Interview with Mykola Mykhailovych SUKHOVETSKY
(On the KHPG website since March 5, 2008).
V.V. Ovsiienko: On February 12, 2001, in Odesa, Mr. Mykola Sukhovetsky is speaking. Recorded by Vasyl Ovsiienko. The editorial office of the newspaper `Dumska Ploshcha`, 4 Yevreiska Street.
M.M. Sukhovetsky: Mykola Mykhailovych Sukhovetsky, born January 15, 1947. Place of birth—the village of Pysarivka, Volochysk Raion, Khmelnytskyi Oblast. I was born into a family of rural intellectuals. My mother, Hanna Serhiivna, worked as an elementary school teacher. I was a good student, graduated from school with a medal, and in 1965 I enrolled in Odesa State University to study Ukrainian philology. Before that, I had tried my hand at writing poetry and had some things published here and there.
Regarding my family. My paternal grandfather—grandpa Hnat—was repressed in 1938 and, as it later turned out, was shot in the basement of the prison in the city of Proskuriv—which wasn't yet a regional center then; the region was called Kamianets-Podilskyi. My grandfather’s death didn’t somehow determine the direction of my thinking or development, but evidently, these things happen regardless of our moods and plans, because at the university, I tried to associate with people who were not entirely captive to the ideology, power, and Soviet propaganda of the time. Such people were not hard to find, there were many of them, just not all of them spoke about it.
In the spring of 1968, we decided to publish our own almanac. What are student almanacs? I, for example, read in a book about Dobrolyubov, from the series “The Lives of Remarkable People,” that this man, as a student, once published a handwritten almanac called `Slukhi` (Rumors). And back then, in what we call “obscurantist” Russia, this was not a major sin. And so we published such an almanac in the spring of 1968, calling it `Kolo` (The Circle). It had a philological focus. We included poems by contemporary local Odesa poets whom we respected, as well as famous ones like Mykola Vinhranovsky and Lina Kostenko. We also added publicist articles—for instance, I wrote a short piece titled “Long Live May Day!” It was not at all “revolutionary”—it was simply an address to young people with my wishes: that they be thinking individuals, that they not get stuck, as they say, in the past, but think about the future.
We thought it was a completely innocent act and that no one should be troubled by our thoughts. But it turned out quite the opposite: people started to get worried… The leadership of the philology faculty and the university was the most alarmed, and especially the party organizer at the time, whose name was Leon Khachykovych Kalustian, by the fact that someone, some students, dared to publish an unauthorized almanac here at the university. The very fact that it was unauthorized terrified a great many people. Kalustian came to my dormitory room and told me not to go anywhere, that someone would come for me later. I lived on 29 Pastera Street at the time—that building has since burned down and is being rebuilt; actually, it was transferred to the Refrigeration Institute, now the Academy of Refrigeration, but at that time it belonged to Odesa University.
About two days later, the party organizer appeared again and invited me to his office, and Leon Khachykovych started asking various questions. His main question was: “Is it Riznykiv who is stirring you all up?” I said that no, Riznykiv was not stirring us up, and that it was very strange to me that our unremarkable-from-every-angle almanac could frighten anyone. Apparently, it had. I said that Oleksa Riznykiv had nothing to do with it, and I said frankly that we hadn't wanted to upset anyone at all, and besides, it was our business, a youth matter—what did any inquiries and interrogations have to do with it?
It was very quickly established who was involved in publishing this almanac. It was, besides me, a student from the Russian department, Yevhen Aksarin, and a student a year ahead of me, Tetiana Ananchenko. She retyped our works and the poems we brought for the almanac. This trio can be considered the creators of the almanac.
What happened next? A whole investigation began. They started traveling to Yevhen Aksarin’s home in the Mykolaiv region, and they started questioning others. And finally, they made a whole case out of it. Reports were heard in the regional Komsomol committee: “Young nationalism has reared its head at Odesa University.” Conversations began with university authorities at various levels—with the dean, with the deputy dean of the philology faculty. I must say, it was still the spring of 1968, and the whole affair, strange as it may seem, was allowed to slide. Later, my thesis supervisor, the well-known literary critic and Shevchenko Prize laureate Vasyl Fashchenko, said that if it had happened a year later, we would have been thrown out of the university without a second thought. But all this was before the Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia. So they tried to handle the matter as quietly as possible and cover it up. True, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, some guys came into my room, particularly from the law faculty, and slipped me questionnaires: “We, the ‘Organization of August 21, 1968’…”—the troops were sent in on August 21, 1968, after all—`“...believe that we must fight,” and so on. They were trying to get me to reveal my intentions. I immediately realized it was a provocation, refused to talk to them, and threw away the questionnaire. Later, they came to my room and rummaged through the books on my shelf—all this continued until the new year of 1969. Finally, these people, who belonged to the authorities, decided that they would not achieve any great success with us, and the event gradually faded from memory.
A little later, I found out that besides those four copies of the almanac `Kolo`, perhaps several dozen more were circulating in Odesa: some people had reproduced them on more serious equipment than a typewriter and had distributed `Kolo` in many places. That is why this fact became known. But back then, at the very beginning, when they were questioning and interrogating me, I didn't know what it was all about. I didn’t think that four typewritten copies could cause such a commotion. But it turns out they did, because some people had distributed the almanac without our knowledge.
Back then, our well-known dissidents, like Oleksa Riznykiv, were still free, still walking the earth, as they say; they were only imprisoned in 1971—but in this case, I know, many students were interrogated, and some of them were so intimidated that they unwillingly became, as we now say, informants. After Riznykiv’s trial, their numbers grew.
When my comrades and I were taken in for interrogation by the partorg in 1968—and these interrogations were conducted only by the partorg, Leon Khachikovich Kalustyan—he would lead me by the arm into his office, sit down, and say, “Well, in your opinion, how dangerous is your almanac?” I would say, “We absolutely didn’t intend for it to be dangerous.” “But you think about this: is Riznykiv stirring you all up?” I told him that Riznykiv had absolutely never advised us to publish this almanac.
Afterward, I thought for a long time about his words, about whether we could have come to the idea of publishing this almanac on our own. I think that without our friendship with Oleksa Riznykiv, we probably couldn’t have, since it was from him that I first heard clearly and distinctly that Ukraine needed to leave the Union if it wanted to live a normal, human life. For me, those words were harsh and cleansing. I thought about them long and constantly (and he spoke about this with many people in the student community), but I couldn’t connect these words with the fact that we, out of the blue, published our almanac. But human nature is complex, and it’s difficult to understand which factors lead to certain actions. And I think that our friendship with Oleksa became one of the factors that made us dare to take such a step.
I now think that the existence of the Red Empire was illogical. I say this not because it’s something one can say now. Any person with common sense can think and come to the conclusion that we were living in very unjust conditions. And so, I think our almanac was like a light breeze; with it, the Odesa student youth in 1968 unthinkingly said the letter “A” in their ideological growth, that it was impossible to live in such a Stalinist or post-Stalinist suffocation. We wanted some kind of development; we believed the chatter that was common in the press during the “Khrushchev Thaw.” But it turned out that nothing had fundamentally changed; the empire existed, and its defenders existed. And even such a light puff of young revolutionary thought, so innocent still, terribly rattled the guardians of the Red Empire of that time. If there had been just a few more people like our well-known human rights activists and dissidents back then, I think it could have been toppled even earlier. But, unfortunately, decades of red propaganda, decades of bleeding the nation dry, of repressions, led to it existing longer than it deserved. That’s what I think.
V.O.: Mykola, once, at the very beginning of our conversation, you called the almanac “Slovo.” It was actually “Kolo,” right?
M.S.: Yes, “Kolo.”
V.O.: And one more thing. As I understand it, the authorities were alarmed not so much by the content of that almanac as by the very appearance of an uncensored publication—even a typewritten one, of only four copies. But did they have any complaints about the content? And what were they specifically?
M.S.: Leon Khachikovich Kalustyan interrogated me about the content, asking who wrote the article “Long Live the First of May!” It was, I’ll say again, an appeal to the youth to be more honest, more active, and to build life on new principles—more active, purer ones. He came at me so hard then that I tried to conceal my authorship. I said: “I don’t remember anymore who wrote it. We had,” I said, “a whole team. And what’s so dangerous in that article? The title is ‘Long Live the First of May!,’ that we will join the spring columns, but we must be as pure and active as these spring columns, caressed by the wind of rejuvenation.”
V.O.: And were there poems in it that hadn’t been published before?
M.S.: The poems were ones that had been published. They analyzed the poems of Lina Kostenko and Mykola Vinhranovsky and realized we had taken them from well-known collections. As for the Odesa poets, we took the most recent poems from newspapers. One of the authors—I don’t want to name him now—he and his friend took this almanac to the partorg and said that, in his opinion, he’d been set up. And why? Because they didn't want him to be accepted into the Party. That is, he said that some enemies didn't want him to join the Communist Party properly, so they stuck his newspaper-published poem into this bad almanac. After that, this whole mess began. Let it be on his conscience. Today he is a well-known writer, but what happened, happened.
V.O.: Did this event have any consequences for your studies, for your future career?
M.S.: Regarding my studies—it was a good thing I wasn’t expelled. I passed half of my semesters’ exams with A's. Then my supervisor, Fashchenko, said that it wasn't necessary to work as hard as I had learned to in school, that I could focus on some of my specific subjects, and I mainly concentrated on literature. What’s interesting, as it later turned out, they wanted to give me some kind of scholarship because I had, after all, completed five semesters with straight A's. I don't know exactly what that scholarship was called, but it was a nominal one. I found out about this much, much later! It was Vasyl Barladianu who, after serving his time, enlightened me that I was due some scholarship. They didn’t give it to me, and I finished my higher education on my own funds and provisions.
V.O.: Did you have any other encounters with the authorities during your life—where they pressured or persecuted you in some way?
M.S.: Strangely enough, Vasyl Vasylovych Fashchenko, wanting me to write a paper with him and defend a dissertation (which didn't happen), advised me to get some job to lie low. In 1970, for a few months, I ended up at the Komsomol regional committee (*obkom*), becoming an instructor of the Komsomol *obkom*. I lasted there four months, no more. That was right when there was a cholera outbreak in Odesa, and I broke through that cholera quarantine line with the help of the Komsomol *obkom* and went to see my future wife. Then the first secretary of the Komsomol *obkom*, Holubovskyi, advised me to resign from that position. I resigned, taught for a bit in Odesa in the Peresyp district, went to the army, and after the army, taught in my wife’s village—that’s Tarutyne Raion, the village of Vynohradivka. This area is predominantly populated by Bulgarians. My wife, by the way, is Bulgarian. She teaches the Russian language.
One day, I get called to the military commissariat, and there I see a certain Comrade Iskrenko, whom I had met at the Komsomol *obkom*. It turns out he had gone on to serve “in the organs.” They must have dug up in my files somewhere that I’d had this incident with the almanac. He led me out onto the street, and we walked along, having a “friendly” chat. He reminded me that I had been an instructor for a few months, and now here I was. He said that rumors were reaching him that in Vynohradivka there was some kind of... well, like some sort of Bulgarian counter-revolution, or something, that some men were gathering for a demonstration or wanted to protest in some way. Then he asks: “What, Petro Ivanovych—isn’t he your wife’s brother?” I say: “He is.” “Don’t you tell him anything. And you’re not giving them any ideas to make noise and protest, are you?” “For God’s sake, I go to school and contribute some articles to ‘Literaturna Ukraina.’ My priorities are literary. As for what the Bulgarians are thinking, I don't know. I'm interested in the Bulgarian old men in these Bulgarian hats; I write poems about them, I’m writing a novella based on Bulgarian material.” Then he swore me to secrecy, not to tell Petro Ivanovych or anyone else what was going on in the Bulgarian community.
Of course, I came home and immediately told my wife’s brother—we lived in the same yard, he in one half of the house, I in the other—everything, that “the organs” in Odesa were very interested in what he and his friends were doing. He was a teacher, by the way, also taught Russian language at the same school I did. He thanked me for telling him, and everything quieted down. His closest friend, Karastan (?)—that was his last name—he was the one, as they say, who was “winding up” the local guys, talking about some unjust regulations regarding agriculture, about how grain was grown, how everything was taken away, how the partorg stood on a high watchtower at the threshing floor to make sure everything was collected and handed over to the state. Those local men started talking about it, and they talked so much that it reached all the way up there. Thus, I unwillingly became a witness. And they dug up that I, too, had been involved in some things in the past, and they wondered if I wasn't the one stirring everyone up there. That was one such incident.
After that, I tried to come to Odesa, lived in other people's corners, worked for 15 years at the "Mayak" publishing house, earned an apartment, then my books started coming out, and in 1979 I became a member of the Writers' Union.
V.O.: Perhaps you could name your books, at least the most important ones, and when they were published.
M.S.: Certainly. I have four books of short stories and novellas. The first is "Three Kilometers from the Station," 1977. Then a book based on Bulgarian material, novellas and short stories "Khoro," 1979. I was accepted into the Union after my first book. And this one was on the horizon, about to be published. After that, my books "From Beloved Hands," 1985, then "The Playroom," 1989, were published. Four years apart. And now you have to publish books at your own expense; I keep planning to, but never get around to it. Mostly, my works are sitting in a drawer. That's the literary part of my work.
I’m not bragging, but when Oleksa Riznykiv returned from the camps, I immediately wanted to approach him and say: “Well, let's get that manuscript as soon as possible, maybe we can do something.” Oleksa was suspicious of me at first, because he didn't trust anyone then. But he came to me about a year or a year and a half later: “So, is this thing possible?” I said: “It should have been done long ago.” With our joint efforts, we very, very quickly published his first book around 1990. For this, thank God, he was immediately accepted into the Union. That is, my way of thinking was clearly defined, long-standing. And it remains so to this day.
V.O.: Are you now working at the "Dumska Ploshcha" editorial office?
M.S.: I am now at the editorial office of the newspaper "Dumska Ploshcha," which is a supplement to the city newspaper "Odessky Vestnik." Under the previous city administration, it was a separate newspaper. Then, local elements started shouting that “‘there cannot be two newspapers for one body,’” meaning the city council. For this reason, they wanted to shut down this newspaper altogether, but thanks to the Odesa intelligentsia, as well as the new administration, which understood that if it closed this only Ukrainian publication opened by the previous mayor's office, it would not be counted as one of its merits. So they tried to preserve it as a newspaper for the Ukrainian community of Odesa, with all the parameters that entails.
V.O.: And what is your position?
M.S.: My position is head of the culture department.
V.O.: Thank you for your story.