Our Others

© Sergiy Polezhaka

APPLES FROM A FORGOTTEN GARDEN

“It was like this: When the Czech boys were taken off to the war, they enlisted in General Ludvik Svoboda’s army corps,” Yosyp Mykhalchyn, from the village of Hrushvytsia Persha just outside Rivne, explains loudly and expressively. “The Czechs saw right away what a collective farm meant and what real Soviets were all about. And one of the Czechs told the commander, ‘We want to leave the Volyn colonies and go back to our country. We’ll liberate Prague, just let us go back.’”

The Prague Offensive, which ended on May 11, 1945, became the Red Army’s final offensive operation in Europe during World War II. During the operation the Soviets took over 850,000 German soldiers and officers captive, as well as thirty-five generals. The Volyn Czechs too participated actively in the liberation of Prague. General Svoboda had no choice but to honor his promise and allow the colonists to return home.

The Czechs waited for permission for over a year and finally, on July 10, 1946 in Moscow, signed a document with a never-ending title: “A Treaty Between the Government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Right of the Option for and the Reciprocal Resettlement of Citizens of the Czech and Slovak Nationalities Residing in the USSR on the Territory of the Former Volhynian Governorate and the Citizens of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Nationalities Residing on the Territory of the CSR.”

That’s how almost forty thousand Czechs who had settled in Volyn in the 1860s were granted the right to leave Ukraine. And the majority of them took advantage of this right. They had fared rather well in the Ukrainians lands: Dozens of years of labor had borne good fruit. The Czech households here were the wealthiest, their houses were the best built, and there was no shortage of either Czech churches or breweries. But this life of theirs proved incompatible with the Soviet order.

“It’s hard to part with where we were born, with the place where we and our parents toiled to secure a better future for our children,” Vladimir Šrek, a Czech, said at a mass at the local Czech church in 1947. “Everything here was made by our hands, moistened by our sweat. We thought that all of it would belong to us until the end of time. But now we’re leaving Volyn with satchels over our shoulders. Almost penniless, we’re leaving everything behind. Though did our parents come to Volyn with greater wealth than that with which we’re leaving? The fruits of our labor will remain here.”

“Who of us hasn’t known a Czech we happily spent time with and talked to? We’ll miss them when they leave,” the Orthodox priest added.

After the sermon, the congregation, as did the priest, began to cry.

Rivers of Milk

“Jozef Gavliček, 1932. There should be a plaque here somewhere,” Yosyp Mykhalchyn repeats, making his way through the overgrown shrubbery. “Here, alongside the road, is where our first house stood. And over there,” he waves his hand in the direction of a thicket, “all the houses were Czech. And further that way Czechs, and in this direction Czechs—all in all, there were twelve hundred Czechs living in this area. Some of them got married here, so they stayed. Not so long ago, we buried Karolina, a Czech, and Raček, another Czech, stayed too. But all of them have died already.”

“There was a road right here. Oh my, everything’s so overgrown now. It’s good that there’s a path at least,” he sighs, vigorously making his way through the bushes.

Yosyp’s family moved here from Eastern Slovakia to take up the place of those same Czech colonists who left after World War II.

“When we arrived, all you could see was sky and nothing else. I was seven years old then, I remember. The women were raising their hands to the heavens in lament. It was only later that we moved into houses. Ours was that Gavliček’s: That’s what was written on the cement foundation. This here was our plot of land,” he says, motioning at a vast field. “Work it to your heart’s content.”

Before that, back in Slovakia, Yosyp’s father had heard the government calls: “Dear brothers and sisters! We have a great idea and goal—the unification of the entire Russian nation so that it no longer suffer either social or national oppression. The Soviet socialist order and system are the highest form of democracy in the whole world. The working people have taken power into their own hands and are performing miracles under the guidance of the Communist Party.”

Leaflets under the heading “If You’re Russian, You Belong to Russia” and bearing the above text, which was studded with grammatical errors and haphazardly adapted to the local language, appeared in the villages of Eastern Slovakian in February 1946. The Soviet authorities were trying to motivate the local Slovaks to move to Volyn. They were needed to fill the demographic void that had opened up after the Czechs’ departure.

“The propaganda was brazen,” narrates Yosyp. “No one could’ve even suspected that such blatant lies could be generated at such a high government level. The Soviet emissaries painted a picture of rivers of milk flowing here.”

The government of the USSR promised to quickly and conveniently move not just the Slovaks to Ukraine, but also their cattle, furniture, and farming equipment. They guaranteed the following housing plan: A family sells its house in Slovakia or gives it over to the Czechoslovak government and receives an “assessment certificate” in return—namely, a confirmation of the property’s approximate value. At the new location, they then buy a house, either for “real money” or by trading in their assessment certificate. Whatever the specifics, the propagandists assured the people that the living conditions would be wonderful, since they would be leaving behind spacious, well-built brick homes. And if on top of it they were being offered large plots of fertile soil and an opportunity to take part in the building of a perfect society, who could say no to all that? If it wasn’t to their liking, the Slovaks were reassured, they’d be allowed to return within two years without any problems.

Mikula Mihalčin—the father of Yosyp, or little Yošek, as he was called back then—listened to his fill of propaganda and grew fixated on the idea of moving “to Rusko,” that is, to Volyn. He became one of approximately twelve thousand optants—people who elected to change their citizenship on the basis of the treaty between the two countries.

“Our people signed up. Why wouldn’t they? They described such a paradise. They were supposed to provide everything—the farmland, the house, the horses,” says Yosyp.

From his native village of Chmel’ov just outside Bardejov, one third of the population left.

“Trains, wagons, farewells, tears,” he recalls. “The journey was long, almost a whole week! Because there were all kinds of problems with the trains. What’s more, we rode in cattle cars because there were no passenger trains. We slept in them too. And just imagine, we had to eat and cook and keep warm all in those same cattle cars. Each family had one car. We had to bring grain to plant and chickens to raise with us. And in another car, there was the cattle. People took all kinds of poultry, whatever they had. It was just the Czechs who traveled with nothing, only the sacks on their backs.”

The Slovaks were promised to be delivered to their destination quickly. But due to the poor coordination between Soviet functionaries in both countries, the trains of resettlers would spend several days at a time sitting at intermediate stations or on sidetracks. The journey could stretch out into a week, sometimes two. Yet the travelers had only brought a few days’ worth of food for their cattle. The situation was difficult. At the final stations the optants often had to find trucks to take them to their villages themselves, even though the Soviet Union had promised transportation all the way to their new homes. Sometimes the search for a carriage or truck took dozens of hours as the family meanwhile waited, with all its belongings, at the train station platform.

“When we arrived, the truth of it all sank in. After the war there was horrible hunger, devastation.” Yosyp gazes into the garden. “But the gate was shut already. There was no running back.”

In late 1947 and early 1948, there were recorded instances of dozens of people selling their belongings, buying horses, loading their most valuable possessions onto carriages, and heading in groups toward the border. That’s what happened, for example, in the villages of Mytnytsia and Kvasyliv in the Rivne region. Yet the people would barely travel fifty or so kilometers before being turned back by security forces. The Kvasyliv optants resisted and were physically assaulted by the police. Two people were arrested. One young girl, grabbed by her arms and legs, was tossed onto a police vehicle: She died from the impact of her head against the metal hood.

It’s All Ours, It’s All Jointly Owned

“Lord, the walnut trees are still standing. I haven’t been here in ten years,” the man admits.

We make our way through overgrown bushes to the Czech house where Yosyp spent his childhood and where his parents, Mikula and Zuzana Mihalčin, tried to begin a new life.

“We began to work the land, four hectares of it. The soil was wonderful in comparison to that in the Carpathians. But there was famine right then, drought in the south and east of Ukraine. People would come through begging: They came by day, they came by night. They would try to break in. My dad ran a bell from the house up the pear tree so that we’d hear them coming. Because during the day they would beg, but at night they might steal. And when my mother would give them something to eat, they’d say, ‘Thank you, Stalin, for letting us roam through the West.’ My mother would get angry: ‘Why thank Stalin?’ That’s how we worked, up until the collective farms were opened. The people didn’t really oppose the farms because it was hard on your own.”

In September 1949 the collective farm A New Life officially resumed operations in Hrushvytsia Persha.

“When they came to take our property, we had to submit a list of belongings. The propagandists said, ‘It’s all ours, it’s all jointly owned.’ That was our first lesson in socialism.”

Insofar as most of the resettlers lived in poverty, the benefits of collective farming were clear to them. There were no prosperous families that could’ve been called kulaks in their midst. Applications to join the collective farm were generally submitted voluntarily. The villagers handed over their potatoes and seeds for planting in order to, with time, harvest the future crops. The situation with the personal plots of land was worse. “People didn’t understand why the little garden that they were sowing and tending belonged to the collective farm,” the scholar Štefan Kruško writes in his book Optants. “There were instances when peasants sowed small plots of land that went untended—along various roadsides, for example. When the collective farm officials would learn about this, they would impose a tax on the peasant, mow down the grain without letting it ripen, dig up the potatoes, and knock the fruit from the trees.”

“I worked in Kazakhstan cultivating virgin lands with the Young Communist League, then later worked in both music and culture. I studied at the music school for a while, though, true, I didn’t have the money to buy a bayan. An accordion cost 650 rubles, but my salary at the village club was only 36 rubles. Later I worked as a driver, and then at the power plant where my son now works.”

Yosyp also played the domra and performed at a convention of progressive collective farmworkers.

“Then one time I saw an ad in a newspaper: ‘Recruiting for managerial positions in agriculture.’ What? That’s how they picked people for positions? I couldn’t understand it. That’s how forty years ago I became a deputy. A friend of mine was the village mayor, and he registered me as a deputy. Alright, so be it. I came to a meeting and, as a deputy, said a few words about my constituency: That, first of foremost, roads needed to be built because the only way to get here was via helicopter. That we needed a cultivator too. I also proposed relocating the village council to the Palace of Culture and making the council building into a hotel. Even back then I saw that there were long-haul drivers, so why not make some money off them? And that’s already fifty collective farmworkers that would have jobs. Their response to me then was ‘You tell a good story, Mykhalchyn.’”

A Good Story

Volodia Mykhalchyn, Yosyp’s grandson, is standing next to the Palace of Culture, debating something over the phone animatedly: “Well, we’ve got thirty-five meters of extension cords!”

The idea of relocating the village council and creating a hotel is actually being put to life, albeit half a century after Volodia’s grandfather voiced it. The profit from the hotel is supposed to go toward local community development.

Today Volodia is the deputy mayor of Hrushvytsia Persha. He’s twenty-four. He studied in Kyiv but didn’t want to stay there. The city’s too Russian speaking, he says.

“I didn’t like it. I returned to the village in 2015 and switched to distance learning. My parents said, If you’re paying for it, then do it. So I did. Local elections were happening just then, and I decided to run. I was twenty-one years old.”

“Twenty-one?” I ask with surprise.

“I had a yearning for change; I wanted to figure out how everything worked. I’d been interested in politics since school, maybe because my grandpa talked about it a lot. When I was only ten years old, he took me to the Orange Revolution. We spent the night there. People were marching: a whole sea of them! hundreds of thousands of them! I had never seen anything like it. It’s winter, it’s snowing, and everything’s orange.”

And when Volodia was a university student in Kyiv, the Euromaidan began.

“We were walking in such a huge column that we took over the vehicle lanes of Peremohy Avenue. I was in Kyiv, and my grandpa came on his own on a bus from Rivne. We heard that there were protests outside the President’s Administration Building, so we headed there. I inhaled my fill of tear gas there.”

When he returned to Hrushvytsia Persha, the young man, to everyone’s surprise, headed the future village mayor’s election campaign.

“That was the first time debates were held in the village; it was the first time election agendas were printed. The candidates went from house to house, talking to people. It was neat.”

Over the course of one day, Volodia manages to crisscross his way through the village a few times and take care of a dozen things: pick up the tents, sleeping pads, and backpacks bought for local kids; stop by the site of the future recreation center with the outfitted lake and welcome a delegation; poke into the costume room of the Palace of Culture; and drop by the site of an ancient settlement that’s scheduled to become a tourist development center. It makes our heads spin.

He arrives at home as it’s growing dark. But his work isn’t over yet: Volodia pulls out old photographs and begins telling us about the village. He had grown interested in his own family history and started researching it. He brings over a stack of books, and we talk late into the night—up till Grandpa Yosyp reaches for his old bayan and begins a Rusyn song.

In 2015 Volodia made a list of several goals: to construct a children’s playground in the park, to install trash receptacles in the streets, and to build a soccer field and a gym with mirrors for dance classes. Lastly, he wanted to make the local ancient settlement site appealing to tourists.

Almost all his goals have been met.

“I didn’t even think that I’d be able to get so much done. It’s been all of three years,” he says. “But it was still my great-grandfather who had said, ‘You’ll see, it’ll all change someday.’”