Turning the pages back...

November 22, 1984

Just as it is a country's historical duty to know both its heroes and executioners, it is Ukraine's peculiar historical lot to also have its dull, grey life-sapping functionaries to remember.

Oleksii Vatchenko was virtually a prototype of the Stalinist and Brezhnevite hack. He was born in Yelyzaveto-Kamianka in central Ukraine on February 25, 1914, and after graduating from Dnipropetrovsk University in 1938, he worked as a teacher and then as an "education official" in the city's administration.

A protégé of Leonid Brezhnev and a close associate of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, in the 1950s he plodded upward through the Communist Party of Ukraine hierarchy to the positions of first secretary of Khmelnytskyi (1959-1963), then first secretary for the rural Dnipropetrovsk region (1963-1964) and secured membership in the CPU's Central Committee in 1960, and on the Cherkasy (1964-1965) and Dnipropetrovsk (1965-1967) oblast committees.

In 1966, he gained a foothold in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and exercised a more notably nefarious influence. In 1968, Vatchenko initiated the campaign to have Oles Honchar's novel "Sobor" banned because of its "bourgeois nationalist" content.

In 1971-1972 he helped engineer the downfall of CPU First Secretary Petro Shelest, and thus the rise of Scherbytsky. For his pains, in 1976 Vatchenko was promoted to the posts of president of the Ukrainian SSR's Supreme Soviet and vice president of the USSR's Supreme Soviet.

He filled them, vacuously, until his death in Kyiv on November 22, 1984.

Source: "Vatchenko, Oleksii," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 22, 1998, No. 47, Vol. LXVI

| Home Page |