A recent but sincere affection binds me and the Dimarov couple, Anatolii and Yevdokia. Our friendship began with the writer’s publications. Five years ago we met in person, and the words “I am from Volyn” opened the door for me to a cozy apartment in the writers’ building on Suvorov Street, near the Kyivan Cave Monastery.
“In Volyn I became a Ukrainian” is the favorite phrase of Dimarov, who was brought to our region during World War II. While the battle for Kovel was still raging, Anatolii Dimarov and Yukhym Lazebnyk, the newly-appointed editor of Radianska Volyn, landed in Lutsk on board a military airplane. Having come here as a “Soviet” and an “occupier” (a “humane occupier,” as Dimarov says, because he never shot at the locals), he moved to Lviv a few years later as a “confirmed nationalist.”
Dimarov was the first Ukrainian writer to write about the Holodomor, which he had experienced himself, and about collectivization at gunpoint. In the village in the Poltava region, where he lived with his brother and mother (his father had been repressed as a kulak), people were eating people. But these pages were mercilessly cut from the novel by censors, only to be restored 45 years later.
But Dimarov had never touched upon the OUN and UPA subject in his numerous works, although he was living in Volyn precisely at the time when the UPA was born. I asked him about this during our latest meeting in Kyiv.
“I’ve written nothing, Natalka, because, unfortunately, I was neither a Banderite nor a Melnykite. Only because of this! I only write about what I know, not from somebody else’s mouth.”
HUMANE OCCUPIERS
Nevertheless, there was the one essay about the Melnykites, which Dimarov contributed to Radianska Volyn in July 1945. He mentions this in his book of memoirs To Live and to Recount. “On July 13 our newspaper published the article ‘Bandits Who Do Not Surrender Will Be Destroyed’ by NKVD Colonel A. Yakovenko. It was the story of a Melnykite, who chose to lay down arms and surrender to the authorities. ‘It was Kviatkovsky, codenamed Bohdan, a company commander, who voluntarily surrendered,’ the colonel said. ‘The Soviet government forgave him his grievous guilt, and he now lives as a free citizen.’ After reading this, I instantly hit upon the idea of interviewing Kviatkovsky. I said to Lazebnyk. ‘Do you think I wasn’t going to do the same thing?’ he smiled skeptically. ‘So help me meet him! I’ll go see him right now.’ ‘Where? Kolyma?’ I left his office as though I had been doused in water. It turned out that the unfortunate Kviatkovsky had been ‘sent up the river’ at the very time that the NKVD colonel was writing his newspaper article — he was living ‘as a free citizen’ over there, behind barbed wire.
“That was when I recalled meeting other Melnykites in 1944, without knowing who they were, immediately after I came to Lutsk. Lazebnyk summoned me and said, ‘A group of local partisans has come to the regional party committee. Go and talk to them and write a full-page article.’”
Dimarov talked all day long with the guerrillas who had fought, sparing neither life nor blood, against the Nazis throughout the German occupation. They were all young and very handsome. He felt special affection for a machine-gunner named Alesha, a Russian from Orel oblast, who escaped from a Nazi camp in the very heart of Germany. He fought all right! The Germans had offered a big reward for the head of “bandit Alesha.”
“On my pad of paper I wrote down their combat stories and a few days later wrote a full-page article on the detachment’s actions.
“Then Lazebnyk called me.
‘Where are your notes on the detachment? Bring them all to me! And, above all, the writing pad.’ ‘Throw it into the stove! And forget what you wrote.’ ‘Why? How can I possibly look them in the eye?’ ‘You’ll hardly be able to do this. They’ve all been arrested. They are partisans, but not ours. Nationalists. They will be put on trial.’
“I remember how bitter and hurt I felt, as if I had betrayed those people and thrown them into the fire with my own hands. Later, much later, I realized that when Lazebnyk told me to burn those papers, he was saving me. He knew what was in store for me if the writing pad, all those sheets, had gotten into the hands of the omniscient NKVD. But I was indignant deep in my heart, and I swore that I would never show even one positive Soviet functionary in my books. Sometimes I am asked why I stick to family problems. I do that so as not to write about that scum!”
In February 1946, during the elections to the Supreme Soviet, Dimarov, now a regional newspaper journalist, was told to cover Horokhiv district.
“I chose the most remote village. I sweated blood to write that people are standing up for Soviet power even in the most far-flung village, around which Melnykites are prowling.
“I was not alone. There was also a platoon of submachine-gunners and a few district Party activists also armed with automatic rifles (‘the satellites of a propagandist,’ as wags used to say) and hand grenades. As we approached the village, they got off the sled and formed a file, their weapons at the ready. The impression was that we were attacking an enemy entrenched in the village. The village did not respond with machine-gun fire; it seemed dead. The outermost houses were painted with tridents and inscribed with nationalist slogans, mostly, ‘Glory to Ukraine!’”
“Wipe them off!” said a lieutenant in blue epaulettes, speaking in Russian.
“Maybe we should set fire to them?” a senior sergeant asked.
“You fool! There’s an election tomorrow! Have you forgotten?”
After wiping off all the slogans, they headed for the village council where the polling station was located. Walking, they aimed their rifles at the windows, although not a single living soul seemed to be behind them. Everyone had gone to ground once the news spread that “the Soviets are coming!”
The next day Dimarov came to the editorial office. “I was sitting at a desk, banging off an article with the eloquent title, ‘Human hearts voting.’ Thoughts were popping up like little devils from a barrel, slick lines were coming out, as if it was not I who was writing them but a well-tuned printing machine. Could a different article have been written at the time, about what had really happened? And where would its author have ended up? At the time, I simply could not write otherwise because I sincerely believed that Stalin did not sleep at night because he was taking care of his sons and daughters.”
“Still, sometimes my faith in our just system would be shaken up a little. The NKVD building stood opposite the editorial office, and lights shone in its windows all night long. Once, when I was a ‘fresh-head’ (duty editor who proofreads just-printed pages before they are cleared for printing), I came up to the window to look at the bright dawn. I stretched and suddenly froze with my arms raised: the heavy ironclad NKVD door began to open. From the gaping maw flowed a stream of people: women, children, girls, stooped old men, and young men. On both sides marched soldiers: some were leading dogs, others held rifles with fixed bayonets. There was no end to this column, as if the whole Volyn region had been herded into that horrible courtyard. For several days I walked around looking like death warmed over.
“At last I couldn’t take it any more and said to Lazebnyk:
‘OK, the men fought against us. But the children, those infants — how are they at fault?’
Lazebnyk was silent for a long time and then said in a voice that cracked:
‘I also saw those unfortunate people.’
“Then he told me that Profatilov, the secretary of the oblast party committee, had invited him to go to the railway station to see the Melnykites and Banderites being deported to Siberia in boxcars with grated windows. You could here cries, moans, and the foul language of the soldiers who were escorting those jam- packed cars.
“‘Don’t say a word about this conversation.’ Lazebnyk warned me when we reached our building.
“And I kept silent while I was in Volyn.”
“OLD MAN, TAKE MY RIFLE BECAUSE I WILL NEVER COME BACK”
Living and working in Volyn in the last months of the war and in the stormy postwar time, Dimarov could not avoid encountering Banderites and Melnykites in his everyday life, although he did not always guess who they were.
“When I spoke during the celebration of the 90th birthday of Vasyl Kuk, the last UPA commander-in-chief, I said, ‘I am very grateful that your men did not kill me!’ It happened this way. Lazebnyk had a secretary named Valia. She was the OUN’s eyes and ears, a courier of the Central Leadership. She was arrested in my presence. Lazebnyk also saw the unfortunate woman being taken away. What a beautiful girl! At one time Yakiv Cherniavsky and I tried to marry her off to the Radianska Ukraina correspondent in Volyn. We went to her village near Lutsk over the Styr River. We spent some time in her house and then for some reason decided to take a stroll through the cemetery. We lay down on the grass. Suddenly some young fellows appeared and lay down next to us. How could we know that they were Banderites? They were so personable and handsome! Valia knew who they were, and she said something to their leader. They could have killed us like kittens! But that correspondent later thanked God that Valia’s father declined our matchmaking proposal. Naturally, her father knew who she was.”
“You wrote in your memoirs that you witnessed the execution of UPA soldiers at the Lutsk market.”
“Two Melnykites were being hanged, two soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army — the same summer that I saw those hapless people being deported to Siberia. I liked popping in at the Lutsk marketplace. Sometimes I did not have a penny on me, but I would still walk past the counters, listening to the local dialect. NKVD soldiers had forced all the sellers to leave their counters and assemble. I was let through into the first row. I was wearing a military uniform, so they said, ‘He’s one of ours.’”
Dimarov says in his memoirs: “I was looking at the face of the condemned so greedily. What does a man sentenced to death, with a noose around his neck, feel? With an experienced movement, the well-fed, fat- faced sergeant-major, with a perkily tilted cap on his head, placed the nooses around their necks and tugged them a little to make sure they were holding well. Then he cheerfully shouted to the truck driver in Russian, ‘Go!’ One of the condemned men, who looked like a teenager, began to swing in the air like a maple leaf, but the other one fell to the ground — the rope had broken under his weight. Just before falling off the truck, he cried out in a hollow voice, ‘Glory...’ But the noose gripped his throat, and the noose gave way again.
“‘Oh Lord!’ a woman said in despair. ‘What are you doing? God Himself has pardoned him!’
“But the NKVD people didn’t care about God. I came back from the market, but the word ‘Glory’ was still ringing in my ears. The word of a Melnykite who was hanged three times, a ‘bandit’ who faced death with the interrupted cry ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ I was afraid to confess to myself that I had a mixed, deep-seated feeling of respect for the man who had been executed by the NKVD. How proudly he stood there! How he had died unbroken! No, a bandit and a robber, the usual image pushed by our newspapers, could not have died like this. It is not so, I thought.
“I could not write abut this at the time. If they had found out what I was writing, they would have sent me to Siberia. I lived like a hounded wolf. My novel lay in a drawer for 45 years, and the censors tore out the pages on the Holodomor and collectivization. Zionists sucked a bucket of blood out of me, censuring me all the way to the UN, because of the Liander character in the book. But when the hounds were exhausted, I could no longer return to the OUN subject. I had outgrown this subject. But there were so many plans! When I look back, I see crosses in a graveyard.”
“What is your attitude to the Banderites and Melnykites today? Are they heroes or bandits?”
“They are the greatest heroes who ever fought for Ukraine. And if there had been no UPA, if Stalin had not joined Western Ukraine to Eastern Ukraine (and I am ready to extol him for this!), there would be no Ukraine today. It would have readily surrendered and dispersed in the depths of Russia. You know, I never thought that the accursed Soviet Union would collapse so soon. I thought it would collapse when a war broke out between China and Russia. But much to our regret, Russia is alive. Do you know what my greatest dream is? It’s a little ‘criminal.’ For Russia to leave Ukraine alone!”
“Or, maybe, the other way round?”
“Ukraine will not do this. But I do believe that there is divine truth on earth, and it will be realized. I’d like to see at least out of the corner of my eye that Ukraine, for which the UPA fought, will shake off the parasites and spread its wings.”
Natalia Malimon is a writer based in the Volyn oblast.
