Turning the pages back... June 4, 2000 (06/01/03)

Turning the pages back...

June 4, 2000

In 2000, Roman Woronowycz of our Kyiv Press Bureau wrote a feature about Myroslav Medvid, the Ukrainian sailor, who had jumped ship 15 years earlier near New Orleans, and thanks to U.S. bungling, was forced to return to Soviet custody.

"In 1985 the Medvid affair transfixed the Ukrainian American community and much of America," wrote Mr. Woronowycz. "His plight caused anger, demonstrations and, finally, tears. ... Today Myroslav Medvid is alive and well and living in Ukraine, a man changed by the years - but most dramatically by his tribulations in the United States. He is a parish priest of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church [he was ordained in December 1990] with a wife and children living in the city of Chervonohrad, about an hour's drive north of Lviv."

The Rev. Medvid agreed to The Weekly's requests for his first exclusive interview with a Western publication. He said he felt no bitterness, neither toward the U.S. officials who sent him packing in 1985, nor towards the Soviet henchmen who intimidated and roughed him up during and after his return. In retrospect, he was thankful, he explained, because what he suffered had turned him to God and religion. "What I lived through was my first step to the Lord." He then added, "I would like to meet the person who decided that I must be returned to tell him that I forgive him."

The young priest said he likens his travails to the biblical parable of the wayward son, who returns to his father's home after a long and difficult time seeking his own fortune. Before New Orleans he was hardly a spiritual person, even though his grandmother tried to instill in him a Catholic base. He was a member of the Communist Youth League, but a disaffected one, who belonged because that was the only path to opportunity for a person with any ambition whatsoever. Even then he held strong Ukrainian nationalist beliefs, he had learned to conceal them.

The Rev. Medvid was reluctant to give details of what he experienced on the Marshal Koniev as it waited in the Gulf of Mexico for permission to leave port while U.S. officials decided what to do with the Soviet seaman who jumped ship in U.S. waters. He said he did not know whether he was drugged, even though U.S. psychiatrists concluded after meeting with him a day after his return that he was probably under the influence of halidol and thorazine, two strong mind-altering drugs. As for signing a statement that he wanted to return to the USSR, he said he did so willingly, explaining that his mental state after his ordeal was such that he saw no other recourse. "I understood what was going on and why."

Source: "Myroslav Medvid sees his 1985 ordeal as a positive life-changing experience," by Roman Woronowycz, Kyiv Press Bureau, The Ukrainian Weekly, June 4, 2000, Vol. LXVIII, No. 23.

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