At first glance, one might think this is a folk song about the end of deportations to Siberia. However, it is in fact an original composition, created by a local resident of Zastavna well known in the area — the folklorist Maria Havryliuk. Interestingly, the song was not based on Havryliuk’s own deportation experience but rather on stories she heard from a neighbor who had been forcibly sent to Siberia in the 1940s and 1950s. The way this song came into being reflects a common pattern in which experiences and events significant to an entire community are prompted to be voiced, interpreted, and endowed with meaning by that community. Consequently, such narratives are often adopted by the community’s “thought leaders” for creative expression — even when the events described were not part of their personal experience.

One such significant event was the mass deportation of Ukrainians from Western Ukraine between June 1944 and December 1952, carried out by the Soviet authorities. Those targeted for deportation primarily included the families of OUN-UPA soldiers, individuals who assisted the armed struggle or merely sympathized with the Resistance Movement, as well as the families of so-called “kulaks” and others who resisted collectivization.

Special settlements were located—or intended to be established—in remote regions of the USSR, primarily in Siberia. The sense of being in a “faraway foreign land” was intensified by several accompanying circumstances: these settlements were situated as far as possible from railways, cities, villages, factories, collective farms—any traces of human cultural presence. The areas differed entirely in climate, landscape, ecosystem, and economic structure, and were often uninhabited or sparsely populated. Those deported to special settlements were most often women, children, and the elderly—that is, members of the community who rarely, if ever, had left their homes. All of this radically transformed the lives of the deportees and became deeply etched in collective memory and oral tradition.

A new wave of circulating stories about deportation—stories that reinforced one another and continued to shape shared meanings of the deportation experience—emerged with the return of those few who had managed to survive the Siberian special settlements. At the same time, folk songs about deportation continued to exist in parallel. They encouraged new authorial endeavors, set parameters shaped by oral folk traditions, and offered melodies familiar to the entire community. It is important to emphasize that the creative “mastery” of Siberia by Ukrainians has a long history. Beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, the tsarist authorities of Muscovy continued the forced resettlement of Ukrainians (Rendiuk 2019, 10–17), during which vivid images of lost homes, arduous journeys, foreign lands, hunger, cold, exhausting labor, longing for the homeland, and death far from it were developed in oral verbal culture. The new wave of creative expression about deportation in the 1940s–1960s—brutal, rapid, and unprecedented in scale—is primarily associated with a modern rethinking of the “foreign land” in the twentieth century, both as a physical and a spiritual space from which Ukrainians “were to evict Ukraine” (Vronska 2021).

Memoirs of the deportees testify that composing songs about deportation was a common practice. These songs helped ease the hardships of the long journey to Siberia and life in the special settlements, while also preserving the memory of these experiences within the collective consciousness after the deportees’ return. Although such songs often had a specific author, they were frequently created collectively and quickly adopted by many, which made them closely resemble their folklore counterparts.

In her song about the deportation to Siberia, Maria Havryliuk skillfully captures the folk manner of songwriting, both in content and in form. She essentially annotates the central episodes of the memories her neighbor shared with her—memories that undoubtedly echoed the experiences of others who endured deportation and later returned (for source comparisons, see Soviet Deportations to Siberia in the Late 1940s: Testimony (Радянські депортації у Сибір кінця 1940-х: Свідчення); “Get Together, You’ll Go to Siberia”: Testimony of Post-War Soviet Deportations («Збирайтесь, поїдете на Сибір»: Свідчення повоєнних радянських депортацій)). The verse-song form, by its very nature, condenses the core meanings circulating in oral recollections, creating a strophically structured and rhythmically organized index of the event’s key motifs. Maria constructs just such an index, recalling above all the arduous journey to Siberia, the cold and hunger in a foreign land, the inhuman living conditions and abuses by the authorities, as well as death far from home and the inability to honor the dead with proper burial rites. The representation of these experiences sometimes almost verbatim reproduces folkloric models. For instance, she incorporates into her lyrics the traditional formula “neither eat nor drink,” which frequently appears in folk songs about life in a foreign land: “They do not give either eat or drink there, / They force you to do hard work” (Novytskyi, 2009, 122). The motif of bones scattered across the field is also familiar from the duma: “His body is Christian, but his bones are scattered across a clean field” (Dumy, 2019, 255). In keeping with the imagery of folklore, the lost paradise—so often evoked in stories and in both authorial and traditional songs about eviction—is contrasted with a vision of hell (Kuzmenko, 2018, 419, 514).

Compositionally, the text is framed by two key motifs: the farewell to one’s native land in the opening stanza and the appeal to God for intercession in the closing one. This structure reflects traditional folk song logic, which typically establishes a narrative framework for songs about leaving one’s homeland. The farewell to Bukovyna in the first stanza continues the soldier-recruit song tradition of the 18th–19th centuries, many of which begin with parting words to parents and native soil (Kuzmenko, 2018, 389–390). This opening model reappears in 20th-century works as well. The motif of farewell resonates in emigrant songs — “Bukovyna, Bukovyna, from a distant land, / Be healthy, Bukovyna, for I am leaving” (Pastukh, Kharchyshyn, 464) — and in Ostarbeiter texts: “Farewell, dear village, / Farewell, Ukraine, / Farewell, green garden, / And all my family” (Kushnir, 124–125). The final stanza’s appeal to God, a device dating back to the composition of the duma, likewise demonstrates the continuity and influence of folkloric models.