury item.” Break time. Shcherbakov comes in, calls me aside: “It’s hard enough for me to convince them, and you’re putting sticks in my wheels.” Well, it’s a good thing he didn’t report me, so it just passed.

The students knew that they could talk to me about the events of the forties and fifties. They brought some pre-war literature. I also had some things and would give them to a closer circle—there was a small group—to read.

In the Chortkiv district, until 1964, someone was illegally hiding in the attic of some old woman’s house. He had to live, so at night he would look for some sustenance. He stole a bag of sugar from a store and brought it to this house. But there was a hole in the bag, and he left a trail. In the morning, the shopkeeper comes—the store has been robbed, there’s a trail. He calls the local policeman. The policeman followed the trail into the yard, climbed up into the loft. Do you know what a loft is?

V.O.: Yes, it’s the attic over a cowshed or a barn.

M. Kots: What does he do? He sets up a ladder, puts his hat on a stick, because he sensed that something might be wrong. He raised the hat, and this guy fired a pistol at it. He thought it was a head. Well, and then it all started. The man sees that he can’t escape. I think he threw a grenade down, but it didn’t hit anyone. There was nowhere to run, so he lit the straw in the attic and shot himself with the pistol. And so he burned with the pistol in his hand.

The students from those villages came and told this story. They didn't know my intentions. But I had started a kind of diary and was writing down such episodes. I wrote this one down too. I still have that notebook.

I’ll return to an episode that happened back in Kyiv, when I was studying. We were in Vorzel for practical training, and in Bucha, we spent the night in a private house. The son-in-law was there. He asked where I was from. “Oh, I served there.” “Where?” “Near Brest.” For him, that was already “there.” And he began to tell about his service: “I served as a border guard, and we were sent out to set up ambushes against bandits.” And he told how he went out on an ambush, with six soldiers, he was the senior one. They took up positions in the forest where they expected bandits might pass. They waited until morning, no one came. But at dawn, about six men were walking one after another, in Soviet uniforms. And, he says, I give the command: “Fire!” “We opened fire—mowed them all down!” There was some Uzbek: “Comrade Senior Sergeant, Comrade Senior Sergeant, it wasn’t me who shot, it was you who shot!”—he was afraid he had killed his own. And, he said, he received an order for that.

Another told how they went on an ambush from the border. We are sitting, he says, in the ambush with a radio, and suddenly a group of drunk bandits rides by. “No less than 800 men on carts, with anti-aircraft machine guns. They are riding with songs in the direction of the border.” Well, he says, there were two or three of us in the ambush, we couldn’t resist them. We reported by radio that such a group was moving, and we were ordered to monitor them, to see where they were going. I asked, what was their fate? He says, “We didn’t have the strength to stop them, they crossed the border, entered the territory of Poland.” How reliable this information is, I cannot say. But I recorded this episode.

There was another such episode. Also at the academy, when I was a student, they housed a correspondence student with us. He worked in the Chernivtsi region, in Kelmentsi; he was the secretary of the district committee there for some time, then the chairman of the district executive committee, and he himself was a military pilot. After demobilization, he was sent to party work. And so there were three of us in the room, and he was the fourth. I didn’t pull his tongue, but these guys from the east: “And where? And what? Oh, Chernivtsi region! Were there bandits there?” And this Ivan Vasylyovych Hushlia begins to tell about the adventures that happened to him.

He said: “I was the secretary of the district committee, then the chairman of the district executive committee. I had to travel to the villages, but there were still gangs operating there, you had to be careful. And I, although I was already married, was still young, and I liked to fool around. Well, I liked one teacher. And so I would often visit her. And suddenly the teacher disappeared, the teacher vanished. She was gone and gone. After some time, the KGB (or MGB as it was then) called me: ‘Ivan Vasylyovych, come over and take a look at your beauty.’ Well, I go, they lead me to the garage. And in the garage (what kind of garages were there then—cobbled together from boards and straw) on the straw lies this teacher with her head cut off. The head is lying separately, her hair all fanned out. Despite being bloodied, she had preserved her beauty.” He told with admiration how beautiful she was. Well, and these guys ask: “And why did they cut off her head?” And he explains that there was an order from Stalin that every liquidated bandit had to be beheaded and photographed, the head and body separately, and the photo had to be attached to the report that such-and-such bandit was eliminated.

I also quietly recorded this material in my notes; it is still with me.

Next. I was in Berezan for practical training. They housed me in a peasant’s hut—it was a kind of collective farm house for visitors. There were beds for visitors. And then aviators came to treat the sugar beets. They were also housed there. We got acquainted, where from and what. I said I was from Volyn. And one of them says: “Oh, I was shot down there during the war in the autumn of 1944.” I told him: “In the autumn of 1944, you couldn’t have been shot down there, because the front was already at the Vistula.” “No, no, not the Germans—the Banderites shot me down.” “How?” “We were flying there to the Vistula, returning to the front. We had a warning to fly no lower than 800 m, because it was a dangerous area, they could shoot you down. It was cloudy, I descended and was flying lower. And suddenly, not far from the Starovyzhva station, my plane went down. I jumped out with a parachute, landed, and the plane crashed in a swamp. It was 5–6 km to the station, and it was getting dark. I walked towards the lights, reached the station. They met me there, I told them what had happened. I spent the night there, and in the morning we went to the plane. We got to the plane, and the bandits had already been there, they had even chopped up the stars with axes, smashed things.”

I wrote down this episode. Later in Ternopil, while spending the night in a hotel, a KGB officer from the Rivne region told how in Korets, they were leading a girl to or from an interrogation past a well, and she threw herself into the well and drowned. I wrote that down too.

And when I was working at the technical college, the chief of the district police was a former front-line soldier, a major. He retired from the police (the districts were downsized). Where to put him? They made him the head of maintenance at the technical college. His last name was Tkach or Tkachuk, something like that. One day we were sitting in the corridor, each telling our memories, and he began his.

What did he talk about? About his heroic deeds. He began by saying that he was, so to speak, no slouch. As the chief of police, he was in first place for fulfilling various obligations, particularly, for collectivization. How? And he told how he carried out collectivization. He said, when going to a village (and each of them was assigned to a specific village), he would take a bayonet in his boot. A regular military bayonet, and he would go to the village. I enter the house: “Well then, uncle, how about it—are you writing an application or not?” “Well, you know, I still have time, and my wife doesn’t want to...” “Uh-huh, you don’t want to—fine.” I leave the house, walk around the yard, go behind the barn, take out the bayonet—and stick it in the thatch roof. I go back into the yard: “Come on, uncle, come with me.” I lead him to that spot: “And what’s this you have here?” And I pull it out. “Well, that, I don’t know...” “Ah, so that’s who you are! I see. Now it’s clear.” “Oh, sir, what are you saying, I didn’t...” “Alright, alright!” And he grabs me by the arm, pulls me towards the house: “Maybe you need a little pig or something?” I pretend to resist, saying no, but he won’t let me leave the yard: “Come on! I have a little pig here, and everything you need!” And so I was always first in the district for collectivization, always on the board of honor, my picture hanging first.

And students from the Buchach district told me. They knew that there were caves there. And someone noticed that someone was climbing out of a cave, and reported it somewhere. A policeman came, and to the cave: “Who’s there? Come out!” He wouldn’t come out. So he took a sheaf of straw, pushed it in there, and lit it. The man suffocated in there, covering himself with his greatcoat. They pulled out a dead body. Who it was and what happened—unknown. This was around 1964-65. I documented all this as a chronicle of the struggle.

And I also introduced students to the literature I had, and exchanged literature with them.

While in Kyiv, I think in 1966, in a dormitory on Lomonosova Street, over by the exhibition center, I don’t remember the number, I moved into a room. There was a young correspondence student from the Cherkasy region, considered a poet. We got to talking, found common ground. He introduced me to the journal “Duklia,” with poems by Vasyl Symonenko that were not published here, but were printed there. Aha, good, I copied these poems and returned the journal to him. When I got home, I typed them up on a typewriter, and I kept them. And this poem “To a Kurdish Brother” from this collection I transformed into “To a Ukrainian Brother.” I decorated it with a trident and some other phrases. This is what formed the basis of the accusation against me. I didn’t tell many people what I was doing, so in my case, only this one episode was prosecuted—the production and distribution of leaflets, nothing more. But I did not only this, I did many things. When I made these leaflets, I thought about whether to entrust them to the students. After all, it’s playing with fire: if I get caught, I’ll answer for myself, but for these children, maybe their parents will curse me for ruining their children’s lives. So I didn’t risk involving them in the distribution. I thought it would be better if I distributed them myself. I introduced them to the poems, but I didn’t get anyone into trouble.

They recently told me how the KGB terrorized a boy named Ivan Baskevych. A former student of mine told me. A good student, she sympathized with me. She said that Ivan would come back from interrogations not himself. But he said nothing about me, and he had something to say. He died in a car accident—they believe it was done to him on purpose. I won’t comment on whether it was on purpose or not, but he is no longer alive. He was a good boy, Ivan Baskevych, from the Buchach district.

The second was Volodymyr Shavaryn from the Pidvolochysk district. I never had the chance to go there, so I don’t know his fate. Volodymyr brought me journals. They confiscated one of the journals he brought me. It wasn't the whole journal, but only part of it, I think from “Zolotyi Kolos.” There was a biography of Petliura, but someone had cut out the photograph. When I was arrested, they got their hands on the notes of what I had said, and this part of the journal. Also, the “Kholm Diocesan News” for 1942-43. Also a typescript of Symonenko’s poems, excerpts from pre-war calendars. “Where did you get it? Where did you get it?” I told them I found it in the attic of the apartment where I lived. “And where are they now?” “I burned them.” “Why did you burn them?” “Because they were already tattered, I retyped them for myself.” “What did you do with Petliura’s portrait?” “I found it like that, without the portrait.” “Where did you find it?” “Also in the attic.” I was wary that they might find this portrait somewhere, so I measured the cutout. But they never found that portrait.

As for the journal with Symonenko’s poems, it was like this. “Where did you get it?” “In Kyiv, during a session. The session was ending, everything was being thrown out of the rooms, a whole pile of different papers, notes, was lying in the washbasin. I look—some journal is lying there. I took it, looked at it—there were some poems. I copied them. And the journal was so torn, dirty, so I threw it away.” So what does the investigator do? He sends a request to publishing houses to see if such poems were printed in the Soviet Union. They send him an official certificate that such poems were never printed anywhere. At the next interrogation: “Why are you lying?! Here’s a certificate from the publishing houses that such poems were never printed anywhere!” “And I’m telling you again that I copied them from a journal!” Of course, he had information about where this poem by Symonenko was printed, but he didn’t want to tell me, and I didn’t want to tell him where I read it. He wanted to pressure me with this certificate into confessing who gave it to me. And it would have been enough to say that some student gave it to me—and they would have found him, they would have found him very quickly! I am glad that I didn’t betray anyone, that no one was dragged in and imprisoned because of me.

I thought they would drag me in for these notes, that there would be confrontations. I am sure that they got into trouble along party lines, but there was not a single confrontation with those KGB agents, communists—Hushlia, Tkach. They weren’t mentioned at all! But I had recorded the story of a simple mortal, an electrician named Zayets, his first name was, I think, Ivan… I wrote down his story later and instead of “Ivan,” I wrote “Vasyl.” The investigator found him and interrogated him: “Did you tell such a story?” He said no, he didn’t tell such a story. Then the investigator came to me: “Did he tell such a story or not?” I said: “I don’t remember now. Maybe I mixed up the last name.” They didn’t arrange a confrontation with him either.

I was arrested on October 26, 1967, and while I was under investigation, suddenly the regional newspaper “Vilne Zhyttia” (Free Life) published an article about the heroic deed of a district police officer who neutralized a thug engaged in theft. The one who was hiding in the attic. For two or three years, no one had mentioned him. I am sure that it was the entry in my notebook that prompted this publication. It turned out that he was just some thug.

When Garik Superfin from Moscow read my sentence, he said: “If they gave you 7 years for this, then I should have been hanged.” And his sentence was 5 years. Well, they gave me my sentence not only for what they found, but also for my background.

What wasn’t included in the accusation was that I collected such compromising materials. True, I had many notes from “Voice of America” broadcasts. I listened to the radio and wrote some things down. “Did you listen?” “I listened.” Well, what can you say when they have the notes? “Is it forbidden to listen?” “No, it’s not forbidden. So, did you tell anyone?” “Why would I tell anyone?” “Then why write it down?” “I have a short memory, and I don’t want to be dumber than others.” Just for listening, and not distributing it anywhere, they couldn’t add this point to the accusation. In reality, I did talk about it with people, but no one gave such testimony, not the slightest hint. So that point was dropped—listening to Western radio broadcasts.

The Leaflet.

V.O.: And how did the case itself arise? How did it begin? How were you arrested?

M. Kots: I’ll tell you now. I decided to make leaflets. I looked and thought it would be good to rephrase this poem by Vasyl Symonenko, “To a Kurdish Brother,” into “To a Ukrainian Brother,” with lines like “fight—and you shall overcome,” and so on. I reworked it, made a mock-up, photographed it, made a negative, and produced about a hundred copies using a photographic method.

V.O.: Did you write it in block letters or type it on a typewriter?

M. Kots: I wrote it in block letters on cardboard and photographed it. Then I enlarged it. I began to distribute them. I distributed them in Ternopil, then in Khmelnytskyi, near Volochysk, in Volochysk, in Kremenets, in Dubno, in Lutsk, in Novovolynsk, in Turka, in Kyiv—these were the main places where I distributed them. In the Rivne region, I threw some out on one stretch. How did they get on my trail?

Later I saw that it was no problem for them to find out who the author of the leaflets was and where they were coming from. Everything was under control, they began to analyze where it could have originated. They stumbled upon my trail, and an investigation began. One day, the director comes into the teachers’ lounge. We were standing there, and I saw him scanning the room with his eyes, as if looking for someone. And he came upon me, smiled somewhat forcedly, put on a serious face and said, “Mykola Georgiyovych, do you have a class now or not?” I said, “I do, what is it?” “Well, we need to survey the territory with a level to see where to dig a ditch for water to drain.” “I have a class now.” “Well, alright, then some other time.” But that forced smile stuck with me. He didn’t want to give himself away. About a week passes. He comes to me again: “Mykola Georgiyovych, you know, there are so many strangers hanging around. Some parts have already been stolen. We have a scooter in the garage—take a look, see if it’s been disassembled. You’re familiar with machinery...” Well, alright. They open the garage for me, I glance, everything seems to be in place on the scooter. The batteries are missing, but it’s new, just received. I said that the batteries are missing and there’s no sign they were ever installed. Maybe they’re in the toolbox. We went to the warehouse, I opened the box. Everything was in place. It was a provocation. They just needed my fingerprints. If I took the level—I’d leave prints, if I inspected the scooter—I’d leave them. No one had stolen anything, and nothing needed to be leveled.

So I quickly looked over the box, said that everything was in its place. The next day: “Mykola Georgiyovych, in Chernivtsi...” This is what they say, that leaders are good people. I will never believe that this or that head of an enterprise or institution did not work for the KGB. If they didn’t work for them, they wouldn’t have been allowed into a leadership position. That’s how they decided things: cooperate with the KGB—you get the position, don’t—there’s no place for you there.

The story unfolds like this. “Mykola Georgiyovych, an examining machine called ‘Lastivka’ (Swallow) has arrived in Chernivtsi. You are familiar with technology—you must go immediately and purchase it for the office. We are now talking about the mechanization of all kinds of work, including examinations. Yesterday, an instructor from Chortkiv went and bought one for himself. I’ll give you a travel authorization for Monday, go and buy it.” The travel order was for Tuesday, so he was talking to me on Monday. Fine, I liked trips, I used to travel for visual aids, I thought, why not take a ride. I’ll even take some leaflets with me in my pocket. But this was already a trap...

Here’s what happens. The director told me to go, gave me money on Sunday, saying, go to the cashier, take the money on account, the power of attorney, the checkbook, and go. On Monday, I came home, preparing to leave the next day. But I could have gone to Chernivtsi by bus, by train, or even by catching a ride. Some guys came over to my place in the evening, I had no classes the next day, we sat down and even drank half a liter. But around midnight, the director’s nephew comes running, knocking. “What is it?” I went out: “What is it?” “Mykola Georgiyovych, the trip is postponed. Volodymyr Hryhorovych (that is, the director) said that a vehicle will be going to Chernivtsi in a few days, so why should you lug that equipment around.”

Fine. Tuesday’s classes were already canceled because the students had been told that my classes wouldn’t be held. So I’m not in a hurry to get to work, I go later to find out what will happen next. I go in: “Will I have classes tomorrow, on Wednesday?” “Yes, yes, come in, your classes will be on Wednesday.” Fine, I come on Wednesday. The gym teacher comes up to me: “Take a picture of my physical education class for the display board.” Fine. But I have 4 classes on Wednesday, I couldn’t take my camera, so I tell this Ivan Baskevych: “Go and get the camera from my place, bring it here.” Ivan went to my apartment (he knew where I kept the key), to the door—the door was unlocked. He went into the house, took the camera, and came back, saying to me, “Why did you leave the door unlocked?” “What do you mean, unlocked? I locked it.” “No, it was unlocked.” I remember clearly that I locked it... What could have happened? Well, I had taken someone in to live at my apartment, so I thought maybe he had come for lunch and forgotten to lock it. He comes back from work—this is Ivan Riznyk—I ask him: “Did you come by?” “No, I didn’t.” Then the question arose: who unlocked the door? I checked—the money I had in the wardrobe was still there. Later, I assumed that they knew my class schedule, that I wasn’t at home at that moment—so they could go and do as they pleased in my apartment. So they went to do their business—they were masters at picking locks. But then this boy unexpectedly showed up. They had to bolt out the back of the house, they didn't have time to lock the door. And so it remained a mystery why the door was unlocked.

October 27, 1967. Arrest.

The next day, on Thursday: “Take the power of attorney again and leave by car tomorrow. Be ready to leave at six o’clock.” Fine, I’m ready. I took the necessary documents and at six o’clock I arrived at the technical college, but the driver wasn’t there. I waited. Around seven, the driver appeared—no gasoline, he hadn’t filled up yet, had to wait for the attendant. Well, I’m not in charge. We wait. We waited until eight o’clock, and at eight the director comes: “What, you haven’t left yet?” Well, I say, the driver… “Oh, that so-and-so, he’s been procrastinating all this time, I thought you were somewhere near Chernivtsi by now. Fine, go see the artist too, ask him what he needs for his work—paints, maybe some other things?” I go to the artist. I always had a friendly chat with him, but this time the artist was sullen, not very talkative. He was a party member, and the party members had already been informed. He hemmed and hawed a bit…

I walk out into the corridor, and the director’s wife: “Oh, go see Volodymyr Hryhorovych in his office.” I go in, the director and his wife are in the office. She taught Russian or Ukrainian, and he taught agronomy. “You know what, you’re going to the city, and Volodia’s (the director’s) shoes are old, and so are his son’s. Winter is just around the corner—we would be grateful if you could look in the stores, maybe you’ll find some shoes for them.” “Well,” I say, “I might not have enough money.” “We’ll give you some. These are the sizes.” They gave me hundreds. “Fine,” I say, “what’s the problem for me? I’ll stop by.” And so with such instructions... The bastards, they knew where they were sending me, but they created the appearance of sending me on a business trip. Everything written out, everything certified.

We get in the car and leave. We drove out—fog, visibility was quite limited. Driving from Kopychyntsi to Chortkiv, you could see about two hundred meters. We drove into Chortkiv, decided to stop there, look in a store. We pulled into a courtyard. And they, apparently, were following us, wanting to catch us on the road before Chernivtsi. But the fog must have hindered them, they lost us and rushed on to Chernivtsi. We left Chortkiv, drove into Zalishchyky, parked the car in a courtyard again, went into a store. We leave Zalishchyky—we’re heading to Chernivtsi. At the entrance to Chernivtsi, the driver asks me: “Do you know the city?” “Yes, I know it, but I don’t know the streets, the signs, where you can drive.” We ran into one sign—no entry, to the left—also not allowed... And it was as if we were deliberately wandering, as if we were thieves hiding. We took a detour: we came from the north, but entered the city from the east and got to the visual aids store. We parked the car nearby under a fence and set off on foot to the visual aids store. But on the way, there was an electrical appliance store. I thought, I’ll go in—I had some requests. The store was crowded, I pushed my way to the counter, looked at what they had, and suddenly someone tugged at my sleeve. I look around: who is it? “Look, look—a thief!” I looked—he looked like an alcoholic. “Where?” “There, there, two thieves just left!” I thought he was trying to provoke me, to get me to go with him to catch the thieves. Obviously, they were sent to create such a diversion. I said dismissively, “Ah, I didn’t see anything.” He said to the saleswoman: “Look, look! They stole your flashlight.” “Where?” “What do you mean, where?” I didn’t react at all. He walked away, looking at something.

A few minutes passed, he tugged at my sleeve again: “There, there are the thieves!” I said dismissively again: “I don’t see them, where are they?” Apparently, he wanted to lure me out of the store after those “thieves.” I looked at what I needed, left the electronics store, and headed to the visual aids store, about 100 meters away. I walked in with the confidence of buying the “Lastochka” examination machine. I said confidently to the salesman: “Do you still have any ‘Lastochkas’?” “No, we don’t.” “What, you never had them?” “No, I don’t even know when they were here.” “How? The director told me that an instructor from the Chortkiv pedagogical college bought two machines here yesterday.” “What are you talking about, that never happened! Well, if you don’t believe us—you can talk to the director.” He dials a number—“Speak.”

I could already see that something wasn’t right. I realized I had been sent for the purpose of a provocation. But for what—I hadn’t anticipated. Ah, I thought, to hell with you, whatever will be, will be. I bought something for myself, we went to the car, got in to drive back. We’re driving and thinking about the director: what did you want? This is a provocation. We reach Zalishchyky, there’s a descent down into the village of Khreshchatyk. It’s already about six in the evening, dark like it is now. I see some commotion on the street. Cars are parked, people are milling about. And we are approaching. They come out to meet us, stop us with a baton. The driver stops, one approaches him: “Public road inspector. Your documents?” This is to the driver, while he himself stands on the sidewalk. They open the door, grab me—“Get out!” So that’s what this is all about! I ask, “Who are you?” “Get out!” I say, “I’m not getting out unless you identify yourselves.” He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out an ID. And I had already seen one of them—we had accidentally stayed in the same hotel in Berezhany. He then said, “Oh, so we’re acquaintances! Documents, passport!” I said I had submitted it to renew my registration. They pulled me out of the car—wham—into a Volga, and to the KGB in Zalishchyky. A search. And I had leaflets in my pocket.

That’s how they caught me. They put me in the Volga, one on my left, one on my right. They drive across the bridge and immediately take me to the Zalishchyky KGB, lead me to the second floor, strip me, and find the leaflets on me. The investigator, when he found them, jumped up and shouted, “Oh! We’ve got them!”

V.O.: What leaflets—with Symonenko’s poem, right?

M. Kots: Yes, yes, with Symonenko. The leaflet that I made based on the poem “To a Kurdish Brother.” They found the leaflet—and that was it, all of Ternopil knew. And on the leaflet it was written “Organization so-and-so.”

V.O.: Which one?

M. Kots: I’ll tell you a little later. The whole region was put on alert. The head of the regional KGB himself drove from Ternopil to meet us. He stopped in Chortkiv, 70 km away, and we were driving from Zalishchyky. They were taking me to Chortkiv. Well, I didn’t know where they were taking me, but it was in that direction. No one told me anything, where or what. And so one sat on one side, the other on the other.

The KGB agent who knew me was tormented that he hadn't uncovered, hadn't recognized an enemy in me when we stayed together in the hotel in Berezhany. But the other one didn’t care. He started: “We’re colleagues, I’m also a mathematician, what happened to you?” I thought, what should I tell you? “Have you read Panas Myrny’s novel ‘Do the Oxen Bellow When the Mangers Are Full?’” And he said, “I understand.” And he didn’t ask anything more.

So they bring me to Chortkiv, drive up to the prison, the district KGB is right next to the prison there. They quietly went there, and there were several cars. The driver kept me in the car with the lights off. They went upstairs, whispered something, whispered, then: “Get out, get out of the car!” They take me by the arms, lead me. They take me to the second floor: “Get undressed!” Meaning, take off your outer clothes. I got undressed. “Look, now you’re going to talk to a big boss—the head of the department!”

They take me to the reception room, where a pleasant-looking Colonel Stupak is sitting. Willy-nilly: “Good evening.” “Have a seat. You see the situation in which we had to meet—it would have been better in another, but what can you do, sometimes it has to be like this. You know what, I’ll acquaint you with something.” He takes the Criminal Procedure Code, opens to Article 48. “Read this paragraph.” I read that “a sincere confession, turning oneself in, assisting the investigative bodies in uncovering” etc. is considered a mitigating circumstance. “Well, have you read it?” “I’ve read it.” “Well, so?” “Nothing, I’ve read it.” “Well, and so?” “You understood what’s written here?” I say: “What can I tell you—I’m not a lawyer.” “Well, how so, you’re a person with a higher education, it’s clearly written here.” “Clear to some, not to others.” He twisted and turned, and then: “Read this here, Article 49.” I read that “concealment, misleading the investigation, and so on are considered aggravating circumstances.” Again the same thing: “Well, so, is it clear?” “I told you, whether it’s clear or not—I read it, but I’m not a lawyer.” “Well, why are you like that?” Then: “Who else is with you, name them.” “No one.” He looked at me like that: “Well, go on back.”

They put me in the car, drive me to my apartment. They searched it all night. By morning, they couldn’t read through everything, because there were mountains of stuff. They searched thoroughly, there were at least a dozen of them. They packed two suitcases, sealed them. In the morning, they take me and drive me to Ternopil. I tell Ivan Riznyk, who lived with me: “Give these 100 rubles to the director.” The KGB agents don’t object. I say that I still have the keys to the office, they need to be returned, there’s calculating equipment there. “In the office? Let’s see, what’s in the office?”

We drive. A Volga drops me off at the threshold of the technical college. It was break time. We stopped, no one got out while the students were milling about. The bell had already rung, but this Bohdana Melnyk, who later told me that Ivan had died, I see her lingering, lingering in the yard, not going in. I thought, is she on duty, or what? But she later told me that the students had sent Ivan Baskevych to inform me that it was my class time. He went and saw that something terrible was happening at my place, so many cars were parked. So she already knew that I was being arrested. Everyone went to their classes, but she stood and watched.

When all the students had gone inside, they take me, as if they were colleagues, by the arms, we enter the building, they lead me to my office. Here is my office, the keys. There was practically nothing to search there. They looked around, called the director. He was so agitated. “Do you have any complaints against...?”—they point at me. “No, no, none.” To me: “Do you have any complaints?” “No, I have no complaints. I gave your 100 rubles to Riznyk.” That’s how I saw what a scoundrel that director was.

V.O.: We continue our conversation with Mr. Mykola Kots on December 27, 2000.

M. Kots: We walk down the corridor, and the gym teacher is hanging up some posters, announcements. I offer my hand: “Goodbye.” He looks at me: “What, aren’t we playing chess today?” I say: “No, not today, not ever.” He doesn’t understand what’s going on. And these men in civilian clothes are following me. Further on, the head of maintenance is standing, I approach him: “Goodbye.” He understood.

They led me out to the car, and are taking me to Ternopil.

We’re driving past the Ternopil sugar factory, it’s so foggy, you can’t see much. A policeman is standing there, some officer with a baton. There’s a cluster of vehicles—they’re delivering raw materials to the sugar factory. He points his baton at us: “Stop.” The investigator, Bidiovka, grimaced. He slowed down, bypasses the inspector, has already passed him. The inspector signals “Stop.” He slows the car down, leans out: “What, can’t you see?”—he roared at the man.

V.O.: Who was this?

M. Kots: The one who roared—that was investigator Bidiovka.

V.O.: Bidiovka—your investigator? Oh, he later handled the cases of Mykola Horbal, Levko Horokhivskyi.

M. Kots: Bidiovka, my investigator. I didn’t yet know that he would be directly handling my case. The way he roared at that captain-inspector, who then just waved his baton: “Go on, go on, go on.” That’s how condescendingly the KGB looked down on the police. To them, they were just cattle.

V.O.: Yes, some KGB lieutenant could treat any director as nothing.

M. Kots: The KGB were the guard dogs of the regional party committees. They would express themselves with such arrogance: “This isn’t a meat-packing plant for you,” or “this isn’t the police for you.” It was in the regional committees that they decided what to do with this or that person.

They bring me to Ternopil, to the KGB headquarters. They process the documents, throw me into cell №2. Alone in the cell. Such was my first acquaintance with this institution.

V.O.: So you were arrested on October 27?

M. Kots: It was October 27, 1967.

The Investigative Prison in Ternopil.

I found myself in a cellar. This was the KGB’s investigative prison. They had their own, separate one. While in other regional centers they kept people in the criminal prison, having separate cells there, in Ternopil they had their own, in the basement of the regional KGB Administration building. The head of this prison was Dideshko. As soon as I was brought in, he was a captain, but by Police Day, he was already a major. For the first week, I sat alone. You don’t see any living people, except for the KGB agents. You don’t see daylight either, only a lightbulb is on. But the building is pre-war, the prison is near the sidewalk. You can hear people walking, the sound of footsteps along the wall, you can hear conversations, but they don’t see anything.

V.O.: I know this building.

M. Kots: Well, so I’m sitting. The calls for interrogations begin, the prosecutor came to process me as a suspect, an arrested person. I sat like that for 8 days. “Well, what, shall we move you to be with people, so you won’t be bored?” “Go ahead and move me.” For those eight days, there were no walks, nothing. They moved me to another cell. I walk in, two men are sitting there. We started to get acquainted. One, as he introduced himself, was a student at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute. They took him from his second year. Apparently, he had paraphrased the song “The Cuckoo’s Voice is Heard Again in the Forest” to “Bandera’s Voice is Heard Again in the Forest.” He said that for this he got a year and was kept in the KGB basement, not sent to a camp. Bohdan Shtoyko, I think his last name was, a Ternopil native himself, studied at the Lviv Polytechnic. The second one—maybe you’ve met him—was Viktor Parfenovych Rafalskyi.

V.O.: Yes, the name of a famous political prisoner. They held him in psychiatric hospitals for a long time.

M. Kots: He was a man of tragic fate. He was already very much destroyed by this system, especially his nervous system. He could no longer stand still—back and forth, back and forth. But he stood firm in his convictions. He recited his songs, poems from memory. I remember this short verse of his, a kind of epigraph:

О, Боже милий, скільки ж то

Отих страждань терпіти мушу?

Невже це так вказав перстом,

Щоб кожен ліз мені з брудом в душу?

О, дай мені Самсона міць,

Щоб я струснув оце склепіння,

Щоб вороги поверглись ниць

І зникли в гуркоті каміння.

This is what I remember from his words. He was arrested in the town of Lanivtsi in the Ternopil region. It wasn’t his first time in prison. I think it was the second. And he continued his literary activities. He wrote many poems. All of this fell into their hands. According to his story, this time he was transporting a sack of his manuscripts to Galicia. And they were following him. In Lanivtsi, the police intercepted him, handed him over to the KGB, and the investigation began. I was with Rafalskyi for about 10 days, approximately from November 6 to 15. He refused to give any testimony. They threatened him, that he would be held responsible for refusing to testify. He said that refusing to testify meant up to two years of imprisonment. So he adopted a position of silence, hoping to save himself this way. But it didn't end as he had hoped. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital where he spent some 20 years. I heard about him much later, after my release. Radio Liberty often had reports about him. A collection of his poems was published in Drohobych. After his release, he settled in a village near Drohobych.

So they took Viktor Rafalskyi away quickly, and I sat with that Bohdan Shtoyko until December 31, 1967—his term was supposedly ending. We are wise in hindsight… Somehow you trust a person, because I’m sitting here and he’s sitting here. We were on good terms until the very end. He was called for a talk before his release. He said they warned him: if you meet any of ours (KGB agents) in Ternopil, don’t show that you know them. If they don’t greet you, you don’t greet them either. This Bohdan was released. But later I never met him anywhere, he didn’t participate in any events. This raised doubts in my mind—as a dissident, he should have appeared somewhere.

I remained alone in the cell from December 31 until January 20 of 1968. “Well, what, bored all alone? I feel for you. It wouldn’t hurt to have someone to talk to. We’ll do something, we’ll find someone.” And on January 20, they throw someone into my cell… A wolfish, to put it crudely, snot-nosed kid, he was about 19, and I was already 37. Back and forth, a person comes, we start to get acquainted, where from, what? They brought him from a camp, from Malevychi, from a strict-regime camp.

He said he was imprisoned for hooliganism. But in reality, they had specially prepared an agent for me, to provoke me. He was so ill-tempered, capricious: this is wrong, that is wrong, give me this, give me that. That’s one thing. The second—since they threw him in with me, they didn’t call me for interrogation for 20 days. And him neither. We sit, we sit, we talk. In 20 days, you can talk about a lot. His task was to get as much out of me as possible. After 20 days, they started calling me for interrogations, and him once or twice. I told him what the investigation already knew. And from his side, there were hints to provoke me into sharing what the investigation didn’t know. For example, he says: “And I still have a pistol hidden.” I say: “Don’t talk about it.” He thought I would also say that I had something. And at the investigation, the prosecutor called me in: “Well, what’s the difference now, confess, so the burden isn’t hanging over your neck, do you have a weapon?” I say: “Yes.” “And what?” “A cannon is buried!” “Ha-ha-ha!”

So, in the form of a joke. Although, if it comes to that, as a snot-nosed kid during the war, I collected ammunition. I found two grenades, hid them, ammunition—automatic rifle cartridges, rifle cartridges, German, Soviet—I preserved all of it, thinking it would come in handy someday. I found a rifle, but I didn’t cover it well, so someone picked it up. But the grenades—I’m sure—are still there to this day, no one has dug them up. There was a hole where a post had stood. I threw them into that hole, buried them. True, without the fuzes, anti-personnel, offensive grenades. I have a rough idea of where, but the area has been plowed over. If I had said that, they would have tried me for possession of a weapon as well.

And what does this cellmate propose? He says his three years are almost up, so maybe he could pass on a message to someone? I didn’t risk giving any addresses. But to give some kind of signal about myself, some little note, in such a way that it wouldn’t bring any additional charges against me—that, I thought, I could do. He was allowed to have a notebook and a pencil. I broke off a piece of his pencil and illegally kept it in a broom. They would come, search the cell—nothing. Where’s the paper? You go to the toilet, someone stands over you, shoves a piece of a newspaper, some magazine into your hand, and stands there. Well, sometimes I would tear off a little margin and on these scraps of paper I wrote briefly who I was, how I was arrested. I arrange with him, maybe you can get it out? “Give it to me.” We stuffed those tiny notes into the seams of his work robe. We camouflaged them carefully. After some time, the guards burst in, take him from the cell, and strip me and search me. He gave them those pieces of paper. He had asked me who to pass them to. He hinted that he sometimes sees foreigners. So I said: “Decide for yourself who to give them to.”

V.O.: So he decided to give them to the KGB?

M. Kots: Yes, he passed them to the right place. But until the end of the investigation, until the trial, they never mentioned these notes to me. Only in the camp did a KGB officer hint to me: “What did you write there?” I said: “What you read.” After my release, after rehabilitation, I went to familiarize myself with my case file and found in it a typed transcript of what I had written. But, I say, they didn’t present it as additional criminal material. That’s why I tried to write carefully. That I was arrested on such-and-such a date, for such-and-such a reason. So it all turned out okay.

I was with that criminal until the end of the investigation. He was just sitting there, fishing for information. And then, suddenly, they took me away after the trial. I asked why they were still holding him. “I don’t know what they want from me…”

Then they arrested Levko Horokhivskyi—and the informant was put in a cell with him. After Horokhivskyi, there was a third person—and he sat with him, too. I learned the fate of my notes toward the end of my time in the camp. When Horokhivskyi arrived at the camp, we calculated that the informant had spent about a year with just the two of us. I thought: And what were you hoping for, man? What did you think you’d gain from selling someone out? Some people are like that. He said he was from Zalishchyky, that his father was a warehouse manager and his mother a nurse. I had no way of verifying how true that was. I’ve forgotten his last name; I’ll recall it later. That’s all concerning the snitches.

About the investigation. They interrogate me: “What pushed you onto the criminal path?” And the interrogator frames the introductory part with these words: “Having listened to the anti-Soviet propaganda of hostile Western radio stations, he embarked on a criminal path.” In other words, I was supposedly a victim of hostile Western bourgeois centers. I didn’t like that: “On what basis are you writing that I listened to bourgeois broadcasts?” “Well, you did listen, you have the recordings right here.” “So what if I listened? What—do I not have a mind of my own? I listened, but that wasn’t the deciding factor.” “Then what was the reason?” “Your actions, your criminality. You destroyed my brother and mother, you persecuted my father. That is what prompted me to fight against you.” They wrote down that, as the son of a kulak, dissatisfied with the Soviet government, I had acted against it.

They didn’t have a single direct witness who would claim I was conducting anti-Soviet agitation. There were witnesses who had found a leaflet but didn’t know me. He brought the leaflet to the KGB and turned it in. There were about five or six such people. So I didn’t have any confrontations with people I knew, where one would accuse the other.

April 11, 1968. The trial.

So what did they do? Right before the trial, they held public meetings in two towns—Kopychentsi and Khorostkiv. They ordered the heads of organizations to prepare speakers to condemn the bourgeois nationalist so-and-so, and for each to bring their speech in written form, read it, and hand it over to them. These meetings were run by the head of the regional KGB, Stupak, the district KGB man, the chief of police, and the prosecutor. They orchestrated the meetings where speeches by representatives of various organizations were read out. It was painful that people who had been on good terms with you, with whom I’d never had any conflicts and, on the contrary, had helped in some ways—once you were locked up, and they were promised that no one would ever see me again—they could just pour dirt all over me, capitalizing on it. Well, unprincipled, not realizing what they were doing. He writes: “I, a Soviet man, ask the Soviet court to apply the most severe measure of punishment to him.” And he even reinforces it with songs: “Широка страна моя родная, много в ней лесов, полей и рек, я другой такой страны не знаю, где так вольно дышит человек!” So, an enemy walked through our town, trampled our land, ate our bread! And this scoundrel wanted an independent Ukraine! I ask that the highest measure of punishment be applied to him!” This is recorded in the case file! The KGB men collected a whole folder of such materials and filed them. This was two days before the trial.

They bring me to the trial.

V.O.: Do you remember the date of the trial?

M.Kots: The trial was on April 11, 1968, and these public meetings were held around April 9. People you worked with were slinging mud at you because they thought you would never find out, that you were as good as buried, and they could say, “I am a true Soviet man, I will demonstrate my civic duty.” What struck me was that no Party members were required to speak; only non-Party members spoke. Because I was primarily accusing the Party. The Party organizers and members were there, but none of them spoke—only non-Party members denounced me as an enemy of the people. Among them was one student—a loudmouth, a Komsomol organizer: “He wanted to turn us into enemies of the Soviet people! We, the Komsomol, the collective, did not allow this and we ask that the enemy be severely punished!”

Those were the kinds of statements. At the trial, the prosecutor declares: “Appeals have been submitted to the court from the public of the towns of Kopychentsi and Khorostkiv.” I think to myself: What’s this? Could someone have dared to speak in my defense? The prosecutor opens a folder and reads out one public appeal, then another. Ah, so that’s what kind of appeals! So that’s what the Soviet public is! I then ask to be allowed to look at them. The prosecutor gave me the folder. I leafed through it and saw the names of people I knew—what can you say?

More on the investigation.

I wouldn’t say they beat me there. But—the conditions of confinement. You are in complete isolation, you see nothing, you have no contact with anyone. They keep you like a lab rabbit. As for the investigation—I’ll say that the investigator, Bidyovka, was a degenerate, a certified executioner. He never struck me, but he lunged at me with his fists more than once. He would curse in the foulest Russian, at the top of his lungs. But he couldn’t get out of me what he wanted. This was about where I distributed the leaflets. I named the locations and approximately how many leaflets. But no one had seen them. The investigator traveled to those places, questioned cleaning ladies, janitors, and the heads of bus and train stations—they hadn’t seen anything, no one had said anything. Someone found one at a railway crossing—the track walkers were passing by, and I had thrown a few out of the train car window; this was between Horodchany and Volochysk.

They suspected me of producing another leaflet—made in a similar style to mine. As if it were made from mine. It also had a tryzub drawn at the top. But they didn’t know who the author was. A different KGB man was handling that one. One time he comes in, with this wolfish glare: “Yours?” “No.” “Yours!” “Let me at least read it.” It was made using a photographic method. He kept hammering me: “Yours?” “Let me at least read what’s in it.” He hissed and hissed and then left.

And another episode occurred. While I was already under investigation, one copy of my leaflet suddenly appeared in the town of Volodymyr-Volynskyi, in a tea room. They interrogated the waitress. She testified that a group of people had come in and sat at a table. They sat there laughing, then left, and another group came in. Then an employee from the finance department came in, sat at the table, and there was something lying on it. And these kids—from a vocational school or something, I don’t know where they found it. Apparently in Novovolynsk, because I didn’t distribute any in Volodymyr—it seems they brought it to Volodymyr and left it on the table. This guy from the district finance department read the leaflet and immediately took it to the KGB and turned it in. This leaflet appeared when I was already under arrest. And so the interrogations began: “Who did you give them to to distribute?” “No one.” “You’re lying! Did you give them to your father?” “No.” He hammered me for half a day about who I had given them to. “No, and that’s it!” “Then how could it have gotten there?” “How should I know? Someone found it and brought it over.” “Who would need it?” “Ask the one who needed it.” This was discovered sometime in November 1967. They never established anything. They opened a separate criminal case but couldn’t find any leads.

V.O.: And approximately how many of those leaflets were made?

M.Kots: Somewhere around a hundred. They were photocopies. I had distributed them in such a way that I still had about a dozen left. I was planning to distribute them in Chernivtsi, but you’re always looking around, wondering where it’s safe to do it and where it’s suspicious.

The case is closing. When they have no real dirt to throw on you, they invent all sorts of things. The investigator went to my village, interrogated people. He got a character reference for me from the village council. The chairman was a stutterer named Mykola Antoniuk, about three or four years younger than me. The reference begins like this: “Mykola Kots, his father was a kulak, was imprisoned, his brother was imprisoned…” That my brother supposedly had a weapon. But he didn’t know that my brother had already been rehabilitated. He had nothing to write about me, so he writes about my brother, whom he didn’t know because he was still in short pants when my brother was arrested. My brother was arrested in 1940, and he was born around 1934, so he didn’t know him at all. But he knew he was imprisoned, knew my father was imprisoned. Not a word about my younger brother and sister—who were nearly his own age. Only the negative things. I was told later that when the KGB summoned him, he said that I had a rich apartment, that I had everything, but I still wanted America!

Through unofficial channels, they spread the rumor that I was an American spy, that I was passing secret messages abroad to American intelligence, that the Americans were supposedly going to come and pick me up in a plane, but the Chekists beat them to it and intercepted me. They spread this rumor in my village, in other villages, and where I worked—that I was an American spy. After my release, some people asked if it was true that I had been an American spy. It’s so absurd, but people assumed I might have had a radio station, transmitting information abroad. For the common folk, this went over well—right, right! Because if you tell the truth, some might start to think. And at the investigation: “He embarked on an anti-Soviet path.” I ask, where? Where do you see that I embarked on an anti-Soviet path? Where does it say it’s anti-Soviet? I spoke out not against the Soviet government, but against the Communists. The leaflet only talks about opposing the Communists. This infuriated the prosecutor: “You see what he’s come to! He wants to split the Party and the people! It won’t happen! It won’t happen, citizen Kots!” It won’t happen, so it won’t happen, but in the protocol they kept writing that I had acted against the Soviet state system. But I would take it and add that it was not against the Soviet system, but against the Communists. And who represented the Soviet system? The Communists. The Soviet government was just a screen to cover for the Communists.

Before I was to review the criminal case file, the head of the regional administration, Colonel Stupak, summons me again for a conversation. I am ordered: “Tidy yourself up.” They bring me in. Someone else is sitting next to him—I don’t know who, I didn’t ask. “Well, how are things?” “As you can see.” “We once spoke after your arrest (he hadn’t said this then, but he made it up), that if you had any questions, you should come to me. And now half a year has passed, and you haven’t come—do you have no questions for me?” “Not at the moment. The case is finishing, I’ll review it, and then we’ll talk. I’ve seen the interrogation protocols, but there are other materials I haven’t seen yet. Other people were interrogated, I don’t know what’s written there. Then we’ll talk.”

He takes my leaflet: “Tell me, please, how many people were on the teaching staff where you worked?” “There were up to 30 people.” “How many of them have two higher education degrees?” At first, I didn’t catch what he was getting at, and I reply: “Right now, no one. There’s one who enrolled in a second university.” “And you?” Ah, that’s it—you want to hint at how ungrateful I am to the Soviet government, which gave me two degrees, and yet I acted against it? I say: “Education isn’t handed out like medals or certificates of merit. Education is earned.” “Well yes, but we created the conditions for you…” And then: “You see this… (He doesn’t say ‘tryzub’). It’s drawn quite nicely. And where do you know it from?” “What do you mean, where do I know it from? During the German occupation, when an independent Ukraine was proclaimed, the tryzub hung in all institutions—in the school, in the local government office.” “So you remember that, too?” The question of where I know the tryzub from was dropped. He was hoping I’d say this person or that person showed it to me. I thought, you won’t get the answer you want from me. He went back and forth, back and forth, talking to me for four hours, trying to sniff everything out. The conversation ends. “If you have any questions or anything—come to me.” “Alright.”

They take me from him back to the basement. A few days later, they give me the criminal case file to review. I read through it, saw how much was falsified, starting with the reference from the village council, the protocols about my father—that he was a kulak, that he exploited people, hired labor. Well, I think, now I have something to talk to you about. While reviewing the case, I wrote some things down and I approach the guard on duty, saying that I now want to meet with the chief. “I’ll pass it on to Dedeshko.” Dedeshko was the prison warden. After some time, he comes in: “What’s up with you?” “I want to see the head of the Regional Administration, Colonel Stupak.” “Well, I’ll talk to them.” “Alright.”

After a while, the warden of the prison (or pre-trial detention center), Dedeshko, comes to me and says: “The Head of the Administration is busy and has no time. If you have something, write it down for him, and I’ll pass it on.” “If he doesn’t want to see me, then I won’t write anything either.” You see, when you have some counterarguments, he no longer wants to talk to you; he’s looking for me to cry and write to him—I don’t need that.

When the case was closed, they brought me a lawyer—Katsnelson. He looked over the notes they had confiscated from me. He’s trying to be chummy: “So, do you agree with the charges?” “What do you mean, agree? This isn’t right here, and that’s not right there.” “Oh, that’s just a simple matter, they’ll sort it out in court, there’s nothing special here.” “But it’s not true!” “That doesn’t matter—the court will consider everything. Let’s sign that the case is closed.” I see what kind of man he is—so fine, I signed that the case was closed and let the trial begin.

The Verdict.

Another two weeks or so pass before the trial. It was a closed trial, no one was allowed in the courtroom, not even at the threshold. But my parents somehow figured it out—they hired a lawyer in Lviv, Tamara Andriivna Sikovich, and she came to defend me. They thought she could do something. Where did I see her? At the trial, she approaches me: “I’m so-and-so, your parents, brother, and sister hired me to defend you.” They paid the money, she came. We weren’t that farsighted, but when you go through a trial, you see what the role of a lawyer is in a Soviet court. Well, at least she didn’t turn into a prosecutor. The only thing she said was: “A crime was committed, but it must be taken into account that this is the first time he has done it. The duration of his hostile activity was very brief. And I ask…”

V.O.: Did she conduct the defense in Russian?

M.Kots: Yes. The investigation and trial were conducted in Ukrainian. But she was Russian. Her entire defense boiled down to that.

And what happened at the trial? “Do you have any requests?” I say: “Since my brother, sister, and father were interrogated, I would like my relatives to be present at the court hearing.” “We will confer.” The presiding judge whispered with the two people’s assessors at the table—“The court sees no need for this.” They refused—no one was to be let in. Only when the interrogated were called: “What can you say?” He said it—and then out the door, go stand in the street.

They didn’t let me defend myself. “Do you confirm? Did you distribute them?” “I did.” “Why?” As soon as you start to answer why you did it—“I will not allow it! I will not allow any anti-Soviet activity here!” They don’t let you say anything. Well, if you won’t let me say anything, I decided to try a different tactic. I would ask the witnesses questions. But there were no witnesses who could say anything meaningful, except perhaps my brother. They called my brother, and I had prepared about a dozen questions. I ask: “Do you remember when they arrested our brother?” The judge didn’t realize what was happening at first. And my brother was terrified. I managed to ask him about three questions in court, but I had a dozen prepared—to reveal things through the witness. When the judge heard the questions I was asking—“I overrule! I overrule! I overrule the question!” And he didn’t let my brother answer anything. Some people say they spoke out in court, exposed things… I didn’t have that opportunity. The only thing my lawyer advised me was that I had the right to review the minutes of the court hearing.

The trial ends, they issue the sentence—seven years of imprisonment, five of exile—goodbye. My relatives are standing outside—my father wasn’t even allowed near. They put me in a Black Maria and back to the basement. Well, you don’t allow a visit before the trial—but the trial is over now. No.

V.O.: And how many days did the trial last?

M.Kots: One day, and not even a full one. A shortened version, why delay. And back to the basement I went.

The Visit.

My relatives are hanging around, asking for a visit—no, no, tomorrow. They thought my family would leave. But they stayed overnight and insisted on being given a visit. And, willy-nilly, they had to observe the formality; they allowed a visit after the trial.

Dedeshko, the prison warden, came and warned me: “Not a word about the case during the conversation, or the visit will be terminated!” Well, what can you do? They brought them into a small room, then they bring me in. The prison warden is standing there, along with two guards. My father, brother, sisters. They are curious to know what the case is about. As soon as they start to ask, he glares at me like a wolf, so not a peep on that topic. Well, I see that they’ll terminate the visit... In fact, it was just a formality, to show them that you’re still alive—and that’s it. They also didn’t know where I was being held, that I was in the basement of this very building. The visit ends, they are told: “You still have the right to a visit before he is sent to the camp.” “But we don’t know when…” “We will notify you, you can come. Goodbye.” They took me back to the basement.

V.O.: How long did that visit last?

M.Kots: About 15–20 minutes.

The Appeal.

They lead me back to the basement, and then I make a request: “Let me review the minutes of the court hearing.” “What do you need that for?” “What do you mean, what for? I want to see them.” “What’s there to see—what happened is what’s written.” “But I have the right to review them, don’t I?” “You do, but what’s there to review?” I insist they give me the minutes to review. They hand me a copy of the verdict, and it states that from the day the copy is served, you have 7 days to appeal the verdict. I write that until I have reviewed the minutes of the court hearing, I will not write any statements or appeals.

For 3–4 days they hemmed and hawed: “What’s there? What’s there?” I insist: “I have the right—give them to me!” So what do they do? They stage a scene—and this proved that they had no court minutes, they were writing them after the fact and fabricating them to suit their needs. They scribbled something down, but it was like night and day compared to what I had answered and what was written. How could they get out of it? They give the minutes to a warrant officer, who comes in and says hurriedly: “Here, here are the minutes, take a look, but I’m in a hurry—sign here that you have reviewed them. I’m in a hurry, I don’t have time.” And he stands over me. I say: “I want to read them.” “What’s there to read?” I see he’s not letting me. But somehow, with great difficulty, I managed to hold on to them, quickly skimmed through them, I couldn’t write much down, but I jotted down a few things, and some notes remained in my memory. “Sign that you have reviewed them.” I write: “I have reviewed the minutes. I will provide my comments separately.” He, without reading, saw what I wrote, and rushed out the door with it. But then they read it: ah, he will provide comments separately—and they got nervous that the procedure was not complete. They bring me paper: well, write. And I wrote to them that this was wrong, and that was fabricated, I described specific facts, that I said one thing and they wrote another, that it didn’t add up. For instance, the character reference for my father, that he worked for the Germans. I even said in court: “Why did you write so little—you should have written that my father was a village elder or a policeman.” And they write in the minutes that the son stated his father was the village elder. But I said it with irony.

I laid out these comments of mine on several pages—here you go. But I don’t know where they are. The question: “What pushed you onto the criminal path?” Let me write it for you. I wrote for three evenings, about 11 pages, describing what the Soviet government had brought us. “What are you writing, anti-Soviet propaganda?!” The first evening, I handed in the manuscript. The next day, he comes for me to continue: “Less anti-Soviet stuff!” “I’m writing facts, not anti-Soviet propaganda.” He hissed and hissed, but took the pages.

Transport to the camp. No one informed my relatives. But they kept coming and found out that I was supposed to be sent somewhere. They arrive, wanting to give me a food parcel. And somehow, before that, a prosecutor came into the cell and asked how things were. I say: “More lies.” He got offended and gave an order to deprive me of the visit before being sent to the camp. “Sign here—they brought you a parcel, but you are deprived of the visit before transport.” I say: “Then take the parcel too—I don’t want to take it.” “What are you doing, people traveled so many kilometers, how will they feel? It will be a blow to them.” In the end, I signed that I had received the parcel, and my relatives went home empty-handed, utterly dejected.

The Transport.

On June 6, 1968, early in the morning, they sent me on a transport to Kyiv. The transport was like this: the “Ivano-Frankivsk–Koziatyn” train (I think it still runs), and a prisoner transport car was attached once every ten days. They threw me into this car and took me away. They transport you in a rather original way. They bring you to Shepetivka, it’s still early. The car is uncoupled and shunted onto a siding. We bake in the car all day. In the evening, they couple us to some train, and we’re pulled from Shepetivka. No one tells you where you’re going, but it turned out that overnight they took us all the way to Zhmerynka. In Zhmerynka, they uncoupled the car again for the day, and again we baked in the car all day. In the evening, they coupled us to another train heading for Kyiv. So, I left Ternopil on the sixth, and on the morning of the eighth, I was already in Kyiv.

In Kyiv, they brought me to Lukyanivska Prison, and threw me, I think, into cell 57. This was a cell for repeat offenders, those who had already been sentenced and were being moved between transports, the “stripes”—that’s where I first saw what that Soviet uniform was. Others were awaiting sentencing, others had already been sentenced and were waiting for confirmation. I had to interact with them. “Who are you?” They were surprised that I was being transported in civilian clothes and with my hair—it made them suspicious: “Everyone else is shaved, but you’re not.” I didn’t hide who I was and what I was there for.

What kind of environment was it? These were repeat offenders, most of them truly lost souls. They walk around like shadows, like beasts, nothing interests them except snatching something or starting some conflict, getting into a fight. But there were interesting people, too. There was a Mykola from the Luhansk region (I don’t remember his last name), he spoke Russian, but he got acquainted with me and seemed to take me under his protection among this rabble. He warned everyone not to touch me or demand anything from me. I had some scraps from a food parcel, a pair of socks. They listened to him. But at first, it was, give me this, or: “What do you need that jacket for—you’re going to a camp anyway, and I’m getting out soon, I need it.” And they’re already trying to dress you in their own gear. Well, I kept my clothes, but they took the socks. After that, they backed off. They are quite organized: they establish connections with neighboring cells: “Got anything to warm us up?” People there shout back: “What do you have?” “What?!” We’re the repeat offenders, you know, and you’re addressing us as if you were some generals or something. And in one of the cells next to us were underage boys, and for them, the repeat offenders were heroes. “Send the horse!” You know what a “horse” is? They pass a piece of a parcel, some tea or sugar—and it goes on the common table.

I spent eight days among them. One of them says this: “I have not worked for this system and I will not work for it. Let me rot here, but I will not work for the communists. And remember: if you politicals ever need help, we are your first allies. We have three camps—Sokal, Slavuta… and somewhere else in the Donetsk or Luhansk region. Remember these addresses—we will always support you!” Such were their views.

From Kyiv, they threw me into the Kharkiv transit prison, into a death row cell. If in Kyiv I was among repeat offenders, in Kharkiv I was kept alone. I spent another 7 or 8 days there. Though, before they shipped me out, they threw in a man from Vinnytsia, a fellow, “for the war,” as they said. He died in the camps, a simple peasant.

V.O.: What was his last name?

M.Kots: Kryvolap, but I’ve forgotten his first name. That was my first acquaintance with a political prisoner who had already been in a camp. They had called him in because they were dragging someone else into an investigation. Have you ever had to see a death row cell?

V.O.: Yes, I was there too, in Kharkiv at Kholodna Hora, in a death row cell. Made of sheet metal…

M.Kots: One sheet of metal like this, and another welded like that. Those are the bunks. Instead of a nightstand, a cube welded from metal and concreted into the floor—not a single movable object. Even the latrine bucket was chained with such a massive chain that even if they unhooked it, it weighed 80 kilograms, and carrying it out—you just drag it, because you don’t have the strength to carry it. Double or triple doors, triple bars—that’s what a death row cell is like.

We’re traveling on the Sverdlovsk train. They take us on and on—through the Saratov region. I recall the name of a transit prison… It was there, before Potma.

V.O.: Ruzayevka?

M.Kots: Yes, Ruzayevka. They threw me in Ruzayevka—it’s a peripheral prison, there weren’t many people. Two more showed up there—a Latvian and a Russian with the last name Zhukov. And this Latvian… At first glance, you’d think the people there were ideal, but in reality, he was a foreman in the camp, always hanging around the administration.

And this Zhukov introduced himself as someone who had been in the West, worked for Radio Liberty. He decided to return, and here they slapped him with a “ten-spot.” They even manipulated him: “We’re giving you ten years as a formality, if you work well, behave properly, you won’t serve the full ten years.” And this man naively believed it. He said: “I’ll tell them, I was there, I know things, I’ll have many more conversations with them.” He was traveling with that kind of attitude…

[We arrived at Potma, spent one night there. There were no beds, nothing, we were lying on the floor every which way. It was a scene that truly showed what Soviet prisons, concentration camps, were like. There was a women’s cell on the other side of the wall. The shouting back and forth—what filth! The things you could hear there! Savagery! They shout to each other, request songs—and what kind of songs… The depths women can sink to! You don’t see their faces, you just hear all that. We spent the night in Potma, and then they take us to the 11th camp. So on June 29, I arrived in zone 11 and saw what Yavas was.

But I’d like to say a couple of words about our transport from the train car to the prison in Kharkiv. To stoop to such levels—it’s incomprehensible! The car was parked maybe 200 meters from the station, the “Black Marias” couldn’t get right up to the car, so we had to be moved about 50 meters, maybe more. They unload us from the car: “Get down, get down, get down!” There were probably two dozen of us. “Link arms! Single file! On all fours!” Some snot-nosed kid, a junior lieutenant, screaming. And so we crawled on all fours from the car to the “Black Marias,” you could say; you have your things, you drag them behind you. If I hadn't seen it myself… This savagery is forever etched in my memory. That’s how they brought us to Kharkiv. Then into the “Black Marias,” taken to the prison where I was held.

June 29, 1968. Mordovia.

I arrived at the 11th camp. First introductions. Everyone is waiting, hoping someone from the outside will bring something new—but who, what? Everyone comes up and tries to get to know you. The first was Myroslav Melen. There was Mykhailo Zelenchuk. Anatoliy Shevchuk—he introduced himself to me a day or two later. It was like a telegram arriving from the free world: “Who are you, what’s your story, where are you from, what sins brought you here, and for how long?”

It so happened that I spent exactly one year in the 11th camp, almost to the hour, you could say. They brought me on June 29, 1968—and on June 29, 1969, they were clearing out that camp for common criminals, and they were dispersing us to other camps, and I ended up in the 19th.

V.O.: That’s in the settlement of Lesnoy.

M.Kots: I want to say more about the 11th camp. It was large, there were over a thousand people there. I get acquainted. I also want to know the news—who, what, you look for fellow countrymen, who is from Volyn, what kind of people are here? It was like a library, or a living archive. How truthfully each person shared his story, that was on his conscience, but you get a lot of information. It would be worthwhile for everyone to spend about three years there, then a person would learn what Soviet reality is. Unfortunately, people don’t know this. Perhaps to someone on the outside, it might seem: oh, what a monster, he wants everyone to serve time there. But among the prisoners, there were such talks, that if only everyone could go through these “universities,” then they would know what the Soviet government is. Instead, they stuff their heads with all sorts of rosy ideas.

What did I do there? At first, they threw me into the polishing shop. They made various furniture there, wardrobes. Then they moved me to the sofa assembly shop. Then I managed to get transferred to the electrical shop. Ivan Pokrovskyi, a fellow countryman of mine, worked there, so at his suggestion, they took me to the electrical shop. There I learned how to rewind electric motors, and I spent the rest of my time there. This was the change in my work over the course of a year. But I was severely exhausted by this prison and work. In the sofa assembly shop—the dust was terrible when you’re stamping the cotton batting. In the polishing shop—the acetone fumes were so bad that my heart gave out, and I could barely walk. They put me in the hospital there, I spent about ten days there. I see them carrying someone out into the corridor on a stretcher—a dead man lying there. But then I hear a conversation that, no, he’s alive. Perhaps you’ve had to meet him? He was from the Kyiv region or from Kyiv, he had been on a hunger strike for about seven years. So, in my presence, they took him away, sent him to the third camp hospital as a hunger striker. He lay motionless on the stretcher.

V.O.: Maybe it was Anatoliy Lupynis? But he was on a hunger strike for two years.

M.Kots: And this one was a unique case, he had been on a hunger strike for seven years.

V.O.: I’ve heard of someone like that, but I can’t recall the name.

M.Kots: There were meetings with KGB officers there. After some time, Colonel Arbuzov, the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Mordovian Autonomous Republic, arrives from Saransk. He called me in for a chat, to, so to speak, set me on the right path. He starts lecturing me like a criminal. I sit there silently. He looks and looks: “Do you understand me?” I say: “I understand.” He continues talking and talking, and I sit silently. Again: “Do you understand me?” “I understand,” I say. Then he started in on how “you are a criminal.” I say: “First, take a look at yourself, who are you?!” He: “I have worked in this system for twenty years, and I don’t know of a single case where someone from our agencies was a criminal.” I say: “And who was Beria? He was your father.” “You see, he was an international agent, he worked for British intelligence.” I say: “There’s no need…” We parted on unfriendly terms. Even before that, some junior lieutenant in civilian clothes called me in and started a conversation with me: “You know, you could get a better job here, but there’s something about your views that isn’t right.” Meaning, if you change them, they’ll give you some privileges. But I didn’t see any privileges until the end of my term.

In the 19th zone, I ended up in the electrical shop, and I was there from June 29, 1969, until March 20 or 30, 1970. I was even there for the population census. I’ll briefly mention two things worth noting. They brought people from the Institute of Sociological Research who were conducting public opinion polls and giving out questionnaires to fill out. The questionnaire was specially prepared for prisoners, but for common criminals: what crimes did you commit, do you repent, what are your plans? —That sort of thing. Some refused to fill it out, saying, we are political prisoners, why are you giving us such questions. Some wrote whatever came to mind. For example, there was an Estonian. I can’t recall his name now. When Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia, he fled, deserted, and hid among the Czechs, but then he was handed over and imprisoned. He wrote: “I curse my parents for agreeing to the annexation of Estonia to the Soviet Union in 1940.” We wrote rather sharp answers. Some refused, and some wrote. It wasn’t the first time these people from the institute had been in such a camp. I asked: “Will this be published?” “Well, we’ll see.” “Then why write it, if it will never see the light of day?” He replies that he needs to gather material, to report back: “Well, we’ll see, we’ll process it…” They conducted the survey twice. Once it was comprehensive, the second time it was selective, every tenth person. I took part in both and gave answers as I understood them. That was one clash with citizens from outside the camp.

Then—the census. They call you in, ask questions, and write it down. “Your specialty?” I name it. “Where do you work?” “I am a political prisoner.” “We know that, but right now—you are a worker.” I say: “No, I am not a worker, I am a political prisoner. What, am I supposed to deceive the state with you—I’m a prisoner, but I’m going to write that I’m a worker? I want the state to know, so that falsified data is not sent to it.” We got to the point where he got angry, he didn’t want to write what I was saying, and I refused to confirm that I was a worker, even though I was working as an electrician. “No,” I say, “I won’t.” “Go on!” I left, and that’s how we parted. In this way, people with higher education in some remote Mordovian village were recorded as workers during the census.

This was in the 19th. They take me, Vasyl Pidhorodetskyi, and Oleksandr Nazarenko, from the Donetsk region, and put us in a “Black Maria” for transport. They take us to the 17th. And the 17th was divided into two zones. One part of the people was in one zone, and the other part in the other. So they took Pidhorodetskyi to the “smaller” zone, as we called it, and me and Nazarenko were thrown into the “larger” one. And so, around March 30, 1970, I found myself in the 17th “large” zone. It wasn’t that large either, because there were only about 150-170 people there at the time. What can be said about this zone? I’ll say this. I tried, wherever I was, to be interested in information about the camp, I collected sociological data. I was in the 17th until 1972, until the transport to the Urals, until August 9. So I served the full year of 1971 there. I looked into the mortality rate, and it turned out that one in every eleven went to the next world. 1 prisoner out of 11 died in a year. This information is not made up, but specific. I remember some of the names, some I don’t, but this number from those years remains in my memory.

We formed a group there—Levko Horokhivskyi, me, and Oles Nazarenko. They also brought Stepan Bedrylo from Lviv. So there were 4 of us, more or less like-minded. We discussed various issues, including national ones, dreamed of Ukraine, and even organized a circle to broaden our horizons. Nazarenko prepared literary topics, Horokhivskyi introduced us to architecture—types of architecture, styles, Bedrylo gave us some data on economics, what he knew. I—mainly political issues, as far as I knew them. We did it like this: one week, one person gives a report in this small circle, the next week—another prepares, the third week—a third. We would go out on Sunday, sit down somewhere off to the side... Then Bedrylo was released, probably born with a silver spoon in his mouth: they only gave him two years, a unique case. The three of us were left. Then they took us to the Urals, and some remained behind.

They had brought Bakhtalovskyi to the 17th—a priest, a monk, the former abbot of the Ivano-Frankivsk monastery. I had to talk with him many times. And he had a decent education: he had graduated from two universities—the Innsbruck Catholic University and a Belgian one, he knew many languages. Then they transferred Balis Gariauskas from the “small” zone, he is a unique person. Gariauskas tried to improve his Lithuanian language, he was fascinated by different languages, so he would spend hours with that priest Bakhtalovskyi, they would speak Spanish. We used to laugh that Bakhtalovskyi spoke French better than Ukrainian. He spoke Ukrainian with a Galician accent, but he was fluent in German, Polish, French, and knew—to what extent, I won’t judge—Hebrew and Latin. In this respect, he was quite erudite. There was an Anatoliy Berger—perhaps you’ve heard of such a prisoner? The poet Vynohradsky, Anatoliy Berger? This Bakhtalovskyi sought out conversational partners. Although Berger was a Jew and he was a Greek Catholic, they found common ground, talked for hours. The priest wasn’t interested in your nationality, but he tried to sway you towards Greek Catholicism. By the way, as far as I know, it was he who converted Kalynychenko to Greek Catholicism. Do you know Vitaliy Kalynychenko?

V.O.: I know him, I know him.

M.Kots: There was a story with this priest—I’d like to tell more about him, but time is short, so I’ll just say this. He tried to write some things down and send them to the outside world. Two guardian nuns would visit him, bringing him things. They were only allowed a general visit. The Chekists would mock him: “Who is she? Your wife?” He: “No.” Well, for the Chekists, it was a mockery that some ladies were visiting him. His term is ending. He was ill, because after all, he was born in 1897, so at that time, in 1970, the old man was 73. His sentence was not long, only three years in the camp and five in exile. So, leaving for another camp, he wanted to pass something to the outside world, but there was no one to do it through. Then he turned to me and to Mykhailo from the Lviv region: “Help me somehow.” We took this bundle of his writings. What to do, how to get them out into the world? There was no way. We were soon to be transported to the Urals, so what to do? We found a dark plastic jar, put the manuscripts in there, I threw in some of my own things, and Mykhailo Lutsyk also threw something in.

V.O.: I know Lutsyk too.

M.Kots: We were building a barrack there, we went to this construction site on the second floor. They were laying hollow panels, and we stuck this container into one of the panels. I am sure that it is still there to this day, preserved. I raised the question with some people, that we should go and get it. If I go there—they won’t let me in. So I turned to the director of the Institute of Church History, Borys Gudziak, and told him the story, that your priest left something there. “What?” “I didn’t read it. I think that since you are engaged in the history of the church, it would be useful for a museum.” He agreed that it was worthwhile. “And how can we get it?” I say: “If I go, no one will let me in, they won’t let me break down the wall, and I know where it is hidden. We need some authoritative person.” I recommended to him: “Get some recommendation from Metropolitan Ivan Cardinal Lubachivsky to some representative of the administration of the Mordovian ASSR, then at that level they might let us in.” He agreed, but nothing came of that conversation.

The Urals.

The transport, how we were taken from Mordovia to the Urals—it is described in the third issue of the magazine “Zona.” I won’t talk about that. They took us to the Urals, threw us into the 35th zone.

V.O.: That’s Vsesvyatskaya station, right?

M.Kots: Vsesvyatskaya. When they were transporting us, they tried to do it so that no one would know. They shunted the car onto a siding somewhere and led us out to the “Black Marias.” That is, not to “Black Marias”—they transported us in freight trucks. Three submachine gunners stood at the back, and they sat us on the floor with our backs to them. They lead us out of the cage in the car in threes and hand us over. We had to be led 20–30 meters to the truck, because the truck couldn’t get right up to the car. After they had led us away, they would crawl around like that: checking if any trace was left, a note or something. They’d sniff around—then lead the next trio, then sniff around again in the same way. So after each trio, they sniffed around, then loaded the trucks, a convoy of trucks formed, and they drive off. We can’t see ahead, only behind: every 100 meters on one side and the other, there’s a soldier with a submachine gun, and where the road turned, there was even a machine gun set up on the road. That’s how they took us to Vsesvyatskaya zone No. 35.

V.O.: And how many of you were brought then, a whole echelon or what?

M.Kots: No, they divided us—a part was taken to the thirty-sixth zone, I think two cars, and us—three cars, about 170 people. That’s when Hryhoriy Nykytyuk, a 25-year-term prisoner from the Rivne region, died in the car.

V.O.: Nykytyuk, I’ve heard of him.

M.Kots: I was in the same cell with Ivan Kandyba then, I got to know him. We had been close before, but in different zones. What about the thirty-fifth? I had to work various jobs: in the emergency brigade, loading and unloading, and assembling overhead tracks for livestock farms, and I worked in the electrical shop. I finished my term there in the electrical shop and, by the way, passed my position on to Yevhen Proniuk. Sometimes they also had to depend on the prisoner. The motors burn out, and to rewind them—you have to take them all the way to Sverdlovsk. That would take a month, to get it there, they’re not in a hurry there, and the machines are idle because there’s no motor. They started looking for a way to rewind them on site. Well, who can do that? Ivan Pokrovskyi suggested that I could do it. There was a young guy there, a mechanic, a free man, he approaches me: “Could you do it?” I say: “I can rewind it.” Well, and when I demonstrated… One of their motors burned out, a metal shaving got into the winding, it sparked—and it stopped, the lathe operator was out of a job. He comes to me: “What can be done? How much time do you need for this?” I say: “I need to take a look.” I examined it: “I can repair it in about three hours.” “Well, do it.” They removed the motor, I soldered the burnt wires there and started it up. They liked that—I became an indispensable person. They keep me in this electrical shop: a motor burned out here, a motor burned out there—repair it. Well, my term is ending, the foreman approaches me: “Who could you recommend for your position?” I have the opportunity to choose. I turned to the guys: “Who wants to?” I see that Proniuk’s health is poor, I say to him: “Do you want to? There’s still time, I can train you, give you the diagrams. It’s still easier than slaving away somewhere.” But then that long hunger strike started, and he joined it. But right before my release, about a week before, I showed him on the fly, and he stayed to work on rewinding, and they took me on a transport to exile.

My term was ending on October 26, 1974. I was preparing. Everyone asks: “Maybe you can pass something on, write, inform…” I know they will check everything I have, I won’t be able to keep any notes. I memorized ten addresses: from Kyiv, Moscow, Lviv, including one from Garik Superfin, Ivan Kovalenko from Boyarka, and Valeriy Marchenko gave me his addresses.

I want to draw attention to the procedure of my release. You walk around there, saying goodbye, the last two days you don’t go to work anymore. I had a conflict with the shop supervisor, Azarov. What was the conflict about? He suggested I sign the safety log: “Sign that you have been briefed on safety procedures.” I say: “I didn’t come here to work for you to be signing things. My head could get torn off, and you’ll say you didn’t ask me to come here.” Everyone else signed, but I refused—I won’t sign for you that you’re not guilty. Well, I thought he would hold a grudge against me. But he no longer put me to work on the lathes or milling machines, because it was more dangerous there. Where to? Tying bundles of shackles for hanging troughs. I worked there until I left the zone. And so on the second to last day or the last day, people are going to the work formation, and I’m standing to the side, saying my goodbyes. Azarov came up to me: “What, are you getting released?” I say: “Yes.” “Thank God.” This surprised me, and later Antoniuk told me that he had passed many various illegal things to the outside world through Azarov's wife. These were the kinds of Chekists you could encounter.

October 1974. Transport to Exile.

Around four o’clock on October 25, they tell me: “Get your things ready.” And before that, about two weeks earlier, I had to hand over my books for inspection. I had accumulated many subscribed magazines, a whole sack of books, many notes, various abstracts. You have no choice, you have to hand them over. I was left with a bag of clothes. They take me to the guardhouse: “Get undressed.” I get undressed. They check everything, take all the clothes I wore in the camp, and throw me their rags. They pawed through everything and “bend over”—nothing there. “Get dressed.” Well, what, are you going to be naked? I had to put on what they threw at me. “Sit down.” I sat on a stool, and they seat a guard next to me. They were convinced I was carrying something illegal, that it was impossible for me not to be taking something out. And I understood that this trick wouldn’t work for me. I had an episode in Mordovia where I got burned to some extent. They twisted my arms back then. I understood that I was under special scrutiny, that I shouldn’t take anything, only what I could keep in my memory.

So they sat me next to a guard, I’m sitting and he’s sitting. They held me from four o’clock until midnight. An hour or two passes, other searchers come, they check me a second time. Some more time passes—a third group comes, bringing a doctor. He put on a glove: “Bend over”—and proceeds to check my rectum. He checked, and left without a word. Having found nothing on me, they kept me on a stool, thinking I wouldn’t be able to hold out for so long: if I had stuffed something in there, I would need to use the toilet. That was from four o’clock until midnight, a guard sat over me for eight hours. It’s time to send me off. A “Black Maria” pulled up, they put me in the “Black Maria”—to the train. Some train was passing, and it had a prison car. They were transporting teenagers in it. They throw me with my things into this car. They took me to the Sverdlovsk transit prison. I stayed in Sverdlovsk for about three days, but I won’t talk about Sverdlovsk. It was a kind of “combine,” they said it processed two thousand people a day—receiving and sending. From Sverdlovsk, they send me on a transport to Novosibirsk. It was a day’s journey to Novosibirsk. By then, most were heading to the Baikal-Amur Mainline—“Let’s build BAM!” The “volunteers” building BAM were on their way. Who were they? These were truck drivers who had caused an accident somewhere, or someone who had been in a fight. In this car, the control wasn’t as strict, it wasn’t overcrowded. So they took me to Novosibirsk.

In Novosibirsk, they held me for about two days. The Novosibirsk episode. I had almost a hundred kilograms of luggage, mostly books and magazines.

V.O.: But you’re only allowed to have 50 kg on a transport, right?

M.Kots: At every stage of the transport, they go through everything, look it over, and wonder what kind of weirdo is carrying a sack? Everyone else has small bags, and here’s this guy dragging two massive suitcases and a sack, four pieces of luggage. In Novosibirsk, during a search, as they were sending me off to Tomsk, one sergeant major said: “You should have brought a cow with you, too.” They look, and see they are Soviet magazines. One woman was going through them: “Give them to me as a gift.” I say: “No, this is my memory.” So they brought me to the Tomsk prison. In the Tomsk prison, due to weather conditions, they couldn’t send a plane to my destination—they held me for about twenty days. I almost didn’t make it there. I was sick, the cell was damp, humid, the frosts had already started, and my clothes were thin. And who can you complain to, who needs you? A paramedic would come by formally. I tell him I’m suffocating in the cell, the smokers fill it with smoke. “What, should I take you home with me?”—that’s where the conversation ended. “If you survive—you survive, if you croak—you croak.” Well, I survived. They took me to the Tomsk airport, put me on a “kukuruznik” plane not under my own name, but under some Andriyevsky, they wrote out a ticket for a prison guard, stuffed me into an An-2, and put me under the unofficial supervision of a retired Chekist who worked in the police in Teguldet, where I was being sent. The old man didn’t bother me, I sat like the other passengers. They fly us in that “kukuruznik” from Tomsk to Teguldet. They brought us to Teguldet, the airport is about 4–5 kilometers from the settlement—where do you go with such luggage? My unofficial guide went to the station, called the police, and a “Black Maria” arrives. The driver went off somewhere, and this guy tells me: “Put your luggage in the back, in the compartment for transporting prisoners.” I threw my sack, two wooden suitcases, and another bag into this compartment. And the compartment was already full. The driver comes back, the other guy says: “Get in.” Where? I get into the car. “What, don’t you know your place?” And the escort whispered to him that there was no room there. He fell silent, so I had to sit next to him. They brought me to the police station, and shoved me into a temporary detention cell, even though I was a free man.

Exile. Teguldet.

And now—to work. According to the law, I have the right to choose my place of work, but that’s just on paper, for fools. This is a very long topic, I won’t say much. They brought me, threw me in a temporary detention cell, it was 40 degrees below zero, and I had nothing warm to wear. “You have the right to choose,”—they don’t deny it. I went out in my tarpaulin boots in such a frost, went to one organization, then another—and no one even wants to talk to you. Who are you? “An exile? No, we don’t need you.” A day, two on starvation rations. They bring some tea and some kind of soup. You lie around for a day, freezing. They bring in alcoholics, and they spend the night with you in this detention cell. And another piece of news. They say: “A man burned to death, they burned a man.” In the boiler room. There, exiles, vagrants, killed one person, and to cover their tracks, they stuffed the body into the boiler room furnace. They couldn’t fit the whole thing in at once, so they pushed it in piece by piece. A watchwoman was walking outside and went into the boiler room to warm up, she looked—and part of a body was sticking out of the furnace. She runs to the police, reports that a man is burning in the furnace. They rush there, pull it out, everything is burned… All criminals, common criminals. One of their own kind came to visit them, they were drinking there, he disagreed with something—they hit him on the head with a hammer, and then where to hide the body to cover their tracks? But they didn’t succeed. They were put on trial. One got, I think, three years, the other—five.

V.O.: Did you count how long you were on the transport?

M.Kots: Exactly one month. This is the easternmost district of the Tomsk region, it borders the Krasnoyarsk Krai. It’s a work settlement. The entire district had a population of 10,000, and this settlement itself had 5,000. Half the district’s population lived in this district center, and the other half in several villages. There were about a dozen such dying villages, with only a few families living there—10-15, and the rest were empty houses, like after some pogrom—not a soul around. There was Altaika. They didn’t take us to the forest for work—there stood a dead village, not a single soul, houses standing, nobody needed them, people had left for wherever they could. The area of this district was half the size of an average Ukrainian oblast, 12.7 or so thousand square kilometers. You can imagine the population density. The area of the Tomsk region is 300,000 sq. kilometers, and the population was not even a million—800,000. And of those 800,000, 400,000 lived in the regional center, Tomsk, and 400,000—in small towns like Asino, Kolpashevo, and in district centers. The villages were sparsely populated. The density was minuscule: in some districts, one person per square kilometer. That’s regarding the Tomsk region.

V.O.: Did you stay there for all five years?

M.Kots: All five years.

V.O.: What did you do there?

M.Kots: What did I do? They used me everywhere! They threw me, as if into a pit, into a brick factory. I cut lumber at a sawmill, they call it that there, but I call it a “tarktak.” At first, they put me to transport the cut logs, boards, to stack them. They assigned me to a mute, a cripple who couldn’t speak, a man named Shcherbakov, he was the driver, and I was his assistant. And I couldn’t understand what he was saying: “Alya, alyolyo.” We would arrive on a horse named Grom, load up materials near the sawmill, take them away, and stack them. I worked like that for some time. They had a small power station with a capacity of one hundred kilowatts. The workers at this power station were these drifters and lost exiles, alimony dodgers or those in for some other offenses, drunkards. And when they got drunk, there was no one to replace them. Somehow, the topic came up with the mechanic that I could do it. He dared to take me on at the power station as a shift worker, a substitute. I started working on this diesel—one day on, another day on, a third day on, we rotated by the day. I became a diesel operator, and at the same time, you run the generator, supplying electricity for the farm’s needs. I worked at this power station for about a year, and then those drunkards let it freeze, and the diesel broke down. After that, they used me at the brickyard, or to chop wood, or they took me to the logging site. That was my work there.

A couple of words about the boss himself. He was so stupid, an idiot. An exile was brought in—a drunkard and that’s it. He hadn’t been briefed on who was who. They put me on the diesel, but he was carrying out his task: “Keep an eye on him.” He comes over: “Well, how are things?” And he sniffs me. At first, I didn’t understand what was going on. He comes right up to me and sniffs me, day after day, week after week, month after month. And he never sniffed it out, I never smelled of alcohol. But one episode happened. My relief, Kuleshov, was a drunkard, he got a bottle somewhere, runs to the power station to me: “Find a jar.” I don’t know what you want to do with a jar, I say: “Here’s a jar,”—a half-liter one. “Hold it.” He opens the bottle, pours it into the jar, and wanted to treat me at work. But the director noticed that Kuleshov had run to the power station, he either suspected something or maybe it was a provocation. I’m holding the jar, and this guy is opening the bottle. The door opens, Vedernikov, the director, bursts in and immediately rushes towards me: “I’ll have you arrested right now!” If he had come 3-5 minutes later, I probably would have drunk 100 grams, but he hadn’t even poured anything into my jar yet. “I’ll send you away right now!” “Go ahead and send me.” He lunged at this Kuleshov, grabs the bottle from him, and the bottle hadn’t even been opened yet. “Oh,” I think, “so that’s why you’ve been watching me so closely. No, that’s not going to happen, you won’t catch me on this.”

Such was the life, such was the boss. I worked in these conditions for some time. There were clashes, friction. I take books, newspapers, I read. “What is he reading, is he not normal or something, that he’s sitting with books when everyone else is drinking, everyone else is partying?” Due to time constraints, I will shorten this topic a bit.

I happened to meet a worker from the district party committee there, Liudmyla Smolina. She was a beautiful girl, a teacher, much younger than me, had graduated from Tomsk University, was sent to a school, and the district committee noticed her ability to speak, her pleasant appearance—they took her to work at the district party committee. She worked as a librarian. Various representatives, artists would come, and she was entrusted with presenting them with bread and salt. There was a movie theater there, and the film “Kovpak” was showing. I used to go to the movies, and they were surprised that an exile went to the movies. It so happened that I was sitting next to this Smolina, and I made a remark that, you know, it wasn't like they show it. And she: “What, do you know?” I say: “Of course, I know this.” “I would like to talk to you about this topic.” Well, alright. The movie ended, we went out into the street and walked for several hours. She was interested, and so we started to communicate, meeting from time to time. And she was already like a friend, inviting me to her home for dinner. But she was, as they say, devoted to the communist idea to the bone. She sees it as an absolute, nothing else can be. I couldn’t get into such conversations too deeply, but sometimes it came to the point of why Ukraine cannot be independent. She: “How can you say that! The issue is about the unification of everyone, so why should Ukraine secede?” The secretary of the district committee at the time was Volodymyr Mykolaiovych Tymoshenko from the Khmelnytskyi region. She tells me: “Volodymyr Mykolaiovych has a good opinion of you.” Well, that’s good. Before him, there were two wolves, and he became the third secretary, and has a “good opinion.” I’m walking down the street one day, he’s driving by in a car, and he greets me first. And she: “Wouldn’t you like to change your job? There is work in Tomsk.” I say: “That doesn’t depend on me.” “Well, what if the district committee intercedes?” I was living like in a stable—why wouldn’t I want to change for something better? As a result of negotiations, they recommend me for a job as an accountant at a state farm. But they already sensed it: “Aha, we’ve made concessions to you,”—and right away, the KGB guys come from Tomsk to “get acquainted.” I hadn’t even managed to transfer there before they started searching for “common ground.” “Well,” I think, “so that’s what this is.” They summon me for conversations—searching for “points of contact.” The first time, we spent four hours in conversation. “Well, did we find it?” “What were we supposed to find? We remained at our own positions.” “How can that be? Really?” We did a sort of general international review of what’s happening in the world. He started hinting to me about the OUN—that they were fascists, servants of fascists. And I tell him that, if it comes to that, I didn’t belong to that organization, but the communists have more in common with the fascists than the OUN members do. “How so?!” I say: “That’s right. The flag of the communists is red, and the flag of the Nazis is red. Your party is the ‘worker-peasant’ party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—that’s the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The only difference is that they set a goal of building socialism in their own country, and you—in the whole world.” This was a bombshell for him, he was stunned, what could you say to me? Well, alright, he’s leaving: “We’ll talk next time.” He once said: “No one has ever stood up to us.” Well, if they haven’t, they haven’t. A month later, he comes back to storm me again, to find “common ground.” We didn’t find common ground again, so he bit off all his fingernails in front of me. “Can’t we really find it?” I say: “What are we supposed to be looking for?” But after that, they gave me the opportunity to transfer to a teaching job at a vocational school. They send an inspector to check my teaching. She pops into one lesson for formality’s sake, pops into another, pops into mine for ten minutes, and then leaves. And at the discussion of the classroom observations, she tears into me: “Who allowed him to work here? He’s completely incompetent!” And what can you say to anyone?

V.O.: And what did you teach there?

M.Kots: I taught mathematics, physics, and drafting there. They stuck me with political economy. Is this a provocation or what, for me to teach political economy? (Laughs). I started to explain, the director didn’t understand what the matter was. I say: “Well, I can’t teach so many subjects. You’re a lawyer—you take political economy, I have so many different subjects.” And so I got out of political economy, I only had math, physics, and drafting. So she tore me to shreds—that I’m not capable of anything. What can you say to anyone? She left, I go to the head of studies: “Find someone to replace me.” “What’s the matter?” “I’ll finish the semester (there’s a month left), but after that, I don’t want to work.” “What’s the matter?” I say: “Well, you heard…” I’m not going to spell out that the inspector was sent specifically because I didn’t yield to the KGB. “Well, I’ll tell the director.” I stuck it out until the winter break, what else could I do? They sent a math teacher from another school to check. She checked—no complaints. They took a physics teacher from the school, he also didn’t have any major complaints. So the director says: “Maybe you’ll work a little longer?” I had doubts, I thought: if I could finish this school year, somewhere until June, that’s four months, and then there’s the pedagogical leave, and in two months and a week my exile ends altogether, and I’m free. If I leave the school, they’ll send me to work God knows where. I hesitated and hesitated and decided: I’ll try to continue.

A new KGB man arrives, Viktor Ivanovich, from Tomsk, a former Komsomol worker. If the first one, Chepygin, thought he would saddle me right away and got burned, this one started talking to me more slowly, got acquainted, listened, but the song was the same: “common ground, we need to find common ground.” It also helped that it was a long way for them to travel from Tomsk—almost 300 kilometers, so they didn’t come often. I thought, if only I could hold out until the school year ends. And I did, without finding “common ground.” Vacation. I have a legal right to pedagogical leave. They come to where I live now and start the conversation again. First with promises. Firstly: where will you go after release? “Where? To my homeland.” “What?! Aren’t you ashamed?” “I have nothing to be ashamed of.” “Do you think you were wrongly convicted?” “If it comes to that, let’s pull up the case, I’ll show you.” “I believe what our people wrote.” “Well, that’s your business. Then we have nothing to talk about on this topic.” So, he understood that I would go to my homeland, without being ashamed before anyone, that I wouldn’t be walking around looking over my shoulder like a scoundrel. “Well, how can you go like that? You don’t have an apartment there, or a job?” “How do people move from place to place? They move, and I’ll be on the same terms.” “Well, we could help, by the time you arrive there would be both an apartment and a job in your specialty, wherever you want.” “No need. We’ve settled our accounts—and good day to you, I’m leaving, starting my life anew, I’ll sort myself out.” “We have our people there, they would help.” “Oh,” I say, “I know who those people are.” This enraged him. “Why do you look at our people with such hostility?” “I know what kind of people they are, how they handled the case.” “Look, we view those who have realized their guilt and sincerely repented, and have started their work, in one way, and those who continue to hold on to their positions in a completely different way.” “You can hold on to your positions as you wish.” That was the farewell warning.

1979. Lutsk

So I held out until the end of my exile and arrived in Lutsk. My brother and sister lived in Lutsk, another sister in Novovolynsk, in Volyn. There was nowhere to get a foothold, wherever you go—mockery, they chase you away, you can’t get a foothold anywhere. This is also a rather tragic topic. I’ll say this: I was on the verge of taking my own life. For six months—nowhere to sleep, they terrorize my sister, they terrorize my brother, everyone starts looking at you as if you’ve arrived like a disaster. Where to go?

V.O.: This was 1979?

M.Kots: 1979. I returned on September 13. Where to go? Wherever you turn for a job, as anyone, even a watchman: “First, get registered.” You go to get registered—“First, find a job.” The prosecutor in Teguldet, Ivanova, had told me: “They’ll give you the runaround there.” This surprised me, I even reproached her, threw some barb at her in a complaint addressed to her in Ukrainian. She replied to me: “Write in Russian, otherwise I will not answer.” And I sent her reply to the regional prosecutor’s office: “On what grounds is my native language, as a state language, being ignored? Officially, the language of each republic is considered the state language.” I sent it to the Tomsk prosecutor’s office, and after some time, a prosecutor from the regional prosecutor’s office arrives and summons me. I enter the prosecutor’s office, greet him. “What, you want independence?”—he says to me in Ukrainian. “I,” I say, “did not come to you about this issue, I have a domestic issue.” “Heh, we know! Do you know what you’re doing? You’re causing disruption in our work, we can’t give a timely answer because we don’t have translators. I had to travel 300 kilometers from Tomsk to consider this case.” I say: “That doesn’t interest me. I have the right to use my own language.” That was the kind of clash I had with him.

I wrote to various newspapers, supposedly on a domestic level, but in Ukrainian. This also caused scandals: they can’t figure it out, they send people to investigate, to clarify. I thought, you can have the trouble. At the post office, subscribing to newspapers and magazines. In every organization, there were authorized people for subscriptions. The foreman didn’t understand the catalog: here, choose for yourself. And I suggest to the guys. The catalog included the magazine “America,” and “England,” some Japanese magazine, and at the bottom, there was a star and a note: “Subscription for specific regions.” I say to the guys: “Oh, the magazine ‘America’ is good, subscribe.” Several people filled out the receipts, paid the money to that organizer. She went to the post office, and they grabbed their heads: “What have you done? This isn’t distributed everywhere, it’s for a specific region!” Where are those regions, where are those oblasts where you can subscribe to such magazines—who knows. She tells the subscribers: “Oh, they played a trick on me, you can’t subscribe to these magazines.” So people got a taste of what the Soviet government was like. That’s one thing. Twice I sent telegrams: to my father for his birthday and to my nephews. I compose the telegrams in Ukrainian. I hand it in—they toss it back: “Write in a human language!” I go to the postmaster, the postmaster starts lecturing me. And he himself, the scoundrel, is from the Khmelnytskyi region. To get a bigger pension, he went there to work for a few years. He starts lecturing me: “But you’re a literate person,”—he knew me,—”here’s a Khakas man, even he knows Russian, right?” “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I know, I know, I know.” I say to him: “Are you accepting it or not?” “No, write in Russian.” Well, if you don’t want to, then I’ll send the text of the telegram to the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor didn’t ask me, he summoned him. He says: “The rules do not prohibit writing in any language, only two conditions: either in Latin or in Russian letters. We offered him, but he refused.” The prosecutor tells me that I refused. The next telegram, I write the Ukrainian text in Latin letters—the same result. I send it to the prosecutor’s office again. A few days pass, someone knocks when it’s not yet light. The telegraphist who delivers telegrams: “Here—is this typed correctly?” She had already typed the text of my telegram in Latin letters on the machine: “Is this typed correctly?” I looked it over, there were small mistakes. “That will be 50 kopecks.” So I forced them to send a telegram in Ukrainian.

Such was the struggle. Despite being an exile, I did not give up. It was a legal struggle. They couldn’t prosecute me for demanding the right to use my own language. Always, when I wrote or spoke about everyday matters, I demonstrated to the Russians that I was Ukrainian, but when I saw that it was a Ukrainian, I would suggest we speak Ukrainian. Wherever I wrote complaints—it was in Ukrainian. This was also unpleasant for them, but they had to swallow such pills: if you want to ride the sled, you have to pull it.

For six months, I struggled in Lutsk. Nowhere to sleep, you look for some acquaintance somewhere. I didn’t visit any of my former acquaintances, because I knew well that everyone was afraid. You walk by, and they look away and pretend not to see you. These are unpleasant things, but what can you do. Then I came to Kyiv, spent one night at Ivan Kovalenko’s, then went to Andriy Koroban’s, spent the night there. He tells me that Stus has just returned from exile, so let’s go and meet Stus. We went to him, met Stus. Stus offered me a place to sleep for the night. Koroban went home, to his place in Vasylkiv, and I stayed. We arrived sometime in the middle of the day or so, and talked, through the evening, through the night. We set up cots like that, me on one cot, him on the other. He told me his troubles. He was under surveillance, so he only walked me out to the street. “Further,” he says, “I can’t go, I have to go to my shift.” He worked at a shoe factory somewhere. He went to work, and I got on a train, went back to Lutsk. I had come to Kyiv to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and raised the question: where am I supposed to go? “And what are you, who are you?” “Here are my documents.” “Well, we can’t have you in Kyiv…” “And I,” I say, “didn’t come to Kyiv to beg, I came to my homeland. Where am I supposed to go? I haven’t been able to get a foothold anywhere for five months.” If you don’t have a registration, you can’t stay in a hotel, go to a clinic. You are a nobody, a vagrant with no place anywhere. He read, got acquainted: “Write me a brief summary.” I wrote it for him, he says: “I’ll forward it, come back in about five days. I will give instructions for you to be registered. Where should we register you?” “Where to? I have nothing.” I found one apartment—the landlady was summoned by the police, given a talking-to for keeping unregistered people, fined, and threatened with a criminal case, that she would be prosecuted for charging tenants more than is allowed. I found a second one, the person agreed to take me in. As soon as I went to the passport office, they immediately pounced on him: you have a large apartment, and we need to house a family. We will evict you and move this family in. Nowhere to register me. Then he: “Well, where would you like?” “Since my brother and sister live in Lutsk, I would like to be in Lutsk too.” “Alright, go, in a few days, contact the regional administration, they will register you.”

And this was a conflict between the MVD and the KGB. The KGB—under no circumstances register him, the police weren’t happy with me either, they were playing the same role, especially since they had to bow down to the KGB. When I arrived at the police station, I went in, and the colonel says: “We are busy now, no time, come back in two weeks, but, make sure you go to the elections.” I thought, I’ll be going to your elections. And they needed to talk it over, what to do. Kyiv is putting pressure on them. Two weeks later, I go in, they say: “Where should we register you?” “Well, where,” I say, “there’s nowhere.” And for work—to a construction site, that’s the pit where they take everyone. I go to the relevant construction organizations, and they tell me: “O-o-oh, you don’t have a construction education, we only hire certified professionals. We can’t hire you. You can go to construction training courses, they have specialties like plasterers, masons, rebar workers. Go there, finish the courses, then they will send you to a job.” Well, what to do? I go to the courses, look over what groups there are, I see—crane operators. I’m somewhat familiar with technology, I ask. They were just forming this group, they were short of people, so they took me, and housed me in a dormitory, and then temporarily registered me in the dormitory. I finish these courses. The courses have practical training, they send alcoholics. He’s twenty-something, I’m already 50, I’m his apprentice and I have to serve him. Not only do you have to fuel the equipment, fill it with water, start the engine, but he comes and just operates it. And you also have to go to the store, bring back half a liter, prepare snacks. I had to perform such functions for several months. Humiliation, insult—who can you complain to…

After five months, I finished these courses, received a certificate, and with great difficulty, I got a foothold in construction organizations, and so I worked for them for five years until retirement. I retired in December 1990. I got out—I thought, thank God, I’m finally free.

Perestroika.

And then the processes of perestroika began, and I got involved in activities again. They started to criticize me in the newspapers again, saying, look, this and that. And now the person who was pouring mud on me, Pyrozhko, heads the Volyn radio and television company. And you hear—he’s giving such patriotic speeches now! This was in March 1990, when he published the article “Scum”—here he is, so-and-so, and he’s even getting into politics. Lately, I have to meet him sometimes, I appear on television, and I don’t mention this moment to him. But personally, I never approach him, even when I need to be on television, but I go to his deputy, a woman there. She somehow has more sympathy for me, she arranges my matters, sometimes lets me speak, sometimes I record something on tape and give it to the television station—they air it. Such is my activity to this day.

V.O.: And after your release, were you in any organizations?

M.Kots: I joined the UGS [Ukrainian Helsinki Group] in 1988. Meletiy Semeniuk and I went to a rally with Chornovil. I submitted my application in the summer, but in the application, I wrote that I should be admitted from the day of my arrest. I was arrested on October 26, so count me as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union from the 26th. Although I wrote the application in August, but in honor of that date, I thought, let it be. In that article “Scum,” it was written with indignation, who, they say, belongs to this Union? Why, they are common criminals! They reprinted this article in all the district newspapers, lambasted us on the radio in every way—look, see who they are. There were about a hundred publications in the region on this topic, to tear you down, to mix you with mud. I was still working until the end of 1990, so I would travel somewhere, as a rule, on Saturday, and on Sunday, I would go back to work. So they: “Ah, you see, he is making connections with Lviv. How can we cut him off?” So they send me to the north of the region, to a remote backwater, so that I couldn’t be a participant in various public events in Lutsk. But, despite that, I tried to somehow find time. I was left without a home again, but that’s another topic. I finally got housing in 1992, the order was issued on February 12. With great difficulty, they gave me a one-room apartment… And these democratic forces—so much trash, so much filth attached itself—and they are national heroes! Who are you? We don’t know you. They chase me away, send me to remote areas so that I’m not even close, while they work in various jobs, in various organizations, in institutes. “We represent the intelligentsia, we represent the democratic forces—and who are you? There is no place for you here.” I had to deal with such people, the clashes were quite…

V.O.: Besides that, you are probably a member of the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed, right?

M.Kots: Of course, I am, you could say, a co-founder.

V.O.: On June 3, 1989, were you at the Lviv Square in Kyiv?

M.Kots: Yes, we came to the House of Artists, and they gave us a space for the constituent assembly, so what were we to do? We walked around and around, and then stood in a small park. I was there, so I am a founding member. The same with the Ukrainian Republican Party. I’ve been in it since the first days. I came to Kyiv, we discussed the issues of how to create a party, discussed who would prepare the program. “Who will write the program?” Chornovil: “I will,” Lukianenko—“I will.” Well, write it. After some time, a program was supposedly written. I only know that we gathered in some apartment…

V.O.: On Olehivska Street, 10, probably.

M.Kots: And Olehivska—is that in Podil?

V.O.: Yes.

M.Kots: No, no, no, wasn’t it in Pechersk. About 20 of us gathered to discuss the program. And such a picture: Chornovil brought his program, Lukianenko—his. Chornovil—presented a short draft of the program. Then Lukianenko reads his. And that one seems possible, and this one is possible—but which one to take as a basis? They didn’t connect, you couldn’t merge them into one. So sit down together, make a joint one—no, neither one nor the other. We struggled and struggled, who to give preference to. You couldn’t persuade them, each wanted to be the leader. Somehow we leaned towards letting Lukianenko’s program be the one. This infuriated Chornovil, because if it’s Lukianenko’s program, then he will be the chairman, and Chornovil is left out. And so at the first congress, and especially at the second, Chornovil—went on a rampage.

V.O.: Chornovil did speak at the Constituent Congress, but he did not join the URP, because he had already been elected chairman of the Lviv Regional Council and wanted to be non-partisan. I know this story. He was already speaking as a guest.

M.Kots: I think it was at the second congress that an ambulance picked him up after his speech. There was so much scandal around that! He insisted on being given 20 minutes, but they said—no, according to the rules, five. He—no, I, he said, have invested so much… And Khmara—no, under no circumstances. The deputy chairmen were Stepan Khmara and Hryhoriy Hrebeniuk. Well, Hrebeniuk was more tolerant, but Khmara—no, only five. So they spent more time on this bargaining than they gave him. He did speak.

So I belonged to the Ukrainian Republican Party. I returned to Lutsk, but I was constantly traveling, so they gathered some young guys—they are already members of the Helsinki Union, they’ve already pushed me aside, they are already forming the Republican Party, electing Vadym Kozhevnikov as chairman. He’s a scoundrel. He’s not vindictive, but a complete adventurer. There’s no time, and maybe it’s not particularly necessary to show this.

I looked at the environment I was in and developed a program. It was the second congress, or something, someone from each oblast was supposed to be a member of the URP Council. Under no circumstances me. Kozhevnikov joined as the head of the regional organization and some others. After all, I am a founder of the Helsinki Union, I took part in the discussion of the program, and here some guy comes along… It wasn’t just—he was a KGB plant. And I was left on the sidelines. Well, fine. What to do? I develop a program for the regional organization, distribute responsibilities, who does what, what rights they have, how to coordinate them. I particularly emphasized the financial side, so that every hryvnia, every kopeck would be under control, not like they collected money, the money is in the chairman’s pocket, and he squanders it. If at first they walked around with bags, collecting, they announced once or twice where the money went, and then they walk around with bags again—give us money. I developed this: a cash box, there must be a cashier, a cash book, every kopeck must be recorded, where it came from, from whom, and where it was spent. I came up with this: the cashier has the right to issue up to ten karbovanets for some needs, and a larger amount—that’s for a meeting to decide. “What’s this for? You’re establishing Bolshevism. The money here, to me!” E-eh, I think, my friend… Well, if that’s the case, then right after the declaration of Ukraine’s independence, on August 27, 1991, I spat on it and never went back. Not the right company: liars, adventurers, idiots, drunkards crawled in, it was shameful to gather. So it just went sour. It formally exists, supposedly, but there’s nothing left of that party.

As for the KUN [Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists]—it’s a similar story. The KUN sent an invitation to come to the modern House of Teachers. “Oh, something must be happening, Slava Stetsko will be there.” But it wasn’t specifically known for what. “Well, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” You arrive, enter the lobby, and they shove an application into your hands, write an application, or you won’t be allowed in. This offended me so much: what do you take me for—a fool? If you had warned, sent out applications, whoever wants to, let them sign. But you put me in such a foolish situation: you called, I came to Kyiv, and out of the blue, to enter the building, you have to write an application that you are joining the KUN. I hesitated and hesitated, well, I thought, alright, I’ll write it, I’ll listen. I wrote it, but after that, I participated everywhere as a listener. I didn’t declare that I was leaving, but practically I no longer consider myself a member, even though they called me a member of the leadership. That’s your business, I don’t even pay dues. You need my name—I don’t protest, write what you want, but I don’t consider myself a member of the KUN, because I see what kind of team has gathered there. As of today, I consider myself non-partisan, because I don’t see anyone to support. They invite me: “Come join us.” But I don’t want to, I see what these parties are, how clueless they are.

So, basically, I’ve told you about myself.

V.O.: Please also state your date of birth.

M.Kots: I was born on December 4, 1930, in the village of Hushcha, Volyn region. I currently live in Lutsk, at 66/3 Voli Avenue—that’s the postal address. As for the phone, this year I managed, with great difficulty, to get a one-way line installed. It’s like a public phone: I can only call into the city, but people can’t call me. To contact me, you can use my brother’s phone, number 4-52-54.

V.O.: And your brother’s name?

M.Kots: Andriy, the same last name. Also in Lutsk, 31 Voli Avenue, apartment 14. He lives about half a kilometer from me, one trolleybus stop away. His wife’s name is Lesia, there’s always someone at their home. My brother was born in 1933, he’s younger, also a pensioner.

V.O.: And you have a sister, right?

M.Kots: Yes, a sister, Halyna, born in 1935. Her last name is now Sabina, from her husband, she lives in the city of Novovolynsk, 1/27 Vynnychenka Street. My sister’s phone number is 2-54-68.

Now about the period of my work between 1980-90.

While working, I showed my attitude towards the regime. In particular, I did not join the trade union. I was the only one in the organization who was not a member of the trade union. This immediately became known to the KGB.

Why didn’t I join the trade union? Because the Soviet trade union is the “transmission belt of the Communist Party.” So why should I support it? They told me: “What if you get sick?” I’d say: “It’s fine, I’ll survive! I’ll survive without your trade union!”

Second. I did not participate in any elections, of any kind—judges, the Supreme Soviet, local bodies. No, I didn’t hide like others. For example, on election day, some would go to a village somewhere. I stayed at home. Someone comes: “Elections today!” I say: “I know.” She left. An hour later, she comes back: “It’s election day today!” I say: “I know it’s election day today!” A whole brigade comes. The head of the polling station: “Elections!” I say: “I know it’s election day today!” “Well, why aren’t you? Maybe you’re sick—we can bring the ballot box.” “No,” I say, “I’m not sick. I’m healthy.” “Then why don’t you want to?” I say: “I don’t know the people who are nominated, that’s why I’m not going. And not participating in elections is not a crime.” The threats begin, but I don’t go—and that’s it!

Then with the subbotniks. Subbotnik—hooray! I don’t go. A scandal—one person didn’t show up for the subbotnik! They drive me twenty kilometers from the site, so to speak, to be carpeted. The company director is sitting there, the party organizer, the trade union organizer, the chief engineer, and they start lecturing me: why didn’t you come to the subbotnik? I say: “Is a subbotnik mandatory or a voluntary event?” “Well, everyone comes out…” I tell him again: “I’m asking you again: is it voluntary or compulsory?” He stammers: “Well-well-well. Well, you’ll come out,”—he coaxes,—”you’ll come out another time and make up for it, so there’s a mark.” I say: “This is a voluntary matter. It is my right to come out or not to come out.”

This is a scandal. I don’t go for a year, I don’t go for a second year. Then they just silently marked that I was there. I didn’t see this. They needed to report up the chain that everyone had participated in the subbotnik.

Then—various letters. Of a production nature, about violations, theft, in defense of workers. One time I managed to get a correspondent from “Robitnycha Hazeta” [Workers’ Gazette] to come from Kyiv. A decent person, you could say, he listened to me. Even though they were hissing there: “Who are you listening to? He was in prison!”—that’s what they were saying. But he talked to me, found common ground, invited me for coffee. He wrote an article in the newspaper that such a letter had been received, describing such disorder at work, violations of financial discipline. But, he said, due to the fact that the management does not like the author of the letter, he would not name me.

And what did that accomplish? Each of the workers (it was about business trips) started receiving twenty rubles more per month. Oh, everyone was happy, applauding me: “Well done, you really got to them!” And that’s about one hundred and fifty people. Some people got in trouble for this. The boss himself, the chief engineer, and the accountant received reprimands. They scowled at me. And I tried to behave in such a way that they couldn’t find fault with me anywhere. Am I at work? I’m at work. You won’t see me drunk, you won’t catch me being late either. They had to reckon with me because it wasn’t so easy to grab me by the throat and crush me: I do the work that is assigned to me. And that you are violating things—that’s your business.

And then there was the language issue. A tractor driver, a bulldozer operator comes: “I need to write an application. How is it written?” I say: “Let me, I’ll write it.” I write in Ukrainian. “A-ah!” “Why, a-ah?” Because everyone else was scribbling applications in Russian: “I ask that I be issued gloves…” The boss himself, a Russian, spoke Russian, but when he called me to his office, he spoke only Ukrainian with me. Although I never reproached him for anything.

V.O.: You taught them to respect you.

M.Kots: I knew how to put him in his place, to make him listen and not get too carried away.

The struggle continued like this. In 1988, they were planning to hold a meeting in Lviv on December 10, Human Rights Day. I was warned to come. Fine, I’ll come. And we worked in weekly shifts. I had to travel on a Saturday. My day off falls on that day. The administration finds out that I am going to Lviv to see someone. They must not let me go! What do they do? The foreman comes to me: “Here’s the thing: you need to be at work tomorrow.” “But it’s a day off.” “There’s supposed to be a commission here. We need to conduct an inspection, prepare the equipment. The boiler inspection service will be checking.” I understood that they had found out, and I know who informed on me, because I told one person that I was planning to go to Lviv. They are already standing over me: “You must be at work!”

The next day I come: there is no work. They kept me until noon, and then go on home. I’m not needed here, and I didn’t go to Lviv.

Subheadings provided by V. Ovsiienko on 10.08.2007.