Viaceslav Ciornovil

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Viaceslav

Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil (Ukrainian: В'ячеслав Максимович Чорновіл; 24 December 1937 – 25 March 1999) 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…Citește mai mult

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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…Citește mai mult

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Journalistic and party career Following his graduation, Chornovil became an editor at Lviv Television (now Suspilne Lviv) 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. 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…Citește mai mult

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1965–1966 purge and aftermath 1965 marked the beginning of a series of mass arrests of Sixtier intellectuals as the 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 Ukraine 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 30 September of that year, Chornovil's Lviv flat was searched by the KGB, the Soviet security agency. 190 pieces of literature were confiscated, including the Galician–Volhynian Chronicle, the Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, monographs and articles by authors…Citește mai mult

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Exile to Yakutia Chornovil was arrested in August 1967 in response to Woe from Wit and charged under article 187–1. Another search of his flat resulted in the seizure of a copy of Woe from Wit, as well as Valentyn Moroz's samvydav booklet Report from the Beria Reserve, which served as the basis for the libel charges against him. Chornovil chose to deliver written, rather than spoken, testimony, as the latter option at the time carried the risks of having one's arguments distorted and manipulated during interrogations. Chornovil argued his innocence, as well as that of those who had been arrested during the purge, saying, Representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were arrested in August and September 1965 in Kyiv, Lviv, and other cities of Ukraine. They were charged with anti-Soviet propaganda, and the majority of them were convicted in 1965 in closed court processes. I personally knew several of those arrested and convicted; I never noticed anything anti-Soviet in their actions and words, but, on the contrary, I saw sincere concern for the state of Ukrainian culture, the Ukrainian language, for the restoration of normal socialist law and socialist democracy, which were trampled during the years of the tyranny of…Citește mai mult

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Life between arrests (1969–1972) Chornovil was released as part of a general amnesty in 1969. He struggled to find a stable job, working variously at a weather station in Zakarpattia Oblast, as an excavator during an archaeological expedition to Odesa Oblast, and as an employee at Sknyliv railway station. In September 1969, he also met Valentyn Moroz, another dissident who had been imprisoned as part of the 1965–1966 purge. The two quickly formed a friendship and paid frequent visits to each other, as they both sought to strengthen the dissident movement and further confront government abuses. During this time period, Chornovil, alongside Svitlychnyi and Sverstiuk, also led a donations campaign to prevent Moroz (unable to find employment due to his criminal record) from falling into poverty. The campaign collected 3,500 rubles (equivalent to 3,663,000 Russian rubles in 2023). He organised further donation campaigns for other formerly-imprisoned dissidents, such as Sviatoslav Karavanskyi and Nina Strokata. In January 1970 Chornovil launched a new samvydav newspaper, known as The Ukrainian Herald. The newspaper contained other samvydav publications, as well as information on what he considered Great Russian chauvinism and anti-Ukrainian sentiment. It detailed human rights abuses by the Soviet government and the police,…Citește mai mult

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Ukrainian Herald trial Another wide-reaching crackdown on Ukrainian intelligentsia began in January 1972, sparked by the arrest of the Belgian-Ukrainian Yaroslav Dobosh, an Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists member tasked with smuggling samvydav out of the Soviet Union. Chornovil was arrested on 12 January following a Vertep celebration at the Lviv flat of Olena Antoniv. He was charged under articles 62 (anti-Soviet agitation) and 187-1 (slander against the Soviet Union) of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. The Vertep ceremony had been organised as a protest against Soviet cultural and religious policy, additionally serving as a fundraising effort for The Ukrainian Herald and for political prisoners and their families. It raised 250 rubles (equivalent to 251,000 Russian rubles in 2023), which were used to assist those who had been arrested during the crackdown instead. Chornovil was imprisoned at the KGB pre-trial detention centre in Lviv, alongside Iryna Kalynets, Ivan Gel, Stefaniia Shabatura, Mykhaylo Osadchy and Yaroslav Dashkevych. Chornovil's trial took place behind closed doors. Prosecutors argued that Chornovil was responsible for the content of The Ukrainian Herald, which allegation he denied. During the investigation, other dissident activists refused to give evidence of Chornovil's role in the paper; the government relied…Citește mai mult

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Imprisonment in Mordovia (1972-1978) After his conviction, Chornovil was sent to a corrective labour colony in the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. From 1973 to 1978 he was variously imprisoned at two camps; ZhKh-385/17-A and ZhKh-385/3. Despite his imprisonment, Chornovil continued to actively lead prisoners' protests, leading him to be nicknamed "General of the zeks" by author and dissident Mikhail Kheifets. He was separated from other prisoners and placed under increased surveillance after refusing to obey any of the rules which prisoners were meant to follow. B. Azernikov and L. Kaminskyi, two refuseniks who were imprisoned at the same camp as Chornovil, also described him as having "great authority among all political prisoners," and wrote an open letter to global society urging his release after they left the Soviet Union in 1975. Chornovil's activities continued to draw international attention during his imprisonment. He was recognised as a prisoner of conscience by human rights group Amnesty International, and awarded the Nicholas Tomalin Prize for Journalism, recognising writers whose freedom of expression is threatened, in 1975. Around this time, Chornovil also began to smuggle his writings out of prison, and used the opportunity as a means to continue to demonstrate Soviet human…Citește mai mult

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Return to Yakutia (1978-1980) Chornovil was released from prison and again sent to Chappanda in early 1978. There, he continued to write about the status of political prisoners and human rights within the Soviet Union. He also continued to get involved in the conflict between Moroz and Shumuk; in a letter to Moroz's wife Raisa, he called for a public "boycott" of Shumuk, while arguing that Moroz was being inflexible. Moroz's nine-year imprisonment had seriously impacted his mental and emotional state; Chornovil characterised him as self-aggrandising and narcissistic. During his exile, Chornovil's friendship with Moroz came to an end as the former sought to distance himself from the latter, owing to the conflict with Shumuk. During his exile, Chornovil continued to send letters to the Soviet authorities. In a 10 April 1978 letter to the Procurator General of the Soviet Union, he criticised the fact that the theoretically wide-reaching rights granted by the Soviet constitution were absent in reality, asking "Why do Soviet laws exist?". He also wrote a samvydav pamphlet, entitled "Only One Year", and was admitted to PEN International that year. At the time, he was working as a labourer on a sovkhoz farm in Nyurba, where he…Citește mai mult

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Wrongful conviction for attempted rape (1980-1985) Chornovil was arrested yet again on 8, 9, or 15 April 1980 on charges of attempted rape. The charges are frequently described in Ukrainian historiography as fabricated, and were likewise referred to as such by the American Time magazine. Several other leading dissidents, including Mykola Horbal, Yaroslav Lesiv, and Yosyf Zisels, received similar bogus accusations around the time. Myroslav Marynovych, a member of the UHG, quoted a KGB officer as saying that "we will not make any more martyrs" by arresting individuals exclusively on political charges. Chornovil's arrest, as well as those of several other dissidents from Ukraine and throughout the Soviet Union, took place amidst a meeting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Madrid, and Time stated that some observers believed the arrests were done to demonstrate Soviet umbrage towards the Helsinki Accords. Following his arrest, Chornovil declared a hunger strike, characterising his arrest and those of others as contrary to Leninist ideals and an effort to stifle dissent in the leadup to the 1980 Summer Olympics. He was moved to a prison camp in Tabaga, Yakutia, where he was placed into a cell smeared with vomit and faeces.…Citește mai mult

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Return to Ukraine By the time Chornovil returned to Ukraine, the country had changed dramatically. First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Petro Shelest, a moderate, was removed and replaced by hardliner Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a member of Brezhnev's Dnipropetrovsk Mafia. Shcherbytsky dramatically escalated Russification policies and a crackdown on Ukrainian culture. Partially as a result of Shcherbytsky's policies, by the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982, fewer books had been published in Ukrainian under Brezhnev's leadership than during the rule of Joseph Stalin. This decline in Ukrainian culture, along with the government's slow response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, soured public opinion and led Chornovil (alongside other Ukrainian dissidents) to begin building a unified front against communist rule. Despite Gorbachev's reforms, the Soviet government continued to intervene against Chornovil and other dissidents. 1987 saw the state launch a smear campaign against Chornovil, in part due to internal dissent over Shcherbytsky's Russification efforts and in part due to pressure from Moscow. The Ukrainian Herald, which relaunched in August 1987 and published essays from prominent opposition-minded intellectuals, attracted state-backed accusations of being supported by "foreign subversive security agencies". Around the same time, Chornovil gave an interview to The Ukrainian Weekly, a…Citește mai mult

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Revolution The Revolutions of 1989 sweeping Central and Eastern Europe throughout 1988 and 1989 greatly interested Chornovil, particularly in their adherence to non-violence. Their success would lead Chornovil to abandon his public support for Marxism–Leninism in favour of anti-communism, which he had supported in private since the mid-1960s but avoided publicly stating in an effort to appear as a moderate. Other Ukrainian intellectuals, too, began to back anti-communism, and the Writers' Union of Ukraine began to develop a popular front in late 1988, justifying it as encouraging the populace to become more active in local government and take a greater interest in economic concerns. Chornovil additionally supported the spread of Memorial, a human rights movement in the Soviet Union, to Ukraine, writing a positive letter to the presidium of the group's Ukrainian chapter upon its founding in March 1989. On 18 July 1989, a union-wide wave of mining strikes reached the coal miners in the city of Makiivka, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The employees first demanded improved worker conditions, better wages and increased social protections. From the outset, however, several Donbas miners had also viewed the Ukrainian independence movement with sympathy as a potential path to self-governance.…Citește mai mult

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Chornovil in power The Supreme Soviet election, the first multi-party vote in Soviet Ukraine's history, was held on 4 March 1990. It was marked by high turnout, with 85% of registered voters participating. In most of Ukraine, the result was beneficial for the communists, with 90% of previously elected deputies being re-elected and 373 of 450 deputies belonging to the Communist Party. In all three Galician oblasts, however, the Democratic Bloc, a Rukh-led coalition, won the majority of seats. Ivan Plyushch, who was elected as Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, wrote in 2010 that the Communist majority was unable to command the same influence at a parliamentary level as the Democratic Bloc was. Chornovil was elected as a Democratic Bloc deputy from the city of Lviv's Shevchenkivskyi District by an absolute majority, winning 68.60% of all votes against seven other candidates. Within the Supreme Soviet, Chornovil was among the leaders of the Democratic Bloc's radical wing. Chornovil was also elected Chairman of the Lviv Oblast Council in April 1990, making him the first non-communist head of government of Lviv Oblast. He quickly adapted from life as a dissident to politics, moving to the right and becoming one of the…Citește mai mult

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Declaration of independence and presidential election The Supreme Soviet passed a law on 5 July 1991 establishing the office of President, with its holder to be determined by election. Hardliners opposed to Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union launched a coup d'état on 19 August 1991. At the time of the coup, Chornovil was in the city of Zaporizhzhia on a business trip. Upon learning that a putsch had occurred, he immediately returned to Kyiv and began calling for an emergency session of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR; he also banned the Communist Party's activities in Lviv Oblast. In the Supreme Soviet, the deputies of the Democratic Bloc began to advocate for Ukrainian independence, arguing that Ukraine was a part of Europe and not the Soviet Union. Following the failure of the coup, the Supreme Soviet adopted the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine on 24 August 1991. The campaign for the presidential election officially began on 1 September 1991. The National-Democratic camp was fractious, with three major candidates (Chornovil, Yukhnovskyi and Levko Lukianenko), while Kravchuk was already a well-established figure as the incumbent, if de facto, head of state. The race soon narrowed to an effective two-man campaign…Citește mai mult

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Party governance Following the presidential election, fissures developed within Rukh over the future of the group. One faction, led by Drach and Mykhailo Horyn, sought to dissolve the organisation and support Kravchuk's nation-building efforts, while Chornovil and his supporters sought to reformulate the organisation into a party to support Chornovil's future presidential ambitions. Several members threw their support behind Yukhnovskyi or Lukianenko, treating Rukh's endorsement of Chornovil as a mere recommendation, contributing to further intraparty tensions. At the Third Congress of Rukh on 28 February 1992, a split in the organisation was briefly averted. Drach, Horyn and Chornovil were elected as co-chairs of Rukh as a compromise between the two factions. Nonetheless, the Ukrainian Republican Party and the Democratic Party of Ukraine, which had formed out of Rukh, decided to cooperate with Kravchuk. Ultimately Chornovil's faction prevailed at the Fourth Congress in December 1992 as Rukh was reorganised as a centre-right political party under his leadership.

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Crimean issue Shortly after the Soviet Union fell apart, Crimea's ethnically-Russian population sought to break away from Ukraine and unify with Russia. On 5 May 1992, Crimea sparked tensions as it unilaterally declared its independence from Ukraine. The flag of Ukraine was replaced with that of Russia, and a wave of repressions against the indigenous Crimean Tatar population began. Chornovil, who had maintained an interest in Crimean Tatars since his imprisonment, called for the Verkhovna Rada (independent Ukraine's successor of the Supreme Soviet) to cancel Crimea's declaration of independence and demand new elections to its parliament. During the crisis that lasted for several years, he was among the hawkish politicians on the issue. By 1993, Russia waded into the Crimean crisis. Valentin Agafonov, deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, pledged to recognise Crimea if their independence was confirmed by referendum. In June, the city of Sevastopol additionally applied to join the Russian Federation. Leading pro-Russian activist Yuriy Meshkov arranged an army composed of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and seized control of police and media buildings with supporters. At one point, the Ukrainian government considered selling the nuclear arsenal that it inherited from the Soviet Union in order…Citește mai mult