Raisa Vasylivna Moroz

Interview with Raisa Moroz on December 26, 2012

We are speaking with Ms. Raisa Moroz in the Kyiv apartment of Ms. Raisa Rudenko. The interviewers are Vasyl Ovsiyenko and Oleksandr Tkachuk. Filmed and recorded by Valeriy Pavlov.

Briefly about the Greeks in my village…

The presidential election of 1991. Kravchuk and Chornovil were the main contenders for the presidency of Ukraine. I had just arrived in my village of Velyka Novosilka in the Donetsk region and went to see my aunt Marfa, who had returned to our village with her family. She was already retired. Her sons were there—my two cousins, Lyonya and Zhora. And a discussion flared up between them. Their sister calls them from Moscow (there are three children, the sister has lived in Moscow for a very long time) and says, “Your Kravchuk is so cunning, so cunning!” And Aunt Marfa, her mom, says, “And why shouldn’t he be cunning? A politician has to be cunning!” So that’s the story. There was already a conflict between those who live in Moscow and those in Ukraine. Then Zhora and Lyonya say, “We are voting for Chornovil.” A remote Greek village… How would they know about Chornovil? But Aunt Marfa says, “And I’m going to vote for Kravchuk. I like his platform.” The boys ask, “Well, Mom, you are for an independent [Ukraine], right?” “Yes, of course, for an independent one, of course!” Such was the euphoria back then. And then Alla asks, “You also want the Orthodox Church to be separate.” And her mom tells her, “Of course! Why should our church have to give money to Moscow?” I think such a scene should have been recorded in my memoirs, but I forgot. (Referring to the book: Raisa Moroz. *Against the Wind: Memoirs of the Wife of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner*. – Lviv: Svichado, 2005. – 216 pp.; Moroz, R. V. *Against the Wind: Memoirs of the Wife of a Ukrainian Political Prisoner*. Second edition, revised and expanded / R. V. Moroz. – Kharkiv: Prava Lyudyny, 2012. – 288 pp., with photo illustrations.)

I also forgot to write: when Ihor Kalynets was on trial—and he was tried, I believe, a year later than Iryna…

- He was also arrested later… August 11, 1972. Sentenced on November 15.

- Yes, arrested and tried. I came from Ivano-Frankivsk. Back then, only women would come to the courthouse or sit in the hallway to show some sort of solidarity with the prisoner. Among the men, perhaps only Mykhailo Kosiv was still free. Although he said he had been Chornovil’s friend for forty years, he didn’t show up anywhere back then. He wrote all sorts of blunders against Sheptytsky...

I went to support Ihor. Although we knew he wouldn't see us, we went anyway: Olenka Antoniv, Ihor’s mother Zenya (Zynovia), me, and probably Liuba Popadiuk was there, and a few other women. But the KGB had already come up with something: to discourage us from attending trials, they decided to sentence people like us to three days of street sweeping. They invented a new punishment. We are sitting in the hallway. Ms. Zenya is in a gray coat, and I am in a bright orange sweater. A KGB agent walks by and points me out with his eyes—we noticed it—as if to say, “that's her.” Zenya says, “You know what? They want to take you so you'll be sweeping the streets of Lviv.” But I had come from Ivano-Frankivsk, and I had my child there! I had left my son. So Zenya says, “Put on my coat, and give me your sweater and get out of here!” We swapped clothes. Thus, I avoided sweeping the streets of Lviv. And Ms. Zenya remained sitting there with Olena Antoniv and the other women.

Of course, I’d like to remember everything… I also wrote very little about my son. For instance, while he was little, Valik never asked, “Why is Dad in there?” I took him to all the visitations. He would say, “Dad, shave off your beard, stop being a grandpa!” but he never asked, “Why are you here? Why don't you come home?” Never, ever did he ask. What was going on in that little head of his, I don't know. I should ask him someday if he remembers anything.

When he got older, he gathered all his information from the streets, not from me. Apparently, his friends told him about the UPA and the OUN. I wrote in my memoirs how he recorded in his DOSAAF membership booklet that he was a member of the UPA and the OUN, that his leaders were Melnyk and Bandera—he wrote down everything he had heard. At school, they handed out some DOSAAF booklets—“Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy.” Their principal was a KGB man, with the surname Krasnopery, because it was an elite Ukrainian school. And this Krasnopery gave them the assignment to fill in all their personal data in the booklet at home. Everyone wrote whatever they wanted. My son wrote what I'm telling you. Then Krasnopery caught him somewhere in the hallway (I wrote about this in my book), took him to the physics classroom, and started trying to snatch the booklet from him. He and the gym teacher ripped it away from him, gave the booklet to the KGB, and I was summoned there and told that I was not raising my child properly, that I could lose my child, that they could take him and raise him in an orphanage… In short, they started pressuring me with threats to take away my son.

- When you went abroad, how old was he?

- He was born in 1962, so he was 17 years old.

- How did his life turn out? Did he study somewhere?

- In Ivano-Frankivsk, they didn't give him a high school diploma, even though he finished school. We were worried about how he would be admitted to a university. But there was a man named Vasyl Markus in Chicago—he was, by the way, preparing an encyclopedia of the Ukrainian emigration in the USA—and he vouched for him, explaining that the KGB had ordered them not to give my son his diploma, but that he would study. And my son did study; he graduated from a very prestigious school—Loyola University of Chicago. He completed political studies and earned a bachelor's degree. Then he went to Edmonton in Canada and did his master's in Ukrainian folklore, because politics didn't interest him much. But studying Ukrainian folklore as an émigré is a hopeless cause. Obviously, it would have been hard to make a living from Ukrainian folklore there or to get a job, even though they wanted to keep him in the department.

Later, he was invited to Radio Liberty, and he moved to Munich. Then Radio Liberty moved to Prague. His wife—his second wife—didn't want to go to Prague, so he was unemployed for five years. Then he got a job at a computer company and still works there. He doesn't find it interesting, but he works because you have to earn a living somehow.

- I heard his radio broadcasts, but that was after I was released, starting in 1988. He was introduced as “Valentyn Moroz, Jr.”

- Mykola Rudenko said his broadcasts were quite good. It's a shame, because he was a good journalist. He also wrote for a magazine, received some sort of award there, and it was interesting work for him. But he didn't go to Prague because Halya didn't go, and so he stayed. Halya is the ex-wife of Taras Chornovil. She divorced Taras Chornovil, had twin boys with him, and married my son. Now his child (my granddaughter) lives in Vienna; she's 22 already. And he divorced Rosya and now lives with Halya and Chornovil's children. It's all very complicated, and nothing depends on a mother, Vasyl. You know yourself: what can a mother do? It just hurts a mother when such things happen. But I have contact with my granddaughter; I have visited her. I wanted her to come here, to see Kyiv, but Raia Rudenko fell ill, so I had to stay here with Raia.

- What is your maiden name?

- Levtorova.

- Where does that surname come from?

- Because we are Greeks. My whole family, for generations, are Greeks. Greeks resettled by Catherine II at the end of the 18th century—not resettled, but actually deported from Crimea to the Donetsk region, which was then called the Novorossiysky Krai. She resettled us by force, at gunpoint, to colonize the Novorossiysky Krai. Suvorov led this deportation. Our village was founded in 1781. I obviously didn't know this; I learned all about it in the West. There was a linguist, Oleksa Horbach, the husband of the well-known Anna-Halia Horbach, who sent me materials from which I learned all of this. At home, we knew we were Greeks, that we had been evicted from Crimea. My grandfather even used to sing a very sad song (my mother told me this—I no longer know it), and my mother knew this song. So we remembered that we were evicted from Crimea. We preserved some things, mainly in our daily life: national dishes, songs, and dances. That was the level of it for us. We would have parties at our house, and my mother would dance and sing our songs. But to have, say, some amateur cultural group—in those times, that was impossible. That only started after perestroika. The village is now called Velyka Novosilka, but it used to be called Velykyi Yanisol. By the way, I have now learned that we were resettled from the village of Yani-Sala, on the bank of the Salhyr River in Crimea, not far from Simferopol. I don't know for sure, I haven't been there yet, but I've always dreamed of going.

- But you mentioned that you were once in Crimea and stopped by a certain village, and you felt that this was your ancestral homeland!

- Yes, I was traveling then with Olenka Antoniv, her son, and my son. We were in Koktebel and decided to take a trip to Yalta. We traveled along mountain roads, and on the way back, we came along the coast. So, we were on these mountain roads, the bus taking us through some dusty villages. And it stopped at a regular stop in a village. And I saw something that looked as if our house had been picked up and moved to that village. I remember even telling Olena, “My ancestors were probably resettled from here.” Because I felt something, I was so stirred, it affected me very strongly. So we knew we were Greeks, evicted from Crimea, but much of our culture was no longer preserved. Somewhere near Mariupol, for example, where the poet Kostoprav came from—in our time, there were still poets there who wrote in Greek, but in our village, it was only at a household level. It’s the Velyka Novosilka Raion, the district center. We are the main village, and a whole series of Greek villages belonged to our district.

- Tell us a little about your youth, your childhood…

- I studied in a Russian school. Almost half of our teachers were Greek. The church was Greek Orthodox, but they destroyed it in the 1930s. Besides Greek, we apparently also absorbed the Tatar language and brought it from Crimea, because in some villages there were more Tatars. In any case, they weren't deported, and those villages have survived. Our village is now called Pionerske, not far from Simferopol. And the other village—all the people there were probably Greeks, and they were deported. In places with more Greeks, they mostly knew only Greek. My father only knew the Greek language. My maternal grandmother knew both languages—Greek and Tatar. She was Orthodox; she had an icon of Jesus Christ that she hid for years.

- Does your language have its own name? Is it a dialect of Greek?

- It is a dialect of the Greek language; we are Urmeys, or in some villages, Rumeys. Valentyn once showed me some historical article, back in Ivano-Frankivsk, and a Rumeian state was mentioned there. He asked me: what does this mean to you? Does it immediately remind you of your self-designation by association? And I said: of course, that's where we get the name Urmeys or Rumeys. It's the same thing. For some reason, we don't call ourselves Hellenes. Our Greek language is *Urmeyk glosa*, as we say. But in school, we had to study in Russian; both our schools were Russian.

I graduated from school in 1955. And in the 20s and 30s, there were Greek schools for a time. My brother even remembered a little poem in Greek. But at the same time that the Ukrainization policy was halted, our schools were also closed. Heorhiy Kostoprav, our most famous Greek poet, was arrested and executed. Rylsky wrote that he was a talented poet. So all this happened simultaneously. Ukrainization and korenizatsiya—it all disappeared. Most of the teachers, and even the school principal, were Greek. But they taught in Russian. Even the teacher of Russian literature and language was a Greek woman, a very good teacher—but she taught our parents that under no circumstances should they speak Greek with their children, or they'd end up going nowhere, they wouldn't study, they wouldn't do well in school.

In our village school, they spoke surzhyk. But at our house, while my father was alive, Greek was spoken. Likewise, my sister always spoke Greek with my mother, as long as my mother was alive. With me, my mother tried to speak Russian, listening to the teachers. That's why I know Greek worse than my sister does. I know it, I can speak it, but it’s harder for me now after so many years of being away.

- Did you feel that you were, after all, living in Ukraine? Or was that not felt at all?

- Why do you ask? We would fight with the Ukrainian kids from across the river. The villages of Vremivka and Neskuchne near us—those are Ukrainian villages! We felt it, of course. We envied them because they were more cohesive, they didn't snitch on each other at the collective farm. The Russians were first-class, the Ukrainians second-class, and we were some kind of third-class. That's how we felt.

- I read your book and know that you were a Komsomol activist.

- Yes, I was about 12 or 13 and dreamed so much of becoming a Komsomol member that I even said I was already 14. I learned the charter and joined. But towards the end of my schooling, I began to get disillusioned, and by the time I was in university, I had completely withdrawn from the Komsomol organization. That is, I was still a member, but I no longer took any active part. I became an athlete, started singing on stage.

I graduated from school in 1955 and went to Lviv, because my sister Valentyna lived and worked in the nearby town of Mykolaiv, so she had to support me, since my mother on the collective farm couldn't, and my father had died in a car crash in 1948.

In university, all my Komsomol enthusiasm evaporated completely.

- And how did you adapt to the Ukrainian environment?

- At first, it was obviously easier for me to write all my notes in Russian; I would translate them on the fly. There were a few, but not many, Russian-speaking students; they were mostly the children of the Lviv elite who had moved there—military officers, all sorts of bosses' children. They demanded Russian, and I went along with them. A lecturer would come in and ask, “In which language do you need the lecture?” So we would shout for Russian. But the majority was for Ukrainian. The Ukrainian voices prevailed. We would say that it was “trudno” for us, that it was hard to take notes. But I learned Ukrainian very quickly because I lived in a dormitory with girls from the surrounding villages, from the Lviv and Volyn regions. So I quickly switched to Ukrainian. And I finally switched to Ukrainian as my language of communication when I met Valentyn Moroz. That was at the end of my first year. You could say he gave me that push. We even had a few conflicts over language. I would ask: what does it matter, *morozyvo* or *morozhenoye* [the Ukrainian and Russian words for ice cream]? To him, it did matter. I even called him a “nationalist” once, and we had a conflict over it; we quarreled, and I had to apologize.

- He was studying in the history department, and you were in the foreign languages department; you chose German…

- Yes, I studied German. He graduated two years before I did, because I had been sick and lost a year in school. After graduating, he went to Volyn. In fact, my first steps toward reading samvydav were taken in Lutsk. I was still in the village of Marianivka in Volyn, and he had already been hired to teach history at the Lutsk Pedagogical Institute. And one fine day, on a Saturday, he brought poems. They were poems by Symonenko, Drach, Lina Kostenko, and Vinhranovskyi. He mysteriously called me to the shore of a lake—it wasn't even a lake, more of a pond—and began to read these poems. He said that these poems were being copied by hand, that most of them weren't printed anywhere—either copied by hand or typewritten, only four or five sheets through carbon paper. For me, these poems were like a bolt from the blue.

He said that there were more people like us, who were critical of reality, in Lutsk, and even more in Kyiv and Lviv. He named Horyn, Svitlychny… That's how it began. Soon after, in 1964, we moved to Ivano-Frankivsk. Because he was hired to teach history there, and I was hired to teach German. We were in Lutsk together for literally a few months, but they didn't approve his position there, because he had a file trailing him that labeled him a potential nationalist.

- Especially after he gave a lecture on Shevchenko…

- That was later, when we were already working in the village. The reason for the file was that he asked inconvenient questions at the university, questions that the professors preferred not to hear or answer. A lawyer friend who was studying at the same time, but in the law department, told us about it. And he knew that a file was being kept on Moroz, that he was a potential nationalist.

In Lutsk, compared to Frankivsk, our circle was more “literary.” We read poetry. There were two fifth-year students from the Lutsk Pedagogical Institute—they were young poets, writing such fresh verses. There was Dmytro Ivashchenko, a lecturer at the institute, who led a club similar to the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv, a “Poetry Club,” or something like that. That was our circle. When we moved to Ivano-Frankivsk, the circle was more politicized. These were historians, Petro Arsenych, Fyhol (an artist), there was Panas Zalyvakha. I didn't personally know Zalyvakha at the time, but this was the circle that was already thinking about politics.

- And Oksana Popovych was there…

- No, Oksana Popovych came later; we didn't know her at that time. They were from a different generation, a different worldview—they were open nationalists who had served time for nationalism. Our circle didn't speak so openly about nationalism. We read forbidden literature; there was Dziuba's work *Internationalism or Russification?*, and there was Ivan Koshelivets's article “Ukrainian Literature in a Moscow Noose.” Dziuba's book, I remember, was typewritten, a big, thick book. I didn't see Koshelivets's work; Moroz gave it to Maria Vlad to read—a poet from Hutsulshchyna.

- Koshelivets’s—that was probably a booklet, sent from abroad…

- Yes, it was probably part of his work, perhaps printed by *Suchasnist*, I can't say for sure because I never saw it. We also had Stanislav Telniuk’s poem “Forget the Ukrainian Language,” which they confiscated during a search. They didn't take Dziuba's book from us, but Maria Vlad testified that Moroz had given her Koshelivets’s work. So there, in Ivano-Frankivsk, samvydav was already in full swing, I would say.

Sometime in the summer of 1965, early summer, Mykhailo Horyn came to visit us. I saw him for the first time; he was a stranger to me. He asked for Valentyn. Valentyn wasn't home, so he said, “Maybe you could take me to Zalyvakha?” I had only heard about Zalyvakha, that he was a very brave man, the bravest in Ivano-Frankivsk, because he openly criticized hack work in art and literature, never hid anything, and didn't adhere to socialist realism in his creative work. But I knew where he lived. He lived in some nook of the Armenian Church; he was alone at the time, already divorced from his first wife. The Armenian Church wasn't a church, but some kind of warehouse, and a small room had been built onto the side, and that's where he lived. I took him there, introduced them, but unfortunately, they paid no attention to me, they started hugging and kissing, and I went home, disappointed, because I really wanted to meet Zalyvakha. Zalyvakha lived at 10 Koshovoho Street later on, after serving five years in prison.

- And Mykhailo Horyn, I know, at that time launched a very extensive effort to publish samvydav; there were several typewriters, all of it was being produced and distributed throughout Ukraine…

- By the way, Mykhailo Horyn warned me then. He said that arrests were being prepared, that word had somehow come down from the upper echelons of the Communist Party in Lviv that Kyiv or Moscow knew about the revival of nationalism and that it would soon be suppressed. Horyn brought this news, and by that time we already had quite a lot of samvydav, and besides that, there were books from a certain Ms. Hrushkevych. Both Fyhol and Moroz used to visit her. Her husband was Teofil Hrushkevych, a very active Ukrainian under Polish rule, I think, because his books were magnificent. She had works by Dontsov, collections from the *Chervona Kalyna* series. I remember Moroz brought Vynnychenko's *Notes of a Pug-Nosed Mephistopheles* from there, and I read Vynnychenko for the first time, and I was even annoyed that he hadn't brought more Vynnychenko, but some *Chervona Kalyna*. To me, this *Chervona Kalyna* was nothing compared to Vynnychenko. Then they swept it all up. On September 1, 1965, they came to our place with a search warrant and confiscated everything.

- Actually, the arrests had already started on August 25…

- Yes, yes, and they came to us on September 1.

- Well, back then there was no such communication—did you know about Mykhailo Horyn’s arrest, or not yet?

- When they took Valentyn on September 1, I immediately went to Petro Arsenych, because they were close friends. And he says: we were just sitting together the day before, on the last day of August, discussing it… They knew from somewhere about the arrests that had swept across Ukraine. The discussion was about hiding things: if you have anything, hide it. Valentyn came home and just fell asleep; he didn't hide anything. And in the morning, they came, around 6 a.m.—a knock at the door. He quickly put on his track pants, opened it—and a group of KGB agents burst in, their pistols visible, and began the search.

- And you said you hid or destroyed your own things…

- No, I didn't hide anything. The only thing was, I really loved Symonenko's poems, and I had copied them into a notebook. When Horyn told me, I immediately tore out those pages and destroyed them. My mother used to tell me about the arrests in the 1930s; she said the “black raven” used to come around. When we would come home to our village for the holidays, all the students from different institutes and universities would gather, and we would argue very loudly in the garden—already about politics. And my mother would say, “Listen, stop shouting for the whole neighborhood to hear, or the ‘black raven’ will come.” I already knew about that “black raven.” So when Horyn told me, I destroyed everything right away.

- Valentyn was arrested, but how did the authorities treat you?

- My colleagues, the lecturers, pretended they knew nothing. This was while I was still working at the institute, teaching German. But soon the rector of the pedagogical institute, a man named Kravets, summoned me and said literally this: “You need to think about this, and I believe you should raise your child by yourself.” So, he hinted that I should get a divorce. I didn't say anything to him in response.

Sometime later, the director of the ethnographic museum, Synytsia—the wife of a KGB major, also named Synytsia—met me on the street, seemingly by chance. And she suddenly said, “Oh, Raya, it turns out we’re from the same area, I’m also a Greek! I had a first husband, he was convicted, I divorced him, and I think you should do the same. Come visit us, my husband will advise you on how to do it all.” I again remained silent, said neither “yes” nor “no.” But, obviously, I took no steps to get a divorce. I felt that this was not the time for divorce.

- And they had a law that if a defendant was sentenced to three years, that was sufficient grounds for divorce. Automatically, without his consent.

- By the way, we had conflicts—not on national grounds, but of a different sort. Moroz did not behave as a married man should, and I had wanted to divorce him several times. But once they took him, I felt it was not the time to divorce him, to abandon a person in trouble. Especially since I knew he was not a criminal, just being tried for his beliefs. And so they sentenced him—the trial began on January 20, 1966, in Lutsk—along with his co-defendant Dmytro Ivashchenko, and gave him four years.

In the spring, two unfamiliar women came to me, their names were Liuba Lemyk and Oksana Popovych. They told me that Ivan Svitlychny and Nadiika Svitlychna in Kyiv would like to see me, that Oksana Meshko had given them my address, and so they appeared at my door. They gave me Nadiika Svitlychna's address—she was working at the radio in Kyiv then—I was to go see her, and then Nadiika would direct me to Ivan Svitlychny.

I had already heard about Ivan Svitlychny, about the Kyivans. There was a girl who used to bring packages to Zalyvakha. She mentioned Alla Horska, Svitlychny, and Iryna Zhylenko. I had seen that girl in Zalyvakha's paintings; she apparently posed for him. She disappeared somewhere later. All sorts of rumors circulated about her, that she might have been working for the KGB… But she at least mentioned these people, and I really wanted to meet them, because I was very lonely in Ivano-Frankivsk. And here was such an opportunity. I was delighted that I could go and meet these people.

Ivan Svitlychny had been arrested for several months and then released.

- They held him for eight months and released him “for lack of evidence.”

- Yes, I think it was to spread rumors that he might have started cooperating—because no one else was released, only him.

And sometime in June, I arrived in Kyiv. First, I went to Nadiika; Nadiika gave me an address—35 Umanska Street, apartment 20, I think—and I went to Ivan Svitlychny's place. I imagined him to be a Kozak type, mustached, strong—but the man who opened the door was of medium height, not at all athletic, but on the contrary, more of a scholarly type, slightly stooped. And from that time, my acquaintance with the Kyivans began.

This was a completely different circle. Uninhibited, compared to Ivano-Frankivsk, not so timid. They behaved as if nothing had happened: that we weren't the ones breaking the law, the state was breaking its own laws, and we only wanted the state to adhere to the laws it had proclaimed. In fact, it was from them, from the Kyivans, that I received my first lessons in civic behavior.

Ivan Svitlychny gave me Slavko Chornovil’s address. He didn’t say why he wanted to see me. Ivan Svitlychny was a very good conspirator: if there was no need to speak, he didn’t speak. He gave me Olena Antoniv's and Chornovil's address and told me to go to them as soon as possible. I went to them right away. It turned out that Chornovil needed documents or some information about Moroz, because he was preparing his White Book—*Woe from Wit*. And I gave him all the documents, everything I could: excerpts from letters, Moroz’s biography; and he included him in that book. Chornovil published that book, obviously a homemade edition. It was about as thick as a large man's palm, because the photographs were glued in, and the pages were typewritten. He gave one book to each of us women and told us not to hide it too much, because he had sent the book to Kyiv (Brezhnev was already in power by then), and that he was doing all this legally. At that time, my son and I were living in the dormitory; Moroz had already been taken. I placed the book on top of a wardrobe, and it stayed there. Chornovil was arrested soon after and given a light sentence for “slander.”

- Yes, Article 187-1, they gave him three years.

- Yes. And when he was arrested, I kept glancing at that book, wondering where to hide it, but it was so thick, where could you hide it… I was living in a dormitory, although it was a side entrance, it was still a single dormitory room, that was all I had. And so it went on and on—until suddenly one night, around two o'clock, it was as if someone pushed me and woke me up. I got up in the middle of the night, grabbed that book, and started frantically searching for a place to hide it. I carried it around and around, and finally, I saw the washing machine—a round machine where you had to pour water in and drain it out by hand, it was a very primitive machine. I turned it over and saw that there was space near the motor. I found some shoelaces, tied *Woe from Wit* to the motor, turned it back over, and went to bed.

I didn't get to sleep for long: around 6 a.m., there was a knock at the door. They had come with a search warrant in Chornovil's case, looking for his *Woe from Wit*. Well, *Woe from Wit* was in my washing machine, and the investigator turned out to be an acquaintance from university, because he used to date Valia Khromykh, my roommate. She was a Russian-speaking girl from Yessentuki, the daughter of some military officer, very delicate. She went out with him for a while, but then left him because he spoke Russian with an accent and was “local.” That’s how she explained it. Though he was a very handsome man. And so here he was, searching my room, and he found her photograph. He stared at it for a long, long time, and then he says to me, “You used to be different, you know, you weren't like this back then…” And I say, “Yes, back then I demanded that lectures be in Russian, we wanted everything to be in Russian. Yes, I was like that. And we looked at you—well, I was lying, obviously—we looked at you as ‘locals,’ as if you were second-rate.” He said nothing to that. But I don’t know if it was because he saw that photograph, or if he was just not very experienced yet—but he didn’t think to turn that machine over. Though every time he got near it, my heart sank. I was tense. So he didn't find anything. And later Slavko thanked all of us: it turned out that when he was arrested, all the women had hidden their copies of *Woe from Wit*. Not just me. Some guardian angel—his or mine, I don't know—nudged me and woke me up: “Hide the book.”

- Well, Valentyn was sent to Mordovia, he was in the 17th camp…

- No, the first was Sosnovka. We had a visit with him in Sosnovka.

- It would be interesting to know how those visits went, and did you take your son with you?

- I always took him. I dragged him everywhere, to all those concentration camps. I don’t know if that was a good thing.

The first and last visit in Sosnovka was a long one, three days. They would take him to work and bring him back for the night. They gave us a room, and we had our visit with him in that room. During the day, I would prepare some food and immediately go out with the child to the river. There was a little river there that reminded me of the Donetsk region. The rivers there are also beautiful, calm, not turbulent. A sandy bank, and we would sit there. The only difference was the pine forests, the watchtowers, and the barbed wire.

One day we went outside and saw a whole line of prisoners. And Moroz was standing there with a man who was completely bald; and he says with a kind of pride, “Raya, look, this is Mykhailo Soroka!” The name meant nothing to me at the time, but I sensed that he was some kind of extraordinary prisoner, because of the way Valentyn said it.

- Yes, he was the most respected political prisoner, not only among Ukrainians, but among all political prisoners in general.

- That was the first and last time in my life I saw Mykhailo Soroka. There were some wooden footbridges, and we were walking, and they were all standing there watching Moroz's wife and child (laughs). I was walking with Valik, I took him outside because we were bored in the room. That was the one and only visit. The second visit was when we arrived in Sosnovka, but they were no longer there. They had already been transferred to the 17th camp.

- You arrived with Olga Horyn, right?

- Yes, we met her on the bus. We got on the bus and saw her daughter Oksanka sitting there! And Olga had run off somewhere. I say, “Oksanka, what are you doing here?” “My mom, my grandmother, and I are going for a visit at the 17th camp.” We got there, and all the prisoners were at work. The work area was enclosed by several wooden fences. Olga managed to find a crack in the fence, one of the prisoners called Mykhailo as close as possible to the crack, and she spoke with him. They didn't grant us a visit because they “were not on the path to correction.” Horyn's mother was there, Oksanka, Olia Horyn, and me with my son. So, two of our families had traveled so far, and they wouldn't grant us a visit. Olia arranged with Mykhailo that we would go to a hill near the forest in the morning: “At dawn, you and Valentyn come out into the yard. We’ll at least get to talk.”

- Olga told the story of how she wanted to throw a sausage over the fence!

- Oh, she didn't just want to, she did it! She had already served time, so she was experienced and brave. We had come for a visit, so we had sausages, various foods. Everything that could be thrown, she tossed over the fence. She warned Mykhailo that we would speak German so the authorities wouldn't know what we were talking about. For secrecy. Because both Mykhailo and Moroz had boasted about studying German. Early in the morning, we left our children with Mykhailo's mother and went to that hill at dawn. It was unbelievable: the grass was knee-high, dewy, mosquitoes were eating us alive from head to toe... We climbed the hill and started shouting in German, primarily, of course, about the fact that we had thrown them sausage and bread over the fence. I'm yelling to them, “*Brot und Wurst*!” and Mykhailo shouts back, “What’s *Wurst*?” (laughs). Some secrecy! By the time we explained what *Wurst* was, a guard spotted us and started running and shouting, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Well, at first we paid no attention, but then we saw that he had narrow eyes—he was either Kazakh or Uzbek—he really would shoot, because you couldn't reason with him. We started to run, and he chased us. He kept shouting, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” So we stopped, and he took us to the commander. The commander said, “We will report you to your jobs for your poor behavior.” Olia wasn't working anymore, but I was, yet he never reported anything. So that was that. Our visit ended without a visit.

- But it's known that Valentyn wrote his famous “Report from the Beria Reserve” in that very 17th camp. How did it get out? Was it you who smuggled it out?

- Not me, we only had one visit at the very beginning; they didn't give us any more visits. Someone else took it out, I don't know who. I only know that Marta Skorupska took it to the West, and the “Report” was published in *Suchasnist*. By the way, it was translated into Russian; the Russian-language newspaper *Russkoye Slovo* in New York published the report but cut out the parts about Russification, a word they didn't like. It was translated into many languages, along with Dziuba's work and Chornovil's *Woe from Wit*. This work was very popular in the Western world.

- Yes, it’s a very powerful piece of journalism.

- Actually, in the English-language preface to it, they noted that it was the strongest piece written against the KGB: with names, titles, and their methods of punishment. It was the most biting, and the author obviously got the full treatment because of this piece. They immediately opened a case, even before his first term ended. They held him for about a year and a half at 33 Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv; this time his investigator was Kolchyk, and he drove Moroz to a very bad state. Kolchyk allowed me to see him. My relationship with Kolchyk is a whole epic in itself. That is, his attitude towards me: “Oh, a Greek woman! My grandmother was also Greek,” he acted overly familiar with me, like we were from the same area… This started back in Lutsk. He wasn't Moroz's investigator then; he was Dmytro Ivashchenko's investigator and he essentially “broke” him. Kolchyk's file is full of “broken” people: not only Dziuba, he “broke” someone else, a woman—I read about this later in Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska's interview. Kolchyk gave me a visit on April 1, 1969, in Kyiv, for my birthday. He was playing the friend! This was near the end of the investigation. He said they were closing the investigation for lack of evidence, there were no testimonies. This was not the only visit; Kolchyk gave us several visits and passed along all the packages.

- And were these visits just in a room, across a table?

- Yes, he would bring us in, lug my pood-heavy bags, he was a terrible gentleman—I'm telling you, he played the friend for those first four years—or rather, not four years, but since he started the investigation into the “Report.” Kolchyk also came to search our place in Ivano-Frankivsk; he drove me to the point where I fainted several times after his interrogations. He had a way of doing it: he’d play the friend, joke around, mention his Greek grandmother, and then suddenly, out of the blue: “And now a question, Raisa Vasylivna. Have you read the ‘Report’?” I say, “No, I haven’t.” He replies, “Aha, you haven’t?” And he starts rummaging, I see, through my letters. I frantically think, “What did I write there that he’s about to catch me red-handed…” “I was at Slavko Chornovil’s a few days ago,” he quotes from my letter, “he fed me very tasty dishes.” “What kind of dishes were those?” So, he found and seized upon the very phrase that related to the “Report.” I say, “It was so long ago, I don’t remember what the dishes were.” Then he starts joking again, talking about something completely off-topic, and then suddenly again: “And now I have to tell you something very unpleasant…” Again, something happens to my heart, it plummets. And he says, “We have to conduct a search of your home.” I was immediately relieved because I had nothing in the house at the time. And he, of course, sees this; he was a very good psychologist. He acted as if he wasn't really looking for anything. But after that conversation and that search, they had to call an ambulance for me three times.

My neighbor, Lina Vakulenko, an archeology lecturer, lived in the other tiny room and called the ambulance for me. She just shook her head, because she knew what had brought me to such a state.

So I think he used the same methods on Moroz. Because the last time I saw him during the investigation, I was struck by his appearance. On April 1, Kolchyk gave us a visit and said he was closing the case. I was very happy because there were only a few months left until his release on September 1, 1969. I tell Valentyn this, but it doesn’t register with him. He was so focused on what he was going to say in court. He said, “I will stand up in court and say: ‘Yes, I wrote this piece. And I will say nothing more.’” I say, “Valentyn, they are sending you back to the camp.” It finally dawned on him that Kolchyk was closing the investigation into the “Report” and that he was being sent back to continue serving his first term. But he looked terrible. He was so yellow and not just thin—like a dried-up mushroom.

I think those eighteen months in solitary in Kyiv plus Kolchyk's methods brought him to that state. Because I brought very good packages to Kyiv: Lyolya Svitlychna and I would search the whole city for greens, the best sausages, something fresh—so it wasn't about the food, it was about the pressure he was under. And then it happened again in Vladimir Prison—another two years in solitary… I think that’s what finished him.

- Valentyn served his four years and was released on September 1, 1969….

- He was free for nine months. By the way, before his release, the institute rector summons me and says, “You live in the dormitory, your husband is being released, so you need to vacate the room because there will be unhealthy student interest in your husband. So you need to look for a place to live.” Of course, I was dismayed, but I thought, I'll look for a place because it was important for me to keep my job.

Valentyn was released and came back. He got a very warm welcome in Kyiv—after all, the author of the “Report”… He stayed at Alla Horska's place. He arrived thin as a rail, but very cheerful, did exercises, even stood on his head outside. The students did indeed stare at him, they were curious—but I saw that no one was calling us, no one was kicking us out of the dormitory anymore. We looked for an apartment, but it was impossible to find one—as soon as they found out it was Moroz… By the way, the same people who had listened to his “Report” on various “enemy radio stations”—they were afraid and didn't want to rent to him! They would say, “Why do we need this? The KGB will be coming here and conducting searches.” It was hard, practically impossible, to find an apartment in Ivano-Frankivsk. Then I saw that no one was kicking us out, so we decided to stay put!

Finally, someone approaches me and says that the adjacent room has been vacated, it's now empty, so be careful. They've installed a listening device there. Our location was very convenient for them because we didn't have a phone; if someone called, we had to go to the front desk. All letters came to the front desk. It was a multi-story dormitory with hundreds of eyes: anyone who wanted could watch who was coming to see us, who was leaving, because our entrance was on the side. Our apartment's location was ideal for eavesdropping, for surveillance. So they let us live there until about the spring of 1970.

When the rector told me we had to move out of the institute's apartment, Chornovil found out about it and put out a call in Lviv: Moroz is coming, and he has nowhere to live. The people of Lviv collected money for a cooperative apartment. Not for the whole thing, but for the first down payment, 1,800 rubles. I personally only had 180 rubles, so there was no question of a cooperative for me. But Chornovil collected the money, and sometime in the spring of 1970, they moved us into a cooperative building, but didn't give us the order of occupancy. They put us in a three-room apartment with some old man. He was waiting for his own cooperative apartment—there was a terrible flood in Ivano-Frankivsk then, even the first floors were flooded. Moroz didn't get to live there long: they came with a search warrant once, came a second time, and then arrested him—on June 1, 1970, after nine months of freedom. During that period, he wrote three articles: “Amid the Snows,” “A Chronicle of Resistance,” and “Moses and Dathan.”

- And under what conditions was this done? In the apartment?

- No, he was almost never home. He was in Briukhovychi. He went to Lviv, and they set him up in a sanatorium near Lviv, in the forest. By the way, later, in that same Briukhovychi, they murdered Volodymyr Ivasiuk. Valentyn sat there, writing. I think he already had drafts from the camp. I think Kolchyk saw all this and knew that Moroz was preparing something else and that sooner or later, Moroz would fall into their clutches again. That’s my theory.

- He might have released him just so he would write more, to have something to build a case with…

- Yes, because there was nothing to build it on. Slavko Chornovil refused to testify, saying, “I was mistaken, he didn't ask me to send this piece to Kyiv.” At first, he said, “Yes, I sent it at Moroz's request,” but then during a visit, Moroz told me, “Tell Slavko to change his testimony.” I told this to Olena Antoniv. Olena went for a visit to the general-regime camp where Slavko was, and he immediately changed his testimony. So the KGB had nothing to go on. Although, of course, they later used those three pieces, but they never saw the original of the “Report” itself; they never found it. I didn't have it. Kolchyk searched, but didn't find it back when he drove me to the point of fainting. But these three, he had. They came with a search warrant and found all three pieces. Moroz was no great conspirator; he hid nothing. He could have hidden things the first time and didn't, and he didn't hide them the second time either.

- And wasn't there some kind of mess when he went to Kosmach, and they tried to grab him there?

- Yes, they wanted to arrest him there. The priest there was Vasyl Romaniuk (later Patriarch Volodymyr). It was arranged that I would be sent to Kosiv to provide consultations for correspondence students. I think it was also arranged specifically so that I could then go to Kosmach, and they could then fire me for attending a religious holiday. But it turned out that I gave the consultation to the students—there weren't many of them, it was a holiday, Easter. I wanted to go to Kosmach, but not a single driver was going there, the buses weren't running, everyone was celebrating Easter! They are Hutsuls; they don't give a damn about Soviet power and the fight against religion. I had no way to get to Kosmach. I found a car going to Yabluniv, but from Yabluniv to Kosmach, it's probably 10, maybe 15 kilometers. I got to Yabluniv, and then I walked. By the time I reached Kosmach, it was five in the evening, and everything was over. I arrived, thinking they would be surprised that I had walked for so long, but they had other things on their minds; they started telling me what had happened.

Moroz had a tape recorder with him (we had a tape recorder, an early one, very bulky). He wanted to record the church service. Two drunk men (they were the school principal and the village council chairman) approached him and started pulling him. He resisted. People intervened: “Why are you interrupting our service! The man wants to record it.” There were even guests from Moscow; many people came to see a Hutsul Easter. Everyone was standing there, waiting, no one was leaving. It turned out to be very crowded. Some Hutsul woman, a complete stranger, came up to him, took his hand, and said, “You are my guest!” She took him by the hand and led him to her house. And that was the end of it.

I was terribly unnerved by this and immediately returned to Ivano-Frankivsk, while Moroz didn't come back for another day. I came home and saw signs of a search in the house. He arrived, I told him, but again, he didn't hide anything. He came back very tired and immediately fell asleep. The next morning, they came and took all his manuscripts. They already knew where everything was, they knew where his three essays were. They also took “I Saw Mohammed”—a short humorous piece, also his. But at the trial, they said it was not proven to be his. They accused him and then said it was “not proven.” To show that the court was very objective. Then they summoned him several times and he returned home, but one day, on June 1, he did not return.

- And in connection with this case, they tried to accuse you of behaving inappropriately, like a hooligan…

- Yes, they had apparently planned for me to be in Kosmach, but I didn't arrive on time. There was a woman there named Mariyka Yukysh, also a dark-haired woman. They wrote to my rector at the institute, saying I had behaved in a way unbefitting an institute lecturer, that I was shouting, quarreling… It was probably Mariyka who was defending Moroz and arguing. But I submitted a counter-report, stating that I wasn't there and had witnesses that I was giving a consultation at that time, that I wasn't at the Divine Liturgy at all. So that plan of theirs failed. Instead, they put me up for professional review and then fired me from my job, a year later.

The trial was in November 1970. Anyone who wanted to attend the trial—the people from Lviv applied to the relevant authorities—was forbidden from going: they were threatened with being fired from their jobs. Iryna Kalynets wanted to come—and, by the way, she did; Stefa Hulyk was there; Valentyna Chornovil was there, I think. Many people came, even someone from Moscow. And Zalyvakha was forbidden from even appearing on the street where the trial was to be held. Nina Strokata-Karavanska was also warned not to go. And what they did to that Mariyka Yukysh! She had a small child, an infant. Oksana Meshko was receiving treatment in Morshyn and wanted to come to the trial, and she told Mariyka, “As soon as you find out the day of the trial, let me know.” So what does the KGB do? They take Mariyka Yukysh with her small child and put her in a hospital—by the way, in a ward with infectious patients, because apparently there was no room in other departments—and they keep the healthy child there, claiming she is sick! Mariyka is alarmed, but one of the doctors found out and whispered to her, “Your child is healthy. But be careful, there's a man sitting in the next ward watching your every move.” This was all done to prevent Mariyka Yukysh from telling Oksana Meshko about the trial.

I was at the trial—but only for the reading of the verdict. The trial was held in closed session; Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Ivan Dziuba, and Viacheslav Chornovil were witnesses, as well as one man from Kosmach—Vasyl Babyak, a peasant. Antonenko-Davydovych, Dziuba, and Chornovil refused to testify because the trial was closed. For Antonenko-Davydovych, this was a way out, because he had written a commentary on one of Moroz's works, and the KGB had confiscated it. They even brought them face-to-face, because Moroz denied everything, but Antonenko-Davydovych couldn't; he was an old man, and they had his commentary. If only Moroz had been a bit more of a conspirator… He could have hidden it, destroyed it in the end… He destroyed nothing. And before that, Chornovil tells me, “Go to Antonenko-Davydovych and tell him to somehow retract his testimony.” It was very hard for me to do that. I thought, “He’s an old writer, they have the evidence in their hands: how can he retract it?” But it turned out that he no longer needed to, because they refused to testify at all.

- Ms. Raisa, we are now at 68 Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Street, apartment 24. Are you aware that this was the apartment of Borys Dmytrovych Antonenko-Davydovych?

- I know he lived here, and I was even here once for a birthday party. By the way, after everyone left, he subjected me to a real interrogation: why does Moroz behave this way? This was after the second time, after he was transferred from Vladimir Prison to the camp in Mordovia, and all those unpleasant things started, the quarrels between him and Shumuk… In fact, he quarreled with everyone; they started complaining about him, about his behavior. His behavior, of course, was completely inappropriate. I think he was already ill by then, after that five-month hunger strike.

- He got six years of prison, three years of special-regime confinement—also in a cell, five years of exile, and was declared a particularly dangerous recidivist...

- Yes. By the way, Slavko collected 600 rubles for a lawyer. And Ivan Svitlychny went with me to Moscow to arrange for a lawyer—despite the fact that he had already had a falling out with Moroz; Moroz had in fact insulted him very badly, saying, “Ah, you don’t want to deal with this, you’re afraid.” Something along those lines—although it wasn't true.

- Yes, I can also say that at the time when those articles by Moroz were circulating, they were given to me with a strong warning: “Don't give them to too many people!” Because Svitlychny was against distributing these articles; they were, he said, too harsh.

- In any case, I didn't know what was behind it. But Svitlychny was a very close person to me; we felt a great affection for each other, and we communicated very well on a purely human level. But then I heard that Moroz had insulted him. He had also quarreled with Chornovil then. But despite all that, when Moroz was arrested, Svitlychny literally took me by the hand, and he and Lyolya and I went to Moscow to find a lawyer for Moroz. We were thinking of hiring Sofia Kallistratova; she was taking on political cases at the time. But when we arrived, he left Lyolya and me outside and went in himself. He came out and didn't say a word. But later, he somehow let me know that Kallistratova was no longer allowed to, that she had been forbidden to handle political cases. But she recommended taking Kogan; I think his name was Eduard Kogan. He was Sinyavsky's lawyer in that famous Daniel and Sinyavsky case of 1965. And he took the case.

Slavko gave me the money. After the very first day of the trial, Kogan met with me. He was impressed, especially by the article “Moses and Dathan,” which mentions Jews and tombstones in Lviv that were used to pave the roads; Moroz wrote about that. Kogan was impressed, captivated, and told me that Moroz was facing a very, very long sentence, so he didn't want to take all the money. But I gave him all the money, insisted, and he took it. And Slavko said it was a very good thing that I gave all the money, because who knows—maybe this man would have to defend us someday too.

- I remember what Ivan Hel said. He was at Ivan Svitlychny’s in Kyiv. They went outside to talk when suddenly Leonida yells from one of the upper floors: “Ivany, Ivany! Come here, Raya is on the line!” Meaning you were calling to report the arrest of Valentyn Moroz. They talked among themselves: “We had some disagreements with Valentyn, but now that he’s arrested, we must defend him. There is no doubt that we should act any other way.”

- Moroz had quarreled with Svitlychny and Chornovil at that time, but he had become very close with Oksana Meshko. Their characters were a bit similar: they were so straightforward, not concerned with any subtleties.

- Valentyn served this sentence in Vladimir Prison. And there they created terrible conditions for him, to the point that a criminal who was his cellmate cut his stomach with a sharpened spoon. Was it in connection with that that Valentyn began a hunger strike?

- No, he began the hunger strike when his three years were up. They constantly created unbearable conditions for him, putting him in cells with criminal types. When I protested, they would say that they were political prisoners too. Try proving to me, just by looking at them, whether they’re political or not. And in the end, it was like this: a criminal says something against the authorities—and now he's political.

- Yes, and sometimes they did it on purpose: say, he lost at cards in a criminal camp and was about to be killed or raped. So he throws out some idiotic anti-Soviet slogan—“Down with the CPSU!” “Brezhnev is a pederast!”—and they give him a political charge.

- So they put him in with “political” prisoners like that. And he was so hounded by it that he told me, “I demand to be put in solitary confinement.” And he told me to demand it too. I knew that solitary would be ruinous for him; I had seen how he endured solitary in the Kyiv pre-trial detention center during the investigation. He was strange; he would say that the walls were pressing in on him—claustrophobia. He said, “I can't concentrate, these criminals are bothering me, I demand solitary.” The moment I mentioned solitary, they moved him there very easily. He was in solitary for two years.

They gave him six years in prison, he served three, and then he started demanding to be transferred to a camp, because there's a law that if there are no violations, you can be. Well, they didn't transfer him. Then, at a visit across a table in early spring, he said, “I am declaring a hunger strike starting July first. Do something if you don't want me to become someone else.” That’s what he said. I tried to talk him out of it; I know you can never achieve anything with a hunger strike—but he said it so firmly. I left and immediately went to Moscow, to Lyudmila Alexeyeva, with whom I always stayed, and told her the news. Larisa Bogoraz was there too; they were immediately at a loss, not knowing what to tell me or how to help me. But what they did was immediately inform the West, either through Sakharov or themselves, I don't know—but that same spring, the news that Moroz was going on a hunger strike was in the newspaper *Svoboda*, which I confirmed when I emigrated. I had all the back issues at work and saw that they had reported it immediately.

And that was it for a while. Then, sometime in the summer, my best friend Olena Antoniv calls me from Lviv and says in a playful voice, “Raya, I've missed you so much, maybe you could come visit?..” I realized this was for a reason. I went to her, and there she had Iryna Korsunska from Moscow, who was going to the Carpathians for a vacation and had stopped at Olena’s. She tells me, “Lyuda Alexeyeva has suggested that you give an interview to Western correspondents in early July.” She would organize all the correspondents, from Germany, Canada, America, and someone else—she named five. “If you agree, let us know somehow and come a few days early to prepare.” She says, “We understand in Moscow that Ivano-Frankivsk is not Moscow or even Kyiv, that you have a child, so think carefully, because you remember they even took Nadiika Svitlychna’s child (Lyolya couldn’t find Yaremko anywhere when they arrested Nadiika)…” In short, they warned me: think about whether you agree to give the interview—and the interview must be given by the wife, no one else can do it for you, or it won’t have the same effect.

I return home to Ivano-Frankivsk, obviously disheartened: what should I do? It’s terrifying to give an interview, it means burning all your bridges, speaking out against the KGB, against such a state... Before, I was just the wife of a political prisoner—but now I had to speak for myself. What would happen to me, to my son? All these thoughts swirled in my head, but deep down, I already knew I wouldn't refuse. I had to get used to the idea and overcome my fear, so that for the rest of my life I wouldn't blame myself for having a chance to help and not taking it.

- Well, you know, he could have died during a five-month hunger strike. It was no joke. When we saw him at some stage of that hunger strike—they even summoned Moroz's father to go and persuade him, because, you see, the wife wouldn't persuade him to stop the hunger strike. But the father came to me first and says, “They’re telling me to go for a visit.” I say, “Let’s go together.” He didn't want to go alone. They grant him a visit, but not me. And the father says, “No, I won’t go to the visit without her.” So they gave all three of us a visit on November 5 in the “red corner,” which they never do. They even sent a correspondent from APN (Novosti Press Agency). Probably to take a picture and reassure the West that Moroz was alive and well... But who was there to photograph? He looked dreadful! 52 kg at 174 cm tall. And he was saying things that often didn't make sense. When we came out of that visit, old Yakov Moroz, our grandfather, asks, “My dear, is he sane?” Meaning that he seemed mentally unbalanced.

- They must have pumped him full of something.

- I said, “Dad, be quiet. Even if he isn't well, they won't treat him, they'll just make it worse.” He had already been complaining that the prison doctor was constantly threatening him with a psychiatric hospital.

- And they did commit him, didn't they?

- Yes. After he served six years in prison, they did commit him there, to the Serbsky Institute.

- How long was he there?

- I don't know exactly, because I was looking for him, he was nowhere to be found, no letters, the prison wouldn't say where he was. I went to Moscow, no one would tell me where he was. Moroz is gone! Then Lyuda Alexeyeva went with me to some very high-level institution, we arrived—and they wouldn’t say anything there either. Then I shouted at that high-ranking official, “If you have hidden him, I will scream to the whole world that you've done something with him!..” Then he said that Valentyn was at the Serbsky Institute. Lyuda said, “You said it so emotionally that he had to answer you.” I then managed to get a visit with Moroz, and we immediately went to Petro Hryhorenko’s apartment to give an interview about him being in a psychiatric hospital.

- And the journalists were there…

- And there were a bunch of journalists there, Bukovsky's mother was there, sitting distraught in a corner, there were many Crimean Tatars demanding to return to Crimea, and there were many journalists because of that. Hryhorenko had arranged a press conference for the Crimean Tatars, so I was very lucky and immediately gave an interview about Moroz being taken to a psychiatric hospital. And they already knew about Moroz, this wasn't the first interview.

My first interview took place, I think, around the third of July. And in August, I had a vacation, and Lyuda and I agreed that I would come back during my vacation to give another interview! By the way, after the first interview, after Olena Antoniv saw me off, the KGB summoned her for questioning and said, “Did we scare Raya well?” Scared—yes, they scared me, but I was already planning to go for a second interview. Then the head of the regional education department called me in and said, “You know, Raisa Vasylivna, we’ll give you a job in your field.” And I said, “Oh, so do I need to quit that... fly-by-night operation?” (Laughs). “No, no, don't rush to quit!” Aha, I thought, you're making promises so that I won't, God forbid, go for another interview. I went to Kyiv to catch a train to Moscow for the interview—Lyuda had arranged the second one immediately after the first.

It was so hard to get a ticket then. Oksana Meshko says, “Raya, you’ll never buy a ticket to Moscow, look at these lines!” She says, “I’ll go to the station manager and ask for a ticket for you.” And I say, “No, I’ll do it myself.” I went to a ticket counter in the opposite direction, for somewhere in the Kyiv region, not Moscow, because the lines for Moscow were terrible. A lone woman was sitting there. I went up to her, gave her the money—5 rubles extra—and said in Russian, “Young lady, get me a ticket to Moscow.” Five minutes later, she brings me a ticket to Moscow! Oksana Meshko couldn't believe her eyes that I got a ticket! (Laughs). I don't know what the KGB guys were thinking, but I got a ticket and left for Moscow that same day.

When I was giving the interview for the second time, everyone already knew about Moroz, that he had been on a hunger strike for months, everyone was interested in getting some news. After that visit in Vladimir in the red corner, I also called Sakharov and told him how Moroz looked. He immediately passed everything on to the West—until they exiled him to Gorky, until they cut off his phone, he helped me a lot. I was at his home, and he always said, “Come by or call whenever you need to.” For me, that was very great support. Many people wanted to get to him with their complaints, but how could he see everyone? Yet he saw me—obviously, thanks to Lyuda.

- So, Valentyn served those six years of prison, a bit of that psychiatric hospital, and then he was brought to Sosnovka, to Mordovia, and there he served until that exchange. I remember—I was also in prison then—on June 18, 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed that SALT—Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty… In that criminal zone, there was a television. I’m watching—Brezhnev leans toward Carter… I’m thinking: are they going to kiss?! They’re kissing! A deep kiss. That was June 18, I remember, 1979. And before that, that “slave trade” took place.

- Yes, but before that, there was another interesting moment. After I gave the interview about him being in the psychiatric hospital, I returned home—and in the middle of the night, around two a.m., a phone call from Washington: “Would you be willing to give an interview to the *Washington Star*?” The newspaper's correspondent, Philip Shandler, would conduct the interview with the help of a translator, a student named Andriy Mukhnyak. I’m thinking: I'm going to pay for this interview tomorrow! But I agreed. And they ask me about Valentyn, whether he's in a psychiatric hospital, whether he's sane. What could I say? I say: yes, he is completely mentally sound. Even though I myself was going to that visit with a sense of dread, thinking he was probably ill. And he really did stand there, detached, looking so gloomy—not my husband, a stranger. But I tell them that he's healthy. Then they ask me, “What do you know about the elections?” The elections were going on then, I knew Reagan was a candidate and so was Carter. I should have mentioned Carter, but I only remembered Reagan. I say: I know that Reagan is running. They wanted to know how well-informed we were here, how politically literate I was. “Do you believe that Moscow will adhere to the Helsinki Accords in the field of human rights?” I said, “I have no illusions about that.” The word “illusions,” I later saw, that Mukhnyak didn't know how to translate, but he translated it approximately as “I have no hopes” or something similar. Because later, when I arrived, they gave me that interview on a cassette from the “Voice of America.” The interview was printed on the front page of the *Washington Star* on June 15. The newspaper *Svoboda* also reprinted it. Right after the interview, on June 11, I get up in the morning—and my phone is disconnected. It was silent for several months. The KGB guys had missed the conversation and punished me for it after the fact!

Two days later, the Party organizer from my work calls me and takes me to the head of the household services complex to which my vocational school belonged. A KGB agent is sitting there and starts questioning me: “How dare you talk like that—about elections, about state agreements!” You see, suddenly Raisa Moroz decided to chat about such lofty matters! (Laughs). They gave me a good talking-to then, but they still didn't fire me from my job—it was the kind of job where it would have been easier for me to be a cleaner, I would have had free time.

- You were sitting in some library there, guarding two bookcases?

- Yes, locked with a key. They often kicked me out of there because they were giving general lectures, and I would sit in the accounting office and embroider. An accountant sat there, and her little girl named Kvitka would come to visit. And later, that Kvitka turned out to be Liliia Hryhorovych! That accountant was very much against the Soviet government—she knew who she was talking to. When we were alone, she would just hiss at the Soviet regime! So Liliia Hryhorovych comes from that family.

- Before signing that treaty on the limitation of strategic arms, five Soviet political prisoners were exchanged for two Soviet spies—Valdik Enger and Rudolf Chernyayev, I think they got 30 years…

- They each got 50 years. But they were very important to the Soviet Union, and they didn't want to abandon them. Because then who would want to be a spy? They worked at the UN, they were diplomats, but they were spying.

- The political prisoners put up for exchange were Valentyn Moroz, Alexander Ginzburg, Georgi Vins, Mark Dymshits, and Eduard Kuznetsov—five men for two spies. They weren't asked if they wanted to or not… It was political slave trading. And on the night of April 27-28, 1979, this exchange took place at Kennedy Airport in the United States. And how did you find out about it?

- By the way, it was as if someone suggested to me, “Quit your job.” So I quit. And I was already preparing to go into exile, because his terms were coming to an end, and he was supposed to go into exile. I had sent him money in Mordovia, so he would have money in exile, and I had quit my job… I just didn't know what to do. My son was finishing tenth grade, what would happen?…

Literally on April 30, it was a Saturday, Nadia Lukianenko calls me early in the morning from Chernihiv. She wakes me up and says, “Raya, get up, are you sleeping?” I say, “What is it?” “Valentyn is already in New York! All the radio stations are blaring about it!” When I turned it on—it was true, even the jammers couldn't block it. All the radio stations as one: BBC, Voice of America, Radio Liberty—they were all talking about the same thing, that five political prisoners had been freed for two Soviet spies. That’s how I found out. They didn't tell me anything for two weeks, and then after two weeks, they called me into the OVIR and asked, “Will you be going?” I said, “Yes, I will.”

- Because there was this idea of “family reunification” then.

- Well, yes, but it was also difficult. On the one hand—to stay, but what awaited my son in Ukraine?

- Speaking of your son. Tell us how they terrorized the boy.

- Even as a little boy, when I was going to all those interviews—he was already 12 years old—he would say, “Mom, I’ll be by myself, I’ll wait for you.” And then some boys attacked him on the street, tore his little coat… The boys themselves ran away, but he was taken to the police station and held until midnight! “Let your mother come and get you.” And they knew that his mother wasn't there, that his mother was in Moscow. They let him go home late at night.

The second time was more serious. He was about fourteen or fifteen. An unfamiliar KGB agent with very large stars on his epaulets summons me and starts talking about this and that… I don't know where he's heading. And then suddenly he asks, “And how old is your son?” The moment he asked me that, my heart went cold… Yes, I thought, this is it. They know very well how old my son is, they know everything: how old I am, how old he is. They're going to start tormenting him now, so that I'll stop caring for my husband and think about my own child.

And they also threw a stone at me, and they summoned my brother from the collective farm: “Go, or we’ll arrest her, go save your sister!” There was a terrible uproar! My brother told my mother, my mother went to my sister, they were worried about me. At the same time, I was being called in for interrogations almost every day. My brother arrived, they started taking him from one office to another, saying, “We’re doing this so you won’t meet, because she’s here with us for questioning,”—and then they scared him so much, wound him up to the limit, and let him go. He came to my workplace—and there I was, sitting on a bench, I hadn't been in any KGB office that day. He saw me and just burst into tears, right there in front of people. “What are you doing,” he started shouting, “they’ll arrest you!” And he’s crying. I somehow calmed him down, and he stayed with me for a few days.

They call me for interrogations, and one time they even tell me: “You know, Raisa Vasylivna, you blame us for everything. You were kicked out of your job, we won’t let you work in your field, we didn't give you an apartment—you blame us for everything. And what if something happens to you? Will you blame us for that too?” I’m thinking: something's going to happen, they’ll probably kill me, or what. I tell them, “Well, how can I blame you then? The dead don't accuse.” Although, to be honest, the dead do accuse. But that's what I told them. And they say, “No, something minor will happen—maybe hooligans will beat you up, something like that.” By the way, I was afraid of that, because I often ran over to Opanas Zalyvakha's place, and that was across the whole city. I would return at night and was afraid that they would definitely, I thought, either disfigure my face or do something like that.

“Maybe hooligans will do something…” And literally the next day, a round stone comes through my window at night. It’s the first floor. It hit me just below the eye. It just missed my eye; if it had hit my eye, I would have lost it. And then they started calling me in for questioning and all running to look at me. They were curious to see what I looked like. I had a bruise under my eye.

At the same time, they broke the window of my single neighbor, and also across the courtyard in another house—they broke the windows of all three of us. My brother says, “See, if their windows hadn't been broken, you would have thought it was the KGB, right?” He was already getting ready to go home, so I kept quiet, not wanting to scare him, though I knew for sure it was the KGB. They spread a rumor that it was because of our boyfriends: she’s single, I’m single, and there was someone else there who was single. That was the rumor. And I call Moscow and tell them what happened. I say: true, I’m not entirely sure, I didn’t catch them red-handed. And they tell me: of course, it was them! So here's what they do: so that I would have no doubt that it was indeed them, they break a window of one of my colleagues at work, but this time in his kitchen. The man to whom I gave books, and they apparently caught on. I gave him a samvydav collection of Kalynets's work to hide somewhere in his village. They sensed that we were friends, so they broke his window too. He was married, with children.

- And how they also accused your son, Valentyn, of supposedly stealing a bicycle from the chief of police himself?

- Oh yes, they made him out to be a thief. One day I'm coming home from work and I feel it—you know, a mother feels it—that something is wrong with my child. I get home and the phone rings: come to the juvenile police department, pick up your thief. I go there. They tell me: he stole the police chief’s bicycle.

And here’s what happened: an unfamiliar boy, not from our courtyard, offers to sell him a bicycle. My son had a bicycle, but not like the police chief’s, just a simple one. The boy says: give me three rubles and buy this bicycle from me. Obviously, his eyes lit up: such a bicycle, he doesn’t have one like it, for three rubles… “I don't have the money. I’ll get the money and bring it to you tomorrow.” And the boy gave him the bicycle. Valik immediately got on it and rode along the embankment by the river, and right there, the policemen grab him: “You’re a thief, you stole the police chief's bicycle!” He says, “I didn't steal it, I bought it! I promised to give three rubles for this bicycle!” Well, fine! They go to that boy, to where they were supposed to meet, with the bicycle, and that boy either forgot about their arrangement or what—but he takes the three rubles from Valik. It turns out that they sold him the bicycle, but he's still a thief. That other boy was either put on a list or not—but this one was put on a list, and rumors were spread that he was a thief. Even some acquaintances believed these rumors, stopping me and sympathizing that I had such a son.

And then they set a trap for him—already in the eighth grade. They made him out to be an alcoholic. Because the boys—it was eighth grade already—had drunk a little wine... They caught him with a friend from his class. They let the other boy go, but held this one and kept him on their records, until about the 9th grade. I go to the police: “Why are you holding him? There haven't been any violations.” “The school hasn't sent a request.” I went to the principal Krasnopery, the KGB man, and he says, “It’s the police who aren’t sending the request, it has nothing to do with us.”

That's how they delayed, sending me back and forth, and then through the military enlistment office… All the boys underwent a commission, a health check. They give everyone a few questions and let them go. But to him, they say, “We’re putting you in a psychiatric hospital.” He asks, “Why me in a psychiatric hospital?” “Because you've been on the police records for years as an alcoholic.” And in a rapid-fire voice (he described it all in my memoirs) they tell him, “Don't even go home, don't go to your mom, just go lie down there, and we'll discharge you quickly…” But he went straight to the police, made a scene there, and then came to me at work and says, this is what’s happening, they want to put me in a psychiatric hospital. I immediately called Moscow: listen, now they want to put my child in a psychiatric hospital as an alcoholic. The very next day, they called him in for another commission, asked all the same questions as everyone else—and let him go. So that plan failed, and they didn't make him a lifelong alcoholic.

- So you had a very strong argument for leaving: because your son had no future here.

- Yes. And also, listen, many people were renouncing their USSR citizenship. Maybe some didn't actually intend to leave, but some political prisoners were renouncing their citizenship and demanding to emigrate. If I had refused to go, it would have been a slap in the face to America as well—even if it was a “slave trade,” as you say, these exchanges were still arranged at the highest level. What future would my son have had here? But there, at least he graduated from university…

- And what was the emigration procedure itself like? I know you also smuggled out Vasyl Stus’s poems.

- They called me into the OVIR and informed me that Moroz was in America. They asked if we would be leaving. Opanas Zalyvakha receives a letter from Vasyl Stus. They hadn't corresponded before. I know that Opanas was generally not much of a letter writer and was already trying to keep a low profile. Vasyl sent him a letter with a series of poems. He was in Kolyma at the time. We understood that he wanted me to memorize these poems and take them out. He was so worried about every one of his poems. And I was in such turmoil… I knew I would never be able to memorize those poems.

Liuba Lemyk—she was so resourceful—took a cambric handkerchief, cut it into three wide strips, and copied all those poems onto them with a chemical pencil. Then she undid the hem of my skirt, that turn-up, sewed all the poems in there, and I left wearing that skirt.

They took Valentyn's ring from me—his wedding band. They took my red Hutsul coral beads—they didn't allow them. In short, they took everything, but they didn't find Stus’s poems. They searched me, told me to undress—everything, they found nothing.

- And now those scraps with the poems are in the Museum of the Sixtiers…

- Yes, two of them are on display there, in the Museum of the Sixtiers.

- And how were you met there, how did they receive you, and what did you do there in America?

- Yes, this is important. As my life goes on, I think: why did I end up there, what was the point? For the entire first year, I was something of a “superstar.” I was invited everywhere that Ukrainians lived. Within two weeks, I had separated from Moroz. He went his way, and I went mine.

They invited me everywhere to speak about the situation in Ukraine, about political prisoners, about arrests—to tell them about Ukraine. Obviously, first and foremost, I spoke about the arrests, about the persecution of the wives of political prisoners… After every speech, there was an interview with a foreign correspondent. The first year, it was a sensation! Everyone wanted to talk to me because I was the wife of one of those who had been exchanged.

So I traveled all over Ukrainian Canada and America. I was even invited to Europe, to Switzerland, by "Faith in the Second World"—it was an organization that researched faith in communist countries. I had an interview with Austrian correspondents on the German border, but on the German side—because they wouldn't let me into Austria, as I hadn't arranged for an Austrian visa. Several correspondents from different newspapers came specially to get an interview—such was the sensation surrounding the exchange. All of this was covered in Austrian newspapers. Halia Horbach sent me photocopies of the interviews from several Austrian papers.

And then I got a job at Voice of America. The contract stipulated that I would review various books published in the languages available to me—English, German, or even Russian—and I would summarize them for Voice of America, for Ukraine. I read a great deal, a great many books, and every week I would send them one report. I would record it in Winnipeg, and they would receive it by radio wire in Washington and broadcast it to Ukraine.

- You worked there for eight years. If you multiply 52 weeks by 8 years, that’s over 400 reports!

- Yes, I reported on important books. George Shevelov’s book about the persecution of the Ukrainian language (it was published in English and has since been translated) under various occupation regimes: Romania, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia. It turned out Russia was the worst persecutor. I reported on Tom Prymak’s book about Hrushevsky, about how he was murdered in Moscow. I reported on the book by an American historian, Jan Gross, about the Soviet Union’s takeover of Western Ukraine, about all those arrests, the deportations in cattle cars… I sought out all the most stinging material.

And I think to myself, if there was any point to my emigration, it was what I did during those eight years at Voice of America, and after that, I also worked as a freelance correspondent for the Ukrainian section of Radio Canada International for over twenty years. I reported on, for example, the English translations of Stus’s work. There was a wonderful translator from Ukrainian to English in Toronto, Marko Tsarynnyk. I also reported on Halia Horbach’s translations into German.

I told the truth to the Ukrainian people, who had no access to it except through these “enemy” radio stations. I believe that I—though Oleksandr Tkachuk disagrees with me—made my greatest contribution to Ukraine during those first eight years I worked for Voice of America. Because the books were very serious; they were academic publications.

By the way, I recounted Ivan Hel’s book “Grani kultury” [Facets of Culture]. I got my hands on it and was so delighted because even the authors of academic publications were very cautious: they would claim that Ukraine was not a colony in the classical sense of the word, because, you see, many Ukrainians worked in the higher echelons of power in Moscow. They were wary of being accused of a lack of objectivity by their colleagues. But Hel dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. I just didn’t know it was Hel—he wrote this book under the pseudonym “Stepan Hoverlia.” We all understood it was a pseudonym. I said, “Nadiika!”—with such enthusiasm—“Listen, what a book has come out! Finally, everything is spelled out, finally I can talk about Ukraine’s colonial status!” Because our guys avoided this; they were terribly afraid to speak of colonialism. Maybe later, from the camps, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group said something, but not before that. Nadiika says, “No, someone from the diaspora wrote it.” But I started to defend it: “Hel could easily have written this, I know his views! Or maybe Khmara?” I thought, Khmara—Hoverla, maybe there’s a connection…

- Incidentally, they also gave this book to Leonid Plyushch abroad, for him to say whether a Ukrainian could have written such a thing, especially while in prison. Plyushch said, “It’s impossible.”

- So you see, Nadiika must have listened to him.

- Yes. But Ivan Hel did the impossible—and you guessed who it was.

- And I guessed by chance! It was only twenty years later that I came here, met with Mariika, Hel’s wife, and she says, “And I, despite all those roadblocks, smuggled Ivan’s book out anyway, I devoured it.” (See: Raisa Moroz. The Odyssey of One Book // Ukrayina moloda, No. 38 (4294). – 2012. – March 14; https://museum.khpg.org/index.php?do=search=; http://maidan.org.ua/static/mai/1300969230.html).

- I’d also like you to recall Alla Horska, when she wrote that postcard to Valentyn: “You are a flower amidst the snows…”

- After writing the essay “Among the Snows,” Alla Horska responded to it by writing a postcard to Valentyn, calling him a “flower amidst the snows.” She praised him in an allegorical form. During a search, this postcard fell into the hands of the KGB. Baranov summoned Alla Horska for interrogation. During the questioning, which was sometime in the autumn of 1970, she called him a “baran” [ram]: instead of “comrade Baranov,” she said “comrade Baran.” Whether she did it on purpose or by accident, I don’t know, but soon after, she was found murdered. I met with her then; she told me about her interrogation and predicted a very harsh sentence. Because of that postcard, which Valentyn didn’t hide or destroy… I always blame him for it; he was very, very careless. A lot of things could have been destroyed, for example, the letter from Antonenko-Davydovych, or at least hidden. The same with this postcard.

What I also wanted to say: right after I arrived, Iris Akahoshi came to meet me—a Japanese surname, because her husband was a Japanese-American. She was a member of Amnesty International in New York and was looking after Zinoviy Krasivskyi; they had been corresponding for years.

- She wrote him about 33 letters, but from prison, he couldn’t write her a single one.

- He replied to her while he was free; I translated some of his letters for her. And Anya Procyk from New York had done it before that. Iris was afraid that Zinoviy would be arrested as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. She suggested I write a letter to the New York Times. Just then, political prisoners were joining the Helsinki Group, as all the members who were free had been arrested. And I wrote a letter, which they published, in defense of Zenko Krasivskyi to prevent his arrest. But it didn’t help: the letter appeared in February, and he was arrested, I believe, in March (March 12, 1980. – Ed.). Then, sometime before summer, Mykola Horbal was arrested on charges of attempted rape, Chornovil—also for “attempted rape,” Yaroslav Lesiv—supposedly for possession of drugs, in Dnipropetrovsk Petro Rozumny—for some kind of knife, and someone else…

- And Vasyl Sichko—also for “drugs.”

- I didn’t know about Sichko. In short, I wrote another article. The English title was “The KGB Changes Tactics: Political Prisoners Presented as Criminals.” And it was in defense of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group; they were all being repressed.

- Yes, that was 1979-80.

- The article was published in the summer in the New York Times. I think this is very important because everything printed in the New York Times was broadcast by the main radio stations. I don’t know about the BBC, but Voice of America and Radio Liberty broadcast it to Ukraine. This relates to the point that I contributed not just as a “political prisoner’s wife,” but tried to do something for Ukraine myself.

- And what is your current situation?

- Now I’m trying to stay and live in Ukraine, which is very difficult. Just as it was difficult to leave for there, it’s difficult to return. Not spiritually—spiritually, I feel very comfortable here: I have friends here, interesting books are being published, there are meetings, exhibitions, interesting conversations… I don’t have any of that there. But I’m at an age where I need medical treatment. And then, I worked for a Ukrainian institution, so my pension is small. If those Party of Regions people start ripping me off for 15 percent of every currency exchange into the Ukrainian hryvnia, I simply won’t survive here. All these problems worry me a lot. It’s very hard to take the step of burning all my bridges there and returning to my homeland. I don’t know if you understand this. You all live here, and I console myself with that thought: all my friends live here, why can’t I?! But there are problems like these.

- You have a living example in Raisa Rudenko, who also sought Ukrainian citizenship but was never granted it.

- Yes, and she is still an American citizen.

- At the OVIR, they wanted a bribe from her; she refused to pay it—so she remained a non-citizen of Ukraine.

- Raya is in a slightly different situation; she returned a bit earlier. She has, for example, access to treatment at Feofaniia, which I won’t have. She has some local pension here. I don’t expect the privileges Raya has, because I didn’t serve time, I am not a Hero of Ukraine. My pension is small, but I can live on it comfortably there. There, if you don’t meet the minimum subsistence level, the state will supplement your income.

- But that won’t happen here.

- Not only will it not happen—they’ll take it away. (Laughs). If they take 15 percent, or even 10 percent, that’s a lot.

- There’s no such robbery anywhere else in the world…

- There isn’t, it’s outright plunder. So I’m trying to stay, but everything is uncertain. I have no interest in living there.

- Mrs. Raisa, we somehow forgot to talk about the consequences of those interviews you gave in Moscow…

- Committees began to form—all over the world, you could say: in Europe, Canada, America, even in Argentina. Committees for the Defense of Moroz. The Prime Minister of Canada raised the issue with Gromyko or Kosygin. There were many governmental appeals about his fate. So it’s no coincidence that he was released; the publicity was huge. Well, and then, obviously, the Ukrainian problem emerged thanks to this exchange. He spoke out, declared himself a nationalist—even though the academic world looked askance at nationalism then, and still does. But everything was fine, and in fact, thanks to this exchange and all the noise around Moroz, the Ukrainian problem became known to the world on the front pages of newspapers, for a time at least.

- Yes, and the youth in particular were fascinated by Moroz. Osyp Zinkevych told me that at stadiums, during international matches, a banner would suddenly appear: “Freedom for Valentyn Moroz!” And this would even get onto Soviet television screens!

- And Moscow would immediately cut the broadcast, claiming technical difficulties! That was right during his hunger strike. As I said, the publicity was tremendous. When I arrived in America, I read all the newspapers about what was being done in his defense—it was incredible. Canadian parliamentarians demanded that Canada stop selling grain to the Soviet Union until Moroz was released! Morton Shulman, a Canadian MP and a doctor by profession, wanted to go and treat Moroz, to check on his health. They wanted to grant him the honorary title of an American citizen. Several people had been nominated for this title at the time: Churchill, Columbus, Kościuszko, Solzhenitsyn… and Moroz. No one got the title except Churchill, but they were nominated. Moroz, by the way, as soon as he announced he was renouncing his Soviet citizenship, kept asking America to give him citizenship. I’d say, “I asked for them to give you asylum.” – “What asylum! Citizenship!” I’d say, “Valentyn, citizenship is a great honor, it’s a whole procedure…” – “Citizenship! What do you know…”

- Mrs. Raisa, you once told a very interesting story about Oles Berdnyk’s arrival in the United States after he had repented and was released early.

- Berdnyk arrived when it was already “perestroika.” He first came to New York, spoke there, mentioned Jesus Christ, trying to seem so pious—and never said a word about his repentance and that shameful accusation that the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was collaborating with American intelligence. Mykola Horbal happened to be there and told me how Berdnyk behaved in New York.

I was prepared for him to say the same thing in Canada because he was invited as the keynote speaker to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. He was introduced by the head of the Slavic Studies department, Yaroslav Rozumnyj, who spoke of him as a hero, a writer, a member of the Helsinki Group… At the end, everyone stood up and began to applaud. I remained seated. My husband, Hryhoriy Kuksa, out of solidarity with me, also did not stand up. This greatly surprised the people around us; they started running up to me and asking questions, including Petro Savaryn—he was the head of the community in Edmonton at the time (he’s a lawyer, by the way, and was even the Chancellor of the University of Alberta). He came and asked, “What’s the matter? Why, Mrs. Raisa, did you not stand up?” And I told him that you’re portraying him as a hero here, applauding him, but this is how he behaved. If only he had just repented… Because other people repented—but they didn’t accuse anyone. But he cast such a stain on the Ukrainian Helsinki Group by accusing it of collaborating with American intelligence! The KGB made a video with him: he’s on the banks of the Dnipro, with a bandura in his hands, I think… Nadiika saw that video. And I’m telling them all this.

In short, I spoiled everything. A scandal erupted. He no longer gave his speech. After that, there was a banquet. Apparently, the community swung from one extreme to the other: one moment they were applauding him—and the next, no one wanted to sit next to Berdnyk! No one! He sat all alone at that table. And the next day—this is what I was told—everyone disowned him; he was at the hotel. He walked around saying, “I want to eat, I’m hungry…” (Laughs). So he did get his comeuppance for his shameful actions.

But I got mine too: Kots wrote me a very nasty letter. Kots had paid for his trip to America. Kots was a wealthy Ukrainian, but he didn’t give much money himself; he only encouraged others to give for various causes, while he was in no hurry to donate. But he sponsored Berdnyk. He wrote me a letter saying I behaved that way because I was a Greek woman, not a Ukrainian. Another anonymous letter came, which I don’t even want to mention, it was so disgusting. It was obviously from those who had presented him. That was the story. I believe it’s important to talk about this. I mentioned it in the second edition of the book.

- So now the second, substantially expanded, edition of your book is being published by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

- Yes. There are additions about Mykhailyna, about Berdnyk, about Nina Samokish, who deserves all praise and mention. I have expanded this book.

- Thank you…

- And thank you.