Otaman Yukhym Tsiurupa (born in 1896) from Rozkopantsi had two older brothers: Ivan (born in 1884) and Havrylo (born in 1889).
In the Museum of the History of the Bohuslav Region, we found out that Ivan Tsiurupa participated in the insurgency during the Ukrainian Revolution and was killed. Havrylo Tsiurupa was shot by the Soviets in 1938 in Kyiv and secretly buried in Bykivnia. Only the youngest of the brothers, Otaman Yukhym Tsiurupa, who fought against the Bolsheviks in the Bohuslav region in 1920 on the side of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes.
At the beginning of October last year, we undertook an expedition to the village of Rozkopantsi near Bohuslav to visit the otaman’s relative Nadiia Tsiurupa (Serby), the granddaughter of the middle brother, Havrylo Tsiurupa. The first part about our expedition can be found here. And here follows the story of Nadiia Tsiurupa:
“My grandfather Havrylo graduated from Tomsk State University. In 1908, he worked as a clerk in the Kainsk city public administration (now Kuibyshevo, Novosibirsk region), from 1909 to 1921 he worked as an official in Tomsk in the provincial military presence, and from 1913 to 1915 he was a first-rank cashier of the Kainsk district treasury, in 1915 he was a clerk, and in 1916 he was drafted into the tsarist army. My grandfather had many plots of land, the Lendivshchyna tract belonged to my grandfather.
His brother, my grandfather Yukhym, graduated from a military school and was a captain… He was very hot-tempered, a troublemaker, and perhaps that’s why he was sent to a military school… My grandfather Havrylo was very calm. In 1919, my grandfather Havrylo returned to Bohuslav region. And [his brother] Yukhym was already in 1919 with Otaman Zelenyi… My father told me that Yukhym came to Bohuslavshchyna with Ukrainian officers. And here they stayed on their own, until they joined Zelenyi… He would come to his grandmother’s house and leave his horse where our forest was, where there were lots of viburnum bushes. Grandma Hanna said that he had a white horse. So he went to my grandmother’s house. Grandma said that her husband Ilko went outside (they lived at the bottom and our house was on the top). And, he said, he heard shooting. And there were many horses. And he saw that one horse was without a rider. He [Yukhym] wounded one of them, and they left. The next day, the police arrived, the whole yard was full of Red Army soldiers. They started to ransack the place, and Yukhym was sitting in the woods with a machine gun and watching. And if necessary, my grandmother said, he would shoot at them. They tried to ambush him many times, but they failed to capture him.
Yukhym’s unit frequented Bohuslav and Tarashchany districts. And people in Bohuslav kept him in mind. Once my mother was in hospital and they called her by her family name. An old Jew was sitting there and asked her where was Otaman Tsiurupa and if he was alive. My mother did not confess that she was a relative, she only said that they were just namesakes.
Their older brother Ivan, who died, had two sons, Ivan and Havrylo. And the boys, according to my father, were quite hefty. And there was another son, Semen, who was born to his wife from another man since Ivan died. And these boys were once walking from the river to the village. They were walking through a field when they saw an activist lying stabbed to death. And the boys called for help, and the people accused them, and the boys were exiled, my father never saw them again. This is probably in the 1930s.
[For the last time] Yukhym came to his mother’s house in Bohuslavshchyna and invited his brother Havrylo to join him abroad. Havrylo said, “I have only one homeland. That’s what the grandfather Yukhym, when he was writing letters, mentioned [about it]. And Havrylo didn’t go… Yukhym had a friend, also Tsiurupa, Sylvester, Nightingale as he used to be called. He was also in his unit. They arrived in a cart, unharnessed the horses, and threw the cart into a deep ditch where the farm is now. They invited the brother, but he refused, so they bid him farewell and left. And, apparently, when they were crossing the border, Sylvester was shot dead. Yukhym got married there [in Poland], his wife was German, and he had two factories.
My father recalled that during the famine, his grandfather Yukhym used to send petliovka to his family from Poland. Petliovka is flour. He rescued us from the famine. And, thanks to Yukhym, we survived, he says.
My grandfather Havrylo worked as an accountant at a workmen’s cooperative association, then in a road company, and in Stalin’s time, he was demoted. There was a denunciation from a fellow villager that my grandfather Havrylo was agitating against the soviet government… And on 6 February 1938, my father woke up to find the house full of police and his father was already standing there dressed in a fur coat (ready to be taken away). My father did not have a mother, she, Frania from the Branytsky family, died when my father was 5 years old. We never heard anything more about my grandfather, and my father was always awaiting him.”
