Interview with Vira Pavlivna LISOVA (HRYTSENKO)
(Last revised on February 26, 2008)
V. P. Lisova: I am Vira Pavlivna Lisova, née Hrytsenko, born on January 5, 1937, in the town of Kaharlyk in the Kyiv region. My parents worked on a kolkhoz: my mother, Palazhka Oksentiyivna Hrytsenko, born in 1907, worked in the fields, and my father, Pavlo Prokopovych Hrytsenko, born in 1910, was a veterinary feldsher. My mother was a good person, beautiful in appearance and in spirit; she loved the world, the sun, flowers; she was honest, calm, poetic, and skilled at many things. My father was a peculiar man, quite gifted; he drew well, played the balalaika, and could do anything with his hands (cobbling, sewing, etc.). He was a good veterinary specialist, loved nature, was a hunter and fisherman, loved to travel, and did not like to manage the household. Such a peculiar man. We lived in poverty. He told many stories about the famines, was a German prisoner of war, and talked about the Germans and the Americans, as he had ended up in the American zone. And he constantly said that the communists were bandits.
I had three sisters—there were four of us girls in total: Aniuta, born in 1930, Natalia, in 1931, and Maria, in 1938. We have loved and supported one another our entire lives. Our whole family endured great hardships. My mother was swollen from hunger twice, in 1933 and in 1947, despite being very hardworking. Both of my older sisters were convicted in a 1947 show trial for taking ears of grain. They were beautiful and modest girls, and this devastated them and broke their health. Maria, the youngest sister, was fired from her job at the district Komsomol committee in the sixties for retyping samizdat. She was fired a second time from the district department of public education at the insistence of the local “boys from the KGB.” In the seventies, the KGB had expanded throughout Ukraine; it was everywhere by then, not just in the districts of Kyiv, but the oblast districts also had their departments—without signs on the doors, but people knew who worked there. And the second time she was fired from her job simply because she was Vira Lisova’s sister, and Vira Lisova’s husband was in prison for political reasons.
After graduating from high school, I enrolled in the correspondence department of Kyiv University.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And what years did you study?
V. P. Lisova: I was in school from 1944 to 1954, and after graduating from Kaharlyk secondary school, I became a student in the correspondence department of Kyiv University and worked at the motorcycle factory. It seems to me that I was never indifferent to the world and the events in it my whole life, particularly in the microsphere where I found myself. That’s why in school I sang in the choir for a time and was a Komsomol activist. While working at the motorcycle factory, I directed my efforts toward cultural activities. We, the youth of shop No. 1, worked, collected scrap metal, and used the money to buy paintings and records, and we organized evening events in the shop. We were supported by the shop supervisor, a Jewish man named Semen Raskin, who gave us a room for lectures and evening events and even read poetry with us.
I was the only one in the entire factory who spoke Ukrainian. There were probably Ukrainian speakers among us at home, but they did not speak Ukrainian in public. Interestingly, the whole factory knew me and was very supportive of it. I never felt any hostility from anyone, the kind I would later observe on the streets of Kyiv—all sorts of insults for speaking Ukrainian: “Speak a human language.” Or “In Ukrainian? Don’t, you dullard!” But at the motorcycle factory, I was accepted.
The district Komsomol committee recommended me for a job at a school. I went to work as a Pioneer leader in school No. 24. This was in 1956–57. I left the school because I was dedicating myself to that work; I liked it immensely. But I had little time left for my studies. So I went looking for a quieter job to finish university. And after graduating, I worked as a lab assistant at the USRIP (Ukrainian Scientific-Research Institute of Pedagogy. – V.O.) and in an evening school.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: What years did you study at the university?
V. P. Lisova: From 1955 to 1961, six years in the correspondence program. In my last year at the university, I met Yevhen Proniuk and Vasyl Lisovyi. Lisovyi and Proniuk had already graduated from the university and had been assigned to work.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And when you were a student, did you attend lectures by Ivan Benedyktovych Brovko?
V. P. Lisova: That’s interesting. I grew up like a blade of grass, like some little branch that grows naturally and pushes its way toward the sun under any conditions, pushes through purely instinctively. But this instinct was evidently nourished by the Ukrainianness that had been embedded in my subconscious by my family and way of life. I defended myself at the level of that blade of grass. And it was from Ivan Benedyktovych, from his lectures at the university, that I first heard a distinctly nationally oriented line of thought. I even remember the lecture where I absolutely felt and, to some extent, realized something I hadn’t understood or been aware of before—that I am a Ukrainian. It was precisely at Ivan Benedyktovych’s lecture, at the very moment when he was telling us about Solomiya Krushelnytska and said that the whole world knows this brilliant Ukrainian woman, but we Ukrainians do not. That was the impetus for my national self-awareness.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: What did he teach?
V. P. Lisova: He taught a short course on Soviet literature, particularly Oles Honchar. And then I worked at the USRIP, where Yevhen Sverstiuk worked on the fifth floor in the Institute of Psychology. Ivan Dziuba, Roman Korohodsky, Drach, and other interesting people would come to see him. At that time, Sverstiuk would occasionally give me interesting literature, in particular Franko’s article “What is Progress?” Sverstiuk is the kind of person who never tried to convince anyone of anything. He might just delicately say something, a single phrase—and that was it, and you could take it however you wanted. There was no pressure from him, because that’s his nature. But his every thought was so fresh that one wanted to remember it. From him, I got works by Vynnychenko, individual articles and poems, some of which I retyped. After reading Franko’s article “What is Progress?” the scales of that social way of thinking fell away at once. So, it was interesting for me to work at the Institute of Pedagogy. I read a lot there. This was facilitated by the heads of the departments where I worked—the mathematics professor Ivan Teslenko and the professor of pedagogy history Oleksandr Dzeverin, and my colleagues Nelia Kalinichenko, Vasyl Smal, Lilia Khliebnikova, while Tamara Ivanivna Tsvelykh was my good advisor and guardian.
The evenings at the Club of Creative Youth, the “Zhaivoronok” (Lark) choir, which was first led by Moldavan and then by Vadym Smohytel, the gatherings by the Shevchenko monument, reading literature that was already starting to reach us from Ukrainians in the diaspora. At this time, I started working at the evening school. Well, that was a luxury!
V. V. Ovsiyenko: As a student?
V. P. Lisova: No, no, this was after I graduated from the university; I was already working at the USRIP and at evening school No. 40 in Darnytsia. This was 1962–64. It was interesting to work there. These were adults, a large portion of them even older than me. And here were these evenings, this literature; I used it in my lessons. I remember they would come up and say: “Thank you for the lesson!” I invited Yevhen Sverstiuk and Petro Boiko to the school then. The evening school was stunned when these people spoke. They were followed, asked questions. And when we, the evening students and I, put on a Shevchenko evening based on Sverstiuk’s script, it was a real event.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: What year was that, I wonder?
V. P. Lisova: That was in 1964. It was such a discovery for the whole school—of Shevchenko, and of the language, as they told me. The entire school sat in the hall as if enchanted, and at the end, they even sang. That was completely unusual for an evening school. On that note, I recalled a story from Paraska Danylivna Heta, who worked in the only full-time/correspondence secondary school in Kyiv. The classes of this school were attached to Kyiv factories like “Khimvolokno,” the Radio Factory, and the “Khimfarmzavod.” Many boys worked at these factories after finishing vocational school (PTU). By law, they had to have a secondary education. These were not easy kids. Teachers were afraid to enter some classrooms. Paraska Danylivna taught mathematics, embellishing it with poetry, both Ukrainian and Russian. And then into this class walks a beautiful fifty-year-old woman, lively and energetic, with beautiful brown eyes, and sings «Туман яром, туман долиною». That was Vira Nychyporivna Cherednychenko. For several years, she organized literary evenings and meetings with interesting people, including inviting the “Zoloti Kliuchi” ensemble with Nina Matviyenko. She was simple and sincere with these children, treated them to pastries, and in this way eventually tamed these difficult kids. Nadiyka Svitlychna also gave unusual lessons in this same school for six months in the late 1960s.
And then I was fired from the Institute of Pedagogy for laying flowers at the Shevchenko monument on May 22. That was also in 1964. I went to work at the daytime Russian-language school No. 168 with the deputy principal, who had moved there from the evening school and invited me. I worked there for four years. That period was truly a celebration in my life. I want to both talk and write about my work in that school.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: But that was a Russian-language school, wasn’t it?
V. P. Lisova: Yes, Russian-language, but the children there were extraordinary. They accepted me.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Where is this school located?
V. P. Lisova: It was on Tampere Street, but it’s not there anymore; they closed it. A good number of fine, intelligent people came from there, and my students in particular. They wrote such essays that I was advised to circulate them in samizdat. But I didn’t dare to do that, because they were children, you can’t put them at risk. But what essays they wrote! The children began to open up. They were creating. Sasha Cheshkov wrote original and even scholarly essays. In the 90s, he became a member of KUN [Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists]. Also Volodia Kalibabchuk, who is now in the Club of Young Scientists, in the Skovoroda Society. Alla Glazman, when emigrating to the US, took her student essays out through the American embassy because she was afraid they would be confiscated. I remember her saying: “It was through the lessons in Ukrainian literature that I became a conscious Jew.” Tania Kovalchuk now has great achievements in educational activities. Valia Dmytrenko, Yura Shmalko, Ira Kuksa, and many other very interesting children who have achieved success in various fields. And to this day, when we meet, they say: “We even remember the words you said to us.” And the exams in Ukrainian literature! In a Russian school, Ukrainian literature was an oral exam, while Russian was written. It was an exceptionally interesting time. May God grant these students of mine a happy fate. Because Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians alike became conscious citizens.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: You worked at the school on Tampere and at the USRIP at the same time, right?
V. P. Lisova: No, at that time I had been fired from the USRIP, in 1964. I worked at the school on Tampere from 1965 to 1969. There was another side to this school. Denunciations began to be sent to the principal’s office, the trade union committee, and the party committee, because to some, my lessons seemed “nationalistic.” And they started summoning me for all sorts of talks. The secretary of the district party committee came to the school; I was even summoned during my vacation and told about my “erroneous positions.” They were going to raise this issue at the district conference, but there was an intelligent woman at the district party committee—Liudmyla Ivanivna Kalinicheva, who later became the principal of our school. Apparently, she decided not to make it public, not to take it to the district level. But she herself had a very interesting conversation with me. And later I left the school—“of my own volition.” It wasn’t just me who left then. The district committee was accusing the school of flourishing nationalism and Zionism. The “Zionist” was Bela Binder, who taught Russian literature. So that was her—a Zionist. (Laughs). She was an interesting and intelligent teacher; we were friends. So both she and I left the school “of our own volition.”
I returned to the USRIP again. This was in 1971. Tamara Ivanivna Tsvelykh, the wife of Anatol Kostenko, an intelligent and highly educated person, was head of the department of aesthetic education and promised me, as did the administration, a position as a junior researcher. Even when I first worked at the USRIP, I had an unapproved dissertation topic and had passed my candidate exams. When I returned to the USRIP, the director, Academician Rusko, had already passed away. After a conversation with the leadership, I had hopes for good scholarly prospects.
And at this time, in 1972, there were these events, the arrests of January 12.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: A little more detail about that. You’re skipping over such an important event…
V. P. Lisova: Vasyl Lisovyi got involved in these events. Since he wasn’t arrested on January 12, he, along with Proniuk, Ovsiyenko, and Haiduk, became involved in the creation and distribution of the “Ukrainian Herald,” as well as Lisovyi’s open letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Vasyl Semenovych was arrested on July 6, 1972, and I was due to give birth in two weeks. I was on maternity leave. Interestingly, I received messages from the USRIP telling me to come in and submit a letter of resignation of my own volition. The reason was ordinary fear. The KGB called the HR department and asked about Lisova, whether such a person worked there. The head of the HR department replied: “Yes, she works here—and who is asking? Because she is currently on maternity leave.” “This is the state security organs. Well, let her work, let her work.” That’s what the messengers told me. And so, I was supposed to write a letter of resignation “of my own volition.” Then Tamara Ivanivna Tsvelykh sent a lab assistant to me, who relayed the message: “Under no circumstances should you dare to submit a resignation letter of your own volition! They have no right to fire you because you are on maternity leave.” The lab assistant there was Vasyl Lisovyi’s niece, Nadia Kornieva, an intelligent, decent, and noble young woman. She has been a friend to our family for life. She supported us unfailingly more than once in our difficult life. We are immensely grateful to her. But some people at the USRIP became hostile toward me, not even greeting me on the street, while others remained neutral.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: How did you take this situation? You were in such a state, about to give birth, and your husband was arrested... How did the search happen? They came to you on July 6, right? You were living...
V. P. Lisova: On Darnytsia Boulevard, in a room in a so-called hotel-style building, with neighbors. It was a normal search; they were looking for anti-Soviet literature. They didn't find anything at our place. Although they probably had no right to search the corridor, since it was shared with other citizens—and there, I had Sverstiuk’s article “Ivan Kotlyarevsky Laughs” and a thick notebook with Dziuba’s work “Internationalism or Russification?” that I had copied by hand. And so it remained there. After the search, these papers were taken by my neighbor down the hall, a history teacher from the Dnipropetrovsk region, Valentyna Andriivna Shcherbyna, an intelligent and well-educated woman. It was from her in the 60s that I heard about the district committee secretary, now the well-known ex-prime minister Lazarenko, that he was a good manager in the district and that people respected him. She recounted that in the fields, talking to tractor drivers, he would sometimes say to them: “Lads, what kind of language is that you’re speaking? Speak a pure language.”
And how did I take it? In such situations, every person acts according to their inner “I”: some get scared, and some cannot be other than what they are. And Lisovyi was defending not only his own dignity but also the dignity of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. What helped us to endure was the understanding that it was the authorities who were violating the Constitution, not us.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: I once heard that you were summoned to the KGB in that condition, and you took some papers with you, because they could search your home in your absence, so you went to the KGB with those papers. They didn’t search you there.
V. P. Lisova: Yes, that happened. That was after I had given birth to Oksen and when Oksen was a bit older, I was already holding him by the hand. Oksen would sit there and draw, while they talked to me. I had a small handbag with me, and inside were materials on cigarette paper, folded in half; there was Lisovyi’s Letter to the Central Committee and some other things. I would open the bag, take something out, a passport or a handkerchief. And even earlier, when Oksen was little, investigator Tsimokh came with someone else for Vasyl's Letter, but I eventually said that I had burned it.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: This was no longer during the investigation of Lisovyi's case?
V. P. Lisova: No, this was for other reasons. Without experience, without knowledge of the laws… I simply could have not gone there with my child. Neither pregnant nor with a small child should I have gone to those interrogations. But I, being a law-abiding person in principle, was summoned, so I went. I spoke as my conscience dictated. I was always restrained and tried to tell these people the truth. Calmly, restrainedly, I told the truth. I would say: but this is 1937, what are you doing? Investigator Rybchenko replied so calmly and benevolently: “Oh no, this isn’t 1937, it’s a little different…”
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Our case was handled by Karavanov; he was clearly not Ukrainian.
V. P. Lisova: Karavanov was cruel to me, spoke to me rudely in Russian, and even threatened me: “If we find Lisovyi’s letter anywhere else—because we have confiscated his letters everywhere—you will be held responsible, even when your children are grown.” I remember him telling me: “He meddled in something that was not his business; he should have taken better care of his family.” I replied: “But he is not only a family man but also a party member who, besides duties, has rights, for example, to criticize certain negative phenomena in society.” I remembered Karavanov’s warning when we returned from exile and I continued to be summoned for all sorts of baseless interrogations. By this time, a nice little building had been constructed in the Darnytsia district for the district KGB. The conversation was recorded; the investigator spoke in beautiful Ukrainian, and they said he was from Lviv.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Maybe Vasyl Ivanovych Ilkiv?
V. P. Lisova: A tall, handsome, middle-aged man—I’ve forgotten his name, unfortunately. I said to him then: “For what you did to Vasyl Stus—you will yet be held to account.” He looked at me so intently and said: “Oh really? We’ll be held to account?” I said: “Of course.”
V. V. Ovsiyenko: What year was this already?
V. P. Lisova: This was after we returned, in eighty-six.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: But there is a Helsinki Group document about your persecution. And in it, there’s an episode described where your apartment was searched without you being present. (Memorandum No. 8 “On the Persecution of Vira Lisova, wife of a political prisoner” of 15.03.1977 // Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords: Documents and Materials. In 4 volumes. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kharkiv: Folio, 2001. – Vol. 2. – pp. 95–96. – V.O.).
V. P. Lisova: Apparently, they did enter; I saw traces. I wrote to the local policeman: “Protect me,” and he replied: “What’s this, do you have a persecution complex?” But when I went to the district police station for a meeting, I met a human being among the police investigators. I looked: his eyes, his reaction—everything was human, and he said: “Yes, I understand. So, they needed to see something in your home.” But those “boys from the KGB,” as Vasyl Stus used to say, began to actively harass me after Vasyl had served the first half of his sentence and I started writing in his defense. I wrote a lot, everywhere: first to our own authorities, and to Moscow, and to the Central Committee, and to the Supreme Soviet, and to the Committee of Soviet Women, and when I saw the boilerplate replies, I wrote to the French communists, because Tania Zhitnikova had just been appealing on behalf of her husband, Leonid Plyushch. And I wrote letters to the Canadian communists, and to Amnesty International, and to the International League for Human Rights. The only reply I received was from Georges Marchais, which Maria Ovdiyenko helped me translate: it said that the French Communist Party was not indifferent to the situation in the USSR, but in this specific case, it could not help.
After that, they began to treat me very aggressively, particularly through their authorized agents, their curators. I had three of them. The first one was—unfortunately, I can’t recall his name now—a lieutenant colonel, older, calm, restrained. He spoke to me very nicely: “Well, how many of you are there? You’re just a handful; you should repent and live like normal people.” He had a habit of coming to me like this: meeting me somewhere on the road near my work right before the New Year—literally on the afternoon of the thirty-first. Or somewhere right before my child’s birthday, so as to unexpectedly spoil some celebration for us.
But soon they assigned a second one. With a sharply contrasting demeanor. This was the famous Kirichek. In our circle, there were rumors that he was a specialist in fabricating criminal cases, particularly against Vadym Smohytel, Mykola Horbal, and Sasha Feldman, who, by the way, had delivered Vasyl’s letter to Moscow. This Kirichek was very cruel to me. At that time (in October 1976), I got a job at a research institute that was a branch of a Moscow one (Ukrainian Branch of the Central Institute of Scientific Organization of Labor, Management, and Rationalization of the Tsentrosoyuz). They treated me very well there. I was a home-based worker; I typed, edited, did everything they needed, and they hired me on temporary contracts. And during the breaks, I had the opportunity to go to the village for food. He went to my workplace and, in the presence of the head of HR and the deputy director, spoke to me very rudely. The reason for his displeasure was that I had not come to a KGB summons. The head of HR, a former military man, upon hearing that he had some sort of unreliable person working for him, was beside himself. When this Kirichek asked why I hadn’t come when summoned, I said: “You had neither grounds nor the right to summon me.” The head of HR asked: “What? How do you know they didn’t have the right?” “I read it.” He nearly jumped up: “What?! She reads, too?!” When I was left without witnesses, Kirichek behaved like a fascist toward me. It cost me a pre-infarction state. I was fired from my job; this was in February 1977. And when my colleagues from the Institute came to pick up the typewriter, they said that the deputy director sympathized with me but could do nothing to help. I thanked them for their sympathy.
And what they did with the children, those were truly horrifying stories.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Tell us about it.
V. P. Lisova: Well, the fact that we ended up in extreme financial hardship was a consequence of our choice. But the cruel manipulations with our children were shocking. In 1979, Vasyl was already in exile, in Buryatia. He calls me around four in the morning: “What happened over there? Because they’re telling me here that something happened and you’re very upset.” I say: “Calm down, nothing happened.” I went to work for the second shift, and around three o’clock Myroslava (she was in the seventh grade then) calls me, her voice terrified, and says: “Mom, I was attacked, and they tried to rape me.” I rush home and immediately call my curator, this was a different one: Kirichek had been removed after my complaints (I told the KGB that he was a fascist). So I call the curator and say: “This is what happened. And you can do such things?” “Vira Pavlivna, you think it was us, you think it was us?” “You miscalculated—Vasyl Semenovych found out about it before it happened. He called at four in the morning, and it happened at three in the afternoon.” Some guy attacked her and clearly faked it, gave her a chance to escape right here, in the entryway. He had been watching her, following her, then he overtook her and went into the entryway. But for us, it was a terrible shock; we were simply afraid. The girl, in the seventh grade, no longer went to school alone in the morning; I would walk her or send her with the neighbors’ children. I used to walk with my two children, and from time to time some guys would follow us with a little camera, so the children would see it. Myroslava would always say: “Mom, look, he’s walking there and pointing his little camera at us.” I’d turn around—and he’d be looking off to the side somewhere.
I was shocked by their attitude toward children. We are adults, but the children?! We were going to Vasyl in exile, to see dad in Novaya Bryan (Zaigrayevsky District, Buryatia). And so the curator calls, gives some advice, gives me a phone number where I can get a job there, offers to see us to the train, like a real friend: “You can go there, they’ll find you a job.” We arrive with the children in this faraway place, beyond Lake Baikal, instead of the children being on vacation somewhere. We arrive, and the landlady of the apartment where he was living says: “But they took him away tonight.” They took him for so-called “parasitism.” In essence, they didn’t let him work for three months—and then they imprisoned him. Right before that, he had written a letter to Brezhnev about Afghanistan.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: What time was this?
V. P. Lisova: That was when the war started...
V. V. Ovsiyenko: The war in Afghanistan began on December 29, 1979.
V. P. Lisova: In 1979, Vasyl arrived in exile in June.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Why did you decide to go to him in exile?
V. P. Lisova: Why? I just know what Vasyl is like—he is a very honest person and not inclined to any compromises. He is not a person who acts on impulse, but if he believes something is right, he will calmly see it through to the end. And I was afraid for him. I thought that if we were with him, it would be easier for him. But they gave him a job in some neglected cowshed with absolutely unsanitary conditions, and eventually, he fell ill with jaundice and was hospitalized. There, in that part of Siberia, it’s so unsanitary: children, dogs, cats—all playing together in the sand. And of course, people there get sick with jaundice and tuberculosis, as I later saw while living there for two years.
V. Ovsiyenko: He was taken away sometime in early 1980, right?
V. P. Lisova: He was taken in the summer, on June 11, 1980 (he was released on June 11, 1981).
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And you arrived just when he was arrested?
V. P. Lisova: Yes, we arrived in the morning, and he had been taken away during the night.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And what, you stayed there?
V. P. Lisova: We stayed there, because the investigation was ongoing. Though what kind of investigation was it? He refused a lawyer, and I said I would speak in his defense at the trial. We lived there for a month—the investigation lasted a month—in an apartment belonging to the Nepitayev couple, Nina and Ivan. Very nice people, Old Believers, by the way. Good hosts and pleasant to talk to. I spoke at the trial, of course, as a defender, but it was ridiculous, especially from today’s perspective. Because everything was planned, and there was no need to defend or prove anything to them. When the sentence had been handed down, I passed what I could to Vasyl, and we went home. He was taken to the Mukhor-Shibirsky criminal camp. There are terrible prisons there, prisons and more prisons, camps for recidivists. And he ended up there and stayed for a year. It’s extremely cold there—minus 45–50 degrees Celsius. He returned from there very weakened. And my children and I were preparing for our future move. A year later, we ordered a shipping container and went. I had already seen how people lived there and what they ate: three-liter jars of wine on the shelves, black vermicelli that fell apart in boiling water, and some kind of canned fish. Often there was no bread either. So in Kyiv I stocked up on food, various clothes, different medicines and herbs for Vasyl, and everything else. We went to the village of Ilka in the Zaigrayevsky District of Buryatia, where Lisovyi was sent after his release from the camp. We lived with him for two years. Interestingly, when I arrived in Ilka with the children and asked for the street where the political exile lived, people responded very kindly: “Oh, you’re like the Decembrists.” And then a man gave us a ride on a wide horse-drawn cart and said just as kindly: “There have always been many like you here. Don’t worry, with the help of God and good people, everything will be fine.”
V. V. Ovsiyenko: That was already 1981, and until 1983...
V. P. Lisova: Yes, until June of eighty-three. I wanted the family to be together. For the children to be with their father, because he is a caring father to us and knows how to create a calm, creative, and intellectual atmosphere. Vasyl worked as a lathe operator at an auto repair plant.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And what about your Kyiv apartment?
V. P. Lisova: The apartment? Before leaving, I went to a meeting at the KGB and said: “I came to inform you that I am leaving, and I hope that my apartment will not be sealed, as happened to a dissident family in Moscow—the wife couldn’t come back for six months, and their apartment was sealed and taken away.” A general spoke with me, courteously but not without irony, a handsome Stierlitz type: “Well, of course, we have no intention of doing such a thing, especially since we hope that the Solzhenitsyn Fund will give you money for the trip and you will be able to come back here in six months.” I answered him: “Well, you must be speaking with such irony about the Solzhenitsyn Fund. You took the father away from his children, abandoned me with two small children to fend for myself, and now you want good people not to help us?” I did, of course, come back to Kyiv every six months, twice a year by plane, almost across the entire USSR.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: No one lived here?
V. P. Lisova: For a certain period, my niece Natalia, my sister Aniuta’s daughter, lived here; she was studying in Kyiv.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And those years when Vasyl Semenovych was in prison, I know you were involved in some work. You mentioned the Solzhenitsyn Fund.
V. P. Lisova: I got into the Moscow dissident scene through some Lithuanian women I met near the train ticket offices in Potma in the Urals. They said that in Moscow, people were very interested in Ukrainian political prisoners and their families but couldn’t find a way to connect with Kyiv. They offered to introduce me to people from A. D. Sakharov’s circle, in particular Andrei Tverdokhlebov, Tanya Velikanova, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Galina Lyubarskaya, Malva Landa, the Shikhanovich family, and others. Tatyana Khodorovich, the administrator of the Solzhenitsyn Fund, a very nice person, asked me then if I could deliver aid to the families of Ukrainian political prisoners. Well, of course—how could I tell her no, that I was afraid or didn’t want to? Of course, it was dangerous and even scary—they would conduct searches. Sometimes in connection with a theft, because they knew someone was visiting me—either Sergei Khodorovich, or Petya Vins, or Yuri Shikhanovich, or someone else coming to see me or Alla Marchenko. And they would conduct a search to find this money. Searches even in connection with some theft, somewhere in the Lviv region, in some department store. Of course, a certain amount of money for a certain number of families was brought from Moscow. We distributed the money here.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And Alla Marchenko took part in this?
V. P. Lisova: Of course.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Because, as far as I know, in Galicia it was Olena Antoniv who did this.
V. P. Lisova: Olena, Olena… She was a wonderful, bright person, intelligent, kind, modest, educated, loved music and literature and… courageous. As Zenoviy Krasivsky wrote from his exile to us in our exile, for him, Olena Antoniv was a gift of fate for all his suffering. I loved Olena very much; she will remain in my memory forever. Olena was involved in helping political prisoners and their families even before the Fund appeared, because it came to us later, much later. But that was later, I think, from the time I attended one of the press conferences with foreign journalists at Tatyana Khodorovich’s apartment. And in the beginning, Oksana Yakivna Meshko and Borys Dmytrovych Antonenko-Davydovych here in Kyiv somehow tried to organize help for the families of political prisoners with their own resources. Ivan Benedyktovych Brovko also had connections with priests in Lviv who collected funds for aid. And then there was some help, albeit small, but from time to time. It was impossible to collect much here, and many families were in such a difficult situation that they literally had no money to go for a visit.
We tried to send some funds to the camps for subscriptions or for “Book by Mail,” to buy books, or for food parcels or packages. And some people, like me, were constantly out of work. I was either on maternity leave, or they fired me, or I did some work as a home-based embroiderer, or I typed, but I earned little from it. We survived as best we could. As for me, the first year my family, my sisters, helped me a lot. They would simply come every month, one then the other, then the third, and bring me some provisions. Their husbands, my brothers-in-law Borys Vasheka and Fedir Yovkhymenko, are noble and good people, thank them.
Those “boys from the KGB” really did not want any help to come to us. They readily let me leave Kyiv.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: They were probably glad that you went to Siberia?
V. P. Lisova: Very, very. When I was going there, as I said, my curator was so happy, so energetic, saying that I would have a job there and that my husband is like a child. This was about Lisovyi.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: You returned in 1983...
V. P. Lisova: And there were all sorts of other tricks—it’s even hard to describe. When they brought Vasyl to Kyiv to repent in the late summer–autumn of 1975, there was a really interesting moment with a letter. They put some currency speculator in Vasyl’s cell, who was supposed to do a certain job.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: During that “prophylaxis,” right?
V. P. Lisova: Yes, yes.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: I was brought to Kyiv in seventy-six, at the end of summer.
V. P. Lisova: And here’s how it was... This currency speculator passes a letter to Borys Dmytrovych Antonenko-Davydovych, in which he writes that he wants to inform him so that they know the truth. There’s this Lisovyi sitting here, who is slandering everyone. And he’s badmouthing General Hryhorenko, Borys Dmytrovych, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, and someone else. Borys Dmytrovych read this letter, gives it to Mykhailyna Khomivna, Mykhailyna runs to me, I read the letter, remembered absolutely everything, word for word (I’ve forgotten a little now) and I tell her: “Well, this is not Lisovyi’s style of thinking or expression, it’s not at all characteristic of him—they are clearly plotting something.” It mentioned people he didn't even know. And in general, it is not in Vasyl’s nature to say anything bad about people. Vasyl is so restrained in his assessments of people, let alone that he would start saying something to some currency speculator. It was all crudely fabricated. They obviously wanted to publish some material in the newspaper, that Vasyl had supposedly written a letter of repentance in which he slandered Ukrainian writers like that. But since this scheme became clear to me, I quickly went to the KGB, wrote a statement, and through my curator Kirichek, I said that I knew about such a letter. This means your action against Lisovyi will not work, I said, because Lisovyi is not one of those who can be bought. He asked: “What are you saying? Do you have that letter?” Borys Dmytrovych was given the condition to read and destroy the letter. Borys Dmytrovych gave his word. But I told Kirichek that if necessary, I would show him the letter. And then he softened. I left him a statement addressed to the head of the KGB, in which I said that if they were plotting something, I had already figured out their plan and their shameful trick would not work. And nothing appeared after that, thank God.
In exile in Buryatia, our children studied in a Russian-language school for two years. The teachers and children treated them well. When Myroslava would answer in class, the classroom would fall silent and listen to her very attentively. She participated in republican competitions there and won first-place awards. Oksen was in the 3rd-4th grades, was a sweet boy, and was good friends with the local children. One of the teachers once said to me: “He is a wonderfully sweet and kind boy, but the problem is how to preserve this kindness.” Fortunately, he has remained just so.
In exile, we lived in half of a house that we bought. The money for the purchase was sent by Nijolė Sadūnaitė from Lithuania. Her family and she personally had endured camps and exile, and upon returning home, she helped exiles from different republics a lot. Incidentally, the house we bought was built after the war by Baltic participants of the national liberation war of the 1940s-50s who had been deported to Siberia. So we arranged our house and yard in the Ukrainian style. Vasyl worked a lot with the children, in particular, on learning foreign languages, we organized various competitions and, when possible, trips and walks; in the winter we went ice skating. I remember one trip to the taiga, where we were invited by the family of a local engineer and a history teacher. We were struck by the grandeur and power of the taiga. We were talking, and Oksen was climbing on the mighty fallen trees covered with moss. The history teacher complained that the Buryats, after a Buryat became the party secretary of the autonomous republic, “the Buryats even wanted to switch the teaching in their university in Ulan-Ude to the Buryat language.” To which I sincerely replied: “And where should they have their university, if not in Moscow?” After that, the local intelligentsia’s communication with us ceased.
We made a very interesting trip, thanks to the Nepitayev family, who offered to take us in their own car, shortly before our departure to Kyiv, to Novopetrovsk to visit the Decembrists Museum on the famous Damskaya Street, named in honor of the Decembrists’ wives. Only one two-story house of Odoyevsky’s wife remains there, which now houses the Decembrists Museum. We also visited the house of the Ukrainian Decembrist Horbachevsky, which is now the city library. We also visited Horbachevsky’s grave in the local cemetery. On behalf of my family, I express our feelings of affection for this family, which we preserve to this day.
We returned from Buryatia through Central Asia, with a stop in Uzbekistan, in Tashkent with its famous Registan. After our return, they wouldn’t give Vasyl a job. Three months had already passed—he couldn’t get a job anywhere.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Not working for three months—that’s already “parasitism.”
V. P. Lisova: That was already “parasitism.” And two weeks before the end of this three-month period, the deputy chief of the Kyiv police came to our apartment—a young, pleasant-looking man. He asks: “Well, how are you doing with finding a job, how are things?” I tell him that Vasyl Semenovych can’t get a job anywhere: they won’t hire him in his specialty, and they won’t hire him outside his specialty either, because he has a higher education. “Well, you keep looking, keep proving your case.” I say: “Then help us—you see the situation. Must he go back to prison after three months?” He doesn’t listen to what I’m saying: “Well, okay, okay, keep proving your case, keep looking. Goodbye.” So that was already a warning. I was, of course, very worried then; we were expecting trouble again...
And Vasyl—perhaps under my pressure, because there was no way out—turned to the KGB. They received Vasyl. They asked him: “And what kind of job would you like? And where would you like to work?” Vasyl says: “At the Institute of Philosophy—where I used to work.” “Okay, we’ll ask.” And then they call and say: “No, they’re turning up their noses there, they don’t want to take you. How about the Museum of the History of Kyiv?” So Vasyl went to the Museum of the History of Kyiv and worked there for several years. Of course, the very low salary was no longer an issue, they paid him 80 rubles there, and I was making 90 at the school. But we were just glad to be home; we could get by on that somehow. It was hard for us to make ends meet: besides, Oksen was studying pottery in the Poltava region, and we couldn’t even allocate enough money for his food.
Still, we started looking for other work. And so Vasyl ended up at the Velykodmytrivska school, from which he had once graduated with a medal. There, the school principal, Volodymyr Vasylyovych Solodukhin, turned out to be a good man; he hired him at the school, and later even spoke at the Academic Council of the Institute of Philosophy with a request that he be reinstated at the Institute of Philosophy, where he could engage in scholarly work. At the school, the teachers and children were very fond of Lisovyi. He gave interesting lessons in any subject.
So after the Museum of the History of Kyiv, he went to work at the school and worked there until the political changes came.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Two years—in what years was that?
V. P. Lisova: That was 1988–1989, and then he was invited to the institute. They raised the question of bringing him back to work, and he left his home school. There is an honor board in the school, on which the names of medalists are inscribed. When Vasyl was arrested in 1972, his name was scratched out, and then it was restored.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: He said today that he was the first medalist in that school.
V. P. Lisova: And today the teachers ask him to come to the school, but there’s no time, he doesn’t have time now, but he should. They invited me too.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: So you have two children: Myroslava—what year was she born?
V. P. Lisova: Myroslava was born in 1966, Oksen in 1972. Our children are intelligent and quite gifted, and well-read. Despite the difficult conditions in which they had to live, they received a higher education and are now working successfully. But sometimes, when I remember, my heart aches that their childhood was so difficult.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Oksen was born in July, on what day?
V. P. Lisova: On July twenty-second.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And his father was arrested on July sixth?
V. P. Lisova: Yes. I, of course, worked a lot with the children; there was a certain strategy. I imagined how I wanted to see them, and I prepared them accordingly. I read a lot to them, we visited museums, theaters, traveled, they watched filmstrips, read literature according to a certain plan. We read aloud until the tenth grade, and they loved it. I remember that Slavtsia, even in the tenth grade, would ask: “Let’s read aloud!” I sang them folk songs; we have a very good collection of records, so we listened to all of them. I read them fairy tales, first Ukrainian ones, and then, when they got older, those of other nations. I did the same thing at school. I read dumas, Skovoroda’s fables, Ukrainian classics, poetry. In the seventh-eighth grades, they read historical literature. In the eighth-tenth, world classics. When I went to work in the extended-day group, they gave me the opportunity to work according to my own plan. I was constantly being fired from jobs, and “Radio Svoboda” would report that Lisova has two children and is being fired without any grounds, so a curator came and said: “Well, go on, go to a school, just don’t teach.” Then the KGB allowed me to work in a school, but not to teach. So I worked in the library, but that was also a luxury. From the first to the tenth grade, I went to classes and gave talks.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: So from what year were you allowed to work in a school?
V. P. Lisova: That was in 1978. I went to school No. 183 and worked there until my retirement. The staff there treated me well, the principal Mariia Andriivna Klishchevska, the deputy principals Zinaida Ivanivna Todorchyk, Mykola Serhiyovych Zameha, and Mysel Stanislav Ivanovych—they were intelligent people, they allowed me to work according to my own plan. Even when I worked in the library, the deputy principal for the upper grades, a physicist who conducted political information sessions in the upper grades, would invite me to give talks on cultural issues. And when I started working in the [extended-day] group, I also conducted educational work with the children there—as I imagined it, in the spirit of ethnopedagogy. It’s a very interesting system; I saw it later in practice, and the administration accepted it well. My year was divided into natural and holiday cycles, into which the anniversaries of great people were inserted: Shevchenko, Lesia Ukrainka, and others. The children and I read and sang. I taught them to sing spring songs, Christmas carols, shchedrivky, Cossack songs, and Sich Riflemen songs. At the end of the year, we would put on a Shevchenko celebration.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: And did you take part in public affairs, with perestroika?
V. P. Lisova: Well, not to my full capacity, of course, but when Rukh started, I was with Rukh as much as I could be; I loved Rukh very much. I was the head of the Prosvita chapter in my school (No. 183).
V. V. Ovsiyenko: I see you take part in academic conferences, I see your publications in the journal “Zona.”
V. P. Lisova: Incidentally, I was in the Union of Ukrainian Women for a while, but I wasn’t an active member. Yes, I spoke once at an international conference on behalf of the Union of Ukrainian Women, and took part in some of the Union’s events. I participated in Rukh, constantly campaigned during elections. I actually did the campaigning myself. I would get a bunch of leaflets from Rukh and go around on the electric trains, through the housing estates, to the markets, I traveled to villages, even with my children and grandson—I delivered and distributed them everywhere, telling people who to vote for and why. But, unfortunately, I didn’t get actively involved in Rukh. We, people from the dissident circle, are different from these new figures. Some of them, among the women as well, are people of a slightly different behavior, a different way of thinking, and it’s a bit difficult for us to cooperate with them.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: It seems that the people of the generation you spoke of are related by something so profound that these new people cannot grasp it.
V. P. Lisova: Yes, that’s true. Back then, it couldn’t even enter our minds to accuse one another of something. We women were so close. We knew each other’s flaws, but that was no reason for disagreements...
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Somewhere you said that you were all under one dome, all united by that dome, that information circulated in this environment. It was a narrow circle of truly kindred people who simply loved one another.
V. P. Lisova: We loved each other very much, and we still do—these people, Halynka Didkivska, Tamila Matusevych, Valia Stus-Popeliukh, Liolia Svitlychna, Nadiyechka, Nina Mykhailivna (I’ve loved Nina Mykhailivna for a long time, since the sixties, I was simply in love with her back at the USRIP, where we worked together), Alla Marchenko and the late Olena Antoniv, and Olia Horyn, and Liuba Popadiuk, also deceased, Nadia—Ovsiyenko’s sister, Liuda, her daughter, Svitlana Kyrychenko—these are the kind of people, we have remained like family. I haven’t named everyone in this minute...
V. V. Ovsiyenko: But your articles exist—there’s such a huge list there! (The Women of the Seventies // Zona, No. 12. – 1997. — pp. 3–13.)
V. P. Lisova: Yes. And now it was difficult for us to get along with these new people. Even in the Social Service, where Mrs. Maria Spolska from Canada tried to bring in representatives of different organizations—from Rukh, from the URP, and others—nothing came of it.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: I know that it was also very detrimental that you had to look after your grandson Stepan—your daughter was studying, and someone had to look after the grandson.
V. P. Lisova: Myroslava applied to the institute six times! As they told me at the medical institute, she failed to get in for those six years “not without help.” There were cases where she would get four-five-four-five, and then they’d give her a three on the last one, and one time they even gave her a two. I said: “Just think! With a three she could have passed, but they had to give her a two.” It was horrible, such mockery—that application to the medical institute! And finally, when she got in, she got married and a baby was born—I was forced to rescue the situation. That, of course, took a lot of my time and energy. I dreamed of working in “Prosvita” when I retired. I no longer had the strength to look after my little grandson Nazar, and now also Ustym—Oksen and Lesia’s sons. I wanted to travel around Ukraine—I feel immensely sorry for the village teachers! It’s so hard for them to figure everything out, they lack so much literature and information. That’s why I try to add my drop to the ocean from time to time. But I do distribute literature, newspapers, and so on throughout Ukraine from time to time. Because I see that, despite the large number of different public organizations and parties, educational work is not being carried out energetically and systematically, especially in the villages. Because I feel dissatisfied that the worldview of our people, including the intelligentsia, is changing so slowly, because only this will provide a reliable foundation for the state that we all dreamed of and still dream of.
V. V. Ovsiyenko: Thank you, Vira Pavlivna!
This was Vira Pavlivna Lisova-Hrytsenko, and we recorded this conversation on October 9, 1998, at the Lisovyi residence in Kyiv.
Vira Lisova. Photo by V. Ovsiyenko, 2002.