Interview with Stepan Semenovych ANDRUSHKIV
(On the KHPG website since April 3, 2008)
V.V.Ovsiienko: On April 3, 2001, in Dnipropetrovsk, Mr. Stepan Andrushkiv is speaking. Please, first state your postal address.
S.S.Andrushkiv: Postal code 49101, Krasnoflotska Street, 43, apt. 2. Telephone 42-10-32. I, Andrushkiv, Stepan Semenovych, was born on January 6, 1926.
V.O.: Right on Christmas. Vasyl Stus was also born on Christmas.
S.A.: I also have a brother, Yosyf, who was also born on January 6, but in 1936. He is not my full brother on my mother’s side. I was born in the village of Koniukhy, Kozova Raion—it used to be Berezhany Raion, Ternopil Oblast.
V.O.: Is that where Petro Saranchuk is from?
S.A.: That’s my first cousin. I have his book, published in America, called “Koniukhy—A Cossack Nest.” They sent it to him, and he gave it to me as his cousin. There are photographs too.
V.O.: I recently visited Petro Stepanovych in Mykolaiv, in February.
S.A.: We went to school together, lived in the same courtyard, the Germans wanted to take us to Germany together, but he managed to escape, and I was driven all the way to Peremyshl. Under Polish rule, I finished six grades, and in 1941, under the Germans, they took all of us to the FZO (Factory Vocational School). There was a dormitory on Terezy Street in Lviv, and it was something like our FZO. They taught trade professions there before taking people to Germany. I studied there from the fall until May 1942. We saw that the first batch had already been taken to work in Germany, so we decided to flee. We scattered. I had an aunt in Berezhany, who had worked as a servant for a lawyer back in Polish times. So I didn’t go back to my own village but went to my aunt’s. And that’s when we joined the underground. We collected weapons—there were a lot of weapons scattered around when the Soviet troops retreated. We stole weapons from the Germans. We gathered provisions. On the orders of older friends from the OUN, we carried out this kind of work.
I was arrested on February 3, 1948. I was serving in the Soviet Army in the Chelyabinsk Oblast at the time. Then we were transported to Krasnoyarsk for transit, and from there in 1948, we were taken to Norilsk. My Norilsk number was B-509.
V.O.: Wait, tell me about the arrest and the trial in a little more detail.
S.A.: The Germans took me from a camp to Austria. In 1945, with our Ukrainian Insurgent Army, we wanted to cross into the American zone of occupation in Austria, but the Russians cut off our path, and we fell into their captivity. And there, towards the end of the war in 1945, they took us into the army. They marched us on foot from Austria for a whole month. We passed through Austria, Hungary, Romania, and only in the city of Cluj in Romania did they put us in narrow-gauge railway cars. Near Odesa, we were reloaded into boxcars. At first, they told us we were going to our homeland. But they transported us for a whole month to Manchuria. We arrived in Manchuria, stood there for a week. There was practically no fighting there; the Kwantung Army had already capitulated. They loaded captured Japanese soldiers into those boxcars (our regiment arrived in one train), and our 162nd Mobile Transport Company (commander Kukutiukho) escorted them to Irkutsk. We guarded them in Irkutsk. That company had many captured horses—Manchurian and German. Every day we took 100 Japanese men from that camp to service that horse base. Then we were transferred to the Urals to the Second Separate Bridge-Building and Road-Construction Battalion, and we built a road to China. We loaded crushed stone from Baikal simply with shovels. It was like a penal battalion. Whoever didn’t meet the quota, there was an order from the Minister of Internal Affairs Chernyshov not to be taken back to the barracks until he fulfilled that quota. True, all the equipment there was American—stone crushers, vibrators. But most of the work we did by hand.
There was a guy there from the Kamianets-Podilskyi Oblast. We were in Austria together. He sold me out. In Austria, on the recommendation of the Ukrainian Committee, which was in Peremyshl, I joined the OUN in 1943. I received Ukrainian newspapers there from Berlin, from Vienna, and we conducted propaganda work there accordingly. And that friend sold me out. On February 3, 1948, around 11 o’clock at night, starshina Titov approaches and says, “Let’s go.” He takes me to the operational department. They undressed me. And it was winter, February 3rd, very cold in the Urals. Senior operational officer Kiselyov told the starshina: “Bring him a summer uniform.” They took off my winter clothes, brought me those old battered boots, a tunic—and put me in a cold punishment cell, right there in the unit. I sat there from February 3 until April 14, until the trial.
A “troika” tried us—a special-purpose court, and they gave me 10 years under Article 58-10—a Russian article for “anti-Soviet agitation,” and 25 years for “treason”—Article 51-A. They sent us to Chelyabinsk to a stone quarry.
V.O.: And what were you accused of?
S.A.: Since I had been in Austria, they gave me the article for “treason.” And “agitation” because I received literature and because we held OUN meetings.
In Chelyabinsk, I was in the stone quarry. And towards the fall, sometime in July or August (because the steamboats were still running), they sent us to Krasnoyarsk for transit and then by steamboat to Dudinka.
We sailed there for two weeks. At the transit point in the Krasnoyarsk Krai, they loaded a little bread. They were pulling five barges—four for men and one for women. They took enough bread to last for three days. The water they gave us to drink was straight from the Yenisei—there were pumps and iron barrels there, so the drinking water was pumped directly into them. We sailed for 2-3 days, and the bread ran out. They started making a kind of slurry—flour with that water. Dysentery broke out; the hold was divided into two halves—in one were the more or less healthy, and in the other half were the very sick people. And at every stop, every 2-3 days, they would bring 10-20 bodies upstairs. So, by the time we reached Dudinka, almost half of us were left, and those, as they say, were barely breathing.
In Dudinka, they fed us up a bit. And from Dudinka to Norilsk, there’s a narrow-gauge railway, 120 km long. They loaded us onto that narrow-gauge and took us to Norilsk. I ended up in the fourth special-regime Gorlag—“state special-regime camp.” That camp was located in the so-called eightieth quarter—that’s maybe 5-7 kilometers from Norilsk. There were solid two-story buildings there. They brought us there and took us to work at the so-called Gorstroy. We dug into that permafrost, laying foundations. There weren’t enough masons, but they needed to build. Everyone was without a specialty, so they took us to masonry courses. I got into a brigade where the foreman was a Vlasovite from Moscow named Voinov. At first, we were building houses, and then the so-called Medstroy opened. In the tundra, on bare ground, they began to dig the earth and lay the foundation for a new factory. I worked there almost until the end of my camp life.
And then there was the uprising. Our headquarters was at the fourth special-regime camp, but the main actions were where my cousin Petro Saranchuk was imprisoned, in the third hard-labor camp, under the mountain; there was a special camp there. They marched us past there to work, so you could see that they had raised a black flag, it fluttered there for a long time, about three months, until that punitive expedition arrived from Moscow on Beria’s orders. Then they surrounded and shelled the camp with crossfire, killing many, and after the shelling, they broke into the camp with tankettes and started shooting at the barracks. And there was a kind of self-defense group there—these were thieves who had sentences of a year or two. They were taken into that self-defense group, and they would drag the wounded outside the gate and finish them off, then load them up and take them to the foot of Mount Shmidta. There were special trenches there where they threw the bodies.
In 1955, a special commission came from Krasnoyarsk for a retrial, and they told all of us: “Don’t resist, confess how everything was, nothing will happen to you.” And we were released.
V.O.: Do you remember the date of your release?
S.A.: It was August 1955, the 12th, it’s all in my documents.
V.O.: And how was the basis for release formulated there? Was it rehabilitation or a reduction of sentence?
S.A.: They told me it was “conditional-parole release.” That’s what was written on those cards. Most of those from Western Ukraine were not given the right to return to their homeland. We were then taken back to Dudinka, brought to Krasnoyarsk on the same steamboat, and even given, as it was written on the card, a meager sum for travel expenses. But they told us that those from Western Ukraine should choose where they wanted to go—either to Donbas, or Dnipropetrovsk, or Kryvyi Rih—in short, they sent us to the mines, to the ore pits, 110-120 kilometers from the regional center, but just not to Western Ukraine.
I also want to say that my cousin, Petro Saranchuk, was on the Taishet-Lena Railroad, and when they brought them from the mainland to the Arctic, they were taken to our fourth camp, where they built tents—apparently, things weren’t quite ready in their third hard-labor camp. So we were together for about four more months.
Well, where was I to go? They wouldn’t let me go home, my parents were exiled to the Mykolaiv Oblast, and they were already deceased. I didn’t want to go to a collective farm. But I had a friend from the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. I went to his place while I looked for work. This is Apostolove Raion. And he knew I was already a mason. I said, “You know, I have to make my way somehow, what am I going to do on a collective farm?” His sister worked at the Petrovsky Plant. Through his sister, he got me a job at “Yuzhdomnaremont”—there’s such a place in Dnipropetrovsk. After smelting, the furnaces are stopped and repairs begin. Everything was falling apart there, my God, when I first went in and looked around… But I had to somehow get settled in the city. They agreed to hire me, gave me a certificate, I went to the passport office, and they issued me a passport. But I didn’t go to that plant. I was walking past that plant, and there, near the industrial technical college, was a notice that they needed masons, carpenters, plasterers—all kinds of construction specialties. I went to that OKS—“otdel kapitalnogo stroitelstva” (Department of Capital Construction), the head there was Aleksandr Sadovnikov, and he hired me.
They gave me a room in a student dormitory on Nohinska Street. I lived there for a year and decided to get married. The girl was from a village in the Dnipropetrovsk area, had also been in Germany, and had returned. She also had a brother and a younger sister. They lived in the Novomoskovsk area, where the brick factory is at the foot of the hill. Her mother worked in a kindergarten, but the girl needed to live somewhere, so she went to the city to work—the coking plant was being rebuilt then. Everything there was destroyed, so they were digging trenches. The plant later started operating, but there were no pipes, so when they let out the smoke—they were choking in those trenches. She lived in a dormitory and I lived in a dormitory. I say: “Sergey Abramovich, I need to get married, but where will I live when I do?” I told him about the girl, who also worked as a mason, and he says: “Let her transfer to us, we will give you a separate room in the dormitory, you won’t live with the boys.”
We got married on August 24, 1956, and I brought her to the dormitory. My wife’s name was Halia, and our daughter was born in 1959, we named her Olya. My daughter started growing up, and I wanted to have my own home. What is a dormitory—one room. That dormitory was four stories high—and one kitchen for the whole floor. I started walking around the city, looking to buy a small house. And they started pushing us out of this industrial technical college dormitory, because I had moved to a higher-paying job at the repair-and-construction office under the market administration. The head there was Markolin, Mikhail Oleksiiovych. Then the question arose that I needed to buy something. I didn’t have that kind of money, although we had saved a little. I walked and walked—for 1,750 rubles, I bought a piece of a ruin. In the first half lived Izia, a Jewish man, with his wife, and I bought something that was completely useless. Before that, an accountant, Lev Zelmanovich, had lived there. That house was built on a slope. The first half, facing the road, was okay, but the other half was in complete disrepair. That Zelmanovich went to the theater, but didn’t turn off the water; everything got flooded and collapsed. They called a commission, the commission found that the dwelling was uninhabitable, and they decided to sell it. So I bought that dilapidated building, counting on my own strength, that I was a mason and my wife was a mason. I bought it in March 1962. We started to build.
I laid the foundation right next to the existing house. And Izia says, “Let’s move back a bit, about 4 meters, so I have two meters and you have two meters.” I say, “Let’s do it.” So we laid the foundations. That Izia—he was a drunkard—at first started working, but then refused: “I’m not going to build anymore,” he says. Although the head of the administration helped him, because they were Jewish, and his father worked at the slag block factory, in the warehouse, he even brought him slate, he had materials to build with. So I then said, “Izia, since you’re refusing, I won’t step back two meters from that house, but as it is, I’ll step back one meter from your house and continue building.” And I started building separately. The old house was in the middle. We concreted the semi-basement, but then, to raise the walls, the old house was in the way. I started to demolish that house, and then commission after commission started coming—saying that I was building a two-story house. It got to the point that the district executive committee made a decision to demolish the entire house.
What to do? I had been working at the market administration for about eight years, they considered me a good worker, and the chief engineer Nosov went to the district executive committee to defend me. At the second meeting, they overturned that decision and left the semi-basement space for me as an outbuilding. But a case was already opened against me for unauthorized construction. I had a permit for major repairs, so I was building boldly. And that neighbor had one too, but he didn’t want to build. When a commission from the district executive committee comes and says: “You have broken the law, you are doing new construction. A major repair is replacing the floor, partitions, replacing the roof, but you demolished the old and are carrying out new construction. This falls under Article 199.” They assigned the case to one investigator, he delayed it for a long time, seeing that there was nothing to pin on me.
In 1959, I enrolled in the construction technical college, in the evening department. And then this whole saga began—the investigator would call me right out of my classes, I had to miss them, and I already had no time, because in the morning I go to work, work, after work I don’t go home but go to the college, and from the college I come home, turn on a 100-watt lamp and build with my wife.
I had receipts for the stone from the quarry, for all the materials, because I knew they were watching me. I was working at Sukhachivka, there was a market there. One time, just before reaching the city, some man asks me: “Where do you work?” — There and there. — “And what do you do there?” — This and that. And he started questioning me about Petro Saranchuk: “Who is Petro, and how did you study together?” I say that Petro and I parted ways in 1942, and you’re asking me now how he is and what he’s doing. I know he’s in prison, but for what—how would I know? He arranged another meeting with me, but I didn’t show up again.
V.O.: What year was it that they asked you about Petro Saranchuk?
S.A.: It was 1958-59. So he didn’t find out anything from me. I continued building. Then that investigator refuses to handle my case and transfers it to Sulgakov, a senior lieutenant. He twisted and turned it, twisted and turned it, until he twisted it to the point where I was charged under that article and summoned to court. Before that, to be honest, a commission came several times and took all the documents I had for building materials: documents for a thousand slag blocks, for the carpentry from a Finnish house—windows, doors, for cement—for everything I had receipts for, I had documentation. After the investigation ended, that Sulgakov tells me: “You were still lucky: if we had found 120 rubles’ worth of illegally acquired materials, you would have gotten another sentence and everything would have been confiscated.”
They sent the case to court. The neighbors came to the trial to defend me, they all said how we worked, that we didn’t use anyone else’s labor, that no one helped us because we had no relatives here, we did everything with our own hands. The court delivered the verdict: six months of probation with a 25% deduction from my salary and confiscation of all that property. After the trial, I go up to the judge and ask: “Listen, what kind of confiscation is this? The house has no floor, it’s not plastered, it’s an unfinished construction, and you are confiscating it. Is it mine now or not? What should I do next, what to do with it?” She says: “Keep building as you were building.” I finished that construction, and they didn’t bother me anymore. But I left those four meters that were unfinished. Later, after about 4-5 years, I quietly finished that construction, and we still live there to this day.
V.O.: And over the course of your life, were there any other claims against you, persecution, or prohibitions related to the fact that you had been imprisoned?
S.A.: They didn’t bother me later. They only latched onto me for that construction. Their goal was to imprison me again. Just like it was with Petro Saranchuk in Mykolaiv.
V.O.: Yes, yes, they set that up for him and imprisoned him.
S.A.: If you spoke with him, you know this story. They planted a few concrete posts on him, or something… He served 28 and a half years. They wanted to do the same thing to me, but I was very cautious, I didn’t take anything from anywhere, only what was officially issued. At a hotel, they were adding a third floor and dismantling the second, and there were good boards there. I had those issued to me as well. I still have those documents. They have all been checked by the prosecutor’s office.
V.O.: Have you been rehabilitated or not?
S.A.: I have been rehabilitated. When I was released, they only gave me a certificate. And when that rehabilitation wave started in 1991, I had nothing. I tried through the military commissariats because I was arrested in the army. But nobody could give me anything because I had forgotten the military unit number. Then I wrote a letter to the magazine “Chelovek i Zakon” (Man and Law). And I also had a countryman with whom I served. He lived in the Kherson Oblast. I wrote him a letter, he knew the field post office number, I wrote a letter to that field post office, they forwarded it to the Moscow general prosecutor’s office, and there they established that I was indeed there and there, convicted for this and that. And I received rehabilitation from the Moscow prosecutor’s office. That’s how I got lucky. There, they mistakenly wrote that I was from 1924, but I’m from 1926, I still have a birth certificate from 1942. I sent it again to the general prosecutor’s office, and from there they sent me a photocopy of my military record book. It says that I “participated in combat.” Indeed, in April 1945, there was still fighting; the war didn’t end on May 9. It ended much later. They took us into a reserve regiment and threw us at disarming those military groups—UFA, retreating SS units. They were passing through Austria. I was 137 kilometers from Vienna, in the town of Gmünd, and the Germans were about 100-120 kilometers away. They were all following that route, and we were thrown against them. That’s why it was written in my military record book that I “participated in combat.” They sent me a photocopy of my military record book, I went to the district military commissariat, from there they sent it to the regional military commissariat, everything was confirmed, and I was recognized as a combat veteran and given an identification card.
V.O.: Now you are obviously retired, or do you still work?
S.A.: I worked all the time, but not since I retired. 8 years at the technical college, 8 years at the market administration, and from 1967 at the factory that they call the “bed factory” here, but it was called the Medical Equipment Plant. I finished the technical college, went to the repair-and-construction office, repaired housing. But they gave me a lot of projects there, and didn’t write off the materials. So my wife’s brother says: “At our factory, they imprisoned the foreman and we need a new one.” Skokin was the foreman there. “Come join us,” he says. Here I was getting 120 rubles, and there 100. But at the office, I was responsible for the materials. So to avoid trouble, I went to the factory and worked there for 19 years, right up to my retirement, until 1986.
V.O.: And then came “perestroika.” It was interesting to hear that you head the oblast’s Brotherhood of UPA Soldiers. Please tell us how you carried out perestroika here, achieved independence, and when the Brotherhood was founded.
S.A.: In 1989, I joined Rukh—Ivan Ivanovych Shulyk is here. I met two students—Kudelia and Khobot. I met them because I joined the KUN—the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. In 1992, I was elected head of the KUN. In 1993, we organized the Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons and the Brotherhood of UPA Soldiers—here, in Kryvyi Rih, in Dniprodzerzhynsk, in Pershotravensk. Since then, I have been the head of the Brotherhood and at the same time a member of the regional board of the KUN.
V.O.: That was Mr. Stepan Andrushkiv. Recorded by Vasyl Ovsiienko on April 3, 2001, at the home of Mr. Vasyl Siryi in Sicheslav.
In the photo by V. Ovsiienko: Stepan Andrushkiv, April 3, 2001.