Neither Czar nor Commissar

Inside the U.S.S.R. there is a scattered anti-Communist underground. Last week in a Berlin cellar cafe, a leading representative of the Ukrainian nationalist movement told a TIME correspondent a bit of the story of its trials and works.

"Let's not say anything about me," said the Ukrainian. "It isn't safe. But let me tell you something which I heard from a girl who fled last year. In 1948 she lived in Kharkov in the Ukraine. That summer a rumor spread that the Americans had landed on the Black Sea coast and were marching north. So one day there was a big argument in the Kharkov market. A farmer who was about to sell a goat refused rubles in payment. He demanded dollars. Soon thereafter, the arrests came in waves. I suppose the MVD had spread the rumor to provoke us and find us out."

The Fifth Wave. Both the tale and the man who told it were in an old Ukrainian tradition. "Look!" he said. "I belong to the fifth wave of Ukrainian emigration. We have been fighting Moscow since our hetman Mazepa* made an alliance with Charles XII of Sweden in 1709."

Sipping slowly at his Pilsener, the man in the Berlin cafe recalled that the German invasion of Russia in 1940 had given the Ukrainians new hope of winning their 240-year-old fight for independence. Throughout the Ukraine, guerrilla units sprang up and took advantage of the confusion to fight both Germans and Russians. By the end of World War II, the guerrilla Ukrainian Partisan Army (U.P.A.) had 200,000 men and ruled much of the Ukrainian countryside.

At first Soviet forces reoccupying the Ukraine kept to the cities. "But by and by," said the refugee leader, "the NKVD troops got stronger. They burned whole villages and killed thousands of people in reprisal [for U.P.A. attacks]. Three million Ukrainians were shipped to the Ural mines and to the Manchurian border. "

Horror & Hope. Today the U.P.A., its forces scattered and its captured German supplies gone, operates only at night and in small bands. Most Ukrainians have shifted from active to passive resistance. "Life in my homeland is very hard," said the refugee, "and the deportations haven't stopped. But the people still hope."

The people's hope for aid from America, however, has been weakened. In their camouflaged forest bunkers the U.P.A. men listen to the Voice of America. "Sometimes it drives them crazy," said the Ukrainian. "For example, when your Secretary of State says that the U.S. does not intend to undermine the Soviet government. When we hear things like that from America, we clutch our heads in horror . . . My people say to me: 'The Soviet Union has a complete plan for the whole world. And the United States?What plans does it have for eastern Europe?'"

When they had finished their beer the correspondent and the Ukrainian walked out of the cafe into Berlin's brilliant May sunshine. Before they parted the correspondent asked: "What do your people really hope for?" The answer was quick and passionate: "The thing we've hoped for for years. The end of foreign rule and exploitation by Moscow, either through czars or commissars. A life where we can travel more than 20 kilometers without an MVD permit, where we can be without fear and terror, where we are free."

*In his youth Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa (1644-1709) was sent to Warsaw to pick up a courtly education as a page to King John Casimir V of Poland. Mazepa, the story goes, picked up the wife of a Polish nobleman. The lady's husband surprised the lovers and ended the courtly phase of Mazepa's education by tying him naked on the back of a wild horse and turning the horse out onto the steppes. Rescued by Ukrainian Cossacks, Mazepa soon rose to leadership among them. When Charles XII began his invasion of Russia, Mazepa, to the disgust of most of his Cossacks, seemed to be loyal to Czar Peter the Great. Later he switched his allegiance, thereby thoroughly confusing nearly everybody. Defeated with his Swedish allies at the battle of Poltava, Mazepa fled into Turkey where he soon died of exhaustion.

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