An interview with Oleksa Krestyanov and Volodymyr Bushtarenko about DAVYDOVIDENKO, Ivan Ivanovych, recorded on April 7, 2001, in the city of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
V. Ovsienko: Today is the Annunciation, April 7, 2001. We are in the city of Nikopol in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Mr. Oleksa Krestyanov is present here, and Ivan Ivanovych Davydovidenko, a victim of repression who was confined to a psychiatric hospital, was just here. He refused to talk about himself. So I am asking Mr. Oleksiy Krestyanov to tell us about him.
In the city of Nikopol, Oleksiy Krestyanov is the deputy head of the city branch of the Republican Christian Party. He is an archeologist, a geologist, a historian, and an overall very knowledgeable person.
Also here is Volodymyr Bushtarenko. He is now the head of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast branch of the Republican Christian Party.
O. Krestyanov: Mr. Vasyl, from what I know, this Ivan Ivanovych was a power engineer in the cold section of shop number seven at the Pipe Plant. It's a huge shop, over a kilometer long—one thousand one hundred meters. It has a cold section and a hot one, and there are separate power engineers for the cold and hot sections. So, he was a power engineer, an electrical engineer, because power engineering also includes the supply of compressed gases and other energy resources. This Ivan Ivanovych Davydovidenko was responsible only for the electricity supply. He's an engineer, of course, with the appropriate education. But he gradually began to notice that the shop's management was abusing its authority. This was in the seventies. They were embezzling money there, writing themselves various bonuses, selling things, diverting pipes on the side, and so on. He noticed this and started writing to the relevant authorities, first to the Soviet Party bodies. These Soviet Party bodies took absolutely no action. He began writing to higher authorities, but the letters would end up back here, in Nikopol. Then he was summoned to the KGB and warned. And when he continued his letter-writing attack on these same bodies that were taking no action, three hefty guys in a Volga came for him—it was one of those old Volgas, you know, the M-21, with a cross, made to look like an “ambulance” (by the way, they came for Sokolyuk the same way—in a Volga with a cross). They took him and drove him to Iren. Iren is a well-known psychiatric hospital in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and it was famous throughout the Soviet Union, far beyond Ukraine, because various people, human rights activists, were imprisoned there. It was one of the KGB's most brutal torture chambers, and he was put there. He was there for about half a year; I can't say exactly how long he was imprisoned. Because it's hard to get him to talk now.
V. Ovsienko: And when was this?
O. Krestyanov: This was sometime in the seventies, either '76 or '77—one of those two years.
V. Ovsienko: The very height of punitive psychiatry.
O. Krestyanov: Yes, yes. He was there for about half a year. And before he was imprisoned, they, of course, removed him from his engineering position and made him a manual laborer. He was already working as a regular on-duty electrician-mechanic. And after he was released, he worked as a mechanic, and not right away either: for a long time they wouldn't hire him; there was a whole ordeal. And now, you see, he has hooked up with the communists, and now he says that the Soviet government was very good, and that today's communists are the real ones, whereas the others were fake.
V. Ovsienko: What year was he born?
O. Krestyanov: I can't say, but I think he must be at least 60 because, from what I know—I also worked at the Pipe Plant for three and a half years—I was younger than him, because when I started working there, I was 37, and he was already over forty. So he must be around 62 or 63. I can find out for sure later; it's not a big problem.
V. Ovsienko: Okay, thank you. Davydovidenko put it something like this: it wasn't the Soviet government that punished him, not the real communists. And that what was happening then continues to happen now. And that he defended the Soviet government then and will continue to defend it. As for what's happening now—those are “the machinations of imperialism, the CIA, and the SBU, but not the KGB.” That's what he said.
V. Bushtarenko: Yesterday I was told some interesting things about this Ivan Ivanovych Davydovidenko. Almost every weekend, when he's at his dacha, he goes out at six in the morning to the central lane of the dacha cooperative and gives speeches, all by himself, calling for a return to the communist system, to the Soviet government. This is most likely the effect of the psychotropic drugs that were administered to him when he was in the psychiatric hospital. He imagines himself to be a leader. Yesterday, the head of the Communist Party in Nikopol, Volodymyr Prokhorovych Bagriy, told me that Davydovidenko has headed a “Movement for the Soviet Union” in the city of Nikopol. This, in my opinion, is a manifestation of his illness, a consequence of the psychotropic influence he was subjected to when he was in the psychiatric hospital.
V. Ovsienko: Thank you. That was an addition by Volodymyr Bushtarenko on April 7, 2001, in the city of Nikopol, at the local history museum.