Kyrychenko, Volodymyr

Description

Creators

Volodymyr Kyrychenko (d.b. unknown), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Trushky, Bila Tserkva raion, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Trushky, Bila Tserkva raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Trushky, Bila Tserkva raion, Kyiv oblast

Volodymyr Kyrychenko’s letter centers around the topic of perpetrators and victims, evil and good.

He tells the story about a teacher Tymoshenko who wrote down and shared a poem written by his friend Naum Kovalenko about Stalin’s regime in 1932. Both disappeared. In 1953, Kovalenko returned after two terms in the gulag. He served the second term for writing a poem about a prison camp warden. Tymoshenko perished on the construction of the White Sea Canal or Belomorkanal. Kyrychenko calls those who persecuted these two men “enemies of the people.”

He also recalls two local search brigade activists, Antyp and Myna, who abused their power and took the last bite of food from poor, starving people, including their family members. Another grave digger, Vasyl Kyrychenko was taking the bodies of a woman and her two children to the graveyard. One child, Ovram, turned out to be alive, slid off the wagon, crawled into a rye field, found some grain, and stayed alive. Ovram treated Kyrychenko as his brother for the rest of his life.

While Antyp was killed in WWII, Myna became a collaborator. He helped send young people to forced labor in Germany, and betrayed the soviet underground and partisans. It is unclear what his fate was after the war, but the author claims that some former Nazi collaborators still live in his village.

The village of Trushky is featured as Verbivka in Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky’s novel Mykola Dzheria.

Notes