In the winter of 1969, in Kyiv, protesting against the Soviet policy of Russification and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces, Mykola Bereslavsky attempted an act of self-immolation but was detained and sentenced. He served his sentence in Mordovia. Upon returning home, he continued his human rights activism, remaining under KGB surveillance until the collapse of the USSR. The family was accused of espionage, and rumors even circulated in the village that “a secret tunnel led from their house to America….”
In this interview, his daughter, Zhanna Kryzhanovska, shares memories of her father and the challenges their family faced. This is another significant story captured by our film crew during our trip to Ukraine this spring. It is a story that sheds light on the important chapters of resistance to the Soviet regime and the fight for Ukrainian identity.
You can visit the project website “GULAG. Witnesses” by following this link: https://gulag-witnesses.com/eng.
The site offers valuable resources and testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the GULAG system. It’s an in-depth historical project that aims to preserve the memories of those who lived through the Soviet forced labor camps, providing insight into this dark chapter of history.
#HistoryOfUkraine #Resistance #MykolaBereslavsky #ZhannaKryzhanovska #USSR #SovietRepressions #HumanRightsActivists #ECGProductionsCanada
“MY FATHER HAD NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT SOVIET VALUES”
On May 18, 2024, my father would have turned 100 years old. He was born in the village of Novospasivka, which was later renamed Osypenko, in honor of the aviator Polina Osypenko, who was born in our village. However, my father preferred the old name because Polina Osypenko’s real surname was Dudnik, and her husband Osypenko had only spent two days in the village, with practically no connection to it. Therefore, he wished to retain the historical name of Novospasivka. The village was founded by settlers from the Poltava region in 1805, and it is located near Berdiansk in the Zaporizhzhia region. My father studied its history, and some manuscripts he kept are titled “From the History of Novospasivka.” He provided materials to the local museum, but not everyone agreed with the idea of restoring the old name.
We are used to thinking that our patriots are mostly from Western Ukraine. However, both Levko Lukianenko and Viacheslav Chornovil—prominent leaders of the Ukrainian idea—were actually from Central Ukraine. My father was, in fact, from Southern Ukraine. I want to emphasize that my father’s national consciousness was formed not so much within the family—his mother was an ordinary village woman, an orphan, while his father was educated, and so was his paternal grandfather—but it was the teachers in his school, who were not locals, that shaped his national identity. One of these teachers was named Polishchuk, and as my father later learned, he was repressed. My father also remembered a fellow villager named Filymon, whom they called “Uncle Filymon.” This man died before the end of the war. At that time, he was around forty years old—still a young man. The boys, teenagers, would gather around him, and he would say that two evil forces had come together—referring to Stalin and Hitler—and that no one knew how it would all end. “I so want to live to see how it all ends,” he used to say, but he was ill and did not survive. My father often remembered Uncle Filymon as a politically aware person.
My father studied very well, was curious, and loved books deeply. You have to be born with that. He had a brother and a sister, but they didn’t have the same passion for books. He collected them and cherished them dearly. When he was taken to Germany, like many others, as an Ostarbeiter (forced laborer), he wrote letters to my mother, which were sometimes smuggled through, always asking: “Mother, please take care of my books!” Unfortunately, the library did not survive because the house was burned down twice by the Germans. Even though it didn’t burn completely, books are something that catches fire easily. His passion for books stayed with him throughout his life and was passed down to us, his children. In my memoirs, I wrote that I don’t remember my father buying us candy, but he always bought books, albums, and pencils. My mother would buy the candy, and my father bought the things that contributed to our development.
His younger sister was also taken to Germany. My grandmother, Hanna, my father’s mother, lost her husband on the front lines and was left alone with her youngest son, Volodymyr, who was only 14 at the time. The Germans nearly took him too for forced labor because he was tall, and they thought he was already 16. You can only imagine what people of that generation went through, especially my grandmother. She had to endure extreme hardship, left with nothing after their house burned down and stood empty. Everything needed to be rebuilt from scratch. And her children were far away, scattered across foreign lands, with no way of knowing whether she would ever see them again.
In Germany, my father worked at some factory with a fellow villager named Naumenko, and together they decided to escape back to Ukraine. My father knew German fairly well—he had studied it in school and improved it while he was there. He somehow got hold of a map, and German maps, especially military ones, were very detailed, showing even the smallest rivers. He memorized the map because they couldn’t take it with them. They traveled openly along the road, carrying a shovel on their shoulder, pretending to be moving from village to village looking for work. To avoid drawing attention, they didn’t sneak around at night but walked during the day. At one point, a policeman stopped them and asked, “Which village are you from?” My father answered, “Zabeltitz.” “Who do you live with, and who do you work for?” That question he couldn’t answer. The policeman knew everyone in the village, as it was small, so he arrested them but assigned them to work for some locals. These people treated my father well. I don’t know what happened to the other escapee, my father’s fellow villager, as their paths diverged.
There is a photograph (my brother has it) of my father when he was young and looking angry, because he was mad at the Germans. They were trying to convince him to take a picture to send to his “Muter” (mother)… Later, when he saw how kindly the Germans treated him, the relationships improved—not everyone supported Hitler. Many years later, I was in the fourth grade at the time, my father wrote a letter to the village of Zabeltitz, to the woman he had lived with. Her name was Kristina, and during the war, she was already elderly and lived with her granddaughter. It was the granddaughter who replied to my father’s letter, as Kristina had passed away. The neighbors, who also remembered my father well, wrote back as well. They corresponded for about twenty years, and my father wrote the letters in German. Even I corresponded with a girl from the neighboring family.
My father was released when all the Ostarbeiters were freed. He and his sister found each other in Germany. He wrote to her about the books he was reading and how he was collecting books and magazines. But his sister and the girls who were with her would reply, “Why do you need those books? You should buy yourself something to eat, and burn the books.” My father responded that he would never burn books: “I’d rather burn myself than burn books.” He used to say that there was no such thing as a “Soviet” nation; we are Ukrainians. Well, my aunt didn’t have the same awareness as my father. She wasn’t a fervent supporter of Soviet power, as she knew about the Holodomor and the repressions, but she didn’t have the same strong sense of national identity as my father did.
By the way, fate took him to Czechoslovakia for a while, where he met emigrants—conscious people who also guided him toward the Ukrainian path. Immediately after his release, my father was drafted into the Soviet army and worked as a translator from German in some military structure. He hadn’t seen his mother for years, his father had died, yet he was not allowed to return home. Afterward, he also served in the Urals, and only after that was he able to return home.
He would tell stories of serving with people who bragged about how many villages they burned in Western Ukraine while pretending to be Banderites. They dressed up as Banderites and burned villages. The local population knew very well that these were not actual Banderites. They heard Russian being spoken. I have talked to people from Galicia, and they confirmed what my father said. He already knew back then that the NKVD had prepared such sabotage units at a special school in Kharkiv.
He also told me about an incident when some of our soldiers were harassing our own liberated girls, accusing them of serving the Germans and attempting to rape them. My father stood up for them, and his own nearly shot him. But one officer, by the way, a Russian, who was clearly an intelligent and educated man, essentially saved my father.
When he was in Czechoslovakia, he had some connections for a time with the professors of the Ukrainian Economic Academy in Poděbrady, a renowned Ukrainian technical school. However, when he was about to cross into Soviet-controlled territory, he had to bury some materials because he knew they could pose a danger to him.
My father had no illusions about Soviet values. He was outraged when, even at school, teachers forced students to draw horns on the portraits of writers they had studied the day before, to distort their faces, and to add some offensive captions under them. He never celebrated Soviet holidays, but he also never forbade us from becoming pioneers or joining the Komsomol, as he understood we had to live in society and not be outcasts.
After returning to the village, my father got married and twice attempted to enroll in the history department—once at the Donetsk Institute, then called Stalin Institute (since Donetsk was then called Stalino), and later at the Berdyansk Institute. However, he quit his studies both times. Why? Because the history being taught absolutely did not satisfy him; it filled him with anger and disgust. Later, when I was finishing school and wanted to become a journalist—I was preparing for it, even published a little—my father told me, “They won’t let you write the truth, and you won’t be able to lie.”
It was the same when I decided to study history. We then agreed that I should go into philology and instill a love of the native language in children, even though I didn’t want to be a teacher. Fate, however, decided otherwise—I became a philologist and even did some writing. I have published some materials. When I worked at the Institute of Postgraduate Education, writing became a part of my job.
“TEACHERS WITH SWOLLEN LEGS ASKED STUDENTS FOR FOOD”
In our family, we were very aware of the Holodomor. In my father’s family, they experienced hunger, but it wasn’t a fatal famine. My grandmother, for as long as she lived, would cry and say, ‘They say there wasn’t a famine, but there certainly was…’. At that time, people stayed silent about it. My father (born in 1924, so he was nine years old at the time) remembered how the teachers were starving, sitting with swollen legs, and asking students if their parents could send them something to eat. His mother would send cooked beets to the teachers. This memory stayed with him vividly.
Not all the teachers at the school were locals, and some had no households of their own, which made things worse, especially during the active collectivization period.
By that time, my grandmother already had three children. I cannot recall this story without tears: ‘It was early spring. I heard children coming and singing “Rozpryahajte, khloptsi, koni” (a traditional Ukrainian folk song). I looked out the window—it was still cold and wet. The children were in rags, a brother and sister, clearly with begging bags, stood outside the windows and sang, asking for alms. But how can you sing when you’re a hungry child, when you have no parents? And I had nothing to give them. I went to the garden, where only some onions and garlic had just started to sprout. I picked a few stalks and gave them to the children. They immediately sat down by the window and began dividing them…’
If you go through this, or even just let it pass through your heart, you will never forget it—and you will never be able to forgive.
When I worked at the institute, there was an order to gather testimonies about the Holodomor. The Ukrainian language study center, which I headed, was responsible for this. Testimonies from across the region began to come in, collected from teachers, villagers, and eyewitnesses who still remembered the famine. Children were involved in gathering this material. As we read about this horror, we were overwhelmed with anger, pain, and indignation. The question arose: why did our people, eternal farmers on their fertile land, perish from hunger during what was, in principle, a productive year?
The fear was still deeply rooted: elderly people asked that their names not be mentioned under their testimonies. And this was already in our time, in independent Ukraine, yet people were still afraid of punishment, so strong was the terror ingrained in them. Some of these testimonies about the Holodomor were published with the support of the regional department of public education.
I remember my grandmother telling me about a case of cannibalism in their village. It’s horrifying even to imagine—a mother killed her six-year-old son. What level of desperation must people have been driven to, to kill the maternal instinct? I posed to myself a moral question: where does such a person end up—in hell as a child murderer, or in heaven as a martyr?
When my father relied on some information, it was never baseless. He ordered academic books from Moscow and Kyiv, which were printed in only a few thousand copies for the entire Soviet Union. For example, I have Essays on Population Statistics (Gosstatizdat). He was very interested in the demographic situation in Ukraine—where and how it had changed. Another book he ordered from Moscow while studying the issue of the Holodomor was Foreign Trade of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1966. He compared how much food was sold in 1932-33, and in this book, there is information for each product year by year. It was difficult to argue with my father when he proved something because he always operated with facts.
Regarding demography, the Soviet Union conducted a population census in 1926 and 1939. Other republics showed a population increase, but in Ukraine, there was a decline. Then, there was a sharp increase in the number of Russians, literally within a few years, because whole families from the Russian non-black-earth regions were resettled into villages that had been decimated by famine. We knew such families in our village…
How much has our people endured in just the 20th century? There must be deep reasons for this, and my father often asked himself such questions. He found answers in Shevchenko:
“Break the chains, brotherhood unite!
Do not seek, do not ask
In a foreign land
For what cannot be found
Neither in the heavens nor in the fields.
In your own home, there is truth,
And strength, and freedom.”
My father knew Shevchenko well, and so do I. Most people read “Kateryna” or “Naymychka,” which are about more domestic matters. But the true Shevchenko, the one who needs to be understood, is found in his major poems like “To the Dead, the Living, and the Unborn,” “The Dream,” and “The Caucasus.”
In our family, we held Shevchenko readings, with a large portrait of him hanging above the table with the words: “Study, read, and learn from others, but do not forget your own.” I often repeated these words to my students, hoping they would resonate in their hearts. Many of my graduates still keep in touch with me through social media, and I value these long-lasting relationships.
However, I rarely told them about my father, thinking it would be immodest. After all, it wasn’t my achievement. Many students didn’t know that my father was a repressed political prisoner.
HOW DID MY FATHER COME TO SUCH A DESPERATE DECISION AS SELF-IMMOLATION?»
We had an old radio through which he constantly listened to Radio Liberty and Voice of America, even though they were frequently jammed. He had maybe two or three like-minded friends in the village. Most people were focused on their daily lives and didn’t care about his ideas. In fact, what irritated and unsettled them was that he wasn’t like everyone else: he didn’t play “kozel” (a popular card game), didn’t drink beer or vodka, loved books, and wasn’t interested in meaningless talk.
My parents never quarreled with their neighbors. I never heard any vulgar language from them. They always told us, “If people are bothering you, go play somewhere they don’t.” They didn’t go around figuring out who argued with whom, but instead, encouraged us to choose friends who made us feel comfortable.
And just at that time, information came through about the events in Czechoslovakia, about Jan Palach, the student who committed self-immolation in protest against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. By the way, I have a magazine, Ukrainian Week, which mentions both my father and Vasyl Makukh, who also self-immolated in Kyiv and died. He is buried in our city, as his family lived here at that time.
My father was trying to find official ways to influence the situation with Ukrainian schools, but in the Soviet system, trying to reach anyone was a futile effort. He wrote letters to the Institute of Linguistics, to Rusanyvskyi, as well as to various authorities about the mass closure of Ukrainian schools, especially in Donetsk region. It was happening quickly: today they would bring a seal and documents saying that starting tomorrow, the Ukrainian school would become a Russian one, and indeed, by the next day, it would become a Russian school.
What troubled him was why children from Ukrainian schools couldn’t successfully continue their studies in universities, which were essentially Russian-speaking. A child studied mathematics, geography, or physics using Ukrainian terminology, but at the university, the lecturer didn’t know the terms and couldn’t understand what the student was saying. Movies were in Russian, schools were closing, universities were all Russian-speaking, and literature was mostly in Russian, although in the 1960s there was still a fair amount of Ukrainian literature. Before every movie in the cinema, they would show newsreels of ‘Soviet life,’ and everything there was perfect.
Returning to 1968: it is clear that the events in Czechoslovakia became, as they say, the last straw not only for my father. Vasyl Makukh also tried to achieve something by appealing to higher authorities. In a letter to the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Shelest, just before his self-immolation, he wrote about the erasure of Ukrainian identity, the repression and persecution of the intelligentsia, russification, and the blatant inequality of the peoples in the USSR. He referred to the CPU as a ‘puppet’ that followed every command from its Moscow master. He also believed that a time would come when severe retribution would fall upon the Russians. He knowingly sacrificed himself.
It is clear that my father, too, did not know how to influence the situation, how to draw attention to these problems in Ukraine, and at that time, he saw no other way out. He was the father of three children; my eldest sister was 16 at the time. He had a wonderful wife, a like-minded partner, our wise and beautiful mother—kind, decent, and noble. My father had suffered a stroke at 37 and had a second-degree disability. For some time, he could not work, but he managed the household very well—he was skilled at everything and was also an excellent artist. He made a poster—a copy has survived and is now in a museum—although it was the first draft, which he probably didn’t like, as some words were ‘cramped,’ and he rewrote it.
It is clear that he had been struggling with this thought for a long time and couldn’t tell my mother. When he started preparing for the journey, my mother, knowing about his fragile health, asked where he was going. He remained silent. She followed him, crying. He said goodbye, and my mother said he had tears in his eyes. We didn’t know anything for two days. My mother cried a lot. During the time that passed after it happened, and then the trial, she lost almost ten kilograms—she was very distressed. I was a bit older than my brother, and as much as I could, I tried to comfort her. I had read a lot of classical literature, and perhaps that helped form some inner strength in me, giving me the courage to support my mother.
KGB officers came and told us that my father had committed a dishonorable act and started searching the apartment. They didn’t find anything suspicious, as my father didn’t have any connections with dissidents at the time, nor did he have any forbidden literature. What he thought necessary to hide, he placed in a package, tied it with wire, and hung it on nails behind the wardrobe. The wardrobe was placed with its back in the corner of the room, so it was impossible to see the package.
We didn’t understand what was happening. We knew about the repressed, about Ukrainian values—our father told us, we learned Ukrainian poems, and we loved Shevchenko. All of that was there, but, of course, he never spoke to us about his political intentions—not only because we weren’t ready for it, but also because he didn’t want to expose us to danger.
On February 10, 1969, my father stood near Kyiv University and in an instant, put on signs that read: ‘Freedom for Ukrainian cultural figures!’, ‘Fight for the legal rights of the Ukrainian language!’, ‘Without language, there is no nation!’ Then he shouted, addressing the people who began to gather: ‘Long live independent Ukraine!’ And he didn’t manage to do anything else before he was grabbed and taken to the KGB detention center. The trial lasted several months, and my father refused a defense lawyer, defending himself. Compared to what dissidents usually received, the sentence was short—two and a half years. Maybe he defended himself well, or maybe it was because it was no longer the Stalinist era but the Brezhnev era. However, the regime was strict; he was sent to Mordovia, to the village of Barashevo, where political prisoners were held.
“THERE WERE RUMORS IN THE VILLAGE THAT A SECRET TUNNEL LED FROM OUR HOUSE TO AMERICA…”
I don’t know if it was the KGB spreading such nonsense or if the people themselves imagined it. In the village, incredible rumors were spreading: that we were spies, that there was an underground tunnel from our house leading to America… They also said there was a radio transmitter buried under our grapevine and that the children were learning German and preparing to become spies. I didn’t know German at all, maybe just a dozen words from my father, as I studied English in school. The wiser and kinder people avoided asking questions, didn’t offend us, but there were others who could look you in the eye and say, ‘Your father is a spy!’ It was both painful and unpleasant, especially because you didn’t know how to respond. Teachers treated us differently too. Some were tolerant and respectful. But there were others who tried to hurt us in any way they could. I was an excellent student, but there was a moment when I almost quit school. I was so deeply offended by two teachers that my mother had to go and figure things out. Despite everything, I was active, took part in different events, and had good relationships with my classmates and peers.
My father and I corresponded, but he was only allowed to send two letters a month, while we wrote to him more often to support him. My father’s mother, my grandmother, was deeply distressed by the situation. For her, it felt like a disgrace: ‘Mykola is in prison.’ No one really understood the situation. People would say, ‘So much for Mykola being so smart!’ My grandmother was angry at my father for leaving three children behind. But we, the children, never held any resentment toward him. We knew that he was fighting for a cause and were certain that he couldn’t think or do anything bad. Our mother never reproached him for this either.
Interestingly, while he was imprisoned, his circle of like-minded individuals expanded greatly. He connected with people whose conversations became a valuable learning experience for him. At that time, Levko Lukianenko and Daniel Synyavsky were also serving their sentences there. My father interacted with human rights activists from the Baltics and the Caucasus. He mentioned that sometimes disputes of religious or political nature would arise between them. He would say, ‘A good person, educated, intelligent, but a chauvinist — and there’s no escaping that.’ This was often said about Russians. It’s hard not to recall Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s apt phrase in this context: ‘The Russian democrat ends where the Ukrainian question begins.’
My father served time with men from Western Ukraine who had been imprisoned at the ages of 16 or 17 and sentenced to 25 years for their involvement in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These young boys ended up in prison at 17 and spent the best years of their lives there. One of them was Petro Samokhval, whom my father remembered very fondly. He would say that, despite not having had a chance to receive an education, Petro had an innate delicacy and politeness. Even in those harsh conditions, he maintained cleanliness as much as possible.
My father also told me that the prison authorities tried to use the criminal inmates to punish the political prisoners, but the political prisoners were able to organize themselves and several times fought back, so the criminals eventually stopped bothering them. My father was also thrown into a cell with criminal offenders for disobedience, likely to scare him, but it turned out fine, and they even treated him with respect. There is a prison report about my father, a negative one, stating that ‘he refuses to participate in cultural and mass events and has gone on hunger strike.’
When my father returned from imprisonment, he was wearing prison clothes and had a large beard. There are photos of him from that time—political prisoners grew beards to distinguish themselves from criminals. It was like a kind of calling card. My father’s beard was long, and he had aged significantly over those two and a half years. He carried a large, handmade wooden suitcase filled with manuscripts—some of which I still have, written in notebooks. It’s unclear how he managed to get access to that literature. He had beautiful handwriting, but when he wanted to encode something, he wrote it in a way only he could decipher—even we couldn’t read it.
He recalled walking through Kyiv with his beard and suitcase, and people who recognized him as a former political prisoner would bow their heads and nod in respect. In the village, it was a strange sight: Mykola Bereslavskyi had returned—with a beard and prison clothes! My father felt out of place because he lacked someone to talk to. Not that everyone pointed fingers at him—no, though that did happen on occasion. He wanted to find work, but like many former prisoners, it was difficult. He worked as a night watchman, and he took it seriously. Though he was unwell, he spent the entire night walking the grounds. He could never allow himself to sit down or hide somewhere—whatever job he took, even something as simple as sharpening a pencil, he did with precision and care.
At that time, my older sister was studying in Dnipropetrovsk, and it was also time for me to continue my education—I graduated in 1973. Two years later, my brother was finishing school, so our parents decided: if we wanted to stay together as a family, we needed to move to the city. Of course, my father wanted to move there as well, not only to be closer to us but also because he hoped to find like-minded individuals among people in his circle.
And so, in 1974, we moved. At first, we had some issues with housing, but the most important thing was that my father indeed met many people with whom he later joined the People’s Movement (Rukh) and the “Prosvita” Society. Our entire family, from the very beginning, was actively involved in both the Rukh and “Prosvita.” Among the new acquaintances my father made were many people who had spent time in prisons. Our home was frequented by notable dissidents and human rights defenders, such as poet Ivan Sokulsky and his wife, Oryna Vasylivna, and artist Sarma-Sokolovsky, who had also been imprisoned. Sarma-Sokolovsky was a talented man—he painted, made banduras, and wrote poetry. I still have a copy of the famous painting “My Thoughts, My Thoughts…” by the national artist of Ukraine, Mykhailo Bozhiy, from him. My father and Mykola Sarma-Sokolovsky corresponded regularly, and he often visited us, and our parents visited him. Additionally, we were close to the poet Volodymyr Sirenko, who also experienced imprisonment, as well as Petro Rozumny, who was part of the same circle of people. The family of Oleksandr Kuzmenko—an ardent patriot, fiery and passionate about Shevchenko studies—was also a part of this community. Both he and his wife served time in camps. She would recount the tortures she endured: being hung by her hair, forced to stand in freezing water for long periods…
I remember Viktor Klymenko and Prykhodko (I can’t recall his first name anymore) visiting our home after they were released. Levko Lukyanenko’s wife, Nadiya, was a guest in our family, along with the poet and translator Havrylo Prokopenko, and Vasyl Siry, a geography teacher who fully experienced the horrors of punitive psychiatry and later became the head of our Society of Repressed and Political Prisoners until his death.
I especially want to warmly remember Oleksa Tykhy, who was imprisoned for collecting quotes about language and its significance in people’s lives—not just Ukrainian, but language in general. He would knock on doors, asking for this manuscript to be published, even quoting Marx and Engels in high offices, but was eventually accused of distorting Soviet reality. He was from Donetsk and died in prison, just like Vasyl Stus and Yuriy Lytvyn. In 1989, their remains were transferred from the Urals to Kyiv and reburied in the Baikove Cemetery.
Tell me, for what crime was Oles Tykhy punished? My father also told me that he sat with a geography teacher who also couldn’t understand why he was imprisoned. The man openly said that natural resources and minerals in our country were being used inefficiently. It turns out that this was enough to charge a person with some sort of sabotage…
When Gorbachev announced perestroika, the Ukrainian movement immediately became more active. Teachers, writers, journalists, and artists began to speak out loudly about Ukrainian statehood. Among them were the writer Volodymyr Zaremba and journalist Serhiy Dovhal, artist Ivan Shulyk, who were at the forefront of the Rukh and Prosvita movements. My university lecturer Polina Myshurenko, also joined, as well as lecturers Mykola Dniprenko, Volodymyr Rybalko, Anatoliy Popovskyi, and journalist Borys Kovtoniuk, who I know has been gathering information about the activities of the Prosvita Society and the People’s Movement (Rukh).
Ivan Sokulsky played a direct and active role in this process. Every Monday, we would gather near the monument to the young Shevchenko, by the theater, and we already knew by sight who from the authorities or security services was there—people who were monitoring these gatherings. There were even instances of violence—once, they sent veterans of the Afghan war against us, and provocateurs were planted to shout unacceptable slogans. My father attended such events, but he wasn’t much of an orator; he’d get lost in front of a large audience. Young people, students, would come up to him, asking for materials for their projects. That was the kind of communication he preferred. His health didn’t allow him to attend every event he was invited to, such as the World Congress of Ukrainian Political Prisoners. He wrote a lot. I’m amazed at how he managed to contain so much in his head. We subscribed to encyclopedias, dictionaries. “A Short History of Religion,” “The History of Mathematics”—he was interested in everything. But it wasn’t as if he just sat there reading all the time. He had a phenomenal memory, knew a lot, and was an interesting conversationalist. He studied not only Ukrainian history. Ask him about the history of France, Germany—he’d tell you without preparation… Maybe he was a bit categorical in his judgments; sometimes we even argued because we had different views on certain things. But later, when I had gained more experience, he would often listen to my opinion, and we would find common ground.
“WHY THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION IS SO IMPORTANT FOR RUSSIA?”
What is Ukraine? It is God’s gift! Fertile land, beautiful climate, we have everything. We are self-sufficient. And what is characteristic: Ukrainians have never coveted foreign lands. Yes, we fought in the ranks of foreign armies, but we never sought foreign territories. We are farmers. And when you need to sow, plow, when your crops are ripening, you don’t have time, like nomads, to raid your neighbors. Our mentality is different from that of Russians.
The Russian mentality was formed somewhat differently. There (and this is not just my opinion, just read historian Klyuchevsky) — a large conglomerate that developed in the former vassal of the Golden Horde, where the nomadic instinct prevails. It is easier to live at someone else’s expense. Do you know what the Russians wrote on fences in the occupied territories? “Who allowed you to live better than us?”
Who allowed you?.. This envy, this desire to take over… I remember the signs Russians carried after the collapse of the Soviet Union: ‘Yeltsin, force the Khokhols to feed Russia!’ I saw this with my own eyes, it was shown on TV. In other words, that nomadic instinct never went away.
Ukrainian land, Ukrainian resources, Ukrainian labor have always been important for Russia. In his monographs on imperial policy and the great-power psychology of the Muscovites, my father cited both Peter I and Catherine II. The essence of the empire is unchanged: we need you to fear us! That is their psychology…
And now we have straightened our shoulders and declared our identity — not because we are better or worse than them, but because we are self-sufficient, we don’t want to be anyone’s copy. Not anyone’s younger brother. We don’t want to be a copy of the Russian or any other nation, we rely on our ancient roots. Every nation has both positive and negative sides. But we want to be ourselves. And for this, they are now trying to destroy us. I don’t know if we can ever forgive them, even while adhering to Christian morality and knowing that we are supposed to forgive everything. But right now, there is no feeling of forgiveness in my heart.
And there are no curses, only an appeal to God: Lord, establish Your justice! There has never been a war with so many weapons as this one. Yet we live, we move, we give birth, we grow. Look at us — we don’t know when or where the next shell will land, but in every yard, people are planting flowers, they’re moving forward — it’s nothing like in Russia. We live with victory in our hearts, we live with hope for victory, and we don’t even entertain the thought of defeat. It is incredibly hard for our Armed Forces right now, and there are no ‘other people’s children’ — they are all ours and they are all our own. We pray for each and every one of them. I have a long list of names here, and we pray for these boys every evening.
My eldest son went to the military enlistment office on the second day, and on the third day, he was taken as a volunteer. He served for 14 months in the National Guard, but then his wife had a relapse of a severe illness, her disability group was lowered, and he returned, legally, to take care of her, as our daughter was still a minor. The younger one is at home. He has undergone six surgeries on his leg, though he is partially fit for duty. But that doesn’t mean my children might not go to war tomorrow. My heart breaks, because like any mother, I fear for my child. And as a woman who knows that other mothers love their sons no less than I love mine, I can’t tell them to hide behind someone else’s back.
Just two days ago, I received the news that one of my best students had been killed. I cried the entire evening, but in the morning, my colleague wrote that it was a false report. It brought me such joy, and I prayed: ‘Lord, thank you that it was a mistake.’ But how many, how many have died… You walk through the cemetery, you stop at the graves of the boys, bow your head, give them a silent thanks, speak to them in your thoughts…
This is a deep philosophical topic: why do we have what we have today, and why aren’t we all equally aware? Clearly, this is the result of years of propaganda that, throughout every period of imperial rule, was so actively imposed upon the minds of Ukrainians, and not just Ukrainians, but also the residents of other Soviet republics. But Ukrainians experienced this the longest. We were under the heel of oppression for the longest time, and this could not help but affect people’s consciousness. We must also consider that the system periodically destroyed the most conscious, the most intelligent, and the most patriotic individuals, thus instilling a genetic fear in the others. In some, it created a desire to survive, and in others, a need to adapt to the system. Even a small child, when they start lying out of fear of being punished, will invent stories and look for protection in lies. This is what happened to us. Double standards, insincerity. Ukrainians are sometimes accused of cunningness, of not always saying what they think. But the system raised and encouraged this behavior.
The intelligentsia was systematically exterminated. Even if they weren’t sentenced to death, they were imprisoned, silenced, and portrayed in such a way that our greatest patriots and heroes were turned into enemies of the people. Take, for instance, the persecution of Ivan Mazepa—an educated man, a patron of the arts, and a patriot, who was made out to be a villain. All patriots, if you look at them from the earliest times, were enemies of the empire, but they were portrayed as enemies of the people. I remember a university lecturer speaking about Vasyl Symonenko, one of my favorite poets: “Well, there’s still a nationalist tinge to Symonenko’s poetry.” This systematic policy is still being carried out today in the occupied territories.
And what are we guilty of? We are guilty of being divided. If in our historical past we had only heroes and no traitors, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the situation we’re in today. Betrayers and personal ambitions have always interfered—from the time of the Cossack elite, who quarreled among themselves, to later periods as well.
We have constantly been assigned labels: some were called “Banderites,” others “Moskals,” and we were divided along the Dnipro River, and not just along the Dnipro. Yet, despite who we were under and for how long—be it under Poland, Austria-Hungary, or Moscow—we never lost the sense that we are one people. And now, we feel this more strongly than ever.
Today, alongside Ukrainians on the front, there are Crimean Tatars, Russians, and many people of other nationalities fighting. Don’t be surprised that we often talk about the nation. Because it’s important now; we need to restore our identity. That’s why national education has become a priority. But we must also foster tolerance and respect for others. I repeat: there, on the front lines, shoulder to shoulder, stand people defending our land who are not all Ukrainian speakers, and not all of the same faith. But they all live on this land, love it, and are ready to give their lives for it.
My father also believed that we should seek not confrontation but unity—our salvation and strength lie in it. And I think: Lord, how hard it is, but in this crucible, You must have Your divine plan—to unite us.