Yevheniya SOKHATSKA: “I’ve always realized that we must concentrate on the Ukrainian cause.”
Ivan Ohiyenko (1882-1972) is referred to in practically all reference sources as a noted Ukrainian scholar, teacher, ethnographer, cultural and religious figure, an individual possessing encyclopedic knowledge. Kamyanets-Podilsky State University occupies a special place in his life story. The university was founded in August 1918, according to a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic. Ivan Ohiyenko was the first rector. Not surprisingly, the idea of naming the University of Kamyanets Podilsky (then a pedagogic institute) for Ohiyenko appeared when his name was returned to us in the early 1990s. The institution of higher learning marked its 85th anniversary in its restored university status last year, but without the first rector’s name.
Yevheniya Sokhatska, docent of the Ukrainian Literature Chair, Ukrainian Philology Department, Kamyanets-Podilsky University (she is considered to have been the first to articulate the idea of naming the university for Ohiyenko), told The Day that they had sent a letter to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and other top-level authorities in October 2002, requesting the university status and that it be named for Ohiyenko. A year ago, on March 13, 2003, the first part of the request was granted. The second was refused allegedly because the two did not “fit in the same paragraph,” which in the bureaucratese meant that a separate petition had to be submitted... Be that as it may, Yevheniya Sokhatska hopes to have the university named for this distinguished man; she is determined to turn to this authorities with new documents (this time on behalf of the All-Ukrainian Ohiyenko Society), and she thinks that the university is prepared to live under the new name.
What makes Yevheniya Sokhatska so insistent? Why has she spent so many years trying to immortalize the name of the university’s first rector? Where does she get the energy? A likely explanation is found in her biography, rather what she had to say when visiting The Day.
Her father, Ivan Tovstiak, served time in Stalin’s prison camps, even though he had little to do with politics. He was a capable peasant, working hard and saving money to buy more land, as he had five children. His brother Yevstakhiy served in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The Soviet authorities knew this. After World War II, in the course of collectivization in Western Ukraine, they wanted Ivan to propagandize the campaign. He was frightened, knowing that if he did he would one night be visited by UPA men, and that they would make short work of him. He refused and authorities staged a public trial in his village, making him an example of what awaited people who refused to join the collective farms. Before that, his family was levied a huge tax. To pay it, Ivan had to deliver an amount of timber from the Carpathian Mountains only a modern tractor could handle. During the trial, he had to repent and plead guilty, having failed to meet the quota. “You confess your guilt, we’ll put it on record and will let you go the next day,” they told him. The next day his wife came to take him home and was told, “What do you mean? He’s under arrest.” Ivan Tovstiak served five years in Mariupol, building the Illich Metallurgical Works. What money he earned he sent home. Yevheniya’s mother Teodoziya could not work for the collective farm, being a convict’s wife, so she worked instead of an old woman employed by the kolhosp and entitled to receive pay for work, whom Teodoziya paid for the privilege...
The family was evicted from their home (the house is still there, but Yevheniya cannot stand the sight of it) and lived with relatives, working for them as hired laborers. And then Teodoziya was levied a tax as formidable as her husband’s. A sympathetic woman (from eastern Ukraine, incidentally) told her to get out of the village, fast, or they would come and arrest her, and send her children to an orphanage. In 1953, the family moved to Mykolayiv oblast (it was a period of great migration from the west to the east of Ukraine). They arrived and the first thing they learned was Stalin’s death... And then Ivan Tovstiak returned from prison. Now he had a right to get a job. He took the elder daughter and son and went to Drohobych. There he and his children lived in a workers’ dormitory. Some time later, Teodoziya and the rest of the children (among them Yevheniya) returned to the home village. And again they lived moving from one home to the next.
In 1956, a former partisan was appointed chairman of the local kolhosp. He turned out to be one of those who tried Ivan, acting as an agent provocateur during the hearings. Whether it was a guilty conscience or something else, but the collective farm board resolved to return the Tovstiaks their old home (half-ruined by the time). In fact, their home was not simply returned (without any official apologies, of course). Ivan had to pay for it, which cost him all the money he had earned. But the family finally had a home of their own.
For a long time Teodoziya told her children little about the past. She urged Ivan to say little on the subject, there being no need to hurt their young hearts and minds. Was it not bad enough that his past had prevented the oldest daughter from enrolling in the history department, her cherished dream?
Yevheniya entered the Drohobych Pedagogical Institute of in 1960 (the times were different, fortunately). In her third year she married a fellow student from Ternopil oblast, also from a family purged by Stalin. After graduation, they went to work in that region and spent five years there. Then they moved to Ivano-Frankivsk. There were no teaching vacancies, so Yevheniya worked as local club manager. Once she ran into a former teacher from the Drohobych Institute. He suggested that she take a qualifying exam for the candidate degree and get a job at the high school. Yevheniya did (she took and passed two qualifying exams during the year).
While studying and then working at the institute, she met with people that had suffered from the Soviet totalitarian system. One of the teachers, Klym Zabarylo, an expert on ancient history, had to find a teaching job in Western Ukraine because he had failed to leave Kyiv before the Nazis came and continued to teach during the occupation. Another, Stepan Pinchuk, was arrested in Zhytomyr, in the 1970s. His doctorate was found to contain “nationalistic distortions.” And so it was not surprising that Yevheniya Sokhatska, as faculty dean at the Kamyanets-Podilsky Pedagogic Institute, after such experiences, would hold Shevchenko soirees and eventually allow her students to go to Kyiv to support the striking students. She was a member of a concerned citizens’ group supporting the formation of the Rukh Popular Movement. She was elected to the leadership of the local Prosvita organization; she organized Ukraine’s first scholarly conference dedicated to Ivan Ohiyenko’s birth centennial. At the turn of the 1990s, she discovered his name for a number of fellow Ukrainians. Even then she campaigned at all levels for giving the Kamyanets-Podilsky Pedagogic Institute the university status and his name.
Halyna Nasminchuk, deputy dean of the university’s philology department (Yevheniya Sokhatska’s colleague since 1980), told The Day that Mrs. Sokhatska always did more than teach her students. Her three terms as dean (fifteen years, to January 2004) speak for themselves. As an expert in her field, she is known in Khmelnytsky oblast and elsewhere in Ukraine. Also in the Ukrainian diaspora. She has produced several generations of graduates. In addition, she is an active propagandist of Ukrainian studies and is genuinely concerned with all social problems. She heads the Kamyanets-Podilsky organization of Prosvita and is in the process of organizing a memorial room dedicated to Ivan Ohiyenko at the university.
She is respected by the students. Iryna Mazuryk, in her second year in the Philology Department, says Yevheniya Sokhatska’s lectures on the history of Ukrainian literature are interesting because she interprets literature not as something ideal, but as something truly vital. With her, writers emerge not as people out of the world, but as real individuals with all their advantages and shortcomings (although she can portray the latter in a manner making them look like virtues in their own right).
Yevheniya Sokhatska says she has never had a choice in taking her stand: “I have always realized that we must dedicate ourselves to the Ukrainian cause.”
