Viacheslav Chornovil
Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil was a Ukrainian Soviet dissident, independence activist and politician who was the leader of the People's Movement of Ukraine from 1989 until his death in 1999. He spent a total of fifteen years imprisoned or exiled by the Soviet government for his human rights activism. A People's Deputy of Ukraine from 1990 to 1999, Chornovil was among the first and most prominent anti-communists to hold public office in Ukraine. He twice ran for the presidency of Ukraine; the first time, in 1991, he was defeated by Leonid Kravchuk, while in 1999 he died in a car crash under disputed circumstances.
Chornovil was born in the village of Yerky, in central Ukraine, then under the Soviet Union. A member of the Komsomol from his time in university, he was affiliated with the counter-cultural Sixtiers movement, and was removed from the Komsomol after speaking out against communism. His samvydav, which investigated abuses against intellectuals arrested during the 1965–1966 Soviet crackdown, earned him Western acclaim, as well as a three-year prison sentence in Yakutia. Upon his release, he returned to samvydav and began publishing The Ukrainian Herald, a predecessor to the modern Ukrainian independent press.
In 1972, Chornovil was caught in another purge of intellectuals, and would not be allowed to return to Ukraine until 1985. He spent most of this time incarcerated. While in prison, Chornovil was described by fellow dissident Mikhail Kheifets as "general of the zeks" for his leadership of Ukrainian political prisoners, and recognised as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. His release came as the Soviet government loosened restrictions on free speech as part of perestroika. Chornovil actively engaged in building political opposition to the Communist rule in Ukraine, eventually culminating in the establishment of the People's Movement of Ukraine party and a popular revolution that toppled Communism. Amidst the revolution, Chornovil took office as a member of Ukraine's parliament. He was one of the two main candidates in the 1991 Ukrainian presidential election, though he was defeated by former Communist leader Leonid Kravchuk. Chornovil actively promoted Ukrainian membership in the European Union and opposition to the emergence of the Ukrainian oligarchs.
Chornovil was a controversial figure in his lifetime, and the last months of his life were dominated by a split in the Rukh. His death in a car crash during the 1999 Ukrainian presidential election, during which he was a candidate in opposition to incumbent president Leonid Kuchma, has led to [|conspiracy theories] and several years of investigations and trials, which have neither confirmed nor eliminated assassination as a possibility. He is a popular figure in present-day Ukraine, where he has twice been placed among the top ten most popular Ukrainians and is a symbol of the country's democracy and human rights activism as well as Pro-Europeanism.
Early life and education
Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil was born on 24 December 1937 in the village of Yerky, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to a family of teachers. His father, Maksym Iosypovych Chornovil, was descended from Cossack nobility, while his mother was part of the aristocratic Tereshchenko family. Born and raised during the Great Purge, Viacheslav's childhood was dominated by Soviet repressions; his paternal uncle, Petro Iosypovych, was executed, while his father lived as a fugitive from the law in Ukraine. During World War II and the German occupation of Ukraine the Chornovil family lived in the village of Husakove, where Viacheslav attended school. He later claimed in his autobiography that following the recapture of Husakove by the Soviet Union, his family was expelled from the village. They later lived in Vilkhovets, where they had lived prior to Husakove, and where Viacheslav later graduated from middle school with a gold medal in 1955. Chornovil's tumultuous childhood led his parents to avoid teaching him about Ukrainian nationalism, instead favouring an upbringing where he was educated in communist ideology and taught values such as friendship of peoples and proletarian internationalism.Chornovil enrolled at the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv the same year, studying to become a journalist. At this time he also joined the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The negative response by Kyiv's Russophone population to those who spoke the Ukrainian language disgruntled him and left him with an increased consciousness of his status as a Ukrainian. Like other young Soviet activists of the time, Chornovil was also influenced by the 20th Congress of CPSU in 1956, in which Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech denouncing the rule of Joseph Stalin.
Chornovil's noncomformist views brought him into conflict with the faculty's newspaper, which condemned him for "nonstandard thinking" in 1957. As a result, he was forced to pause his studies and sent to work as an udarnik constructing a blast furnace in the Donbas city of Zhdanov. He also worked as an itinerant editor for the Kyiv Komsomolets newspaper. After a year, he returned to his studies, graduating in 1960 with distinction. His diploma dissertation was on the works of Borys Hrinchenko, a prominent 19th- and early 20th-century Ukrainian writer and independence activist. The same year, he married his first wife, Iryna Brunevets. The two had one son, Andriy, before divorcing in 1962.
Journalistic and party career
Following his graduation, Chornovil became an editor at Lviv Television in July 1960, where he had previously worked as an assistant from January of the same year. He wrote scripts for the channel's youth programming. During this time, Chornovil also took up literary criticism, focusing particularly on the works of Hrinchenko, Taras Shevchenko, and Volodymyr Samiilenko. Some of it also appeared on TV - for example, in 1962 he broadcast features on Mykhailo Stelmakh, Vasyl Chumak and the Young Muse group. During this time, he possibly met and interacted with Zenovii Krasivskyi, who was studying television journalism at the University of Lviv. Much like Chornovil, Krasivskyi would later become a leader of the dissident movement.File:Київська ГЕС.jpg|alt=Aerial photograph of a large hydroelectric power plant|thumb|Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant, where Chornovil worked as a Komsomol secretary from 1963 to 1964
Chornovil left his job at Lviv Television in May 1963 to return to Kyiv, intending to complete his Candidate of Sciences thesis. There, he was the Komsomol secretary for the construction of Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant in nearby Vyshhorod. He simultaneously worked as an editor for the Kyiv-based newspapers Young Guard and Second Reading, and was part of the Artistic Youths' Club, an informal group of intellectuals affiliated with the counter-cultural Sixtiers movement. In June 1963, Chornovil married his second wife, Olena Antoniv, and by 1964, Chornovil's second son, Taras, was born. Chornovil also passed exams for post-graduate courses at the Kyiv Paedagogical Institute in 1964. However, due to his political activity he was denied the right to pursue a Doctor of Sciences degree.
On 9 March 1964, the Soviet Union celebrated the 150th anniversary of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet. The CPSU's official position on Shevchenko, particularly during the Shevchenko Days, emphasised the poet's role in anti-serfdom activities and his resistance to tsarist autocracy. In his speech to the workers of the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Plant, Chornovil departed from the prescribed interpretations by presenting Shevchenko as a uniquely Ukrainian hero. Chornovil implored the audience to interpret Kobzar, the poet's main collection of works, as a manifestation of "trembling love for the disgraced and despised native land". He also suggested that Shevchenko's works showed that "every system built on the oppression of man by man, on contempt for human dignity and inalienable human rights, on the suppression of free, human thoughts, on the oppression of one nation by another nation, and in whatever new form it may hide is against human nature, and must be destroyed." Historian Yaroslav Seko interprets this speech as typical of the Sixtiers movement, but wrote that at the time, Ivan Dziuba, writer of Internationalism or Russification?, and fellow dissident Yevhen Sverstiuk had far more influence.
On 8 August 1965, during the opening of a monument to Shevchenko in the village of Sheshory, Chornovil gave a speech with strongly anti-communist overtones. As a result, he was fired from his Komsomol job. Following his firing, Chornovil wrote several letters to the leadership of the Komsomol in an unsuccessful effort to demonstrate his innocence.
Dissident and human rights activist
1965–1966 purge and aftermath
1965 marked the beginning of a series of mass arrests of Sixtier intellectuals as relatively liberal Nikita Khrushchev was removed and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. In protest of the arrests, Chornovil, as well as Dziuba and student Vasyl Stus, held a demonstration inside the Kyiv cinema, which disrupted the 4 September premiere of Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Chornovil shouted "Whoever is against tyranny, stand up!" Later recollections of this event by Chornovil and Dziuba differed significantly. Dziuba later claimed that he did not recall Chornovil being present or even aware of the event. Chornovil, on the other hand, said that he and Dziuba had independently come to the conclusion that a public protest against the purge was necessary, and that after Dziuba's attempted speech was drowned out by the audience, Chornovil continued the protest by shouting that phrase. Seko contrasts Dziuba's more cautious, informative speech with Chornovil's more confrontational approach.On 31 September of that year, Chornovil's Lviv flat was searched by the KGB, the Soviet security agency. 190 books were confiscated, including the Galician–Volhynian Chronicle, the Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, monographs and articles by authors Panteleimon Kulish, Volodymyr Antonovych, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, Dmytro Doroshenko, Ivan Krypiakevych, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, as well as history books about the First World War and interwar period. Two later raids by the KGB on his flat, on 3 August 1967 and 12 January 1972, led to further confiscations of literature, though both were of lesser size than during the September 1965 raid.
Later that year, with the purges continuing, Chornovil was called to give evidence at the trials of Sixtiers Mykhaylo Osadchy, Bohdan and Mykhailo Horyn, and. Chornovil refused, and as a result was fired from his editor position at Second Reading. He turned to samvydav, publishing Court of Law or a Return of the Terror?, which questioned the legality and constitutionality of the Sixtiers' sentences, in May 1966. On 8 July he was charged under article 179 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR for his refusal to give testimony at the Sixtiers' trials, and sentenced to three months of hard labour with 20% of salary withheld. In this period, he worked various jobs, including as a technician in expeditions of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to the Carpathian Mountains, as an advertiser for KyivKnyhTorh, and as a teacher at the Lviv Regional Centre for Protection of Nature.
In 1967 Chornovil published his second work of samvydav. Known as Woe from Wit: Portraits of Twenty "Criminals", it included information on those arrested during the 1965–1966 crackdown and violations of the law committed by Soviet authorities during their arrests. Chornovil sent the work to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, the Writers' Union of Ukraine, and the Union of Artists of Ukraine. On 21 October 1967 it was read during a broadcast of United States-backed Radio Liberty, and it was professionally printed by the end of the year. Chornovil's samvydav was published in the West in 1969 under the title of The Chornovil Papers, drawing attention to the purge at a time when public consciousness was focused largely on the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial. Chornovil's work established him as one of the leading figures among Ukrainian activists at the time, and, along with Dziuba's Internationalism or Russification?, demonstrated to those in the rest of Europe that Ukrainians were not fully accepting Soviet rule.
In addition to Woe from Wit, Chornovil also wrote complaints to the head of the Ukrainian KGB and the Prosecutor General of the Ukrainian SSR about investigators' violations of the law during the arrests of Sixtiers. On 5 May 1967, he was summoned to the office of E. Starykov, Deputy Prosecutor General of Lviv Oblast, who informed him of the existence of article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. The law, which forbade defaming the Soviet system or government, was known to exist but did not figure on the books, so it was only during that meeting that Chornovil could have officially learned that he might have done something illegal. By that time, he already had a reputation of a troublemaker within the KGB.