"And we were surprised that a lot of Soviet and Kiev literature about Hašek was not true, there was a lot of fantasy in it. So we started with that. We brought up Hashko's personal file in the military archives. And everyone wrote from the documents of the personal file. The personal file is accessible, it can be photographed, scanned, it's important not to spoil it. And we wrote an article about Hašek. It was published in the magazine Russian Word No. 4-5 for 2009. In two issues we wrote about Hašek. The article was called "Jaroslav Hasek on the Southwestern Front and in Kiev". We did not discuss his work and what he wrote. We dealt specifically with his military service and biography. It turned out that the literature said that he stayed in the hotel "Praha", he was posh there, and they wrote that he accompanied Masaryk on his trips to Ukraine. None of this happened. Jaroslav Hašek was captured. He was taken to Darnice. From Darnice he was taken very quickly to a camp on the Volga. Everyone there was sick with typhus. He barely survived. From Kiev, from the Darnitsa camp, he went to Totskoye. I remember. And there he barely survived. And when it was announced that prisoners of war could join the army, he volunteered. And they brought him to Kiev."
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
""So in my memory is the first day of the war. It was a Sunday. A warm, rainy day. I went to my friends, I came to them. One of them says, 'Did you hear on the radio that the war has started?' I said, "What war!" The adults started to say, "War? I don't understand why. It was so good. We were friends, we met Ribbentrop, Molotov, Stalin, we drank champagne and suddenly - war!" In the middle of the day, Molotov spoke. Here everyone realized that it was serious, before they could not understand. Everything became clear. Mobilization was announced from tomorrow, from Monday. So the war began. The trains arrived loaded, the echelons. Bachmach is a railway junction. Three stations: Bachmach-Pasaz, Bachmach-Kievsky and Bachmach-Gomelsky. There are loaded trains everywhere. Soldiers are coming. We boys run to see the troops. The radio announces that German planes are flying from the direction of Dymer or Nezhin and so on. The radio reported several times a day where the German planes were. People were coming out of their houses, going into the vegetable gardens, into the fields. No planes flew over. Then it all stopped being reported. But the panic started. Mobilization began. A few days later, suddenly the commercial network was filled with all sorts of scarce goods. It turned out that the echelons that used to go to Germany and bring shortage goods to the Germans: frozen poultry, ducks with sealed heads, rice, white flour - suddenly everything went into the trade network."
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
"My grandmother spoke to me in Czech. And I spoke at the level of a three-year-old: cock, cat and so on. My mother never spoke Czech to me. That was in the early thirties. It was already dangerous to be Czech. It was good that she was already in the household, even in the countryside. She was out of sight of the NKVD. And her colleagues, the so-called Russian Czechs from the Czechoslovak Trade Mission, were all suppressed. Already after 1930, those who worked in the trade mission as employees and technical workers were suppressed under various pretexts. If the main repression took place in 1936-1937, the repression of the Czechs began in 1930. They did not begin in the city, but in the countryside, from collectivisation in 1930. There were many Czech colonists there - the whole of Volhynia: Zhitomir region, Kiev region, Vinnitsa region. All the colonists were well off. They worked only with their families, but they were well off. They began to be kulaks and oppressed in various ways. Some as part of racialization, others for sabotaging collectivization."
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
Alexandr Alexandrovich Muratov was born on 14 October 1927 in Kiev, then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Alexander’s mother Maria Frantsevna Muratova (née Bemova, 1901-1971), a Czech born in Kiev, worked as a translator and typist at the Czechoslovak Trade Mission in Kiev in the 1920s and at the All-Union Trade Mission in Moscow in 1923-1924. The witness’s father - Alexandr Stepanovich Muratov (1889- ?) Ukrainian, born in Donbas, fought in the White Army, escaped execution by the Bolsheviks, worked as an agronomist in seed factories in Ukraine during the Soviet regime. He survived the famine of 1933 in Vinnitsa. The beginning of the Great Patriotic War met him in Bachmach. After the bombing of the Bachmach railway junction, he left for evacuation to the Tambov region. After approaching the front line - to the Penzensky region. In 1942-1943, when he was 15 years old, he was the head of the “Batrak” department of the state farm named after Mikhail Kalinin. In 1944-1951 he served in the army, including four years in the 2nd Guards Taman Division in Moscow, where he took part in military parades on Red Square. He graduated with honors from the Kiev Medical Institute in 1958, then completed postgraduate studies and taught physiology at the Kiev Medical Institute and other universities. In 2000 he retired and went with his wife (Dina Ivanovna Muratova, born 1932, née Kulik, Czech by birth) to emigrate to the Czech Republic, where their youngest son Alexei Muratov was already living. Between 2009 and 2022, he and his wife authored 116 articles and three books on the Czechs in the Russian Empire. He has published in the Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. He has appeared as an expert on the subject on Czech Television.
Translated by automatic translator (DeepL)
