Bohdan Zilynskyj

* 1954

  • "There was this interest group of people thinking the same way, not only from my year of study but also a year younger and a year older. We kind of knew where we were at what it was all about. I remember at that time we got our hands on the text of the Charter very quickly, maybe on the third day after it was actually declared or dated. I even remember this, however insignificant and ridiculous it may have been: We felt at home at the Department and often stayed there until the evening in the room with the secretary; it was like a small study room. Well, we just borrowed an in-house typewriter and actually made like 30 to 40 copies. We typed them and threw them in people's mailboxes, although obviously it was a kind of activity that didn't make much sense. It likely was quite short-lived too."

  • "What sticks in my memory the most is crossing the border because it was so startling and undignified. They drove everybody off the trains in Čop on the Soviet side of the border and locked us in the station building where you couldn't get a drink or anything. For about two hours they searched the luggage of those who were going to the Ukraine or even further, just to see if they were bringing anything that wasn't allowed. I suspect was solely up to those customs officers to declare something undesirable and jsut confiscate it. It was like an introduction to the weird side of the Soviet world. Of course, we didn't know much about it before. Then suddenly we get this kind of 'welcome' on their side of the border. That stuck with me awfully strongly and then, well, the condescending attitude of some of the officials and the station master most of all - he was just this big cheese who made the decisions."

  • "Anyway, I think 21 August was the second or third day after we had arrived. So, I witnessed it in Kiev where seemingly nothing was happening, right? The local society sort of took note of it. The fact is that newspapers came out terribly late that day. See, I was interested in local newspapers every time I went abroad, and they also came out on 21 August but they were hours late than usual; they had to adjust them adequately. What is interesting is that, in the days to come, we would meet many Ukrainian intellectuals who disagreed with it and simply saw it as a collapse of their own hopes that they had associated with it."

  • "I was in Kiev with my father on 21 August 1968. It was actually my second visit to Ukraine. I had been in Subcarpathia in a village a year prior. We had arrived in Kiev about two days earlier [ed.note: before 21 August 1968] and, of course, the impact was felt."

  • "My grandfather from eastern Ukraine who held these leftist yet non-communist views, simply a socialist of the Ukrainian independence movement as it was called, escaped not with the first wave of Ukrainian emigration in 1919 or 1920, but only after he was arrested, and managed to escape via Poland to Czechoslovakia sometime in 1922. He never saw his home again."

  • "I have been exposed to the activities of the relatively poor or small Ukrainian minority in Prague since the end of 1989, because we had relatively low key contacts with other centres. We founded - such was the approach of other national minorities too - the Civic Forum of Ukrainians, which was then renamed the Association of Ukrainians and Supporters of Ukraine in the Czech Republic."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 14.10.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 02:21:43
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Praha 9, 17.11.2016

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    duration: 01:09:07
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 3

    Praha, 04.12.2023

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    duration: 01:59:05
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 4

    Praha, 22.01.2024

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    duration: 02:09:51
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 5

    Praha, 25.03.2024

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    duration: 01:23:31
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I’m a historian who could call himself a Czech-Ukrainian

Bohdan Zilynskyj, Prague, 2024
Bohdan Zilynskyj, Prague, 2024
photo: Post Bellum

Bohdan Zilynskyj was born in Prague on 30 November 1954 into a Czech-Ukrainian family and has been an active member of the Ukrainian community all his life. He studied Archival and Auxiliary Historical Sciences at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague in 1974-1979. He took part in disseminating the text of Charter 77 in 1977. In 1979-1991 he worked as an archivist at the Prague City Archives. Following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, he was active in the Civic Forum of Ukrainians and the Association of Ukrainians and Supporters of Ukraine in the Czech Republic. In 1991-1996 he worked at the Institute of History of Central and Eastern Europe of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and from 1996 at the History and History Didactics Department of the Faculty of Education, Charles University and at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, where he is still working today. Bohdan Zilynskyj was living in Prague in 2024.