Mykola Mušinka

“One could not hear a Ukrainian word in Kiev back then. The Russian language was everywhere, where a man came, just Russian was spoken. I am a provocateur; I said to myself I was not going to speak Russian in Ukraine at all! This way I raised attention in Ukrainian dissidents. In 1965 it was very tight in Czechoslovakia; the censorship was canceled, so I used to tell them about this. There was a samizdat being issued, I smuggled it to Prešov, from where it was passed on to the West. It worked very well until they caught me in 1965.”

“I had an absolute prohibition of publishing; nobody was allowed to employ me, neither in education, nor in the editorial offices, anywhere. Only in the R - worker - category (R – stands for robotník in Slovak – ed. note). In my village they just launched an agricultural cooperative (JRD), so I volunteered there for feeding cattle. I milked cows during the whole winter. Then they needed a cattle herdsman, so I asked my father, 'What if I signed up for a herdsman?' I was already a Candidate of Sciences and a Doctor of Philosophy. 'Would you be ashamed of me?' 'Why? Because of having a job? I would be ashamed, if you were a thief,' said my father, and so I went to sign up. I worked there for five years. I lived in a hut where my friends from Prague visited me. I had correspondence from my herdsman´s hut with the whole world! However, the State Security couldn´t monitor me there, and thus the District Party Committee officially forbade me to graze cattle. So I enrolled in a stoker course.”

“Those were the 1950s, when I tried to swot Russian, at school we had only coal days, flu days, so in majority of time we were at home, in the village. We didn´t have the electricity at home back then, and so I used to read by the lamp to ladies, our neighbors who were spinning a wool. They used to tell me: ʻRead us something from those books you have for school.ʼ And so I read them Pushkin – I loved Pushkin, I even knew some passages by heart - they didn´t understand me! Then I read them Shevchenko – poem Katerine. They started to weep! On the next day even more women came to spin. ʻMykolajko, read us in our language!ʼ They understood Ukrainian. And I paused – what a Russian I am when my mom doesn´t understand me, and when I read Shevchenko she cries as it moves her so much! Thus I changed my study subject from Russian to Ukrainian and yet I took the school leaving examination from Ukrainian afterwards.”

“If I stayed at the university and wanted to publish even one line abroad, I would need to file an application to the foreign department, they would have to agree, and only this way I would be able to publish something in other country. Otherwise, I would be tried for a violation of working discipline. It was logical. The state paid for scientific work, so you had to hand in that scientific work to the state. And the state was authorized to decide, whether you could publish it abroad, or not. But when I was just a worker and the state paid me for grazing the cattle and for heating, I could have published a monograph in Paris without them trying me for it, since I didn´t violate the working discipline.”