“When Hryhoriy returned from the camps, he was welcomed by the whole village. We have photos. He was so well-loved and respected. Many people joined resistance together with him, and he never betrayed anyone. They [the former members of an underground organization] lived a decent life until they were old,” recalls his sister Mariia about one of the leaders of the OUN (b) in the Bohuslavshchyna – Hryhoriy Fastovets.
We visited the village of Tunyky (Tuniki) on the outskirts of Luzana, near the insurgent’s family home, and recorded the memories of his nephew Volodymyr Hnidenko and sister Mariia Fastovets, and also had a chance to scan unique family photographs. Volodymyr also treated us to some of his homemade honey, as the Fastovets have been beekeeping for generations, and this craft has been inherited by Volodymyr from his uncle Hryhoriy.
The Fastovets were a hardworking peasant family with a good income, a large plot of land, a forest, a large apiary, a hefty house, and a large farm. Almost all of this was taken away during mass collectivisation, and grandfather Yosyp gave it all away voluntarily to save his life and that of his family. “They even dismantled the barn and moved it away,” says Mariia. During the Holodomor, Yosyp Fastovets managed to hide several bags of grain in the forest. At night, he would go to the forest, dig it up, take a portion, and bake bread at home. This bread was used to save themselves and to share with weak people who came to the house. During the Second World War, the family hid a Jewish woman from the Germans.
Yosyp’s son Hryhoriy Fastovets successfully graduated from school No. 2 in Bohuslav and was very interested in Ukrainian history and culture. During the Second World War, 18-year-old Hryhoriy joined the ranks of Ukrainian nationalists. With the Soviet front approaching, he travelled to the West.
“There was a period when he was unsure what to do in the underground, so he went to the West to seek advice. And, he was advised to leave Ukraine. He knew German very well since school years. Hryhoriy lived in Western Europe for a while, he visited Italy. But he loved Ukraine so much that he forged documents and returned in 1945. He was immediately drafted into the army and was exposed there. Apparently, he didn’t forge his documents too thoroughly…”
During the torture, he did not expose the members of the OUN underground network in the Kyiv region and managed to hide his leadership biography. In 1946, they sentenced him to a hard labour prison camp, where he was forced to perform inhumane labour at a logging site, and afterwards, he was exiled to Kazakhstan. In total, he spent 10 years in captivity. But even in those circumstances, Fastovets took care of his family and sent his mother financial assistance, as evidenced by the postal receipts she carefully kept.
After the camps, the man studied to become an engineer, settled in Kaniv, where he built the Kaniv hydroelectric power station as an engineer, and got married. Years of deprivation and distress did not erase any historical memory he held. Hryhoriy compiled lists of his fellow villagers who died of the Holodomor, as he himself survived this tragedy at the age of nine and lost his relatives. He wrote poetry and was fond of visiting the monument to Taras Shevchenko.
The fighter for Ukraine’s independence was rehabilitated almost four decades after the camps and exile. Volodymyr recalls: “They called Hryhoriy to Kyiv to Volodymyrska Street, where the State Security Service of Ukraine was located. He thought that they had found out something new about him and would imprison him again. I went with him and already bid him farewell, just in case. I was sitting there, waiting. Then he comes out and laughs, saying that he has been rehabilitated.”
In the mid-1990s, Hryhoriy Fastovets visited Bohuslav at the invitation of the Museum of the History of Bohuslav Region, the family of Petro Hohulia and Nina Levchenko, where he shared a lot about his participation in the OUN (b). We also met with Petro Hohulia, who remembers the conversation well, and recorded an interview with him about the nationalist movement in Bohuslav and Medvyn regions. We will release this material shortly.
