Mykola Mušinka

“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.”

“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.”