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.’”
1968
“Those revolutions—when I talk about them, my head hurts nonstop. My heart too,” says Yosyp Mykhalchyn, placing his hand on his chest. “I’ve lived through so many of