My father was studying at a gymnasium to become a teacher. Then 1939 came. Soviet rule arrived in Western Ukraine, in the Carpathians. The arrests began. During the very first week, they began deporting people.

They came at night. You were allowed to take thirty kilograms with you — some clothes, some food, and that was all. Everything else was left behind to be looted.

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My family, including my father, was deported too. They were sent to Chelyabinsk — into the steppe, into an open field, into the wilderness. They were told: “You will live here. This will be your settlement. Svinoye.”

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Young people immediately began organizing within the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. And young men who were very close to my father’s brother — one was nineteen, the other eighteen — immediately went into hiding.

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It turned out that Ukrainians were being trained in Poland — nurses, couriers... Young men would cross the border into Poland for two or three weeks, sometimes for a month. There were already units there preparing people for the struggle.

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That was when political leaders such as Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera emerged. Andriy Melnyk’s idea was to preserve Ukraine together with its elite. Stepan Bandera was a socialist. At that time, the idea of socialism was extremely popular. Lenin rose on it. Hitler rose on the idea of social justice.

Dmytro Dontsov wrote, “There will be a parceling of the land.” In other words, once they established a Ukrainian state, all the land would be nationalized and divided into parcels. That is what they called it — parceling.

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My father and his brother belonged to opposing factions and both fought as partisans. His brother was a Banderite; my father was a Melnykite.

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Soon afterward, the war with Hitler began. The Germans began taking young people — some to Germany as laborers, others into the army. Those under eighteen were sent to work in Germany; those who were older were, of course, taken into the German army.

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They had not served in the Red Army, but the German army was not theirs either. It was a foreign army.

A priest got my father off the wagon. He was already being taken to an assembly point to be assigned to one of those divisions. The priest saw him and immediately wrote a letter to the Germans saying that my father sang in the church choir. That was how he got him off the wagon. He said that he needed him in the church and could not let him go to the assembly point.

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After that, of course, my father went into the forest.

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In September 1944, the Red Army entered the area. The young men would come into the village at night. They were immediately swept up into the army, into a Red Army unit. If they caught someone somewhere — into the army he went.

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My father realized that they would soon be sent toward Košice. They had been unable to take the city because the Germans had built major fortifications there. It was clear that they would soon be sent to the front.

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My father told me: “Everyone went to lunch, and I took my carbine and headed across the field toward the forest. But they realized very quickly what had happened. There had probably been cases before of soldiers running away. I heard them release the dogs. The dogs were following my trail. I thought: this is it. In the Carpathians there aren’t really fields as such. There is forest, then a little cultivated land, and then forest again. I ran out to the edge of the woods. There was a field. In the middle of it was some kind of rock overgrown with bushes.

 

I thought, if I can reach that rock and those bushes, I’ll lie down there and shoot back. This is the end for me. I ran across the field toward it. The dogs came out of the woods — and at that very moment a roe deer ran diagonally across the field. A Carpathian wild goat. The dogs came out and went after it. And the soldiers ran toward the sound of the dogs. The deer led them away. I lay there. I don’t know how long I stayed without moving. Maybe a day or two. I was that terrified.”

 

That was the kind of horror my father endured. He found himself in the forest, with no way back.

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His brother had completed sergeant training and returned from Czechoslovakia with an entire unit of local young men, armed with machine guns. They too had left the front and gone straight into the partisans. They were already in uniform, fully equipped.

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By 1947, the partisan units had become fragmented because enormous forces had been deployed against the Ukrainian insurgency. Small groups began crossing the border, trying to make their way West.

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The unit led by my father’s brother decided to leave. They approached the border post. My father and another fighter went to collect their fiancées. They were leaving forever.

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But someone discovered the unit — perhaps a sentry — and they had to fight the border guards. They overran the post and crossed into Poland.

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They knew that my father and the other fighter would come anyway, now with their fiancées, and would try to cross. They would not go through the border post, of course. The border was long and had not yet been fully secured.

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They had roughly agreed where they would meet in Poland: if something happened, we meet at such-and-such a place in Poland. If that does not work, then at such-and-such a place in Czechoslovakia. If not there, then somewhere in Italy. All of this had been arranged in advance.

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But the unit was ambushed.

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The Polish authorities had decided that Ukrainians had no right to enter Polish territory and conduct armed operations there. The unit was caught in a Polish ambush and destroyed.

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My father’s brother, Onufriy, was killed.

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By the time my father reached the place, no one was left. He had to remain alone.

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Then an amnesty was announced. Stalin had issued instructions that people should be allowed to come out of hiding — those who believed they had committed no crimes.

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My father came out. Many people did.

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But the Soviet authorities did not tolerate them for long. Had he come out and gone somewhere in Eastern Ukraine or Russia, perhaps they would not have imprisoned him.

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Instead, as a Melnykite, he began actively trying to integrate into Soviet life. He began building things and organizing a school. Andriy Melnyk’s organization had told its fighters that they should leave the partisan struggle and learn to live within the system — within the Soviet system — join the Communist Party, get an education.

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This was not the time, they said. You had to survive and raise your children. Stay alive and raise your children.

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Bandera’s position was different: to the very end — Ukraine or death. But a person has to live.

My mother and father married. In a place where the church had been closed and the priest’s house was very large, my father began organizing a school. He became its principal. These were schools where children of different ages studied in the same classroom. There had been a war. They gathered children who were already older but had never received even the most elementary first-grade education.​ It was difficult work.

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At that time, parachutists were often being dropped into the area and materials were coming in. They began to suspect that my father was some kind of local agent.​ Then Malinovsky, a Soviet official and veterinarian, was killed. They began accusing my father of having done it because the two of them had previously had some kind of dispute concerning the school. Malinovsky was shot at home, in his barn. A carbine was found behind the door.

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Who could have done it? Who had been in conflict with him the day before? The school principal.

So they arrested my father.​ But there was a man who came forward. He worked on a farm. His name was Tarnivsky. He said: “I saw Vasyl through the window. I was walking past the house. I heard the shots over there, turned my head, and Vasyl was sitting there writing.”​ My father was checking his pupils’ notebooks.

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So there was a witness proving that my father had been at home and could not have committed the murder.​But at that time they needed someone... Or perhaps it was a deliberate operation. It is impossible to know.​ And that was how my father was imprisoned.

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His daughter, my sister, had just been born. Only two days had passed since the child was born. On the third day, my father was arrested. The interrogations began. It was an interrogation conveyor: one investigator questioned him, then left, and another took his place. At some point my father could no longer control himself. During the night, he lunged at an investigator and struck him across the desk — a fist directly to the head. That was the state he had been driven to. Then my father himself lost consciousness.

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“When I regained consciousness,” he later told me, “I could feel them pouring water over me. The investigator was lying nearby. Perhaps I had killed him.” They immediately put him in handcuffs. Everything happened very quickly — the prosecutor, the proceedings, and then a death sentence.

My father had the right to appeal, and he did. He waited a year for a response from the Prosecutor General. Eventually the answer came. The death sentence was overturned. But then they gave him everything else they could — the full punishment: no right to correspondence, no communication, nothing. This was 1948.

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I think the sentence was twenty-five, five, and five: twenty-five years in prison, five years of exile, and five years of deprivation of civil rights. But that system of sentences was soon changed. People began receiving fifteen-year terms. My father served ten years.

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After 1953, the laws began changing very quickly. Beria was executed; Malenkov came, then Bulganin. Restrictions were constantly being eased. Large numbers of people were released. But they could not simply release him. Both Soviet civilians and military personnel had been imprisoned. They periodically moved prisoners from the North farther south. He finished his sentence in Bashkiria. The prisoners were building an oil refinery. A prisoner was permanently in debt to the state. He worked, and he had to repay the cost of the bathhouse, soap, clothing — everything. If you failed to meet the work quotas, the debt remained. If you fulfilled the quotas, the debt was gradually paid off. Moreover, they opened a personal account for you. You could even accumulate some money. There was a camp commandant named Naidis. I remember that name very well.

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My father requested an appointment with him and explained: “I have a wife and a small child. They are suffering terribly. Could I send them a parcel?” Naidis gave him permission. By then it was a camp rather than a prison. There was a local store, and my father sent a parcel to help his child.

My father’s memories of the camp were varied. There were even good memories among them. He began studying anatomy and music there. He remembered everyone — all the people with whom he had been imprisoned.

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Eventually correspondence was permitted. Then people began talking about the possibility of being released into a special settlement. My father had no disciplinary violations and fulfilled his work quotas. He had actually served eight years, but because of credits for work it counted as ten. No one believed those credits would ever mean anything, but in the end they did.

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There were several stages. A person was imprisoned and then released into a special settlement. There you had to report regularly to the commandant’s office. Your civil rights were restricted. You had no passport. You could not leave or travel freely. You had to remain wherever the special settlement was located.

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When my father was released into a special settlement, my mother came to him with my sister. I believe they were even given some choice about where they would be sent. My father asked whether he could go to a particular settlement where his parents and sisters were living. They allowed him to go there. My mother joined him. And he finally saw his child, who by then was more than ten years old. That is where I was born — in a special settlement, practically in a camp, in the Urals.

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There is a photograph. I always say that in that picture there are two of us with my mother, because she is covering her belly with her handbag. She is wearing an interesting dress with many buttons.

My mother arrived there without knowing Russian. She had to find some way to survive. There were mines all around, so she went to study and became a machine operator at a mine. A cable severed one of her fingers there.

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My father also trained in mining. He worked as a driver and later in geological exploration. My mother’s cousin Emilia was there as well. She too had been deported in 1939. She worked there with her husband, Volodya. He told my father, “Come work with us in geological exploration.” My father was never rehabilitated.

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Later, when he finally received a passport, he was issued a military identification card. Remember Heart of a Dog: “Where has it ever been seen that a man should live without documents?” They immediately placed him in the Red Army reserve. And in his military card there was a stamp:

“Participated in combat against Soviet and Party activists.” It is extraordinary. Unfortunately, that military card has not survived. There was a stamp saying “rifleman, private,” and beside it another stamp: “Participated in combat against Soviet and Party activists.” 

 

After some time, they were allowed to settle more freely. At first, you could not return to the territory where you had been arrested. Then you were not allowed to live in Ukraine. Later you could live in major Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv or Kharkiv — but not in Western Ukraine. Interestingly, they said they would provide housing.

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My father spent a long time trying to obtain permission to return home. He traveled somewhere in Moscow, petitioning the authorities, until restrictions were finally relaxed and he was told he could settle anywhere in Ukraine. He returned to his village, to his house. 

 

I remember that when I went to a Ukrainian school in Chelyabinsk, people were not particularly friendly toward us. They could humiliate you, and you had to remain silent. They called us “Banderites.” As soon as I learned to speak, I understood that there were many things you were not allowed to say. We were raised to keep silent. There were many things you could not talk about — things you knew or understood. You could not criticize the authorities, especially the Soviet authorities.

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My mother told me: “Under no circumstances. No protests of any kind. There will be consequences.” The entire family was under KGB surveillance all the time. They came to our home. Why? Because my father had once been in the UPA. Then there were the Ukrainian partisans. They were afraid someone might say something. Every organization, even the Church, was supervised by the Communist Party. A Party member was always placed in charge. There were departments, and there were individual KGB officers assigned to oversee churches.

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In Latvia, for example, there were officers assigned to the different religious communities — the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the synagogue and Jewish community, the Lutheran Church, the Calvinist Church. It was not one person supervising all of them. Each had its own officer. He sat there and received a salary for doing it.

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When we returned home, we had to cooperate with the collective farm. My mother had to join the collective farm so that we could receive a small plot of land beside the house. Those plots of land fed people. My father went to work as a driver. There was no other work he could do. He worked as a driver in agricultural machinery services.

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For a long time, he was also an underground priest. It was so secret that when he was ordained, even his own family did not know. Under the Soviet regime, the wishes of a bishop alone were not enough to ordain someone. Permission for ordination had to be granted by the state official responsible for religious affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR or of the relevant Soviet republic.

At that time, the Orthodox Church was permitted. The Greek Catholic Church had been banned in 1946, and its clergy operated underground and were severely persecuted. Greek Catholic priests, incidentally, received very long prison sentences — no less than ten years.

 

My father wanted me to follow the same path as my sister and become a teacher. But it did not appeal to me. So I entered the seminary — after serving in the army, because otherwise they would not accept you. It was not some spontaneous decision. I had thought it through. I had to apply to the seminary in Zagorsk several times. Later I was expelled from the seminary because someone denounced me. I had to continue my studies by correspondence.

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At that time, no one would ordain me anywhere. Eventually I was ordained only in Riga. Ukraine was closed to me, and I did not want to go north, somewhere like Vologda or Arkhangelsk.

 

I was already in the army when my mother became ill with cancer. After I returned from military service, she did not live very long — perhaps another five years. My father was left a widower.

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Later, in Ukraine, during the post-perestroika period, he began serving openly. He came out of the underground, made himself known to the bishop, and was ordained from deacon to priest. He had been ordained a deacon underground. He then began serving in the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, where I myself had begun. It was the revival of the Autocephalous Church.

 

And from there, little by little, things began to change. By then my grandparents had died. My father’s sisters, my aunts, married men who had also been deported. I remember that after the war there were many Germans living in the settlements. Some of them were eventually permitted to have their wives come from Germany to join them there.

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The Soviet regime was extraordinarily cruel toward its own people. They stripped people of so much that an entire generation forgot what normal clothing looked like, what normal dishes and household things looked like. And I saw this everywhere — not only in Ukraine, but in Latvia as well. The system... No one destroyed it. It exhausted itself. It became amorphous, incapable of sustaining itself. It simply died on its own — the Soviet system.