An interview with Oleksa Krestianov about IVAN HRYHOROVYCH SOKOLIUK
V.V. Ovsiienko: On April 8, 2001, Oleksii Krestianov had a conversation with Ivan Hryhorovych Sokoliuk, who was repressed through punitive psychiatry. The conversation lasted about thirty minutes. Sokoliuk later came up to Bushtarenko and me but did not want to say anything for the record. Here is what Mr. Krestianov said about him on April 8, 2001, in the city of Nikopol.
O. Krestianov: Oleksii Krestianov speaking about Ivan Hryhorovych Sokoliuk. Ivan Hryhorovych Sokoliuk was born on May 9, 1932, in the Iziaslav Raion of Khmelnytskyi Oblast. I don’t remember the village. He is a man who ended up here after the war. Initially, he was recruited—back then, there were recruitment drives for various construction projects—and he was recruited to Kharkiv Oblast. He lived directly in the city of Kharkiv, worked in construction, and began to write some poetry. Well, you can imagine the kind of poems someone with a seventh-grade education would write, but the content of these poems—he read one of them to me—boiled down to one thing: that Lenin’s teachings were good, but the current leaders had twisted them and were doing things wrong. In connection with this, he was arrested and taken to a psychiatric hospital. In the Kharkiv psychiatric hospital, he spent about two weeks with the “violent” patients and then was among the regular mentally ill patients. He told me that he wasn't injected with drugs or beaten, but he was kept in isolation. He was held from the end of 1953—this was already after Stalin's death—until about the beginning of summer 1954. He himself didn’t even remember the exact date he was released, sometime in June 1954, and only into the custody of his sister. His older sister came to Kharkiv after learning he was there, wrote the necessary request, perhaps a commitment that she would look after him or something, and took him into her custody. In short, he was released to his sister.
After that, he worked in the Donbas and ended up in Nikopol in the early 1970s. In Nikopol, he worked at the Southern Pipe Plant. And so, in the second half of the 1970s, around 1977-1978, he slowly started writing letters to Moscow about Leonid Ilyich, in which he asked the Politburo leadership—he addressed them directly to the Politburo—to take measures to replace that old man, Leonid Ilyich. He simply wrote: “Aren’t you ashamed? You’re walking him around by the arm; he can barely stand on his own two feet. Can’t you find a normal, young, healthy, energetic, and competent man to replace him?” And he wrote quite a few such letters, but they all ended up with the Nikopol KGB. Here, he was summoned and given a pile of brochures, including Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s “Following Lenin’s Course,” and told to read them. “Take these, read them, study them—and then we’ll talk with you. Maybe then you’ll understand everything.” But he replied, “What are you talking about! Read such nonsense? You read it yourselves; I already know what’s written in there.” He refused to read them, and soon after, he was arrested and sent to Iren in Dnipropetrovsk, where he spent half a year. This was—I clarified it today—in 1980, from early spring to mid-summer. He was arrested and held there for this. I later remembered that I had just transferred from the Pipe Plant to Directorate 109 to work in Ordzhonikidze, building an ore-dressing plant, and at that time, when we would go there by bus, I saw a KGB agent walking with him. So, they locked him up there in 1980.
Sokoliuk was there for six months. I already mentioned he has depression. Well, you just saw for yourselves. He refused to talk; he barely even wanted to talk to me. He says, why reminisce, this and that, you know, God sees everything. He attributed everything to God. You saw for yourselves that he still has depression to this day. The psychotropic substances they constantly injected him with had their effect. After six months, he was released, practically a cripple. But because he didn’t drink vodka, didn’t smoke, went running, and was involved in sports before that, his endurance was much higher than that of other inmates who abused, say, alcohol or something else, because that just compounds the effect.
This Ivan Sokoliuk whom you saw is an ordinary man; he doesn't have much of an education—as I said, seven grades—but he expressed dissatisfaction with that government. If this had happened in a normal country, they might or might not have paid attention, but at least they wouldn’t have repressed him for telling the truth that, indeed, the head of state could barely walk or stay on his feet. When Chernenko came after Brezhnev and said, “I will give all my strength to build communism,” but he had no strength left—they had to support him by the arms just like Leonid Ilyich—Sokoliuk was writing the truth. Simple people like this Ivan Hryhorovych—he's a hard worker, and as I say, he’s not involved in any drinking sprees or anything, but there you have it: he just told the truth, and they locked him up. There, in Dnipropetrovsk, he was, of course, subjected to cruel tortures. But whether someone tipped him off or he figured it out himself—since it wasn't his first time in a psychiatric hospital—he probably gave in earlier, started showing that he was no longer in control of himself, like, say, losing control of his bodily functions and so on. And that was the main sign: once a person starts losing control of their bodily functions, that’s it, it means they are not mentally in control, their nervous system is already destroyed or semi-destroyed. Then, if there’s someone to release them to, they hand them over to their relatives’ custody.
In short, he was discharged from the hospital, and he then lived in a dormitory in Nikopol for over a year without working. He received a one-room apartment only later, after working for a long time in the repair and construction workshop.
He didn’t want to speak for the record, although I pleaded with him, saying, “Ivan, come on, let the man at least see that you are alive, that you are not some fiction or fantasy.” But he keeps going on to me about God, about how God will bring justice...
V.V. Ovsiienko: So what denomination does he belong to now?
O. Krestianov: He’s with the Evangelical Pentecostal Christians. They are close-knit; they called each other on the phone and gave me his number; otherwise, we wouldn't have found him.
V.V. Ovsiienko: Do you know his address?
O. Krestianov: I don’t know his address. I only know his phone number. But I can find out if it’s necessary. He lives somewhere nearby because he arrived very quickly—they just told him, and he was here.
V.V. Ovsiienko: Alright, thank you.
O. Krestianov: Oh, there’s nothing to thank me for, for God’s sake. If the man had told his own story... but you see how much the psychotropic drugs slow people down. You saw that Ishchenko has similar deviations as well. And you saw Davydenko for yourselves. That’s psychotropic drugs for you. Even though people say, “So what, he spent some time in a psych ward, they held him for a bit.” He spent time there, they held him, but he’s not the same person anymore.
V.V. Ovsiienko: This was Oleksii Krestianov talking about Ivan Hryhorovych Sokoliuk on the street near the House of Culture in the city of Nikopol. Recorded by Vasyl Ovsiienko on April 8, 2001.