Since the mid-1980s, local historian Petro Hohulia (born in 1961) has been studying the liberation movement in the Medvyn and Bohuslav regions. He discovered the names of the participants of the Medvyn Uprising (1919-1922), as well as OUN members. In 2014, together with Roman Koval, he published the book Medvyn Uprising, followed in 2023 by the book Medvyn Uprising in Facts, Figures, and Memories, published together with his daughter Maryna Hohulia.
We visited Petro in Medvyn to interview him.
Petro Borysovych Hohulia is a native of Medvyn. His mother Maria Khtodosivna, maiden family name – Prylipko (1926-2005), survived the Holodomor. He repeatedly heard about this tragedy from his family:
“The Soviet authorities were more often considered robbers. No one from [our] Hohulia family died during the Holodomor, but they told us terrible things. My mother recalls the event when they, still kids, were walking to the centre of Medvyn, to the market, at the area of Denysiya, where the river flowed from the [Denysenko] pond and into the Myrskyi pond. She said they have seen the bodies of swollen from hunger children floating along it. They had died somewhere in the thickets, no one buried them, and it was raining heavily, so they were swept into that pond.”
Maria Khtodosivna worked on a collective farm from the age of 12. She survived the WWII and was repressed in 1946. She was accused, among other things, of having ties to the Banderites:
“My mother survived the war as a young girl. She told me that at first the Germans were friendly, shared food, and came to evening gatherings. They were not terrifying, as they are shown in soviet films… When the war ended, those who had worked in Germany returned home, and they saw that people in the West lived better than in the USSR and that Ukraine could live differently if it was liberated from slavery. So these guys went to the woods, they had trident caps… Then Marushevsky returned [to Medvyn], and there was a leader here, Smolyar, nicknamed “Zhuk” (The Beetle), who created a partisan unit. He was killed in 1946, I believe…
In total, there were four collective farms in Medvyn at that time. Although the heads of the collective farms, Kharchenko and Vasylenko had families, they did not stay at home overnight because they knew that they would be followed…
The rebel group believed in the idea of [restoring] Ukrainian statehood, they were preparing for the next [great] war, but the Americans did not attack the USSR, time passed, and these guys were captured. My mother and her friends were sentenced to eight years in prison because they helped those guys to harvest bread.
When she and her companions were in the Volodymyrska prison, and Ukrainian rebels sentenced to death were being held on the floor above, they would thread their clothes and use them to pass notes. Her friend Oksana Sarapuka mentioned that they wrote poems that made them cry.
They heard the doors opening at night and the boys being taken away. They [the mother and girls] were charged with armed robbery because while they were harvesting bread in the field, the boys were with them with weapons.”
Since 1989, Petro Borysovych Hohulia has been one of the organisers of memorial services for the residents of Medvyn who were executed by the bolsheviks in 1920.
“In 1989, we already understood that the collapse of that system was coming. We were already talking about the memorial service held under the Germans, the funeral service, the priests from Bohuslav, the autocephalous church, and the memorial dinner. We talked to Anatoliy Lystopad (deceased), Ivan Stepanchenko, and the Brazhnyky about the need to restore this tradition. Back then, there were Movement centres in Bohuslav and Medvyn, and there was a strong connection with the Kyiv regional organisation. At that time, almost all of the relatives who remembered those who died there were still alive. And it was no longer possible to create obstacles, although party members, commissars, and KGB officers were running around, recording, filming, and photographing everything. I remember that my mother-in-law Valentyna Ivanivna used to visit the retired head of the collective farm Vasylenko and say, “Valentyno, your Petro is wandering in the wrong places. Make sure he doesn’t run into a timber yard somewhere.” But even then, no one took any notice, because the processes were already underway.”
In the late 1990s, Hryhoriy Fastovets, one of the leaders of the OUN (b) in the Bohuslav region during World War II, visited Petro and his wife Nina in Bohuslav.
We recorded his reminiscences about this meeting, which will certainly be posted on our YouTube channel.
