Orest M. Gladky

Olga Verro * My late father, Orest Mikhailovich Gladky (1902-1986), was Russian immigrant writer. He wrote in Russian immigrant press, newspapers and journals, under three pseudonyms to protect his relatives who were living at that time in the Soviet Union.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Orest Mikhaylovich Gladky was born on October 29, 1902 in Nikitovka, a settlement of a big railroad station in the South of Russia in the Donets coal mine region of the Eastern Ukraine. His father, Mikhail Makarovich Gladky, was a head telegrapher on the railroad station of Nikitovka and rector of a choir in the local Russian Orthodox Church.

His grandfather, Makar Timofeyevich Gladky, a railroad switchman at Nikitovka station, was born a free peasant (as opposed to a serf peasant in bondage to the land owner) in the nearby village of Alexyeyevka. After serving twenty years as an enlisted man in the Russian Imperial Army, he chose not to return to till the soil and instead used the opportunity offered to the soldiers returning to the civilian life to become a civil servant. Orest’s paternal grandmother, Yelena Danylovna (no one in the family remembered her maiden last name), was a simple townswoman from the nearby town of Bakhmut.

Orest’s mother, Nadyezhda Vikentyevna Gladky, was Principal and a teacher of the local Railroad School. She and her sister became orphans when they were very young. When their parents, by the name of Mikhnyevich, of Russianized Polish descent and Muscovite nobility, died, the sisters were raised in an orphanage in Moscow for the children of noble families. There they received Christian upbringing, a good education and graduated with teaching diplomas, ready to start careers in education.

Both parents of Orest M. Gladky were very devoted Christians, they loved Russia, were very active in the cultural life of Nikitovka and reared their children with the same spirit—belief in God, devotion to Motherland and service to community.

After finishing the Railroad School in Nikitovka, Orest and his older sister, Anna, studied in the gymnasiums in Taganrog, a town on the Azov Sea, and returned to Nikitovka only for the last year of studies when a gymnasium was opened there on the eve of the revolution.

As a teenager Orest Gladky had an early encounter with the horrors of the revolution when the large and important station of Nikitovka changed hands from the Whites to the Reds. After seizing the station, the Red commissars soon showed their brutality and lawlessness by committing atrocities. They killed Nikitovka’s station master, who was a friend of Gladky’s family, and they burned alive the eleven men captured at the station, White officers who were dressed in civilian clothing, an execution witnessed by the young Orest.

No wonder then, when the Whites had recaptured Nikitovka, not-yet-sixteen-year-old Orest and many of his gymnasium friends enrolled as volunteers in the White Army to save Russia from the Bolsheviks. They enrolled with the blessings of their parents, who considered it to be a better choice for their sons than to be conscripted and forced to fight for the Soviets with the despised Reds should they re-occupy Nikitovka.

Orest M. Gladky and his friends served in the Volunteer White Army in Drozdovsky divisions, which participated in the battles defending Crimea from the pressure of the amassed Red battalions concentrated in the South of Russia. The White units left the battlefield when the Red avalanche could be stopped only by the superhuman strength now drained away by the exhausting campaign. In the fall of 1920 a portion of White Army left the Russian soil and went into exile. But there were not enough ships to transport them all and those who remained on the southern shore of Crimea were doomed to suffer and die from the savage reprisals of the Red commissars. Among those left behind was Drozdovsky Army volunteer Orest M. Gladky, who remained on the shore of the Black Sea in Feodosia.

Orest survived by hiding in the home of his paternal uncle, who at that time was an assistant railroad station master in Feodosia. Then, with the help of friends, he returned to his native Nikitovka. But, as a former White Army volunteer, his documents were stamped in an indelible ink with the condemning word "lishenyets," deprived of the right to vote.

After that Orest M. Gladky was pursued by the Bolshevik secret police as a disenfranchised “enemy of the people” owing to his age sixteen Civil War service in the White Army. He and his family became pawns of the Bolshevik regime in that tumultuous odyssey in which they were relentlessly hounded from place to place in their native Ukraine by the Soviet State watchdogs—CheKa, GPU, KGB and NKVD.

No wonder then, when the Germans occupied Ukraine in 1941 during World War Two and allowed the local newspaper, “New Ukraine,” to be printed, Orest M. Gladky wrote one after another anti-soviet articles, in which he poured out his accumulated hatred for the regime that hounded him for all those years, denouncing the crimes of the oppressive dictatorship of Stalin, and expressing hopes for a liberated and free Russia.

But he was naively wrong—the Germans had another vision for Ukraine as a Lebensraum for Germany and therefore his articles were no longer allowed to be printed. Then, in the summer of 1943, when the Wermacht under the pressure of the Soviet Army was retreating, Orest was arrested and sent to a Gestapo concentration camp. In the fall his wife and daughter found him there in a deplorable condition. But with the help of three humane German men, he was placed in a hospital prisoner ward in Makyeyevka. When the front line came very close, wife and daughter helped him to escape. The three of them reached Stalino (now Donetsk) in time to board a convoy train of conscripted workers

from Ukraine ready to depart to Germany. They got on it—it was his and their only choice other than for him either to be caught by the Gestapo as an escapee from the German concentration camp or to be caught by the NKVD as an “enemy of the people” and for his anti-soviet articles in the Ukrainian newspaper and to be sent to a Soviet concentration camp.

From 1943 to 1945 they worked as conscripted workers, Ostarbeitern, in Germany. But in the cold winter of 1945 the advancing Soviet Army was already on Polish territory annexed by the Germans in the beginning of the war and the Gladkys, who were working there, decided that Orest must not be caught by the Soviet secret police. On the insistence of his wife and daughter Orest left, escaping across Germany until he reached the Zone occupied by the Allies. And then, even when he believed it to be safe, he had to hide under an assumed name of a Ukrainian born in Poland, to avoid being handed by the Allies to the NKVD agents for the forced deportation of Soviet citizens to the Soviet concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Orest’s daughter was smuggled by her sweetheart onto the Red Cross repatriation convoy train for Italian prisoners of war to Italy, where they married. And Orest’s wife, after hiding for one year with a Polish family, was able with their help to join him in a DP (Dispersed Persons) camp in the Allied zone of Germany. The two of them, as hundreds of thousands of others, waited for several years in the UNRRA and IRO camps as DPs (displaced persons) for the country that would give them asylum.

While waiting in the UNRRA camp, Orest M. Gladky started his new-found freedom as a writer. His writing flourished further in England, which accepted them as refugees. There in Ventnor, Isle of Wight, they worked in the hospital for patients with tuberculosis.

In 1958 Orest and his wife Antonina immigrated to the United States, where

they finally found security and freedom. His daughter, Olga, and her husband, Giulio Verro, with their two children, daughter Lia and son Piero, immigrated to the United States, joining her parents, in 1959.

Orest M. Gladky was a prolific writer of stories describing the life of people in the Soviet Union and the evils and horrors of the Bolshevik-communist-socialist regime. Many of the stories were written from the real life episodes that happened to the author, his family, friends and acquaintances—the real names were concealed for the safety of the people remaining behind the Iron Curtain from being harmed by the NKVD and KGB, the Soviet State watchdogs. His stories and articles were printed under the pseudonyms of O. Mikhailov, R. Mikhnyevich and R. Chongar in the Russian immigrant press, newspapers and journals, in England, New York, San Francisco

and Buenos Aires. He never lost hope that one day Russia would rise again and free herself from the yoke of socialism-communism and Stalin’s dictatorship.

In his writings he warns and predicts: “The world should fear

Communism in itself. Russia got to know it with millions of victims,

with rivers of blood and tears, and she herself will shake off the red

beast in a year predetermined not by us...”

Works of Orest M. Gladky, as those of many immigrant writers whose

destiny allowed them to escape after World War Two from the paws of the Soviet secret police, remained in the domain of the immigrant press, rarely being translated or published in English for lack of interest of traditional publishers and lack of funds for independent publishing by the authors themselves.

When Orest M. Gladky’s declining health took a turn for the worse in 1980’s, he brought the whole collection of his writings to me, his daughter, Olga Gladky Verro, and asked me to do what I thought would be the best for preserving his works for the future generations. In my retirement years, I edited and prepared for publication, both in Russian and in English, a two-volume collection of more than 220 stories written by my father.

The first volume "Voices From the Past: A Collection of Short Stories Preserving Facts and Thoughts for Posterity to Pause and Ponder: Russia—Soviet Union: 1917-1971" and the second volume "Portraits from an Old Album: Places and Events, Creatures Big and Small and Lots of People Most of All."

After many years of work I, finally published in Russian and in English the first volume of stories, "Voices From the Past" and finally fulfilled my father’s wish to see his works made available to the new generation, so they would not forget the tragic events in Russian history and the life of people struggling to survive under the socialist-communist dictatorship.

I was able to complete this work with the help of a team of translators and, most of all, with the support and generous editorial help of my dear friend Oliver W. Kellogg, the English Editor. He provided invaluable advice, encouragement and guidance and completed with great patience several rounds of editing of all English manuscripts.

– Olga Gladky Verro, Editor.

ABOUT OREST M. GLADKY, AUTHOR OF "VOICES FROM THE PAST"

Author Orest M. Gladky was a writer between 1945 and 1977 and his short stories were published in Russian immigrant journals and newspapers in England, New York, San Francisco and Buenos Aires. He wrote as a victim of his times. Branded an "Enemy of the People" for his volunteer service as a boy--sixteen--soldier in the White Army in the Russian civil war which followed the 1917 revolution, he survived as such through the years when the victorious Reds established and carried forward the notoriously dictatorial policies which dogmatically sought to enhance the power of the State through reduction of individual power and too often the literal destruction of the individual. Orest M. Gladky loved Holy Russia as constituted before Soviet control and never forgave that hierarchy not only for its tyrannies but also its stupidities. Gladky was a man driven to write and that he did, in scores of stories, prompted not simply by memories of a tumultuous and perilous personal life but also by a deep wish that today's readers learn of those days and be given pause.

-Oliver W. Kellogg, English Editor.

HERE IS THE PRESS RELEASE OF OREST M. GLADKY'S BOOKS

Engaging Stories Told Through the Voices From The Past Orest M. Gladky's collections of short stories bring to life the tumultuous history of Russia--Soviet Union from the revolution and Civil War onward.

HIGH POINT, N.C. - (June 2, 2011) - Xlibris, the print-on-demand self-publishing services provider, announced today simultaneous release of two books "Voices From The Past" and its Russian version "Голоса из прошлого" (Golosa is proshlogo). Authored by the late Russian immigrant writer Orest M. Gladky they were compiled, edited and published by his daughter, Olga Gladky Verro, English Editor, Oliver W. Kellogg. Each book presents six-part collection of short stories written to preserve facts and thoughts from the historic events in Russia--USSR from 1917 to 1971.

The first part in these stirring anthologies, "In Whose Name?" tells that the civil war engulfed the Motherland and follows White Army volunteers defending Holy Russia from the Reds.

In "The Dispossessed," Stalin reneges on the promise of the revolution--All land to the peasants--and launches an onslaught on peasants through forced farm collectivization.

The third part, "I Believe," describes how the Communists imposed Marxist dogma to eradicate belief in God.

In the fourth part State secret police watchdogs relentlessly hound "The Enemies of the People" and send millions without trial to prisons and gulags.

"The Humdrum Life in Socialist Paradise" captures snapshots of ordinary citizens' days in the Socialist-Communist state and reveals their struggle to survive and stay human under Soviet rule and Socialist-Communist-Bolshevik dictatorship.

The last part, "Behind the Iron Curtain," tells with wry humor stories about events after World War Two, in Cold War Years, and under Collective Leadership in USSR.