Mykola Mušinka

“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.”

“I was extremely careful in Volyn not to be embroiled in something. No one believed me I came there just to take notes about folklore. They all wanted to go back, even on the next day! Because they found themselves to stay in horrible conditions, the empty Czech houses were already taken by settlers from the East, by Party´s officers and Lemka´s from Poland. There was left nothing for our people. In case some house was free, there were no windows, no doors, and they lodged there even five families. They were terribly disappointed. In 1947 there was a great starvation in Ukraine, people were dying. This was the situation our people were exposed to. When I went home for Christmas, I informed Docent Kapišovský, a Chair of the Cultural Association of Ukrainian Workers: ʻFrom 1947 there are our people. Now is the year 1965 and anybody hasn´t approached them yet. They do not receive our press, they have absolutely nothing. Why couldn´t there perform e. g. Ukrainian Theatre from Prešov, or some other company?ʼ I wrote several reports, At my countrymen in Ukraine, it was called, nothing too spicy, not to cause a problem, and these articles had amazing response.”

“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.”