An Interview with Mykola Kindratovych P O L I S H C H U K
(With corrections by M. Polishchuk dated March 29, 2009)
V.V. Ovsiienko: June 22, 2002, Mykola Kindratovych Polishchuk. The recording is being made by Vasyl Ovsiienko at his home. Mr. Mykola Polishchuk is from Bila Tserkva, Kyiv Oblast, 64/55 Sholom Aleichem Street, Apartment 35, postal code 09117.
M.K. Polishchuk: Telephone 39-39-74.
M.P.: I, Mykola Kindratovych Polishchuk, was born on December 20, 1930, in the village of Biliivka, Volodarskyi Raion, Kyiv Oblast. Until recently, when dealing with the authorities, I concealed my place of birth because my maternal grandfather, Tsiruk Dorofii Herasymovych, had been dekulakized. Knowing that the descendants of kulaks were treated very mercilessly, I kept this hidden. It wasnt until later, in conversations with people I trusted more, that I would say that my father was a live-in son-in-law for Dorofii Tsiruk and that I was born there, in Biliivka. But on Malanka, on the Bountiful Eve of 1932, Dorofii Herasymovych Tsiruk was dekulakized. They drove everyone out of the house and warned that if anyone let them in to warm up, that person would be dekulakized too. So my mother wrapped me in an old homespun coat, in old rags, and carried me to her father-in-laws house across a field about a kilometer and a half away. And thats why I always stated that I was born in Haivoron, grew up in Haivoron, and went to school in Haivoron—that is, in my fathers house, the house of Kindrat Matviyovych Polishchuk. I dont know my distant ancestry because our lives were so fractured. It was only after my first imprisonment in 1979 that I traveled to Uzbekistan to visit my uncle, my fathers own brother, Hryhorii Matviyovych Polishchuk. He lived about 70 kilometers south of Tashkent, near the town of Almazyk. So I went there to see my uncle. And it was from my uncle that I learned that my distant ancestor, in the mid-19th century, had been traded by Count Rzewucki for a dog in Polissia.
V.O.: How do you spell Rzewucki?
M.P.: Rzewucki, Count Rzewucki. And when he brought him to Haivoron, he forbade him from using his own surname, and since he had brought him from Polissia, he gave him the surname Polishchuk. So that’s my father’s side. As for my mothers father, he had a huge family. He had a family of 14 souls in ‘22, and he was given 14 desiatynas of land, one desiatyna per soul. And from that position, my grandfather worked his way up to become a “kulak.” Ten years later he was dekulakized, even though he gave his horses to the collective farm, he gave his equipment, he gave his sheep—the only thing he didn’t give up was his cow, because his grandson needed milk. The older children—he had mostly daughters—were already married. But, based on the definition of a kulak, my grandfather wasn’t one, because a kulak was a peasant who had a farm too large to work by himself and who used hired labor. Grandfather Dorokhtei did not use hired labor. What’s more, his daughters, who were of marriageable age, earned money for their dowries by working for wealthy peasants. My mother was among them, working for the Rosinskis and the Sidletskis in the village of Biliivka. My mother never spent a single day in school, and neither did my aunts. From a very young age, they worked. From the age of five, there was a river about a kilometer away—I don’t know its name, it’s a tributary of the Berezianka, which flows into the Ros river near the village of Berezna, and this little river flows into the Berezianka—well, someone older would carry a washtub on their shoulders to that river, along with a bucket and food for the little ones, there were other small children there too. A hole was dug for the washtub, they brought water from the river, the ducklings would splash around in it, and the children watched to make sure that birds of prey, kites, didnt steal them. They played there from early morning until late in the evening. They were given a few eggs, some milk, something for the children to eat. So the whole family was like that, they didnt use hired labor, but they dekulakized my grandfather on Malanka in ‘32. At the age of seventy-one, Grandfather Dorokhtei was forced to get a job at the “Leninska Kuznia” factory. My mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Sanka, told me about this. She passed away late last April, we had the memorial dinner for the one-year anniversary on April 27th. My aunt told me how our own people, not Muscovites, were even selling my embroidered little shirts. This Anan Avramchuk was shaking the little shirts, shouting, “Buy the kulaks things, buy the kulaks things.” Sometime after that, my mother went to live with her father-in-law, Matvii Yakovych Polishchuk.
My grandfather, my fathers father, was a blacksmith and had his own forge. I know where the forge stood. But when collectivization began, the forge was taken by the collective farm. Grandfather didnt want to work on the collective farm he found work somewhere in Skvyra. My father didnt want to work on the collective farm either.
In 1933, very, very many people died in our village. The village of Haivoron is divided into two parts by the Berezianka River. The left bank has maybe a quarter of the village, and from the right bank of Haivoron, 470 souls were taken to the cemetery. I heard about this. I was still quite young, and my mother was afraid to tell me about it. My mother didnt tell me about the famine. It was my grandmother, Oleksandra, who told me about the famine, but she couldnt say how many died she didnt know. She was completely illiterate she was orphaned at the age of eight and grew up in a priests house. I first heard the number of dead from Tanas Demianovych Tokarenko. He was a land surveyor, and I was in the same class as his son. His son still lives in Bila Tserkva, his older daughter lives there too, in Tanas Tokarenkos yard, and his youngest daughter, my sisters age, lives in Kyiv on Chornobylska Street. So it was from Tanas Demianovych Tokarenko that I first heard how many people died on this side of the river.
V.O.: What part of the village was that, do you think, what percentage?
M.P.: I cant even begin to guess.
V.O.: A third of my village died, 346 people.
M.P.: No less in ours, either. I heard it a second time, maybe around 1950. I was working on the collective farm after school, and I had to spend a long night at the mill. I was dozing on some sacks, and the men—the miller was Hryhor Zaiets, what was his surname? Zaiets was his nickname in the village, but I cant recall his surname... Baybarza. And they were talking among themselves, and I overheard it by chance. The last time I heard the number, it wasnt just a number. Our field brigade leader, not a relative of mine, but also named Polishchuk, Vasyl Sylovych, was telling us as we were stacking straw in Pustokha. By the way, Pustokha is a field now, but there used to be many houses there from the village of Biliivka, all the way to the road from Skvyra to Volodarka, between Antoniv and Haivoron. Theres nothing there at all now, just a field, but I remember there were orchards, there were the ruined remains of ovens where the houses had stood. I remember this very well because I used to go to those orchards to “graze.” As soon as the cherries were ripe, Id go there to pick them. So, it was in this place that we were stacking straw, and when it rained, Vasyl Sylovych couldnt let us go because the sun came out, and as soon as it dried a bit we could get back to work. So I prodded him a little to talk, and he, starting from the very edge of the village, from the very last house, began to name them: here was a house, such-and-such people lived here—they all died, to the last one. Well, I wrote and wrote it down and came to the same number. So Vasyl Sylovych confirmed this somewhere around ‘61 or ‘62. He even named the houses and how many people had lived in them.
From our village, two women were taken to the cemetery alive. I know both of these women, I know them well. One was Yaryna Kremenetska, I dont know her patronymic, she was nicknamed Paslunka, she was also from a dekulakized family. They took her to the cemetery because the man who was collecting the bodies was hungry and said, “If you dont die today, youll die tomorrow. I have to take you away sooner or later, and Im hungry now, theyll give me a ladle of thin gruel for it.” So he took Yaryna, carried her out to the cart she was screaming, but it did her no good. He took her to the cemetery and threw her into this common pit. Somehow, she got out of that pit, Baba Yaryna, and the last time I saw Baba Yaryna, Paslunka, was in seventy-two. I had just gotten an apartment then, it was practically empty. I was visiting the village and some people asked me to help Baba Yaryna get to confession in Bila Tserkva, at the Church of Mary Magdalene in Zarichchia. I helped Baba Yaryna come here, and that was the last time I saw her. This woman lived for about forty more years after crawling out of that grave.
The second woman was Marta Dobrydnyk, Sylovna I believe, as she was the sister of that brigade leader, Vasyl Sylovych Polishchuk. She married an activist from the village of Antoniv in the Skvyra Raion his name was Dobrydnyk, and he was mentally ill. They had one daughter, and the daughter is still alive, I think, somewhere in the Fastiv Raion. Marta Sylivna Dobrydnyk lived for another fifty years or so after that. She died in the Fastiv Raion while living with her daughter, Halyna Dobrydnyk—that was her maiden name, Dobrydnyk—and the daughter brought her body back to our village, she is buried in our cemetery.
V.O.: In which village, Haivoron?
M.P.: In Haivoron, she’s buried in the village of Haivoron. I know the place in Haivoron where there was a house where a mother ate her own child—her own! There were many cases of people eating corpses, but this case of a mother eating her own child, I know of only one. And I know where that house was.
After it became freer to speak about this, I submitted a similar account to Literaturna Ukraina, and Literaturna Ukraina published it. I think that was in 1989.
In Bila Tserkva, on Stakhanivska Street, there lives a woman two years older than me. Her maiden name was Hanna Kyrylivna Virych, I don’t know her current name. After the Soviet collapsed, her father, Kyrylo Virych, was still alive, he was already 91. I asked her to get information from her father about how many people had died in 1933 on the left bank of the Berezianka. She promised she would, and she went and asked her father to tell her about it. Her father refused. He said that the people, our fellow villagers, who now hold high positions, were the ones involved in that plunder, and it was their fault that this great tragedy occurred. He wasnt afraid for himself anymore, but he was afraid for his descendants and so he named no one, not a single person. I think he was probably afraid of Volodymyr Ilarionovych Shynkaruk. Volodymyr Ilarionovych Shynkaruk was a history professor in Kyiv. Hes probably still alive, hes about three years older than me. I went to the same class as his daughter, Zoya. (Volodymyr Ilarionovych Shynkaruk (1928–2001) was a Marxist philosopher, professor, and a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (from 1978), originally from the village of Haivoron in the Kyiv region. He graduated from Kyiv University, where he became a professor in 1965, later dean of the philosophy faculty, and from 1968—director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, editor-in-chief of the journal “Filosofska Dumka” [Philosophical Thought] (from 1969), vice-president of the Philosophical Society of the USSR and head of its Ukrainian branch. His works dealt with questions of Marxist logic, Soviet humanism, and analyses of contemporary social development in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, as well as the history of philosophy. – Wikipedia). And his father was supposedly the first secretary of the Volodarka Raion Party Committee at the time. That’s what I think, that Kyrylo Virych was afraid of him specifically. Well, I dont think that Shynkaruk could have done anything serious at that point—I dont believe that, but this is just my guess, Hanna Kyrylivna didnt tell me this.
So, 1933. Grandfather Matvii, to somehow save us from starvation, brought a pud of vetch from Skvyra. But we were no longer in the village. My mother had sent me to my fathers sister. She was in Horobiivka, working at the MTS (Machine and Tractor Station), and her husband was a cook at the MTS. They would pass me a small bowl through the window so no one would see them feeding some kulak descendant. So, on the evening my grandfather brought that vetch, he was strangled. And, as I was told, our close relative, Hryhor Martseniuk, strangled him. I dont recall his patronymic. Thats what I was told. I never spoke with Hryhor Martseniuk about this. I was on good terms with his children. His older son was my age, we went to school together, but he died early. Oleksandr is in Bila Tserkva now, he lives not far from me. I don’t talk to him.
And so, in 1934, during the harvest, my father came from Skvyra to reap the rye in our garden. The year 33 had been a great scare, so he had to prepare for the next winter. And my father didnt let my mother go to work at the collective farm—well reap the rye, and then you can go to work. We reaped the rye, came home in the evening, and lay down to rest. And then the village “comrades” arrived—Oleksandr Furmanenko, Hryhor Osadchuk, Vasyl Kyrylovych Kosiuk, and Hryhorii Petrovych Bondar. Hryhorii Petrovych Bondar also confirmed this somewhere around ‘62. So, they took my father and mother to the “kholodna” (cold cell), and Oleksandr Furmanenko conducted a search, looking for what he needed in the chests and took some things. My mother later told me what he took. There were about eleven such offenders. The next morning, they gave my father a scythe, my mother a rake and binding ropes, and Hryhorii Petrovych Bondar, a Komsomol member, marched these people, these offenders, under guard to the field. He marched them to the collective farm field under guard. I emphasize that it was to the collective farm field because later, when I got into some trouble in my adult years and the Deputy Prosecutor of Kyiv Oblast, Rusanov, came to investigate my conflict, I, in my defense against the village activists, mentioned this incident. The secretary of the party organization, Kalen Ivanovych Parubchenko, I think—he was the secretary of the party organization and the school director—really seized on that careless word of mine, that my parents were marched under guard to the collective farm field.
V.O.: You mean, with weapons, right?
M.P.: Well, yes, with weapons.
V.O.: Ill interrupt again. You said your grandfather was strangled—for that vetch, right?
M.P.: For that vetch. But hunger drove them to it. So for several days, my father, mother, and a dozen or so other people were marched to the fields. They were given lunch and dinner there, and then locked up again in the “kholodna.” And while they were being marched to work, our neighbor, Sydir Shevchuk, was given the task of taking the rye from our garden and bringing it to the “red threshing floor.” Sydir carried out this order—he took the rye, brought it to the “red threshing floor,” where they threshed it with a machine, burned the straw in the steam engine, and took the grain for the collective farm. After that, they released both my father and my mother.
I dont remember any other notable incidents being told to me after that. In 1936 my sister was born, Hanna Kindrativna Polishchuk, married name Shapoval, she lives in Bilychi, at 22 Marshak Street. My father refused to go to work on the collective farm, but my mother was a very obedient slave on the collective farm. She was terrified of the authorities, and so when I went to the first grade in 1938, my mother had a fortune-teller cast a spell for me, and the fortune-teller told her to watch me very carefully, because a great misfortune would happen. And no matter how they watched me, it was half a kilometer to the pond—God forbid I go there for a splash—they wouldn’t even let me climb a plum tree to pick a berry, they wouldn’t let me climb the fence. And my parents protected me from this, only the children of the activists constantly harassed me. One-on-one, I could successfully defend myself, but against a group, there was no defense. And so they beat me up everywhere. And my mother would add: “If you see them, run away from them, avoid them.” Well, that wasnt my way—I didnt run.
V.O.: Not in your nature?
M.P.: Not in my nature. And so, in the first grade, a group of them beat me very badly. It was already spring—probably in March—and the doctors couldnt determine the cause of my illness. It was only after I started to bend over that a completely illiterate woman, to whom my mother showed me—that woman diagnosed that I had been crippled. Then my mother went back to the doctors. I was laid up on the stove ledge for maybe ten months before they found a place where I could be treated. Before the war, they placed me in the childrens tuberculosis sanatorium in Vasylkiv. They put me in a plaster trough there. Since it was unbearable to lie in this trough, I would squirm, so they tied me to the bed. Still, Id put my hands under the apron and tear at it, so they made me a plaster vest. Worms started to breed under this plaster vest—it was terrible torture. They took the plaster vest off me in Biliivka—when the war was already going on. My mother brought me to her father, my grandfather, because she was afraid to remain in her husbands village. My mother and grandfather took me from Vasylkiv on the day the Germans took Kyiv. There were about fifteen of us children like that left, and they took me on that day.
Perhaps a very interesting point. During the war, the harvest was very good, but it rained so much during harvest time that people didnt know how to gather it. The Germans let people have the harvest in exchange for the third sheaf, and people gathered everything. There was a stack of grain in every yard. When it froze in the winter, you could hear flails thumping all over the village—people were threshing. And when the Germans began to confiscate the grain in the spring, they didnt take it like the Bolsheviks did. They would look at the size of the family and leave a pud of grain per person until the next harvest, and the rest, whoever had more, they took. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, took everything. And here, perhaps, it would be appropriate to recall Baba Oleksandra, from whom I first heard about the famine in ‘33. I already mentioned that she was orphaned at eight and grew up in a priests family. So, in 22, Baba Oleksandra was given a piece of land, and she and her husband Havrylo built a tiny little hut. I was in that hut many times because it was sold to the man who helped with the dekulakization—Serhii Kysliuk, I cant name his patronymic, but I was in the same class as his eldest son, Vasyl. He later had two more sons, Kostiantyn, who married and went to live with his in-laws in Marmuliivka, Volodarskyi Raion, and the youngest son Mykola—he married and stayed on this homestead I think he has passed away already. Both the eldest and the youngest loved their vodka—and vodka took them both.
So, about Baba Oleksandra Hontaruk. Her husband died of starvation in 1932, either in November or perhaps December. She was left with three small children. Sometime in March, our own Haivoron “servants of the people” came to her, the same ones I already named—Vasyl Kyrylovych Kosiuk, who poked around the yard with a steel spear, Hryhor Osadchuk, and someone else, but I dont know the others. Baba Oleksandra may have named others, but I couldnt remember them. But she cursed Osadchuk all the time—that I cannot forget. So, at Baba Oleksandra’s, they found hidden bread—wheat grain in a pot in the chimney. They took the grain and beat Oleksandra. No matter how much she begged them to have pity on her children, they beat her, saying, “You hid it, you bitch, you hid bread from the Soviet authorities, hid it!” And so they beat her and took that grain—and her children died in 1933, all three of them. Baba Oleksandra left the village for some time. Ive known Baba Oleksandra since about ‘42—she helped my mother, and lived with us, because she had no home. Her house, which she had built with her husband, had three tiny little windows smaller than a television screen—and this woman was supposedly dekulakized because she didnt want to join the collective farm. It was this Baba Oleksandra who told me about her grief and about the famine in 33.
In 43, when the Germans were driven out of the village, I went to the third grade sometime in March.
V.O.: Were the Germans driven from your area in 1943?
M.P.: Ah, no, no, ‘44. My father, I think, crossed the Dnipro somewhere in December of 43, so it must have been ‘44. I misspoke. So I went to the third grade, in `chuni`—do you know what those are?
V.O.: I do, why wouldnt I?
M.P.: They are galoshes glued together from automobile tire tubes. Felt boots, sewn from old coats. And in some imported greatcoat, because it was green. The Soviet ones were gray, but this one was green. So, in 1948 I finished seven grades of the Haivoron seven-year school. I was an average student, because there wasnt the opportunity. There was one or two textbooks per class, and you had to constantly go around—doing one set of lessons with one person, another set with another. But I really wanted to claw my way out of that situation. My mothers situation did not suit me at all. And in the last ten days of August, I walked to Skvyra and on that same day passed all the exams for the Skvyra Agricultural Technical College, to become an agronomist. But an agronomist I did not become—it didnt work out because I caught a cold. I used to walk barefoot, and that was the end of my studies. In the spring, I went and took my certificate, and it wasnt until 1952 that I left for Donbas, enrolled in an evening school there, and worked at the Kirov Plant.
But I need to take a small step back because I missed a very important detail from my mothers life. When I was put in the hospital in Vasylkiv, my sister was about three years old she was in kindergarten. The nanny was washing the windows, standing on a stool, and for some reason the child came up and tugged at her skirt. The nanny jumped down and broke the childs leg. Because of this turn of events, in 1940 my mother was 11 `trudodni` [workday units] short of the established minimum. Because my father refused to work on the collective farm, and my mother didnt make the required minimum `trudodni`, the household of Kindrat Matviyovych Polishchuk was excluded from the collective farm and subjected to individual-farmer taxes—which meant all taxes were twice as high. They took away our garden, leaving only a path to the road, and sowed millet in the garden. They warned us: If even one of your chickens is found in the millet, youll have to compensate for the difference between the harvest we planned and the one we gather. Because of this, my mother didnt have a single chicken. In 1941, about a month before the war, all our property was seized for non-payment of taxes, including the house, down to the last bedsheet. If the war hadnt started, we would have been without our home, my grandfathers home, once again.
I also missed one very important detail—the famine in 1947. In 47, I ate potatoes that the peasants had grown in 1941. There is no mistake here. Ill explain. Back then, when the Germans were confiscating surplus grain, our people didnt open their potato clamps so as not to give the potatoes to the Germans. And so those potatoes remained. The famine forced them to remember these potatoes, because people were eating exclusively lambs quarters, linden leaves, things like that, living on foraged food. And when people remembered those potatoes, they opened one clamp, and of course, there were no potatoes inside, but rather something like pancakes there was starch, wrapped in potato skins. The stench was as if all the outhouses in the village had been opened. But they got these potatoes out, took every last one, cleaned off the skins, spread them on cloths in the sun to dry and air out, and then they pounded this starch in mortars. And that was a delicacy—the porridge was tasty, and they made all sorts of things from it. But only after it had aired out and dried.
V.O.: Perhaps they were called matorzhenyky?
M.P.: No, those were potatoes. Matorzhenyky were made from last years frozen potatoes, those that were missed in the rows and found in the spring when digging the garden. They were frozen, rotten, and they stank too, and they were also cleaned, but matorzhenyky were from those potatoes. They made the matorzhenyky from them right away.
V.O.: A different recipe, as bitter as it is to say.
M.P.: Yes, yes, a completely different one, and a completely different product. This product had been sitting from 1941 to 1947. So, after I couldnt study in Skvyra, I began my working life on the collective farm as a gardeners apprentice, under Tomasz-Khoma Havrylovych. (This mans last name was Blyndaruk. Probably from the German word: “blind”—sightless. His first name was Tomasz, and thats what he was called in the village. But the village leadership called him Khoma. They also wrote “Khoma” in the timesheets. – Note by M. Polishchuk.) It was in Tomasz-Khoma Havrylovychs yard that the house stood where the mother ate her child. His son lives in that yard now—he had one son, and an older daughter. And this son still lives there. My duties included keeping a record of peoples work. People worked in three places, so I had to run around, especially in the afternoon, measuring how much the women had weeded, how much someone had cultivated, harrowed, and so on. They paid me 0.75 trudodni as a gardeners apprentice.
The next year I was a milk recorder at the dairy farm, and in all my life, there was no worse job than being a milk recorder—not because the work was physically hard, but because I never had time to sleep. They milked the cows four times a day back then. We had to cull the cows, to bring in better ones and send the low-producers for meat. So, they started milking at four in the morning until six, and I had to record the milk from each cow separately. By six oclock, I had to take this milk to the separator, pick up the skimmed milk, and deliver it to the pig farm, for the piglets, the calves, and then I was free. At ten oclock they started milking again, until twelve. Again, I had to record everything, take it to the separator, it off, bring back the skim milk. At four in the afternoon, they started milking again, until six oclock in the evening. And in the evening, the same thing—they milked until ten oclock, but this milk, from the third milking, I didnt take to the separator, but I did take the daytime milk. When they finished milking at midnight, there was nowhere to take it. I would sleep right there at the farm, in the straw, because at four in the morning I had to be recording milk again. My eyes were swollen shut.
I was fired from this cushy job—fired because I embarked on a criminal path. It so happened that one time after a rain, a man who transported cream to the butter factory in Volodarka and I were carrying a can of cream. This man hadnt closed the lid properly, the can opened, and we spilled about ten liters of cream. When the milkmaid saw it—it was the end of the month—she was in tears, she couldnt say a word: What am I going to do now? How will I cover this? There was no one to buy more from and no money to buy it with. Well, I took a risk, thinking, I’m not just anyone—I’m the recorder. I told her I would cover it for her with milk. I immediately skimmed off maybe twenty liters of the milk I had brought. I returned to the farm and immediately made a correction in the logbook. If only it had been written in pencil—but it was written in pen. And the farm manager, Omelko Kysliuk, discovered it and immediately reported it to the accountant, Fedir Zakharovych Kysliuk. And he was very angry with me because I was a pretty good artist. By the way, when I was in the third grade, I drew a portrait of Stalin, and it hung in the seventh-grade classroom for several years until printed portraits appeared. For that, I got to go to the movies for free—they would give me a few meters of blank film, I was supposed to draw something, write something, and then they would project it onto the screen before the film. Well, I had written something about this accountant, and this accountant almost beat me up. But since I wasnt afraid, he didnt dare hit me. The zootechnician, Ivan Stepanovych Melnyk, came to my defense—he was a live-in son-in-law in Haivoron. He always spoke very well at meetings and defended me very actively, saying that this was not such a major criminal offense that anything could be made of it.
But they removed me from that job, and I started doing various jobs on the collective farm. I felt incomparably better doing different jobs, because I was no stranger to a spade or a pitchfork. And that summer, my friend and classmate, who worked in Donbas at the Kirov Plant as a train assembler, returned on leave. He convinced me that the work I was doing on the collective farm was much harder than what he, a big, healthy guy, was doing there on the railroad. All he had to do was connect two or three cars, whistle to the engineer, wave a lantern at night or a flag during the day—and off they went. He hadnt gone there alone either his brother, also a friend of mine, now lives in the village of Bloshchyntsi, Bila Tserkva Raion, thats Ivan Semenovych Ilchenko, born in 1928… And my friend Mykola Semenovych Ivchenko, his younger brother, who worked with him in Makiivka, persuaded me to go with him and work there. And he would help me get a job, because he already had experience there. And I went with him.
V.O.: And what year was that?
M.P.: That was in ‘52, in the summer. When I got there, my idea of a factory was that if theres a smokestack, its a factory. Because we had gone on an excursion to Horodyshche, to the sugar factory, and there I saw a small steam engine and a smokestack for the first time—that was a factory. We arrived in Makiivka—and there was a forest of smokestacks. So I asked this Mykola, “Mykola, which factory do you work in?” “The one were walking towards.” And this factory was seven kilometers long and about two kilometers wide. We were walking along the railway tracks. And here were four rolling mills, two open-hearth furnace shops, and from each open-hearth furnace and from each furnace—a smokestack, a smokestack, a smokestack. There was a forest of smokestacks, and I couldnt make any sense of it. And for a long time, I couldnt understand...
But we arrived in Donbas, and I lived in his room. There were four of them living there, there was always a spare bed, and when there wasnt, I slept in the same bed with him. But it was impossible for me to get a job—I couldnt pass the medical commission anywhere. No matter how much I explained that I had done much harder work on the collective farm, it convinced no one—pass the surgical exam. I couldnt pass, and the Makiivka city Komsomol committee helped me get a job—I was a Komsomol member back then, I was a Komsomol member for a whole five years.
V.O.: Since what year?
M.P.: Around ‘48 or ‘49. Yes, from ‘49. And I joined the Komsomol on a bet—I bet that they wouldnt accept me into the Komsomol, and the secretary of the Komsomol organization said that they definitely would. When we went to the Volodarka Raion Komsomol Committee, he introduced me as a very active young man, and they started asking me for my biography. Right there, I said that my grandfather was dekulakized, that my father had been expelled from the collective farm—I thought these were my biggest trump cards. No, Mykola Yanchuk (also an Ivchenko, but from a completely different Ivchenko family) insisted that I read a lot of books, that I participate in creating the wall newspaper, that when the film projector comes, I always participate in highlighting some moments of village life. He insisted that they accept me anyway. They asked me: well, if hes telling the truth, what kind of books do you read? I said that I love reading Dumas, I love reading Dreiser, Ive read Conan Doyle. Only Western authors came out, and he said to me, “Look, you’ve read ‘People with a Clear Conscience.’” “So what if I read ‘People with a Clear Conscience’—can you compare it to ‘The Three Musketeers’ or ‘The Exiles’?” Well, I thought, this is it, they definitely wont accept me now. They accepted me into the Komsomol. They did, and so I became a Komsomol member.
And that helped me get a job—they hired me as a plant guard. This was very necessary for me, because I came not so much to earn money as to get some education—I needed to go to the eighth grade, the evening school. There was no Ukrainian school in Makiivka, and they didnt want to accept me into the eighth grade: You studied in a village school, and this is a city school, the workload is much greater, you wont be able to keep up. I said that if I couldnt keep up, I would go back to the seventh grade, but I insisted on going into the eighth. Oh, there were so many of us!—three to a desk, and some even stood by the desks writing things down. But that only lasted for about three weeks or a month, and then everyone was sitting at the desks, and then two to a desk, and by spring, there were less than twenty of us left.
V.O.: And where did they all go?
M.P.: It was hard, they quit, they couldnt take it. My first grade in geometry was a D, even though I knew the material well. It was difficult for me to answer in Russian. And the teacher said to me: “I can tell you’ve studied something, but you have to understand, youre in an evening school, you have to answer clearly. For the first time, Im giving you a D, and when youre ready, Ill see.” And after a while, this teacher gave me nothing but As, because it turned out that I gave him a very good zinger. Because of my bad character again, the plant security sent me to a post that everyone avoided—guarding explosives.
Heres what happened. I was already going to school, and the secretary of the party organization demanded that everyone in the security subscribe to the newspaper Makiyivskyi Robochyi (Makiivka Worker). But I told him that I didnt want to subscribe to a Russian newspaper—subscribe me to Radianska Ukraina (Soviet Ukraine). He told me, “You understand Russian, and we wont allow you to disgrace our collective—everyone must subscribe to the newspaper ‘Makiyivskyi Robochyi.’” Since “everyone must,” I also paid, but when I returned to the dormitory—I lived in dormitory No. 6 in the Sovkoloniia district then, and studied at the school for working youth No. 2, which was on the Ninth Avenue of Makiivka... So, having returned to the dormitory where only security guards lived, there were nine of us—I was the youngest, and the others were my current age, old men—I immediately wrote an indignant letter to the newspaper “Radianska Ukraina”: why cant I subscribe to the newspaper “Radianska Ukraina,” and theyre forcing a Russian newspaper on me? About a month passed, and they chewed out this secretary. He came running to my dormitory: here, take this receipt for the newspaper Radianska Ukraina and sign here that you have this newspaper and have no complaints against me. Well, my request was satisfied, so I signed.
One time I was on duty at a post called TsEVKH, Tsentralnaia Vozdukhoduvnochnaia Elektrostantsiia (Central Blower Power Station), thats what it was called then. There were two posts there—one at the ash-handling plant and another by the administration. The latter was considered prestigious, while here, at the ash-handling plant, there was a lot of dust, soot, and such a racket that you couldnt have a normal conversation. What was it? There were five mills—horizontal barrels about three meters in diameter, lined inside with corrugated cast-iron plates. Coal was constantly fed into these barrels, and cast-iron balls rolled over these corrugated plates, grinding the coal into dust. Fans then blew this dust into a boiler. The boilers were about the size of a three- or five-story building, thats how big they were. The dust burned there and the soot was discharged through the smokestack. You couldnt get away from this soot in the city especially when the wind was from the southwest, the soot would fall on the city and on the dormitories.
And so I was at this very post. I had taken a bench outside, and I was sitting on that bench when the director of this power station, Batmanov, walked by, and I just sat there. I knew the director was coming—so let him come. But he walked about three steps past the post, then turned back and asked, “Guard, why arent you checking passes?” I answered him that I know you—you’re the director of the power station, a celebrity. He had just received a premium, the “Pobeda” car, so it was impossible not to know him. “Yes, that’s true, but they could have fired me yesterday. And you are obligated to check everyone’s pass. No matter how many times he comes here, you are obligated to check his pass every single time.” Well, I jumped up, stood at attention, apologized: Forgive me, I will be more disciplined from now on. This same Batmanov passed by about five times before lunch, and each time I leaped up from that bench, pulled my carbine to me, stood at attention: “Your pass?” He’d say: “There, well done, that’s right!” Id read it—Please, proceed.” But the fifth time, he lost it—he ran and called the guard commander. The guard commander came running, I was replaced, and immediately received instructions that this was no way to behave.
After that, they sent me to this worst post, where there was no one. Youre there alone, no heat, no fire, nothing—just a telephone and a large pile of felt mattresses, about two centimeters thick and a meter or so wide. And a huge black sheepskin coat, so big I could wrap myself up in it completely. So, at this post, I studied my lessons very well. And thats exactly what happened with that geometry teacher. I was studying the lessons ahead of time, and when we had the topic of inscribing a circle through a given point within an angle, the teacher explained it hastily. Then I raised my hand and said that he had only drawn one circle, but another one needed to be drawn. He told me, “The second circle cannot be inscribed.” “Allow me to do it.” “Well, come on up!” I went up and inscribed the circle—and after that, he only gave me As. The same in the ninth grade—only As. And so on the exam, my godfather, Oleksandr Laitarenko, and I (I have one godfather and one godson somewhere—I disliked the ceremony so much that I later didnt even go to be godfather for my own relatives, for my cousin), well, my godfather and I were a little late for the exam, and our classmates made fun of us: why are you so late—the problems are already here, weve solved them, and youre just showing up? Because they made fun of us, we sat in the general classroom—there were three ninth-grade classes, our class was by the windows, but we sat all the way by the door, separately, in the second classroom. I did my work and my godfathers work, but I didnt have time to fully copy over my own. Well, I figured Id get a C—so I handed it in and left, I didnt care about the grade. And in this way, I greatly offended that math teacher. He came up to me: “Why didn’t you pass the exam? Why did you treat it like that?” And I asked, “What, didnt I get a C?” “You got a C, but you need an A!” “Why do I need it? A C is fine with me.”
Well, they kicked me out of the tenth grade—because of Tychyna. Not so much because of Tychyna, as because I asked the teachers inconvenient questions. They gave me a piece of paper stating that I had studied in the tenth grade—and with that, my general education came to an end.
After that, I returned home, because my stepfather had been run over—he was coming back from seasonal work and got hit by a car. My mother demanded that I come home. I returned to the collective farm. My stepfather left me a cow, he left me a beehive. He really wanted to build a new house and had managed to acquire some materials. So in 1955, I returned to the village.
But no, I have to go back again, because it didnt end there. I had also left the Komsomol in Makiivka. And they didnt expel me from the Komsomol I spoke at a meeting and said why I didnt want to be a Komsomol member, and I handed over my Komsomol card. This is not a trivial detail.
V.O.: And why didnt you want to be in the Komsomol?
M.P.: Because you werent allowed to speak Ukrainian there—you had to speak Russian. I lived in the same room with two secretaries of Komsomol organizations. By the way, I did transfer to the railway department. Again, I committed a crime—when the holidays started, I passed the commission, but for the surgical office, I sent my friend Petia—I owed him a drink, just pass the surgical office for me. Petro passed the surgical office, and I gave him a bottle. I was hired, but two weeks later, they suspected that my health was subpar. Then the station master came, accompanied by his deputy—for me to go through the commission again. They immediately sent me to the surgical office, and the surgical office immediately rejected me—I couldnt do this work. No matter how much I tried to convince them that I did much harder work on the collective farm—no, and that was that. But two weeks had already passed, they couldnt fire me, so they transferred me to be a railcar clerk, in the same railway department, to another station. And again, I lived in the same room with two Komsomol organization secretaries—the secretary of the service was Bilonozhenko, Tolya, I think. This guy was very clever, he designed a tape recorder back then. And the secretary of the workshops Komsomol organization was Volodymyr Kozhedub—this blockhead, this yes-man, he knew how to curry favor. He was an instructor for locomotives. The first was a locomotive engineer, and he was an instructor. There was a phone to our room for this instructor. And because at the Komsomol meetings they wouldnt let me speak in Ukrainian—they let me a couple of times, then stopped—one time I defiantly went up to the podium anyway. By the way, the Komsomol organization there was very large. The railway department served the entire plant, and the department had 11 railway stations. The plants railway department owned 300 kilometers of railway track. There were about five thousand workers, and the Komsomol organization had about 500 members. The meetings could never be fully attended because people were always at work, but about 200 would gather. And so I went up and said that I live in Ukraine, and here we have such outrages: I couldnt find a Ukrainian school, the Russian language dominates everywhere, the Ukrainian language is oppressed, and even at Komsomol meetings I cant express my opinion. The goal of a Komsomol member is to become a Communist, but I dont want to be a Communist like Ogarkov, like Belyaev—which means I have no goal. Please, take my Komsomol card from now on, I am not a Komsomol member. I stepped down from the podium, took out my card, placed it on the table in front of the chairman, and walked out the door. There was a commotion: Wait, stay. And whereas before they wouldnt give me the floor, saying hell just start droning on in his Khokhol language, when I made that last speech in Ukrainian, how attentively they listened, oh, how attentively they listened! Then, quite a few Komsomol members spoke up in my defense, all Russian-speakers, mind you, but they spoke in my defense. They also assessed that I should have a good future, that I shouldnt leave the Komsomol, that I would definitely become a Communist, a useful Communist for the Soviet , but I never took the card back. For another six months, people from the plants Komsomol committee and the city Komsomol committee came to see me, but I didnt take my Komsomol card back.
V.O.: This is an important event, but can you remember when it was?
M.P.: That was already in 1955.
V.O.: Did you mention the name of that plant?
M.P.: I dont think so. It was the Kirov Metallurgical Plant, in the city of Makiivka, which was then in Stalino Oblast, now Donetsk. Back then, there were 12 kilometers between Makiivka, Shchehlova, and Donetsk a tram ran there. There was one little tram. Makiivka had about 500,000 inhabitants then, but it was very spread out because the houses were mostly one-story, made of wood, built from railway sleepers. There were a few multi-story brick buildings, and the largest was an eighty-apartment building. There was even a tram stop called Eighty-Apartment Building, that was a stop. And because in the tenth grade I started asking the Ukrainian literature teacher inconvenient questions, they gave me a warning once. The school principal gave me a huge lecture: If you dont understand something, ask the teacher. Fine, Ill ask, I raise my hand, the teacher says, Later. As soon as the lesson ends, the teacher is out the door and gone, and you cant ask. And so I pestered them to the point that they expelled me from the tenth grade.
I enrolled in correspondence courses at the Rzhyshchiv Construction Technical College. I successfully graduated from this technical college.
V.O.: And in what years were you at the Rzhyshchiv college?
M.P.: I graduated from the Rzhyshchiv college in February 1964.
V.O.: And when did you start studying there? Probably three years?
M.P.: Yes, I studied for three years. The college administration even thought I would probably graduate with honors. I had to retake one control assignment I got a C in reinforced concrete because I was sick, so I had a C, and I had to redo the course project. And they would have helped me, but again, I wasnt interested in grades. I had almost all As, but I didnt get an honors diploma.
Here’s another little thing. I was the only one who did my course project on structural statics in Ukrainian. I felt that if I kept my convictions, they would kick me out of here too. So I had to offer a moral bribe: I switched to Russian and defended my diploma in Russian as well.
But there was no work for a technician in my village. At that time, a thirty-thousander, Oleksandr Trokhymovych Otamanenko, was in charge, a very, very big sycophant he knew neither Ukrainian nor Russian. He finished seven grades before the war, and after the war, he completed a one-year party school and worked as the deputy director of the MTS for political affairs. When the MTS was reorganized into an RTS (Repair and Technical Station), he was sent to do leadership work in agriculture. Thats how he ended up with us. Although I couldnt get along with our own, local collective farm heads, I very quickly felt what it meant to have an outsider. He surrounded himself with a coterie of sycophants, and there was no way forward for me—they gave me exclusively hard physical labor, exclusively.
I had an accident. I had been working for a year, and this collective farm chairman had to give a report. Before the report meeting, the grain had to be reweighed, and I, while reweighing it with the other farm workers, went up to the attic of the cowshed. There was no ladder, so the guys climbed up using the gates, and I was the last one left with the son of that Hryhorii Petrovych Bondar, the one who had marched my father to the collective farm field under guard. He was a year older than me. I brought a ladder and said, “You go on up, and Ill hold it here so it doesnt slip, then Ill climb up.” He climbed into the attic, and it happened exactly as I had predicted—as soon as I put one foot on the attic floor, the ladder slipped out from under me, and I fell down onto that very ladder, onto the rungs. They had just unloaded beet pulp from a truck, so I landed face down in the pulp. They took me to the hospital in Volodarka, where I stayed for 17 days.
V.O.: When did this happen?
M.P.: That was sometime around 1963, I think, or maybe 1962, I cant recall exactly. I didnt want to be there because the New Year was approaching, so I checked myself out of the hospital with a fever. They told me to come back in March to check my health. I went there, and they gave me a certificate stating that I could not perform physical labor. But the collective farm chairman said, “You can use that for toilet paper. You can bring me a whole armful of certificates—they wont mean a thing to me.” I think it must have been in 1962. And so I failed to meet the required minimum of workday units.
V.O.: And did you injure yourself when you fell?
M.P.: No, I was already injured in the first grade at school. Nothing happened this time—perhaps my lower back still feels it to this day. Just yesterday, I stepped a bit too sharply from the curb onto a trolleybus—and either its sciatica or something else reminding me in my lower back. This happens often, especially now.
So, I didnt meet the required minimum of workday units, and for that, they imposed a 50% higher tax on me, and I was forced to pay it. I later spoke about this at meetings more than once. By the way, its probably worth noting here that there were men in our village, older than me, who, probably because I yapped a lot at meetings, would come to me and tell me about various wrongdoings—they would give me topics to talk about. I made an agreement with these people that I was willing, but since you saw it, you know about it, you should be the one to talk about it. “But I cant tell it like you can.” “Ill help you. Lets write it down.” We’d write it out. “Okay, now memorize it like a poem, and then you can recite it.” And I never once succeeded—all these people who provoked me to speak out later ran for the bushes. There was always some reason—he was drunk, or something else, always some very compelling reason why he absolutely couldnt speak, just couldnt.
Here’s another incident. There was a general party line to consolidate administrative units—they were consolidating raions, consolidating collective farms...
V.O.: That was in 1962, under Khrushchev. Thats when they created industrial and agricultural raions.
M.P.: Yes, yes. They sent us this thirty-thousander and merged two collective farms—the Komintern collective farm, where I grew up, in the village of Haivoron, and the village of Petrashivka, which borders Haivoron on the left bank of the Berezianka, where the Shevchenko collective farm was. Our collective farm chairman was my fathers age, with four grades of education from the Haivoron zemstvo school, while the other man, Kuzma Burlachenko, had two grades. Understandably, both were party members, and thats why they were collective farm chairmen. But when they were replaced and this thirty-thousander was put in charge, I very, very quickly felt what that was like.
So a year passed. The Volodarka Raion Party Committee was very pleased with this Otamanenko they wanted to attach another collective farm to his authority—the collective farm in the village of Biliivka, the village my mother was from. They had already held a closed party meeting and a general collective farm meeting at the Frunze collective farm there, and they sent delegates here to merge these two collective farms as well. And at this meeting—it was in the village of Petrashivka, there was one village council by then, but the meeting was held in the village with the larger club. Eleven people from the party-activist group spoke, telling of the benefits that would come from such a merger. I spoke after everyone else, even though they werent going to give me the floor. Again, I spoke defiantly and explained why this shouldnt be done. I warned the Biliivka people, especially, how bad it would be for them, because they would have to run three kilometers to Otamanenko for every little thing, just to get a piece of paper signed. And he would also tell them not to say tovarysh holova (Comrade Chairman) but tovaryshch prysydatel (Comrade Chairman in broken Russian). And if they didnt speak to him properly, he might not sign it at all. Well, the people started murmuring that he was telling the truth, because his mother was from that village, so he knew that village too. I knew these villages very well because I had been a postman in the village, so I knew everyone there—from the oldest to the babies in their cradles.
And so, after my speech, they put it to a vote. Ive forgotten who was chairing. He put it to a vote and announced, Passed unanimously. I stood up and started screaming, Youre very bad at math—Im bad at it too, but I can count to a hundred. I counted eleven speakers, and those very same eleven voted for, and the rest didnt vote. I voted against, and you didnt even see me. Well, a commotion started, and they held the vote again. They recounted—the club was divided by an aisle, and they tasked me with counting the votes on the left side of the aisle, facing away from the stage, and Petro Oleksiyovych Ishchuk (he had also been a collective farm chairman here and had whipped people with a horsewhip in 47) was tasked with counting the votes on the right side of the aisle. They repeated the question, who for, who against—and again, the same eleven who had spoken, the disciplined party members, voted. They finished, I was the only one against. I shouted, straining my lungs, “Petro Oleksiyovych, how many did you count?” What could he do? He said he counted eleven. I turned to the chairman and asked, Did you hear how many votes Petro Oleksiyovych counted in favor of merging the Shevchenko and Frunze collective farms? He didnt answer, but announced, Passed unanimously with one against. I was against, and everyone else was for.
V.O.: But they didnt even vote, did they?
M.P.: They didnt vote. Then the outraged people stood up and left the club, while the presidium remained on stage. About two weeks later, a policeman came for me. Right after the war, I had plowed a field behind the same plow as this policeman, Serhii Maikut—he held the plow handles, and I led the horses. So Serhii came and handed me the charges, on a big sheet of newspaper, I read it and said, You know what, Serhii, youre not taking me by yourself.
V.O.: Wait, what do you mean on a big sheet of newspaper—was it written in the newspaper?
M.P.: No, the charge sheet was as big as a newspaper. And he said, Im not going to take you, but you must understand that if I dont bring you to the police station, it wont be long before, if you cant defend yourself legally, theyll bring you in tied up, and youll end up wherever they see fit. Article 206 of the Criminal Code—hooliganism, for disrupting a meeting.
V.O.: So, this was 1962, the merger of collective farms?
M.P.: No, this was a little later, not sixty-two. This was probably around sixty-three.
V.O.: But when Khrushchev was removed in October 1964, they immediately reversed all that consolidation.
M.P.: Immediately. As soon as Serhii got on his cart and left, I locked the house and ran... I went to Kyiv to my sisters place in Bilychi, at 22 Marshak Street. I really wanted to see my highest-ranking deputies. At that time, we had voted for Synytsia, who was the secretary of the Kyiv Oblast Party Committee—to the Council of the , and Oleksandr Yevdokymovych Korniychuk—he was elected to the Council of Nationalities. I really wanted to see these deputies, to tell them and ask them how one was supposed to understand all this. But I didnt succeed. I spent almost a week and got nowhere—I didnt see either one of them. I tried to get to Synytsia through the Oblast Party Committee, but they kept turning me away for various reasons, and then they told me not to even look for him in Kyiv anymore because he had moved to Odesa.
V.O.: Yes, he became the Oblast Committee secretary in Odesa.
M.P.: Whether it was true or not, in any case, thats what they told me. So I decided to get to Oleksandr Yevdokymovych. His address was nowhere to be found—they wouldnt give it to me at the Supreme Soviet or at any information bureaus. At the Supreme Soviet, a guard suggested I try the Writers —they would certainly know there. I went to the Writers , at 2 Ordzhonikidze Street, now Bankova Street—and no one there knew either. I left the small office, where a secretary or someone was, I dont know, there were a few people there, but as I was leaving the premises, I said very briefly that I was in such trouble: Im supposed to go to prison, but I havent committed any crime, and this is my last hope, and now I dont know what to do. But these people said nothing to me. I went out, walked down the corridor to a window, and stood there thinking about what to do next. Then the woman who had listened to me there came up to me and said that she understood me, that she sympathized with me. “But Oleksandr Yevdokymovych Korniychuk is a very, very big shot, he doesnt receive people of our rank but if you dont give me away, Ill tell you where he lives. For some reason I trust you, but I must warn you, because Ill get into a lot of trouble: Oleksandr Yevdokymovych Korniychuk lives at 10 Karl Liebknecht Street, apartment 28. Hes at home now I wish you all the best, may God be with you, but I beg you again—dont let slip where you got this address.” I promised her I wouldnt. A few minutes later I was there, in front of that gray building, and rang the bell immediately.
A stout woman in a beautiful embroidered Ukrainian shirt opened the door. In Ukrainian, she asked what I wanted. I asked if Oleksandr Yevdokymovych Korniychuk lived here. She confirmed that he lived here. So I have just one question: where and when does Oleksandr Yevdokymovych Korniychuk receive his constituents? Instead of an answer, she countered with a question: “And where are you from?” I told her I was from Haivoron, Volodarskyi Raion. “No, you are not his constituent, he will never receive you.” I started to explain to her: how can that be, I know very well that we voted for Synytsia for the Council of the , and for Oleksandr Yevdokymovych for the Council of Nationalities back then. “No, you did not vote for him, he will never receive you. You did not elect him.” Well, I understood that people like me didnt elect him—he was elected by someone a little different, and he receives those who elected him.
V.O.: And this woman—wasnt she his wife, Liubov Zabashta?
M.P.: I dont know who she was.
V.O.: His first wife...
M.P.: Wanda Wasilewska was, but she was skinny.
V.O.: And the poet Liubov Zabashta was his second wife.
M.P.: I dont know. A stout woman, stout. I only saw her face for 2-3 minutes.
V.O.: Evidently, it was her.
M.P.: Well, that was the conversation.
V.O.: And when was this?
M.P.: This was probably during the harvest of 1963.
V.O.: Wasnt 1963 the year of the bread shortage—do you remember? There was no bread. Pea-flour bread…
M.P.: No, some time had passed since then. That pea-and-corn bread... my neighbor would send his wife to Volodarka in the morning to buy a loaf of bread, while he worked as a fodder-man. After finishing his work at the farm, he would go to Skvyra to buy two loaves—this was the year after that. The year after you had to get buns by prescription. So from there, from 10 Karl Liebknecht Street, apartment 28, I didnt know where to go. Then I decided, come what may, I had to go to the prosecutors office, and so I went to the Kyiv Oblast Prosecutors Office. I arrived in the afternoon, the secretary told me the oblast prosecutor wasnt in, but if I wanted, I could see the deputy prosecutor, Rusanov. I said I had no choice, I was willing to see Rusanov. She went into Rusanovs office and immediately invited me in. He was alone in his office. As soon as I opened my mouth and told him what had happened, that there had been this meeting and that I was being accused of disrupting it, but that I had done nothing illegal, that I had behaved in a disciplined manner—he didnt let me get another word in. He jumped up, started pacing around the office, and started shouting about the party line and how I was undermining it—God forbid... When he was done shouting, he said, “Go home, I will come personally tomorrow, I will sort this out myself. This time, there will be no arrest, but be warned, there will be no more forgiveness for you in the future.”
It was too late to leave then, it was already four in the afternoon. We left his office, and he immediately told his secretary to call Volodarka. I went back to my sisters, spent the night, and took the bus early in the morning. By the time I arrived, it was also around four in the afternoon. I had just stepped over the threshold, not even had time to fry a couple of eggs, when my neighbor came running: Oh, youre home? Run! Run away, theyre going to arrest you today. Some cars came, and the head of the village council was asking if you were home. Run! Well, I didnt see you,” he slammed the door and fled. Maybe five minutes passed, and in comes a major activist, Oleksii Kosiuk. What was his patronymic, I forget. Well, there was only one Oleksii Kosiuk there, he lived with the village elders family as a son-in-law, he really didnt get along with the village activists and constantly provoked me, saying, theres this or that injustice, you tell them at the meeting, because I cant do it as well as you. He came in just the same: “You’re home? Run! Some strange cars have arrived, theyre going to arrest you today. The head of the village council asked if you were home.” And he warned me that he hadnt seen me. No sooner had he left and I had barely had a bite to eat, when the messenger came and told me to go to an expanded meeting of the collective farm board.
An expanded meeting of the collective farm board—that was a real marvel, because this thirty-thousander never did anything like that. At a board meeting, only the people who were invited could be present, no one else was allowed. But this time they made three announcements that there would be such an expanded meeting of the collective farm board. When I arrived, you couldnt squeeze into the club—it was packed with people. I arrived, knowing I had to go up to where the presidium was, because thats where I saw Rusanov and the collective farm chairman, and the head of the village council, and our activists. So I went there, they sat me on a long bench, and the meeting of the collective farm board began.
V.O.: And where was this bench—on the stage, perhaps, or in the hall?
M.P.: In front of the stage.
V.O.: As if you were the defendant?
M.P.: In front of the stage. The collective farm chairman reported on the progress of grain delivery—they had met and exceeded the quota for grain crops, only the corn was left, but the corn was still green. He was confident that they would exceed the corn quota as well. With that, the chairmans report for this expanded meeting of the collective farm board concluded. After that, he gave the floor to Rusanov. Rusanov began to intimidate the collective farmers...
V.O.: And what language did he speak?
M.P.: Ukrainian, flawless Ukrainian. He started scaring people about the high crime rate in Kyiv Oblast. He reported how many crimes had already been solved, how many people had been convicted. And here in Haivoron, too, not all is as it should be. Among you lives a certain collective farmer, Mykola Kindratovych Polishchuk, and he is preventing you from building communism. So, I would like for those people who have worked with him, because its impossible that no one ever spoke to him, I would ask those people to tell us how they tried to bring him to his senses and how he reacted to their good advice. At this, he fell silent. But no one was eager to say anything. He stood up again, began to shame the people, saying that he understood they were ashamed to have such people living among them—but you must understand that you need to build the future, and people like this are hindering you, so you must tell how it was, you cannot tolerate this. He sat down—and again, no reaction, they were silent. Then he stood up, looked around the hall, waved his finger around, and pointed at a very, very young girl, my friends sister, Yulia Oleksiivna Novitska. This little girl stood up and said that she had finished ten grades last year and was now working as a team leader. This greatly pleased Rusanov, he made sure she knew me. She confirmed that she did. Then he asked her to tell everything she knew about me.
But I missed something. After Rusanov, the secretary of the party organization, Kalen Ivanovych Parubchenko, the head of the village council, Danylo Ivanovych Omelchenko, and then the same Petro Oleksiyovych Ishchuk began to speak. After that, three or four other men spoke, and Rusanov stopped the speeches. He stood up and said, I see that this is all the village activists speaking, and if even half of what theyve said is true, then Polishchuk needs to be isolated from you. But will anyone say anything different? And so he began to ask the people. No one responded, and so he pointed his finger at this Novitska, and she stood up and said that she had finished 10 grades, worked as a team leader, and that she didnt know anything of the sort about Mykola Kindratovych Polishchuk that these people were saying. He told her to sit down.
Then a little woman, older than me, Nina Kimnatska, jumped up. She was practically my neighbor, across the road and two gardens over. There was a parallel road on the other side, and our windows faced each other. This woman grew up in terrible poverty, in patched-up shirts and patched-up skirts she grew up, hungry. She didnt marry after the war, and she had a child out of wedlock. Whenever we had to be together somewhere at work, whether by the chaff cutter or some other group work, and there was a pause, the boys were always teasing the girls with jokes, but I was afraid to say even a careless word in her direction, because this woman had been so wronged by fate. And this Nina, with her shining eyes, looks at Rusanov and says, Why are you coddling him? His father was like that—and so is he. Id pack him off myself to God knows where.
After her, her friend, also two years older than me, jumped up. This one married a war veteran. Her father, during collectivization, was for some time either the head of the village council or the secretary of the party organization, but he was a very, very cruel man—the peasants who didnt want to join the collective farm were summoned to headquarters at night. Not only did they beat them, but this Fedir... what was his surname, her mothers poker... Shynkaruk. Fedir Shynkaruk. He had spent some time in a tsarist prison and had contracted tuberculosis there. So after torturing those men who didnt want to join the collective farm, he would grab them by the nose and beard and spit in their mouths to infect them with tuberculosis too. So, his daughter, Vira Fedorivna Ivchenko, also jumped up after Kimnatska and also said that Mykola Kindratovych Polishchuk is a very bad man: hes lazy, he doesnt want to work on the collective farm, if he did even a hundredth of what I do, life on the collective farm would be very good. This was at a time when I, after my accident, couldnt meet the required minimum of workday units on jobs that exceeded my physical capabilities. And she was such a great shock-worker that they wanted to make her a Hero of Socialist Labor. So, besides the beets grown by her team, the women who worked in animal husbandry—in the cowsheds, pigsties, poultry farms—also had sugar beets planted, and these women worked on those beets separately, and it wasnt recorded for them, because they earned their pay separately—one with milk, another with pigs—but it was recorded for Vira Fedorivna Ivchenko. But even that amount of beets wasnt enough, they didnt make her a hero. But she was a very generous woman—she was always traveling to congresses, always a part of these delegations.
After this, Rusanov addresses the collective farmers: “So, maybe we should give Polishchuk the floor—let him have a say too?” Here, there was a loud, united murmur: “Let him speak, let him speak!” He gave me the floor: “Tell us, how do you intend to behave in the future?” I stood up and began to refute why Parubchenko was saying such things, why Omelchenko was saying such things, why Ishchuk was saying such things. Rusanov interrupted me: No, no, no, thats not what the collective farmers are expecting from you! And I asked him, “And what are the collective farmers expecting from me? I havent heard anything from them that they expect from me. If the village activists and the Kyiv Oblast Prosecutors Office expect me to repent, and to repent only because such respected people are accusing me, then I do not accept such an accusation. Even if Rusanov himself accuses me of being a criminal, I will not admit to these crimes until it is proven to me in a convincing manner that I have committed this or that specific crime.
And on that note, this meeting of the collective farm board ended. When all the people had left the hall, Rusanov called me into the collective farm chairmans office and said this: “You see that you have no friends here? You see.” I answered him that I know all these people, I delivered the mail and I know everyone from the oldest to the babies in their cradles. “So heres my advice to you: get out of here. Theyll give you good papers—just get out of here.” I answered him that I didnt want to leave here, because I had already built a house, I already had five beehives, I was already planning to live here. He countered: You will have no life here—and your house will be gone, and you will have nothing. You get out of here.
I didnt listen to him. I endured another year on the collective farm, and then they finally convinced me that they would imprison me for parasitism. Imprison me. And so, in 1964, I left for Bila Tserkva. Initially, they hired me at the 34th Construction Administration as a 2nd-grade carpenter with the condition that they would make me a foreman in the spring. But since that didnt happen, I quit and went through many, many construction organizations. I worked as a foreman at the construction administration of the brick factory for a little over a month, I think. There, they started demanding that I pad the books—so I quit. I thought, I dont have experience with that yet, its too soon. Then I joined SPMK-5—it was a construction administration that dealt with underground utilities and landscaping on the right bank of Kyiv Oblast.
V.O.: What is SPMK? What does that acronym stand for?
M.P.: Specialized Construction and Installation Administration-5. I also remember the management then Serhii Kysylenko was the head, and Hryhorii Dmytrovych Kushnirenko was the chief engineer. They hired me for 100 rubles and sent me to the Tetiiv airport. They sent me there because all the money from the budget had already been taken, but the work was far from started. They didnt allow me to issue work orders or sign transport reports—I wasnt allowed to handle that paperwork. There was a local young man from Tetiiv, he only had a 10th-grade education, but because he was a local, it was much easier for him to go to the motor pool for trucks. They gave me only the technical work. There were two runways—one was 750 meters, and the other 350 meters, mutually perpendicular. A small AN-2 plane flew in there twice a day. And in one month, I leveled both of those runways. I divided the whole field into 20-meter squares, put in stakes, and on each stake, I noted that here you need to remove 10 cm, and next to that stake you need to add 5 cm—I wrote all this down in a separate notebook. A month later, for this work, they gave me a 15-ruble raise and transferred me to another site.
The other site—that was already Myronivka, Bohuslav, Kaharlyk. I had already been in these places. But my partner, Mykola Patsiuk, was severely punished by a bulldozer operator. They had a habit: every foreman felt like a little lord, that he would just sign and stamp the paper, while the mechanics themselves filled out the forms. So this Mykola Sydorets, who worked on the bulldozer, had done something like 50 cubic meters of earthwork, but he was always supposedly making repairs. I gave Patsiuk a note, and based on my note, Patsiuk signed his work report, signed it, stamped it, but Mykola Sydorets left a space, added two zeros, for five thousand, and wrote out in words: Five thousand cubic meters over a distance of one hundred meters. And in this way, he punished this Mykola Patsiuk. He came running to me in tears: “What should I do? I wont work this off in half a year! My salary is what it is, and now this, and my reputation!” I told him, “Here’s my diary, what I recorded.” When he saw it, he exclaimed, “This has saved me!” So they punished that guy, and as for me, I was moved around: Snytynka, Myronivka, I was constantly going around these places.
But in Myronivka, I got into a big fight with the site supervisor, my direct boss. By education, he was a mechanic and he really, really loved to cheat. Now they say hes working at the Bila Tserkva prison colony. I was making efforts to build according to the project plans, while he was doing whatever he needed to get his completion reports signed, to be able to close out the work orders. The head of the collective farm in Myronivka at that time was a Hero of Socialist Labor, Buznytskyi. Buznytskyi chose his staff to be more or less competent in certain things. People from his farm even went on excursions to the United States of America. So, there was a technical supervisor, Robakovskyi, supposedly with great experience, and this Robakovskyi wrote on the project plans that I should do not as specified, but the opposite—that the roads there should not be excavated, through which water was supposed to drain, but that instead of an excavation, I should build an embankment. I did not agree to this. The site supervisor wrote me a note: only this way. Just then, the chief engineer, Hryhorii Dmytrovych Kushnirenko, arrived. I showed it to him and said, Hryhorii Dmytrovych, how can I do this? Kushnirenko crossed that out and wrote: according to the project. I had just started to do so when Kushnirenko left, and that Ivan Yashchuk came running, throwing his hat on the ground: let me write it for you. He wrote again: in a crescent-shaped profile, just so and so—as Robakovskyi had written. I took this project, went to Bila Tserkva, and gave it to Kushnirenko: Hryhorii Dmytrovych, excuse me, but I cant work like this—its like Im harnessed by Jewish coachmen: theyre pulling on both reins, whipping me, and shouting gee and haw at the same time. I dont understand this. And I immediately submitted my resignation.
Then I went to work on the construction of the tire plant, at Administration No. 1. They also hired me as a foreman for 100 rubles, and just a couple of days later they showed me an order stating that all falsified reports would be fully reimbursed at my expense. Two young guys, one of whom is now my neighbor, living on the fourth floor above me, were punished, one for a hundred rubles, and the other for one hundred and four—for falsifying reports. The head of the administration, Cherniavskyi, was walking by and saw that the bulldozers and cranes were idle, the month had ended, and here were paid reports for the work of these machines. So these young foremen were punished for padding the books, and I was warned. Well, since I was warned, I stuck strictly to the letter of the law. But its impossible to work like that—constant, constant, constant accusations from all sides. So I also drove the head of the administration to the brink, just like I drove Batmanov in Makiivka… This head, Cherniavskyi, forced me: that bulldozer is working, write him down for half a day, and let him drag the boiler with molten tar over here, so they can glue the roof up here. I did so. I did it twice and got into a fight again, and I quit that job. They punished me—transferred me to be a leader of a concrete workers brigade. Because of this, I submitted my resignation.
A month later, I found a job in a design organization—there was an organization of the 5th Kyiv Trust for the organization of construction technology. The head of that group was a Jewish man, Oleksandr Malin, Ive already forgotten his patronymic, we called him Sasha. The second chief project engineer was Stanislav Oleksiyovych Kobeliev, a Russian, and there were other senior engineers there. By the way, the current mayor of Bila Tserkva, Hennadiy Volodymyrovych Shulipa, was there. (Hennadiy Volodymyrovych Shulipa is a hereditary opportunist. In the phony , he was a “comrade” of the workers and peasants, a “servant of the people,” a “proletarian.” One of his ancestors had the Ukrainian surname Shulika, but Hennadiy Volodymyrovychs ancestor didnt defend his name, which was distorted by the Muscovites, so he became Shulipa. When the “power of the working people” decided to its mask of verbiage, he immediately became a master in Bila Tserkva, and perhaps the richest one! No wonder he used to enter the offices of “comrades” with his own opinion, and came out with the opinion of the “comrade”… – Note by M. Polishchuk). They also hired me for one hundred rubles, but there they immediately put me on the waiting list for an apartment. A few months later, when the organizations that didnt want to hire me before started trying to poach me—they were already offering me a salary 20 rubles higher, just come and work for us. But I said I couldnt, because they put me on the waiting list for an apartment here—I needed an apartment, I was already, oh my, 37 years old.
V.O.: And where were you living in the meantime—in a dormitory or what?
M.P.: Until then, I had lived in construction trailers and in dormitories. I lived in seven dormitories. They placed me in the Mir dormitory three times. So, sometime shortly before 1974, when my turn to get an apartment was about a year away, a Jewish swindle was exposed in our office. Because of this swindle, we raised a very, very big scandal. Over the course of three months, we had five commissions from Kyiv. The result of our protest was that Kobeliev was committed to a psychiatric hospital, Shulipa was made chief project engineer, I was given the portfolio of a trade group organizer and a senior engineer in the department (the department had 9 engineers and two copyists), and my salary was increased by 30 rubles. There was one senior engineer, Mykola Hryhorovych Berezanskyi, who was on the waiting list he was supposed to be the first to get an apartment. A new trust was being created in Bila Tserkva—Promzhytlobud. They offered him a position as head of the POR group—projects for the organization of work—in that trust. Mykola went there, and, of course, he wanted to staff it with his own people, with whom he had worked. And he invited me to be a senior engineer in his department for 145 rubles. I agreed, but I had already been given an apartment, and after three months I said, Mykola, Im going to go work with him. I submitted my resignation for personal reasons, processed all the documents for the Promzhytlobud trust, and here they are constantly nagging me: “Where do you want to go? And why do you want to go? You just got an apartment, its not fair, you only got an apartment three months ago.” I said, “But they offered me a much higher salary four years ago, Ive paid for being on the waiting list for four years.” And on the last day, when I had worked my notice, there was nowhere to go... By the way, when I was a trade group organizer, they assigned me to speak in Kyiv at the trusts trade conference. I agreed on the condition that they only tell me what to talk about, and I wouldnt consult with them on how I should say it. They agreed, I spoke at the conference in the trust, and after that speech, the department head, Sigalov, and the chief project engineer immediately started persecuting me. Things had changed: Shulipa had gone to be the party committee secretary at the Khimbud trust, and Hudovych was appointed here, but Hudovych was a very good man, a Belarusian. And Sigalov—Sigalov was the department head, a Jewish man. He was very prejudiced against me, even recalculated my scale drawings, and made mistakes. I said, “You make such gross mistakes yourself, and youre picking on me for this.” Thats why I resigned from there. So, the Jews were driven out, we were balanced: three Russians, three Ukrainians, three Jews. So on the last day, so that no one would speak ill of me, I threw a farewell party, and the wife of the chief project engineer—Hudovych had already changed, Hudovych left for Belarus, and Voitsekhivskyi took his place—his wife asked, Well, are you going to work for Berezanskyi? I said, For Berezanskyi. And this was already after 6 p.m. The next day, I came to the trust—and the head of the trust wouldnt see me. You got an apartment? I did. Then go work where they gave you the apartment, well manage without you here. Even though Mykola Hryhorovych wants you to work here, well manage without you. Well, I said, fine, youll manage without me, but Ill manage without Orgtekhbud. Since I got out of there with such a scandal, Im not going back.
After that, I went to the second construction administration of the Khimbud trust, to the production department. In the production department, I worked on the procurement of reinforced concrete and steel structures. They hired me for 145 rubles, but then, a year later, they cut 15 rubles so they wouldnt have to lay someone off. And in 1974...
I should probably make another digression. When I was still working at the Khimbud trust, in the cost-estimating department, there was a very clever Jewish man, Naum Borukhovych Veksler. We received our apartments at the same time. This was when I was already working in the PTO (Production and Technical Department) of the second construction administration. Veksler was a press distributor, and he latched onto me: Subscribe to some newspaper. I told him that the newspaper Id like to subscribe to, they wont let you get, and I dont want any others, Ive had my fill of these newspapers. Ill subscribe you to anything you want. Well, I say, fine, if youre such a brave lad, then get me a subscription to the newspaper Visti z Ukrainy (News from Ukraine). Fine, he wrote it down, but two or three days later he comes back: What kind of newspaper did you name? Theres no such newspaper, its not in the catalog, what are you talking about? I said, Fine, Ill bring you this newspaper. I brought him the newspaper—back then I used to buy them at the Dnipro and Intourist hotels, and I think they were sold in three other places. Whenever I was in Kyiv, I would definitely buy these newspapers. I was especially intrigued because it was from this newspaper that I first read about Ivan Dziuba, about Internationalism or Russification?. They were lambasting him everywhere, and I couldnt figure out for what. I later read that a separate brochure was even published about his Internationalism by Bohdan Stenchuk, What and How Ivan Dziuba Defends. I found it in the catalog at the reading hall of the Library of the CPSU. I submitted a request for this brochure What and How Ivan Dziuba Defends, for Olena Apanovychs The Zaporozhian Host, of which five thousand copies were published (Armed Forces of Ukraine of the First Half of the 18th Century – K.: Naukova Dumka, 1969. – 224 p.) and some other such books—and they gave me none of them. I brought this newspaper and gave it to Naum: Here, heres the newspaper for you. He took my newspaper, and a few days later he came and gave me a receipt: Heres your receipt, pay up. I paid the money, but before the New Year, they returned my money, sent me a postal money order—and that was it, no newspaper... So, Veksler told me there would be no newspaper. Indignant, I wrote to several newspapers that I had subscribed, but they wouldnt give it to me.
In 1974, I was on a tourist trip through the Caucasus. The KGB was already deliberately setting me up with these last-minute tour packages: twice to Zhytomyr, to Korbutivka. And this time I was in the Caucasus, from Baku to Sukhumi. When I returned from this trip, the KGB already knew that while I was in the Caucasus on a tourist trip, I had refused to vote. There was an election there, the whole group went to vote, but I didnt vote, I didnt even enter the polling station. When I returned, they already knew about it in Bila Tserkva. A man named Kupryianets summoned me to the KGB and gave me a warning. So, after this trip to the Caucasus... The surname Bondar, Ihor—have you heard of him?
V.O.: I have. Hes no longer with us, right?
M.P.: No, hes not. He lived at 119 Biloruska Street in Kyiv.
V.O.: Yes, yes, Ive been there, I knew him.
M.P.: His daughter is there now.
V.O.: Unfortunately, I wasnt at the funeral, I must have been out of Kyiv at the time.
M.P.: I was at his funeral, I was also very surprised by it. So, at the very time I was on that tourist trip in the Caucasus, Ihor was living in my apartment. I had known Ihor since about 72, he lived not far from me. An engineer for workplace safety at the bread factory, Mykola Tychonovych Rudenko, brought him to me. Hes gone now too, he was born around 1926, a man who was very ill, but a great patriot of Ukraine, very cautious. And so Ihor gave me a note, saying that I was being invited for a job at a military unit. Friends who knew me from work were also inviting me there. I went right away, while I still had vacation time. They were offering me a job for 160 rubles, and here I was only getting 135—a difference of 25 rubles is significant. I found out that this military unit was preparing project documentation according to the Zlobin method all the guys were doing their own thing, but there was no specialist who knew network planning. And I had been involved in that in Bila Tserkva at Ortekhbud. I did the first network schedule with a man from Kyiv who came to help me, for the Gorky cinema, which was supposed to be commissioned for the 100th anniversary of Lenins birth on April 22, 1970. Then I did the network schedule for the ninth school all by myself. And then with a very large team, because there was so much project documentation, I worked on the network schedule for the first phase of the tire plant. Then I had to monitor its implementation. It was a huge sheet of paper, about five and a half meters long and one and a half meters wide, with about fifteen hundred items.
And so, those Muscovites wanted me to network charts for their projects. The pay was acceptable to me, and the work was acceptable, but after I spoke with the department head about it, we almost came to an agreement and I left his office. I made it seem like I had left for good, but I actually went to the other departments to ask around about how people really worked there. The employees told me that they arrive at work promptly at nine o’clock, but they go home whenever the commander lets them, which could sometimes be as late as ten at night. So what good would those 25 rubles be to me if I had to work like that? I refused to go there. But they didn’t just leave me alone. I was still working at the same place, in the second construction department, and it wasn’t until October that I agreed to a transfer to the military unit, on the condition that I would work strictly according to the Labor Code—no more than eight hours, and if there was some necessity, I could stay no more than 15 minutes late. So I agreed. The commander, Volodymyr Ilyich Mykhailychenko, sent a letter to the department head, Rudyuk, asking him to release me on transfer without a long delay—I had to hand over all my documentation right away. It took me ten days to prepare for the handover, and on October 20, I transferred to my new job at the military unit. Rudyuk strongly tried to dissuade me, saying, “Don’t go there.” On the very day I gave Rudyuk my transfer application and Mykhailychenko’s letter, the KGB agent Kupriyanets summoned me to the party committee of the “Khimbud” trust. This was after the previous warning that I would be prosecuted under Article 187-prim. On that warning, I had written that I was not involved in any such crimes, had never slandered the Soviet government anywhere, that no such thing had happened, and signed it. And this time, he summoned me again, not to his own office, but to the trust’s party committee, to Shulipa’s office. And this Kupriyanets, the KGB agent, gave not the slightest hint that he knew I was planning to transfer to a job at the military unit. This meant Rudyuk had immediately called the KGB. Kupriyanets told me this: “It would be better if you were a womanizer, better if you were a drug addict, better if you were a drunkard, but not a chatterbox. Remember, you won’t get away with this.” That was how I parted with that KGB agent in the party committee secretary’s office. I drove him to a boiling point during that conversation.
Not even a month had passed before they started looking for some pretext to get me at the military unit. On December 9, 1974, at 5:45 p.m., 15 minutes before 6:00, Mykhailychenko called me to his office and said, “Find yourself another job I have no need of your services.” I asked him, “Are there any complaints about my work performance?” “That is of no importance. Find yourself another job.” I said, “Fine. If my work isn’t satisfactory, I’ll look for another job.” The next morning, December 10, at nine o’clock, they wouldn’t let me through the security gate. At the gate, there was an order for my dismissal, supposedly due to staff reductions, and they wouldn’t let me in. There had been no reprimand, absolutely none, just Mykhailychenko’s warning. Well, since that was the case, I started looking for a job.
But at that time, it was very, very difficult to find a job because one construction department, PMK-100, had been dissolved. It was impossible to find work. So I was forced to go to court. I filed a lawsuit, and sometime around the end of January, I was summoned to court they sent a summons. Meanwhile, I was trying to find out if they had hired someone in my place. I went to the employment agency, where a woman from my home village worked, a friend of my sister, whose name was something like Halyna Klymivna Yamitska—she was the daughter-in-law of the man who had suffocated my paternal grandfather. I went to see her and asked, “Halyna, are there any new job openings?” She looked into it and let me know: come by, some new requisitions have come in. Before going to court, I stopped by the employment agency, and they showed me three new requisitions for engineering and technical staff at that military unit. I knew all three of those professions very well. One was for a documentation engineer, the second for a construction foreman, and the third for a geodesist—I knew that one well too. The next day, I took a referral for my own former position and went to court, walking confidently with a trump card, knowing that they needed people there and that there was no staff reduction. But there was no trial the judge called me and the HR officer, Terekhov, into his chambers. The HR officer couldn’t name the real reason I was being fired. The judge listened to my addition to the statement and chided me for writing the application poorly, saying a lawyer should have written it. At the end, he told the HR officer: “You fired him illegally, and if the court has to review this case, it will undoubtedly rule to reinstate him. Furthermore, a decision will be made to compensate him for material damages for the forced absence at the expense of the person who signed the dismissal order.”
That evening, a soldier ran up to me: “Come to work.” The next day I went to work as if I’d just come back from vacation. My desk was so covered in dust you could write on it with your finger—no one had sat there, not even close. We chatted with the guys until lunch, had lunch, and after lunch, they called me to a meeting of the trade committee. The committee chairman asked for my consent to be dismissed due to staff reductions. I said to him, “What reduction are you talking about? I was at the court yesterday, and the day before that, I was at the employment agency and got a job referral to your unit. There are two other new requisitions from you besides this one. What staff reduction are you talking about?” “It doesnt matter, we have staff reductions.” All eight members of the committee knew this very well. They couldnt look me in the eye, but they all voted unanimously to approve my dismissal due to staff reductions. The next day, there was an order firing me as of January 31. They paid me full compensation for the forced absence and settled up completely, just as they were supposed to.
But I couldn’t find a job within a month, and my uninterrupted work record was in jeopardy. So I went back to court. This time, I went to a lawyer. The head of the legal aid office, Donskoy, wrote a statement for me to the court. I rewrote the statement in Ukrainian and added: “I was fired on International Human Rights Day—so much for our rights.” I took this statement to court again, but instead of handing it in myself, I took it to the post office across the street. I said, “Here, take this to the court for me.” The postal worker said, “The court is right there, why don’t you take it yourself?” “Here are ten kopecks. Give me a receipt showing you took a letter from me, and take it over there, so it isn’t me who brings it. I need the receipt.”
This was the prelude to my arrest. Soon after, they framed me with pornography… no, they had framed me with pornography earlier. Just a few days before they were supposed to arrest me, this provocateur gave me some black-and-white films to develop for him. They confiscated those films, and that’s how it all started for me.
V.O.: But you told me that without the tape recorder running, and its not recorded here how they slipped you those films.
M.P.: I started doing photography because I had been introduced to Ivan Makarovych Honchar. (Born Jan. 27, 1911. Sculptor, ethnographer, he assembled a unique ethnographic museum that became one of the centers of Ukrainian national life in the 1960s. It was practically closed in the fall of 1969. Re-established during perestroika. Since Aug. 22, 2004, the I. Honchar Museum has operated in a large building near the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. Author of Samvydav works: a letter in defense of O. Honchars novel “The Cathedral” (1968), among others. Died June 18, 1992, buried at the Baikove Cemetery. – V.O.) Ivan Makarovych was collecting Ukrainian traditional clothing, and I undertook the task of re-photographing such pictures, and if I managed to find an original for him, to bring him the original. For this purpose, I bought a German camera, a “Praktica-L,” which could take pictures from a very close distance without any special attachments, from as close as 33 centimeters. I could lean on my elbow and photograph a picture. The KGB agents really disliked this, and that was exactly why this provocation was necessary. I met this provocateur in the “Melodia” music store (Located on Petro Zaporozhets Square in Bila Tserkva. – Note by M. Polishchuk), showed him my photos, he showed me his, and he played me: he pretended to doubt that I could take photos of such quality and slipped me a pornographic calendar, from which I made four or five color slides, and then from one color slide, I made a color print. That’s how it happened.
V.O.: You havent mentioned his last name, have you?
M.P.: I dont know it, because those types never give their real names. I never got to see Ivan Makarovych again, and everything I had collected was lost—the photo lab and all my property there disappeared. The next time I saw Ivan Makarovych was at the consecration of the monument to Volodymyr the Baptist. There, by the monument to Volodymyr the Baptist, was the last time I saw Ivan Makarovych alive. And then I was at his funeral.
V.O.: How did this case develop? You mentioned December 10, was that in 1975?
M.P.: No, that was in seventy-four. I received a second summons to court for March 11, 1975. Apparently, the prosecutor’s office wasnt ready for my arrest, so a second summons arrived, for March 12. But on March 11, at seven in the morning, five little angels came for me they didn’t even let me wash my face. They searched my one-room apartment for three hours, took me away, and I never crossed the threshold of that apartment again. That’s how it started.
They brought me to Kyiv. They wouldn’t take me at Lukianivka Prison because some of their paperwork wasn’t in order. They locked me in some preliminary detention cell, and once everything was sorted out, they transferred me to Lukianivka.
In Lukianivka, I didnt fall for any provocations. Even after the trial, I insisted that my guilt had not been proven in court. The trial was closed, held in the first hall of the Kyiv Regional Court. They didn’t let anyone in, not even my own sister—the one I just visited—or my mother. I was guarded by five armed soldiers. They called the witnesses like this: a soldier would unlock the door, call a witnesss name, and the witness would enter. After the witness finished testifying, the judge would sign their summons, tell them where to get it stamped, and then they would escort the witness out and call in the next one.
V.O.: But the verdict says it was an open court hearing.
M.P.: Yes, of course, of course, thats right. I denied everything. The trial was on August 18, 19, and 20, 1975.
V.O.: And what were you accused of? Slandering the Soviet reality?
M.P.: Yes, slandering the Soviet reality.
V.O.: Were any specific “slanders” attributed to you?
M.P.: They were, but there was no slander at all. I had talked to this person, I had talked to that person, I had written an open letter to the “Radyanska Ukraina” newspaper. How could I have written an open letter when I sealed it in an envelope and even sent it by registered mail? And the letter is considered open… It turns out you have to write on the envelope that its a closed letter for it to go by special mail if its just sealed and handed over at the post office, its considered open. Thats how it is. Then they brought me to the colony on Christmas Day.
V.O.: And where did they take you?
M.P.: Both times I was in Ukraine, in the Donbas region. The first time was in Dzerzhynsk, Donetsk region.
V.O.: What was the colony number?
M.P.: I think it was two, but I dont remember.
V.O.: The name usually includes some letters from the regional administration, followed by numbers.
M.P.: Yes, yes, yes, Ive forgotten, Ive forgotten it. In Dnipropetrovsk, the criminals robbed me completely.
V.O.: Was this during the transport?
M.P.: During the transport. They took all my food, even though I explained to them that I was going straight to the punishment cell, that I would go on a hunger strike because I was unjustly convicted. That didnt convince the guys they took everything from me. I started to raise my voice a little, to make some noise, and they told me: “Grandpa, we’re gonna wrap you in a blanket, toss you to the ceiling, and gently lower you to the floor—then you’ll calm down. So, what are you unhappy about? You don’t know anything, yet you’re complaining.” And so they took everything.
In Dzerzhynsk, all the authorities immediately flocked to see such a strange specimen because, on the very next day, they put me in the punishment isolator for refusing to go to work. They put me in a separate cell. There was a man named Sherstiany there too he really chided me for being so green, not understanding anything, saying that it shouldnt be like this, “don’t behave like that, or it will cost you dearly.” But I didn’t take his advice to heart—I listened, but I didn’t heed it. And right away, all the authorities started gathering. They would open the first door, the one lined with tin, but they wouldnt open the barred gate: “Oh, so that’s what you look like! I thought you were some kind of monster! And this is a nationalist, an anti-Soviet like you! So how do you like it here?” I said: “Well, better men have had it incomparably worse, so I’ll endure this somehow.” “Well, sit, sit, to hell with you! You’ll sit and think. People tougher than you have sat here.” He closed the door and left. A second one comes, a third one, and so the entire colony administration came by the next day to see this wonder.
When they released me from the isolator, I was swarming with lice. I couldn’t even go into the barracks to rest. Just then, a well-dressed man walks by in felt boots, warm quilted pants, and warm mittens and asks: “Well, tell me, brother, what happened? What winds brought you here?” I was so frozen I couldnt utter a word, just “uh-uh-uh,” like that. “Never mind, endure it it must be God’s will. Wait for me here, I’ll be right back.” This man worked as a bathhouse attendant. He also had a five-year sentence for being a Baptist, for his beliefs. This was Ivan Melashchenko. He was from Sloviansk, had also been a Komsomol member, a drinker, and this hadnt bothered his Komsomol comrades. But one evening, when Ivan Melashchenko met a girl who made a very serious impression on him, he tried to get acquainted with her in the Komsomol way—arm around her neck, hands in her blouse. She immediately recoiled from him and shamed him, saying that he was a human being and couldnt behave like that. Halyna gently calmed Ivan down. Ivan went to the Baptists, was baptized, married Halyna, and when they already had two children, Ivan was given five years for spreading Christianity because he also went around urging people to return to God.
V.O.: What article was he under?
M.P.: I dont remember. And so this Ivan Melashchenko comes back a few minutes later, gives me a bar of laundry soap, gives me a bag of sodium carbonate, takes me to the bathhouse, puts my rags through the disinfection chamber, and I wash myself under the shower and wait so I dont freeze. He brought my rags from the chamber, I washed them, and Ivan took my rags to the boiler room to dry them by the boilers while I stood under the shower. This was a very, very great help, impossible to overstate.
After that, I went into the barracks, fell onto the bunk, and immediately fell asleep. I dont know how long I slept they woke me up for work on the second day. I went to work in the evening, just as the second shift was heading out. The “putyovye” called me over. The table was a plank about thirty centimeters wide and long, with a similar plank on both sides for benches. Thats how they ate. They sat me at the very end because the orderly served from this side, and the “putyovye” sat at the far end. They called me over there, I took my tin bowl and went to them. They asked me what was what. I told them, and then one of them asked: “So, tell me, are you for socialism or for capitalism?” I said: “You know, guys, I cant give you a straight answer, but since under socialism it’s written ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat,’ I consider that a just concept.” “Ah, so that’s what you think, you bastard. Well, remember this: if I don’t want to work for fools like you, does that mean I shouldn’t get to eat?” I said: “I don’t know which of us is smart and which of us is a fool all people must eat, they have the right. But at the same time, all people must participate in production. If I’m a fool, I should work with a rake and a shovel, and if you’re smart, you should organize production so that it’s done right. That is also work, and it…” “Thats enough, we dont need any more of this racket. Remember: when were chowing down, dont even come near the table.” And I had to comply with this demand. Youd come—whether for breakfast, lunch, or dinner—and the ‘putyovye are chowing down,’ and I wasn’t allowed to approach. And when you go to the orderly later, hed say: “Where were you loitering? I dont have anything left.” That was it. So very often, I was left without even my own ration. The wind swayed me I constantly had a pink cloud before my eyes, constantly something floating before my eyes.
And then the administration started spreading rumors about me, that I was an informer for the administration, that I snitched on the prisoners. After some time, they transferred this Ivan Melashchenko from the service unit to the sixth detachment, where I was. Ivan Melashchenko began to defend me. He had already started passing messages from there, saying, you should take a closer look…
V.O.: The zone was divided into local sections?
M.P.: Yes, divided into local sections. My job was to make spring mattresses I coiled the springs. I’d stand there, coiling them for eight hours, and they would take them from me. The administration would ask me and threaten: where’s your work? We’ll put you in the punishment cell for not meeting the quota. I’d tell them that the foreman is here—he is, the brigadier is here—he is, so maybe you got a signal that I wasn’t at my workstation? As for where it disappears, youll have to figure that out for yourselves. So theyd credit me with three mattress nets, just enough so they wouldnt put me in the punishment isolator again. The quota was sometimes five nets, sometimes eight. Well, eventually, I deliberately sabotaged the work and never made more than five. The “putyovye” would take two, and three went to the administration.
But after a while, they changed my job. They moved me to another workshop, to a drill press. Here, no one could take my work. I had to drill a 6.3-millimeter hole for a cotter pin in some rollers about 15 centimeters long and 22 millimeters in diameter. And when they put me on this job, I started meeting the quota. I met the quota normally. I didnt over-fulfill it, just met it, because sometimes you needed to buy something to add to the thin gruel they gave us. You couldnt buy food products with the money that was sent to you.
V.O.: How much could you buy for—5 rubles, maybe?
M.P.: I think it was seven, and then another time, it was only five. Well, after a while, the foreman, again through the “putyovye,” took me off that machine and moved me to another drill press, one that didnt have a mechanical feed you had to feed it manually. Here, I stopped meeting the quota. It got to the point where my right hand, which I used to apply pressure, couldn’t take any load in three fingers—the index, middle, and ring fingers—they just dangled. Then they didn’t allow me at the machine. They would take me out to the zone—there was a new zone about five kilometers away—but wouldn’t let me work, so I just wandered around the zone, warming myself in the sun and constantly exercising my hands. And I got them working again. Before that, I couldnt do anything. They even took me to a doctor, thinking I was faking it—but those fingers just couldnt bear any load.
V.O.: What caused that?
M.P.: I had strained them from feeding the drill. They started to get really picky with me, saying that others on this machine met their quotas, but I didnt. “I cant, dont you see? You can see that I dont step away from it.” Well, I started to deliberately sabotage the work. How to sabotage? As soon as the foreman gave me a brand-new, sharpened drill bit, everything as it should be, within half an hour or an hour I would make the bit turn blue, burn it out. I had a hidden piece of emery paper, and as soon as I saw no one was around, I’d turn the machine on in reverse and press the stone against the bit—thats how I dulled it. And then, no matter how hard you press—because the foreman would come and see that you’re not pressing—I would press with all my might, but the drill bit would turn blue and burn out. He would bring another one, and I’d do the same thing. That’s how I sabotaged that job.
Since I was being persecuted by both the administration and the convicts, I went to the vocational-technical school to study to be a lathe operator—I thought, they wont let me do my real work anyway, I need a trade. I practically fled from the zeks to these courses.
V.O.: I did the same thing, you know. I was also in a criminal camp under similar conditions.
M.P.: So I finished the lathe operator courses there and earned a fourth-grade qualification. Only two of us were given the fourth grade—me and a guy who had been a lecturer at the Sloviansk Pedagogical Institute, Stepan Popovych. The two of us passed for the fourth grade. But I never got to work as a lathe operator. They transferred me from that job to assembling crates, and that’s where they released me from. When they were letting me out, I protested, I refused to put on that nice suit with a tie.
V.O.: This is before they take the picture, right?
M.P.: Yes, for the photograph.
V.O.: Oh, the exact same thing happened to me—that I wanted to be in my Soviet passport photo in my zek clothes, right?
M.P.: Yes, yes, in the same clothes I always wear, I dont wear other peoples clothes. And they were too ashamed to stick that photo on my release certificate, so they stuck on a picture of me from when they photographed me in Lukianivka, when I first arrived, with a full head of hair. They put that photo on my release certificate. And when a similar thing happened the second time, Pavlov was the head of the camp regime, and when I protested like that, he told me: “So youre still acting up—you keep it up for a bit longer, and I promise you, you wont be getting out of here at all.” So I had to agree to that uniform, that rag with a sewn-on tie and a jacket thrown over it. But I made such a grimace that I thought they wouldn’t use it either—but they did, a picture of me with a contorted face.
V.O.: But that was the second time?
M.P.: The second time.
V.O.: So, when were you released?
M.P.: In 1978, released on March 11. I communicated with that Ivan Melashchenko for quite a long time in the colony, with that Baptist. Since I still needed something to eat, I remembered my old hobbies. I had once wanted to be an artist I used to draw. So in Lukianivka, and in transit, and in the colony, I drew various knick-knacks, sometimes even portraits. But mostly, I made designs on handkerchiefs. A handkerchief—Id draw some little flowers, or the Holy Trinity... When they went for visits with relatives, they would pass along such a gift from inside...
V.O.: Ah, they called that a “marochka,” right?
M.P.: Yes, yes.
V.O.: See, I know the terminology. Its from the word “maraty,” to mark or soil a handkerchief, right? A decorated one?
M.P.: Yes. That’s what I did, and for that, they also paid me not with money, but with a can of preserves or something like that that’s how they supplemented my diet a little. From that time on, they didnt persecute me as much. I also drew a lot for this Ivan Melashchenko.
I missed something again. When I was working on the drill press and couldnt meet the quota, they offered me a delicate job—to walk around with the guards, carry the keys, and unlock the local sections, because it was too hard for him to carry the keys. I refused this job. And so one evening at roll call, this guard who was doing the count, when he called my name, he paused and said: “And take note of him—he wants to be a ‘sherstyanoy,’ wants to be a ‘putyevoy.’ He was offered a job like this, and he refused.” And right there in front of the zeks I tell him: “I know your ‘generosity’—now you trust me to lock up the zeks, to unlock whoever you see fit, because you don’t have the strength to carry the keys. And when you are convinced that I will be so obedient and carry out all your orders, you’ll then give me a gun and order me to shoot them. So you go ahead and do it yourself: what you were ordered to do, you do. And as for me, you ordered me to do this—so I do what you ordered me to.” And that had a huge impact—they stopped believing the administration that I was a snitch, and later some even got a beating for me. Before that, they had beaten me three times, beaten me badly. One of them was even a guy from Bila Tserkva, a sporty type, very shifty. At first, he got on good terms with me, but when he started playing chess and winning, and someone started owing him money because they didn’t have any, since he was very strong, he beat up more than one person. But then he got beaten up so badly himself that he barely made it to roll call and asked to be transferred to the service unit. How he survived his sentence, I dont know, but I never saw him again.
(On March 29, 2009, M. Polishchuk added: In Dzerzhynsk, prisoners were transported to the work zone in specially equipped refrigerated trucks. When the outside temperature became high, the “putyovye” warned the prisoners that no more than 50 people should get into a transport.
After the day shift, the prisoners were lined up in columns of five. The “putyovye” were in the first ranks. I was in the 12th rank of five, and when the 10th rank was put into the truck, the 11th ran to the end of the column. I found myself in the 11th rank, and the guards forcibly pushed our rank of five into the refrigerated truck. On the way to the residential zone, the “putyovye” beat everyone in that rank. When we were let out of the transport in the residential zone, my face was covered in bruises and I couldnt stand on my feet. The officer escorting the “passengers” noticed that I didnt look like that when I was loaded into the transport and asked:
– Who decorated you like that?
I replied:
– You, the Soviet government, just using the hands of the prisoners…)
This Ivan Melashchenko, when I was in contact with him, also took under his wing a young Baptist who had refused to join the army because of his religious beliefs, and they gave this boy, Petryk, three years.
V.O.: Yes, thats the standard—three years for refusing military service.
M.P.: As long as Melashchenko was there, Petryk was a very good boy, but after Melashchenko was released, Petryk spoiled very quickly—he started smoking, started swearing. They completely ruined the boy. When I was released on March 11, 1978, Melashchenko came to Bila Tserkva. He came to see the Baptists, but the Baptists found me, and I had a final meeting with Melashchenko. He died some time later, although he was still quite young, born in 1941.
When they released me, they didn’t give me my passport for three months.
V.O.: And you returned to Bila Tserkva, right?
M.P.: Yes, to Bila Tserkva. I had my apartment here, and all my property was left in it.
V.O.: That was three years… Was the apartment locked up all that time?
M.P.: The investigator had me give my cousin power of attorney over the apartment. This cousin lived very close, about half a kilometer from there. My cousin looked after the apartment, and then he rented out my apartment, with all my belongings, to tenants who would at least pay the rent, so he wouldnt have to pay for it. Six months after the verdict came into effect, these people whom my brother had moved in there received a paper, which I still have. It was sent by the head of the “Bilotserkivkhimbud” trust, Vasyl Ivanovych Kononenko: “immediately vacate the illegally occupied apartment.” At that point, my cousin had nowhere to go, because he himself worked at the agricultural machinery plant and lived in a small apartment, which was partitioned in two when children came along… My cousin couldnt take my belongings into his place, so he rented it out so the tenants would at least pay for the apartment, convinced that in three years I would return to my own apartment. But after the sentence came into force, the head of the “Bilotserkivkhimbud” trust, Vasyl Ivanovych Kononenko, sent the paper: “Immediately vacate the illegally occupied apartment.” Because of this, my cousin was forced to sell all my belongings for 200 rubles—because it was urgent, they threatened him with court action if he didn’t vacate immediately. Thats how I lost all my property.
When I was released, I went to my cousin, and he told me all this. On March 28, 1979, I had an appointment with the head of the city council, Vasyl Pavlovych Zalevsky. Vasyl Pavlovych listened to what I told him and spoke to me very honestly, just as it really was. He asked me: “Did you have a job? You did, and a good one. An apartment? You had one, and a good one. What more did you need? You thought you were smarter than everyone else. Well, you see, there were people smarter than you. So go get your passport, register your residence, and we’ll help you find a job. As for the rest of your troubles, you can keep them. I’ll check to see if you can at least live in a dormitory.” And while Vasyl Pavlovych was checking whether or not I could live in a dormitory, they didn’t give me any work, constantly looking for some pretext: now you were given an indefinite passport, where did you put it, now this, now that, there’s always a pretext to be found. And when the “comrades” oppressing Ukraine concluded that I could live in a dormitory, that it might even be more convenient to some extent, they very quickly gave me a passport and found me a job. They gave me a passport within five days and arranged a job for me at the “Bilotserkivkhimbud” trust in the engineering preparation department for construction. They set me up with a salary of one hundred rubles.
They housed me for a second time in the “Myr” dormitory, from which I had received my apartment—its near “Oleksandriya” Park in Bila Tserkva, at 4/2 Pivnichna Street. In this dormitory, they kept changing the people I lived with—they needed informers. And they found such informers—a man from Fastiv, who worked as a zincographer at a book factory, and he would pry words out of me and report them. After I had worked at the “Khimbud” trust for eleven months, I was legally entitled to a vacation, and after eleven months, they gave me one. But before the vacation, they sent me to work as a foreman for a month at the construction of an asbestos-technical products plant. The site manager there was a man who used to work in the fourth general construction department. I had lived in the same “Myr” dormitory with this man for a while we knew each other by sight. But we never had anything in common. And so one time, when they sent me to work as a foreman under his command, I went to him and said: “Yaroslav, I need foam concrete.” He said he would get me a tractor, provide everything needed, but then he asked: “Tell me, what happened?” We were alone in the construction trailer. I had nothing to hide, but I wasnt being too loose with my tongue either. I told Yaroslav Afanasiyovych what the trial was like, that it was closed, that not even my mother and sister were allowed into the courtroom, that not a single witness heard my sentence being read, but they wrote that it was an open court session, that I had refused a lawyer, and so on. So I told him what the trial was like, what it considered, and where I served my time—thats all, I didnt tell him anything more. And Yaroslav Opanasovych immediately, the very next day, gave a statement to the KGB saying that he had conducted educational work with me, that I did not yield to his educational influence, and that in conversations with him I “repeatedly made ideologically hostile statements.” Well, after that, Yaroslav Opanasovych rose quite high—he was elected secretary of the “Khimbud” trust’s party committee. After I was arrested and imprisoned—this was on November 20, 1980, although I dont remember the exact date, its in the verdict—after that, Yaroslav Opanasovych Levchuk...
V.O.: From November 19, 1980.
M.P.: ...was made an instructor at the Bila Tserkva District Party Committee. And then, while I was in prison, when I was about to be released for the second time, he was an instructor at the Kyiv Regional Party Committee, having already moved to Kyiv. I never saw Yaroslav Afanasiyovych Levchuk again they kept him hidden from me. Even after my rehabilitation, no matter how hard I tried to find out where he was, just to look him in the eye, they never gave me the name of a single witness or told me where they were.
V.O.: Was he the main witness?
M.P.: No, he wasnt a witness.
V.O.: Not at all?
M.P.: He wasnt a witness he just wrote that denunciation, and they showed it to me.
I missed something, and probably something interesting. When they found me a job, I started pressuring the authorities about being illegally repressed, that there wasnt a single convincing piece of evidence that I was involved in such crimes. And, by the way, after they got me the job, they put me under administrative supervision. The conditions were as follows: they called me into the police station, they already knew my character, that I wouldn’t sign anything, so they had witnesses there, and said: “From 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., do not leave the dormitory. Do not leave the city. If you need to leave the city, inform the police. If you need to leave the city for more than 3 days, register at your place of arrival. Come to the police station every Saturday to check in.” Those were the terms. Well, I asked Avdeeva, Svitlana, I think Borysivna was her patronymic, what prompted such grace. She told me: “A terrible report came from the labor institution—you havent reformed.” “Well, as you wish, I couldn’t reform myself—I was being reformed by others, so you should address your complaints to those who failed to reform me. I have nothing to do with it. In fact, I very much wanted to reform and asked our dear Soviet government which flaws I needed to get rid of and what other qualities of a full-fledged citizen of a socialist, communist society I needed to acquire. But they didnt answer that question, so I will not sign these conditions.” “Well, if you won’t, then you don’t have to these guys will sign.” They offered it to one—he walks up and signs immediately. Another one walks up, and I ask him: well, do you even know what youre signing? “Of course I do: theyve put you under administrative supervision.” “Well, if you understand that, then go ahead and sign.” That’s how administrative supervision was imposed on me.
V.O.: This was right after your release?
M.P.: No, this was about two months after I got a job.
V.O.: And for how long—six months or a year?
M.P.: For six months.
V.O.: Did they extend it later?
M.P.: No, they didnt extend it. In any case, they didnt summon me. I warned them that no matter what measures they took, I wouldn’t come to check in, not once.
V.O.: But they could have imprisoned you for that! Three violations of supervision and it’s two years in prison.
M.P.: Well, I said that, and then they would check if I was in the dormitory or not. But I never went anywhere.
V.O.: So you didn’t violate it?
M.P.: No, I didn’t violate it, except for that one thing, that I didn’t go to them on Saturdays to check in. They would check up on me. And what was there to check? They’d call, the attendant on duty at the dormitory would say I was sitting there, and that was all.
But I did violate it, while I was still under administrative supervision. I made my way to Losiatyn to see a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, Stepanida Demydiyivna Vyshhtak. I managed to reach her, but it was just a day trip, on a Saturday or Sunday, a day off. The old woman just took my complaint from me it was impossible to talk to her about anything—she couldnt move her tongue in her mouth. Whether she didnt want to, or what, there was no conversation. She just wheezed, confirmed that she was Stepanida Demydiyivna, and that was it, and promised to pass on my complaint, nothing more.
After six months had passed, I was at the theater to see Dmytro Hnatiuk. I brought him this... It must be here somewhere. Dmytro Hnatiuk took it from me and promised he would make inquiries. He also seemed very surprised, but he passed my petition on to the same prosecutor who had signed the warrant for my arrest, Bahachov. This is a copy of what I wrote to Hnatiuk—I gave him the original, and this is a copy of what I gave him. And soon after I gave this to Hnatiuk, they arrested me. They arrested me at work—they came to my job, searched my workspace, then brought me to the dormitory, searched it, sealed my small suitcase, and brought me to Kyiv. Thats how my second term of imprisonment began.
V.O.: Do you think that text ended up with the investigators?
M.P.: I am certain it ended up there. The first time, I only submitted one statement, that I was refusing a lawyer because I didnt trust lawyers. But when they imprisoned me the second time, I submitted four statements that I was refusing a lawyer and insisting that the criminal case against me was illegally initiated... I proposed that it be heard in Bila Tserkva by a visiting session at the construction site of the tire factory, in the “Molodizhnyi” club—where I had worked for seven years. Show the people who know me—what is my crime against the Soviet government? But they couldnt do that, and because of that, they locked me up in the thirteenth ward of “Pavlivka.” There they put me together with Valeriy Kravchenko… (Valeriy Oleksiyovych Kravchenko, born Jan. 2, 1946, a worker. Imprisoned for 4 years in 1980 for protesting against communist totalitarianism. Currently the head of the human rights organization “For the Rehabilitation of the ‘First of May Two.’” – V.O.).
V.O.: What year was this?
M.P.: This was eighty-one, January. I don’t know if Kravchenko was still there or not—a very interesting fellow ended up there. Young, strong, muscles like you wouldn’t believe, and very, very lively. This guy was from Vatutino. In Vatutino in 1979, just before November 7th, where the demonstrations were held, he and someone else repainted the red hammer-and-sickle flag black and raised it over the city party committee building. And they wrote that it was mined. And on the facades, they wrote some anti-Soviet slogans. The demonstration passed under these slogans, the black flag was hanging there, but they were afraid to approach it because it said “Mined.”
V.O.: And where is this Vatutino?
M.P.: It’s in Cherkasy Oblast. And so, somewhere at the beginning of 1981, they found these guys, and they stuck this guy here in the thirteenth ward.
V.O.: I was in that ward too in 1973, during the investigation. They held me for an evaluation for 18 days. Dr. Natalia Maksymivna Vynarska—do you know her?
M.P.: Oh, exactly! We know her, we’re acquainted. And Lifshits too.
V.O.: Lifshits, yes.
M.P.: We have mutual acquaintances. This fellow ran around here for a few days, got to know everyone, and then they did something to him, so that he couldnt carry his own shit from his ward—it was right next to the orderlies station—to the toilet. He would walk, trembling, shuffling, shuffling, it in the corridor, wave his hand, and turn back. That’s what they did to this fellow. Kravchenko must have been gone by then. These psychiatrists wanted a conclusion that I was mentally ill and required long-term treatment. But oddly enough, they didnt give one they refrained. Tamara Mykhailivna Arsenyuk, the head of the 13th ward, did not comply with such an order she gave a conclusion that I could defend myself in court.
V.O.: You know, everyone says this about the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital in Kyiv, that they didn’t make such diagnoses. If they were heavily pressured, they would send people to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, where they would make such diagnoses. But these Kyiv doctors still withstood the pressure.
M.P.: The day before I was to be transferred to Lukianivka, there was an orderly there who told me that 80 cubic centimeters of sulfazine had been prescribed for me, but they hadnt given me a single one. And he told me it was only because he was from Volodarka and was a close acquaintance of my cousin. Thats why he told me.
V.O.: Otherwise, they would have injected you.
M.P.: Yes, otherwise they would have pumped me full of it—and maybe I wouldn’t have been able to carry my own shit either.
V.O.: You are telling me horrifying things. That is worse than death.
M.P.: Thats how it was. So, when they moved me from the thirteenth ward back to Lukianivka, this time different judges presided. These judges were quite composed, because the first judge, Dyshel—oh, he was very...
V.O.: Dyshel was your judge? He was a famous butcher.
M.P.: He got very worked up—and how he jumped up, how he banged his fists on the table! He broke my camera there, couldnt open it. I still thought it couldn’t be like this, they had to release me, I hadn’t committed any crime. After all, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” and “A Tale of Things Lived Through,” and “Not by Bread Alone” had already been published—so much of that kind of thing was published, it couldn’t be that things were going backwards—I didnt believe it, at that time I didnt believe it! I defended myself quite successfully against them. I would say, how can this be reconciled with such declarations? “Alright, the court is taking a recess, the witness is not answering, the court withdraws the question.” They would go off to consult about something. It was like that for all three days. And that Article 215 or 211, the pornography charge they pinned on me—that took a maximum of 15 minutes, practically no time was spent on it.
V.O.: So you’re talking about the first trial?
M.P.: Yes, yes. And at the second trial, Kiselevich presided—he was very patient. But they were all the same and repeated my sentence of three years.
What else should I not forget? They sent me to the colony very quickly, this time to Chornukhyne in the Perevalsk district of Voroshylovhrad Oblast. In some ways, it was easier there than during my first imprisonment. Easier in that they no longer left me without my ration of bread, and there was no such persecution. The second time, none of the zeks ever hit me. But they wouldnt accept any of my complaints—only one letter a month, and nothing more. And so, December 10, 1981. One of the prisoners, whose term was ending, promised to take a letter for me, because I asked him to—it was a statement to the republics prosecutor about my illegal imprisonment. He promised me, and early on December 10, 1981, I gave him the envelope with the statement. I didnt even look in that guy Manko’s direction, afraid to breathe. But even before the work detail was assigned, they dragged me to the deputy chief for camp regime. This Manko had immediately passed the letter to the barracks elder, and the elder was forced to immediately pass it to the regime chief. The regime chief accused me of attempting to illegally send correspondence, which meant the punishment isolator, and I declared a protest hunger strike. I fasted for 25 days, until January 4, 1982.
V.O.: Did they try to force-feed you?
M.P.: No, that didn’t happen. I declared a dry hunger strike. I didn’t even drink water for seven days.
V.O.: My God, that’s terrible!
M.P.: I had already lost my voice. I wasnt alone in the cell, there were at least five of us, and my cellmates could no longer hear me. They constantly brought my ration to the cell, but the zeks ate my ration, not me. I didn’t even drink water. When I felt that they really couldnt hear me, because they kept asking me to repeat myself, I started drinking water. I just drank a cup of water, and immediately felt better, right away.
Here’s a very interesting detail. Although there are such strange people who immediately handed my statement for the prosecutor over to the administration, some kind person, unknown to me, was found who informed my sister that I had declared a hunger strike and was in the punishment isolator—here, to 22 Marshaka Street, in Kyiv. My sister raised a ruckus, began demanding an explanation, what was the matter, why was he in the punishment isolator, why was he on a hunger strike. And it was precisely because of my sister’s intervention that on January 4, 1982, the colony chief Ptashynsky called me in and assured me that all my complaints would be sent to all state authorities, to all bodies of the : wherever you address it, thats where we will send it, just not to relatives—we won’t send those and only through us, not illegally. It was because of this promise—though I doubted it would be so—that I ended my hunger strike.
I ended the hunger strike, and the detachment head Pyokhov refused to take me back into his local section, saying, “I don’t need a corpse, get him out of here.” So they put me in the infirmary. In this infirmary, the chief, with the surname Dniprov, took one look at me, and the zeks were giving me some extra food—a piece of bread with margarine. Im standing there, and this Dniprov walks by. I say to him: “They’re feeding me.” “Good, good, eat, eat, eat.” He knew very well that I wasnt supposed to eat that. When I ate that bread—and by then the pangs of hunger were such that I just dont know… I didnt have the strength of will, and I also ate some pea soup at lunch.
V.O.: And peas are heavy…
M.P.: And then I couldnt find a comfortable position—I kept tossing and turning and falling over, just couldnt find a spot. When the orderly brought me back to this Dniprov, he immediately said: “What did you eat?” So I said that I ate that bread with margarine that you saw, and a bowl of pea soup. “You! I thought you were a man with a head on his shoulders—you could have kicked the bucket like that.” He gave an order to the same orderly, they took me to another ward, gave me a few tiny little pills, like millet seeds, yellowish. After those pills, the pain subsided a little, but as soon as I had a bowel movement, on the third day, they immediately discharged me and sent me to work, right away.
So they’re leading me to work, but where am I supposed to go to that work when the ground beneath me is swaying like the bottom of a boat, I can’t take a step, and my legs are swollen up to my knees. So they led the others to work, and just waved me off—after all, where could he go from here. I made it there, they let me into the work zone, the brigadier arranged for a few crates to be assembled under my name, and they found a place for me under some workbench in the wood shavings, and that’s where I dozed off. But about two months later, they kicked me out into the sun with a broom, and I swept the work zone. Then they assigned me to weave nets—like those string shopping bags, fishing nets. And that’s how my second term ended. True, I also took courses there to be a boiler operator, but this time I wasn’t running away from the zeks. I know Ihor Bondar, he was imprisoned under Article 206 and was a boiler operator.
V.O.: Ihor was there?
M.P.: No, Ihor wasn’t here, but I knew him from before, so I know he was imprisoned under Article 206 and that he learned the trade of a boiler operator in the colony. I knew him after he was working as a mechanic at a consumer electronics repair shop, fixing electric razors. And when I was released, he was working as a boiler operator not far from Biloruska Street. I visited him in the boiler room many times. So I finished the courses there, thinking I might be able to get a job in the boiler room in the colony. But that was out of the question.
After Pavlov promised that they wouldnt release me at all, they did release me and gave me a ticket to Bila Tserkva. They ordered me under no circumstances to deviate from the route and to report to the police first thing. I have relatives and friends in Bila Tserkva. This time they gave me a passport very quickly. They released me on December 20, 1983, and by December 25, they had already issued me a passport, the one I just turned in yesterday for a replacement. Here, the police also tried to find me a job for a whole month—they failed. A policeman, Lieutenant Nemov, was in charge of my employment—a good policeman, I cant say a single bad word about him. But the police couldnt find me a job. Even the top brass of the Bila Tserkva police were getting annoyed that I was slandering, because I mentioned International Human Rights Day, and one of them banged his fist on the table: “In the Soviet , the rights of workers are protected 365 days a year! But in the world of capital, where everything depends on the moneybag, there’s one day. People there have one human rights day, but our people have rights all 365 days.” So, after that, the Bila Tserkva city executive committee took over my job placement.
I missed a small detail. Three months before release, they send a notification that such an unreliable person is returning. This time they sent the notification that I would be returning to Bila Tserkva six months in advance, but Bila Tserkva didn’t reply to the colony. The colony didnt know where to send me, but since I had long been saying that I had housing and property there, and relatives and friends, I had to go there and nowhere else.
So, Vasyl Petrovych Shevchenko handled my job placement. (On March 29, 2009, M. Polishchuk added: In the early 1990s, Colonel of the Soviet Army Vasyl Petrovych Shevchenko told me that in 1943, in the city of Aktarsk, Saratov Oblast, there was a special school that trained “Banderites.” The command of the Soviet (then Red) Army sent these “Banderites” in detachments into the zones where the UPA was active. Disguised as insurgents, the “Banderites” trained in Aktarsk were incomparably more brutal than the fascists.
After punishing the relatives or sympathizers of the insurgents, the “Banderites,” as they were leaving the scene of the massacre, would sing partisan songs so that the peasants would have no doubt as to the authors of the execution.
In January 2009, Vasyl Petrovych turned 93. He still uses the “commonly understood language” [Russian].)
This Shevchenko really disliked the Ukrainian language and tried very hard to push me out of Bila Tserkva. He sent me to Vasylkiv, to Fastiv, to Volodarka, and to Skvyra, but I told him I wouldnt go to any of those places. So he got me a temporary job as a boiler operator at the “Elektrokondensator” plant—they had built a new boiler house there, and that’s where he placed me as an operator, for a month. When I went to the police, I had already become a thorn in their side, a real nuisance, because every morning I went there to report that I was there, I had carried out their instructions, I had gone to such and such a place but they wouldnt hire me, so where should I go next and what should I do. So they asked me: “Where did you sleep tonight? We’ll register you there!” “I slept in a commuter train tonight, so register me to the commuter train.” And so they couldnt do it, which is why the city executive committee took over the placement. When I went to the police, they very quickly gave me a referral to the director of the condenser plant, who then sent a request to the head of the “Khimbud” trust to put me up in a dormitory. And they immediately registered me at the dormitory there the police were very efficient about it.
But after some time, they again began to place secret informants with me. And then they moved me to the factory dormitory, whose construction had just been completed, and in this factory dormitory they kept moving me from room to room, from room to room. And when I refused to move from the fifth floor to a better room for three people on the second floor, the deputy director of the plant for social affairs, Zhukov, summoned me and threatened me very seriously: “Dont think youre going to call the shots for us, telling us where youll live and where you wont—you will live where we tell you to live, and with whom we tell you to live.”
V.O.: Where they had a prepared environment for you?
M.P.: Yes, yes. Because of that, I was forced to move into that room. And in that room lived two managers—a workshop chief named Lohvynenko and a foreman named Pivniuk. When they moved me there, I immediately told these guys why I had been moved there. I told them that I had lived in that “Myr” dormitory, and it was like this and that, and Id been in many rooms already, so they sent me here to you because I wasnt giving any information about myself to the people I lived with in the dormitory. So dont be offended, but you wont hear a single word from me here—I simply dont have the moral right to talk to you, because they will call you in later and force you to testify, and you dont need that. The guys understood—they didnt spend the night there. That same evening they left and didn’t spend the night there. So I was left alone in a three-person room and lived there until I was rehabilitated, and after rehabilitation, they gave me a second apartment.
V.O.: And when was that rehabilitation?
M.P.: I was rehabilitated in April 1989. And I moved out of the dormitory in January 1991.
V.O.: But wait, the Law on Rehabilitation was passed on April 17, 1991, when it was still the Ukrainian SSR.
M.P.: I was rehabilitated while it was still the Ukrainian SSR, in April 1989.
V.O.: How—did you press for it?
M.P.: I did. I pressed very hard.
V.O.: Thats a unique case, that you were rehabilitated even before the Law on Rehabilitation.
M.P.: I pushed very hard, but then I gave up, went silent, very silent. Here’s how it happened. True, one moment—I don’t know if its worth mentioning—on March 9, 1984, my friend Leonid Polikarpovych Gaponenko and I were in Kaniv at Shevchenkos grave, and on March 10, they threatened me very seriously at the KGB: “So, what you got wasn’t enough for you, and youre still walking around chattering, huh? You chatter—well, go on, chatter. You’ll chatter your way into trouble. We’re drying bread for your third term, no less than 12 years. In the meantime, the job of a stoker is too great a luxury for you.”
V.O.: Well, 12 years—thats Article 62, seven years of imprisonment and five of exile.
M.P.: Yes. They had warned me about that before, in the colony in Chornukhyne—“we’ll re-qualify you under Article 62,” but here, right after that conversation at the KGB on March 10, 1984, I called my former chief project engineer at home. He was the second secretary of the Bila Tserkva City Party Committee, Hennadiy Volodymyrovych Shulipa, and now he is the head of the Bila Tserkva city council. I called him at home and asked him to come outside for a bit to talk—maybe he could advise me on what to do. But he got scared and refused to meet with me. He told me: “Make an appointment, like all Soviet citizens, and come, and well talk.” But I went to see him seven times, and he never received me the secretary wouldnt let me in: “What is the issue?” I would say that I’ll tell him, I didnt come to him to be silent. “No, you tell me, what is the issue.” So I went back to the dormitory, wrote him a letter, and just like with the court, I wrote it, took it to the post office, and sent it by registered mail. But he never received me. They summoned me to the city party committee, and the instructors of the city party committee yelled at me more harshly than Rusanov at the Kyiv Regional Prosecutors Office. From that moment on, I fell silent—I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything.
V.O.: So what year was this?
M.P.: That was with the instructors, when I was still at the boiler house, somewhere before May 1984.
V.O.: The Soviet regime was still standing strong then.
M.P.: Very strong. As soon as my probationary period at the boiler house ended, they could no longer legally fire me. I refused to go to the political information sessions, which were held every Monday during working hours, and told the foreman that I had heard enough of such information to last until the final victory of communism, and there was nothing for me to listen to. He immediately spun on his heel, ran to the boss, and right away the secretary of the party organization drove up to me, and they immediately started the process of firing me—immediately! And the deputy director for personnel, Stanislav Pylypovych Mazhara—a good man, Im still on good terms with him, I saw him last around the fourteenth of this month—Stanislav Pylypovych recommended me highly to all the construction organizations: “We just have a staff reduction—hire this man.” And he’d say: go there and there—they’ll hire you. Id go, start talking to the chief engineer, the head of the department. Was I in prison? God forbid, no, no, no, we wont hire you. Mazhara kept sending me places: to PMK-1, SPMK-17, the heat and power plant management, the “Khimbud” trust, he arranged things with Heorhiy Bahaichuk, but Bahaichuk knew me very well since about 1965, only he didnt know who Mazhara was talking to him about, and as soon as I arrived—“Oh, so it was you Mazhara was talking about? No, go on your way, no!” But they had to fire me, had to carry out the KGB’s orders, because they had said that the job of a stoker was too great a luxury for me.
And so, somewhere in early May, at the condenser plant, they held a meeting of the trade committee. At this committee meeting, the issue of my dismissal due to staff reductions was raised—by an HR officer named Kruk, who had disliked me from our very first conversation—the decision to fire me from the condenser plant had almost been made. But then, an engineer for workplace safety, Roza Anatoliivna Vrabits, whose husband was Czech, stood up for me. She spoke out and deeply shamed the entire meeting: “You are making a decision without thinking, you dont know this person at all. This man is persistent, and he will not let you get away with this—he will pester the authorities and force you through the courts to rehire him and pay compensation for forced absence. And he does not have perfect health you will have a lot of trouble over a decision like this.” And they backed down from this decision, making an amendment: to offer him another job at the condenser plant, but if he refused that offer, then to fire him due to staff reduction.
Two days later, they offered me a job as an unskilled laborer in the repair and construction workshop. I couldnt refuse this job because Im a builder by education, so I had to take it. I knew very well that if I refused, I would have to go back to a corrective labor institution, because they wouldnt give me a job anywhere else. So I was forced to go work as an unskilled laborer in the repair and construction workshop. The workshop chief also quickly understood what this was all about and tried all day to refuse, not wanting to take me under his command, but he was forced to.
Some time passed, the forewoman saw that I carried out all tasks without refusal and performed the work skillfully, so she suggested I take the exam for a qualification grade. I explained to her that it was a waste of time because they wouldnt allow me to do it. But after some time, even here, in the job of an unskilled laborer, I again refused to go to the `subbotniks` (compulsory “volunteer” work days), refused to buy those DOSAAF stamps and various other things. They started breathing fire at me again. They began to give me work that far exceeded my physical abilities, and I was forced to seek the protection of doctors. I went to the hospital, brought back a certificate stating that I could only perform physical labor that didnt involve lifting weights greater than 20 kilograms. Well, they couldnt get around that, and at the same time, I began to trouble the prosecutors office. After the prosecutors office intervened for the third time, they allowed me to take the exam, but only for the third workers grade. The workshop chief told the prosecutor: “Hell pass the exam for the sixth grade, but I dont need workers like that,” and that was it. And so, until my rehabilitation, I performed the work of a mason of refractory materials, repairing the kilns where parts were fired at the condenser plant. Although when there were no specialists, I also performed high-grade work, I was never paid for more than a third-grade qualification. After my rehabilitation in April 1989, my workshop chief even offered me a job as a foreman there, but I refused. I said that I was only working there until my pension and, upon receiving my pension, I would not work a single day more. And so I stayed until the last day and got my pension.
V.O.: And when did you get your pension?
M.P.: I received my pension sometime in June 1991. I received my pension one day and submitted my resignation the next. They still tried to persuade me to work as a foreman, “you could still do it,” but I had already clashed with them too much there. By 1989, I had become a little more daring and had to fight a lot, because I was already very actively running around trying to the Society of the Ukrainian Language. In Bila Tserkva, perhaps, I played a significant role in this. I didn’t succeed in creating a chapter at the factory, but in the city of Bila Tserkva, I was not the last one.
V.O.: Tell me, how did you manage to achieve rehabilitation, and which institution rehabilitated you?
M.P.: The Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR.
V.O.: And how did you achieve that?
M.P.: I dont remember for what reason exactly I once again submitted a statement that I was illegally repressed in such and such a way, and Volodymyr Prystaiko sent me a letter...
V.O.: Prystaiko, Volodymyr Illich? (1941–2008, Lieutenant General of Justice, Deputy Head of the SBU member of the pardons commission from 1989-91, head of the investigative department of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR. – V.O.)
M.P.: Prystaiko sent a letter stating that I had been rehabilitated. But they only gave me the certificate of rehabilitation—again my sister started to petition—at the end of December 1989.
V.O.: And were you rehabilitated in both cases or just one?
M.P.: In both cases, for lack of a criminal offense.
V.O.: Then you are a great ascetic for having achieved that.
M.P.: I banged on many doors, but after they promised me another 12 years, I fell silent. After the 25th Party Congress, I became a little more daring again.
V.O.: Probably the twenty-eighth?
M.P.: The twenty-fifth, Gorbachev. (The 25th Congress of the CPSU was in 1976 the last one, the 28th, took place July 2-13, 1990. Perhaps he is referring to the 19th Party Conference of 1988. – V.O.). For not going to a meeting that was held during work hours, I was punished with a 50 percent loss of my bonus, and again, they wanted to fire me. There was a lot, a lot of trouble, but I managed to defend myself, because I knew all their casuistry, as they say…
V.O.: You had already been through it?
M.P.: Well, yes. This way and that, and they couldn’t get me. So they only punished me with a 50 percent loss of my bonus for not wanting to listen to nonsense about the twenty-fifth congress. And when things started appearing in the “Literaturna Ukraina” newspaper, I submitted a piece there about the famine in ‘33, and the newspaper published it.
V.O.: The story you told about the famine.
M.P.: Yes, yes, about that. I grew a little bolder then and gained momentum. In 1989, around March, in Bila Tserkva, at the agricultural machinery plant, the first meeting of the Society of the Ukrainian Language was held, and the first chapter was created there. And sometime in the third decade of March, at the home of my friend in Bila Tserkva, Leonid Polikarpovych Gaponenko, with whom I had been in Kaniv, we held the second meeting of the Society of the Ukrainian Language, and there were people from various organizations from all over the city. Thus the second chapter, “Pochatok” (Beginning), of the Society of the Ukrainian Language was created. This chapter was very active in Bila Tserkva. I, along with some old men—Mykola Fedorovych Pedchenko, Vasyl Mykhailovych Marchenko—I went with these men to schools, to organizations, we campaigned to chapters of the Society of the Ukrainian Language. True, we didn’t succeed much, but still, when the last elections in the Ukrainian SSR were approaching, we managed to achieve the creation of an association of chapters of the Society of the Ukrainian Language and had the right to nominate our own candidates for deputy.
V.O.: Those elections were in March 1990.
M.P.: Yes, yes, yes. I ran for the city council then and lost by 42 votes to the head of the childrens hospital. There were seven candidates in total, I made it to the second round with her and lost by 42 votes. Well, thats a trifle. The important thing is that, while she was a deputy of the city council, she never once spoke in the city council. I checked up on this. So, about the Society of the Ukrainian Language. Because I was on such a disreputable account with the administration, they always gave me my vacations in weather when you couldnt leave the house, and in 1989 they also gave me my vacation in November. I spent that entire vacation creating an association of the Society of the Ukrainian Language in Bila Tserkva and getting it registered. And I did it. I was living in the “Ros” dormitory of the condenser plant at the time, in the “Lenin room,” or the “red corner.” 120 members of the TUM gathered there from the chapters “Pochatok,” “Viche,” School No. 15, School No. 4, the Ukrainian Society of the Blind and Visually Impaired, and the “Silmah” plant. The writer Viktor Miniailo was there. In that “Lenin room” of the dormitory, I held a conference, gave a report, and a leadership was elected. Mykola Fedorovych Pedchenko was elected chairman of the Society. Since many members of the Society of the Ukrainian Language began to believe that Ukraine was being resurrected and that we could be part of this resurrection, there were about four hundred of us who were quite active. But later, when the Society of the Ukrainian Language was reformed and became “Prosvita,” and Ivantsiv became our chairman, that Society practically fell apart theres no one there besides Ivantsiv, and there’s no sense to be had from this Society. That includes Pavlo Mykhailovych Movchan—they are relatives in this regard. (Ivantsiv was the editor of the factory newspaper and created the first TUM chapter at the “Silmash” plant. – Note by M. Polishchuk).
I think around 1995 I started to decline significantly in my activity. In the early nineties, they convinced me that we needed a Ukrainian Orthodox Church, so I founded a community of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Bila Tserkva. When that Church split, I re-registered it with the Kyiv Patriarchate. But when they were burying Vasyl Romaniuk, that evening I turned away from Christianity, my passivity began to grow, and I became very passive in everything.
I probably can’t tell you anything else as interesting that would be worthy of attention, unless, perhaps, there are some questions.
V.O.: Do you have a place to live now?
M.P.: Yes, they returned it to me after my rehabilitation. Only not the same one. I never crossed the threshold of that apartment again. Very close to this dormitory where I lived, there lived a frail, elderly woman she passed away, and they gave me her apartment, practically in a state of neglect. I was still working then, I got a write-off for materials from the plant, they gave me paint, they gave me particle board, they gave me fiberboard. And at that very moment, a great misfortune happened to me: I jumped off a workbench from a height of about 80 centimeters, landed on a piece of brick, and broke my leg.
V.O.: As if you needed that too…
M.P.: I was doing repairs in the apartment on one leg, and on sick leave. I did the repairs because I had already ordered the materials and they had been delivered. I wasnt supposed to walk, but how do you drive a nail without hammering? I pushed for them to at least relay the floor, but I got nowhere with that, so I laid those boards on top of the old ones. And by hammering, I greatly annoyed the people in my entryway, and they even threatened to break my windows. But I explained to the people who came by, I’d say, look, I’m on one leg, and I have to do this repair. So, I think, from the very beginning of February 1991, I have been living in this apartment. All my property was lost—everything. After my rehabilitation, I was awarded ten thousand, I think, and eighty rubles, but all that was left was the hole in a donut.
V.O.: In 1989, those rubles were still worth something, right?
M.P.: What good was it that they were worth something, if I was still living in a dormitory, finding justifications for getting my housing back within a month and getting compensation for damages, but none of that worked out for me. They calculated 10,080 rubles for me, I needed furniture, and they put four thousand in my bank book, but I couldnt use it, everything was lost.
V.O.: One thing I noticed in your story, I don’t think you mentioned your father’s and mothers years of life. And somewhere in the late forties you mentioned a stepfather. So what happened to your father?
M.P.: My father—I have a certificate—died at the front in December 1943. Missing in action.
V.O.: And you didnt mention his year of birth?
M.P.: His year of birth, I think, was 1904.
V.O.: And your mother?
M.P.: My mother was born in 1908, in the village of Biliivka on June 23, 1908. Tomorrow is the anniversary of my mothers birth. My mother died on November 22, 1995. So we commemorate our mother in November every year. Every year on her birthday, I come here to my sisters place. My mother is buried here at the Bilytske cemetery, it’s close to my sister’s house. My sister goes there constantly I go from time to time, but my mothers grave is very well kept. It was our fate to have three stepfathers. Our first stepfather was my father’s own brother. He was also a blacksmith in Donbas, and after retiring, he came here from Donbas and married my mother. This first stepfather—I think it was in 1955 he was in an accident—he was crushed by a truck while they were hauling sugar beets from the fields. Then there was a second stepfather, a Russian guy. I clashed with him a bit, but it was probably because of that stepfather that I became a builder, because he was a carpenter, and I went with him to build barns and houses for people. So later I worked in the construction brigade on the collective farm and went to technical school. My third stepfather was from the neighboring village of Antoniv, in Skvyra district. When I had already moved to Bila Tserkva and found a job there, my mother felt persecuted by the villagers in Haivoron, so she moved there. His last name, this third stepfather, was Hrynchiy, Ivan Romanovych. After some time, my sister took our mother away from him she was there for about three years. But the old man started drinking again he was an agronomist by education, had been the head of a collective farm for some time, but vodka, and because of the vodka, my sister took our mother to Bilychi, and my mother died there near my sister.
V.O.: You were a member of the Society of the Ukrainian Language. Were you a member of any other organizations, parties, and are you now a member of the Society of the Repressed?
M.P.: Yes, the Society of the Repressed came from Kyiv in the summer to hold a rally at our stadium... This was in 1989.
V.O.: The Society was founded on June 3, 1989. You werent at the Constituent Assembly on Lvivska Square?
M.P.: No, I wasnt at the meeting in Kyiv. In Bila Tserkva, the first chapters to appear were those of the Society of the Ukrainian Language. I wasn’t at the meetings of the Society of the Repressed. Later I met Klym Semenyuk, and Klym Semenyuk invited me to his place and recommended I submit my documents there. When that rally was in Bila Tserkva, the police didnt allow blue-and-yellow flags. When we had seen the people from Kyiv off on the train, the police, who kept removing the flags from time to time, would come up and warn and threaten us. Thats when Semenyuk invited me to the Society of the Repressed. That’s when I submitted my application. I knew both Vasyl Gurdhan and Yevhen Proniuk. I attended some of the congresses. Proniuk suggested I a chapter, but I couldnt do it because a man named Volodymyr Kolomiyets took the initiative. He gathered the descendants of those who had been executed, and he gathered more than 80 people. As for people like me, there were also Ivan Dubovyk, Todor Diachun—hes in the UPA Brotherhood now. There were a few men like that who had served time.
V.O.: Real political prisoners, right?
M.P.: Yes, yes, yes.
V.O.: What articles were they under?
M.P.: Fifty-six, sixty...—from that old code.
V.O.: So they are older men?
M.P.: Yes, yes, theyre older, theyre from around 1925. This Todor Diachun—he was sixteen years old when they gave him twenty-five years. He was released after serving half of it. Theres another one—Zakhlyniuk. They also gave Zakhlyniuk 25 years.
V.O.: Did you ever know someone named Kuziukin in Bila Tserkva?
M.P.: No, I don’t know anyone by that name.
V.O.: He was an officer who served in Czechoslovakia, and he distributed some leaflets about it.
M.P.: I dont know such a person.
V.O.: He was in Mordovia with me later. He was severely emaciated from tuberculosis. He broke, and they released him early. He lived in Bila Tserkva and has since passed away.
M.P.: I don’t know such a person, no.
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.