[Article in The Christadelphian] [Article in The Bible Missionary]
Letters to the Editor
IN SEARCH OF "THE BLASPHEMERS"Brother Alan Eyre's article (November 1992, page 409) mentioned a young
relative of Brother and Sister Doubrovsky. This relative, Natasha Boyko, has now written
with her recollections of their fate and of the Christadelphian literature published
before World War II.
—editor
Dear Friends,
I think you will wish to know what I can tell you about some of the Christadelphians in the Ukraine and their books. I am Natasha, who met your brothers in Shchors.
Well, Vladimir (Dmitriy) Doubrovsky of Kuchinovka had three sons: Vladimir, Anatoly and Victor. They all knew various languages, and Vladimir also assisted his father to run the services in the church. There really were books, many of them. After the dispossession of the kulaks, sometime during the 1930s, father Vladimir was taken to prison and he did not return. The son Vladimir and his wife Antonina, with their two children (Granny does not remember names and sex) went away to the village of Naumovka which is now in Kryukovskiy district, and Anatoly and Victor with their mother stayed in Tsepeleff. The house, cattle and books were taken by the "Soviet power"—but not all the books. Some were taken by Vladimir, others were taken to the church, and the remainder was taken by his brothers.
They had to buy a ramshackle house, where my Granny lived, and she remembers the books. There's nothing to be said about the fate of Vladimir's books, but the following happened to those which were left in Tsepeleff:
during the war the Germans took the books from the church [the Ecclesial Hall in Tsepeleff—Ed.J. Some of them were burned, and some were taken by the local inhabitants. The book-stand with the books kept by Anatoly was confiscated by the chief of the village, Glushak.
The mother died just before the war. Victor and Anatoly were taken off by the army—they didn't return. Supposedly Vladimir fell ill with tuberculosis and died. Antonina remarried, and Granny and I know no more about her and her children. Probably some of them or then-close relatives or acquaintances remained in Naumovka. As for the books from the book-stand, they remained at Glushak's. Then he died, leaving his wife and two daughters. One of them, Lyuda, lives in Tsepeleff now, and the other one lives in Makoshino with her mother. She may have something.
Fyodor Danilchenko was my great-grandfather (my father's grandfather) and was sacristan in charge of the church building. That is all I can say for the present. Perhaps you'll find something new in what I have written. I'll just be glad that I have done my little bit towards the history of my ancestors whom I didn't know, and their faith.
Sincerely yours,
Natasha Boyko
Ukraine.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Brother Victor Sluczewski.
A second letter from another Ukrainian gives further detail of the fate of "The Blasphemers":
Sir,
Henrikh Yagoda supervised the slave labour camps to which the various religious believers were sent. He was executed in 1938. But it was Matvei Berman who was responsible under Stalin for the deportation of many thousands from the Ukraine to prisons in the Arctic and Siberia. He also was executed, after self-incrimination, in 1939, after somehow arousing Stalin's suspicion, probably because he was so powerful he was deemed a threat. Berman's prisons housed more inmates at the time (1929-1939) than the total in all the prisons in the rest of the entire world!
Yours,
Michael Jakobson
Canberra, Australia.
(The Christadelphian No. 1546 April 1993, p. 149)
