Review: Unveiling the magnificent stories of Orest Gladky
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 13, 2014
The treasure trove of exquisitely written stories opens with biography of Orest Gladky that is so poignant and significant to the works in this volume that it has been excerpted here: `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 Eastern Ukraine. Both his parents were very devoted Christians, 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. As a teenager Orest had an early encounter with the horrors of the revolution when the large and important railroad 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, 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. 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. Orest served in the Volunteer White Army and 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 among those left behind was Orest who survived by hiding in the home of his paternal uncle, and later he returned to his native Nikitovka. But, as a former White Army volunteer, his documents were stamped in indelible ink with the condemning word--lishenyets--deprived of the right to vote. After that Orest 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. When the Germans occupied Ukraine in 1941 during World War Two and allowed the local newspaper, "New Ukraine," to be printed, Orest wrote 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 the Germans deemed his articles no longer printable. In the summer of 1943 Orest was arrested and sent to a Gestapo concentration camp. While waiting in the Displaced Persons camp, Orest started his newfound freedom as a writer. His writing flourished further in England, which accepted them as refugees. In 1958 he and his wife immigrated to the United States, where they finally found security and freedom. He 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. He wrote, `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 . . .' When Orest's declining health took a turn for the worse in 1980's, he brought the whole collection of his writings to his daughter, Olga Gladky Verro, and asked her to do what she thought would be the best for preserving his works for the future generations.'What follows is a collection of stories that should he heralded as an insight into a period of history too few outside of Russia understand. They are divided in `In Whose Name/', `The Dispossessed,' `I Believe',  `The Enemies of the People', The Humdrum Life in Socialist Paradise,' and `Behind the Iron Curtain.' Most of the stories are brief but pungent, some full of terror, some seething in loathing, some simply about survival under deplorable circumstances, but always not far from the core of each is a beacon of hope form a man who endured, survived and has passed on through his daughter the treasures that came from his head and his heart. Brilliant stories, wondrously served by his daughter, Olga Gladky Verro. Highly Recommended. March 14