Vyacheslav Chornovil: a biography (04/04/99)

Vyacheslav Chornovil: a biography

Vyacheslav Chornovil was born on December 24, 1937, in the village of Vilkhivets, Zvenyhorod region of the Cherkasy Oblast, into a family of teachers.

He studied journalism at the University of Kyiv and was a member of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League). After graduating in 1960 he worked in television and newspapers in Lviv and Kyiv. He also worked as a literary critic.

His "career" as a dissident began in 1965, when he was assigned to cover the trials of several Ukrainian intellectuals and was outraged to observe total disregard of Soviet law. He himself was summoned to appear as a witness at one of those closed trials, but he refused, knowing full well what the cost of such a stand would be. He was arrested and sentenced in July 1966 to three months of forced labor.

Early the next year he documented the trials of 20 Ukrainian intellectuals and sent the collection to Soviet authorities to protest the illegalities he had witnessed. He said of his decision to document the trials of the 1960s: "Not to disclose my own attitude toward what is taking place would mean to become a taciturn participant in the wanton disregard of socialist legality."

The result: he was charged with "slandering the Soviet state" and in November 1967 was sentenced to three years of imprisonment. He was released 18 months later under a general Soviet amnesty in observance of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet regime.

Meanwhile, his documentation of those trials was smuggled to the West, where it was published in Ukrainian as "Lykho z Rozumu (The Misfortune of Intellect) and later in English translation as "The Chornovil Papers." The volume earned its author the prestigious Tomalin Prize awarded by the Times of London.

Mr. Chornovil's third arrest came on January 12, 1972, during the wave of arrests that swept Ukraine. He was sentenced more than 13 months later to six years of imprisonment and three years of internal exile on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" for his involvement with the Ukrainian samvydav (underground publications), specifically, his editorship of The Ukrainian Herald.

In 1975, in yet another act of protest against the Soviet regime, Mr. Chornovil renounced his Soviet citizenship and announced his wish to emigrate to Canada.

In the autumn of 1979, while serving his term of internal exile, Mr. Chornovil join the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, which was founded in 1976 to monitor implementation of the 1975 Helsinki Accords - especially its human rights provisions.

Toward the end of his second term, in April 1980, he was re-arrested and sentenced the following June on trumped-up charges of attempted rape to five years of strict-regimen labor camp.

Calling himself a "hostage of the Politburo," and a "victim of internal terrorism," Mr. Chornovil wrote in February 1981 that he saw no way out for himself but to demand permission to emigrate from the USSR.

In a letter to the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union he wrote: "That I became a victim of a planned, broad-based operation to smother freedom of thought is also attested to by the fact that a whole group of participants in the Helsinki movement, most notably in Ukraine, was sentenced on false charges of hooliganism, resisting authority, attempted rape and other criminal acts." He called these acts "political gangsterism."

Mr. Chornovil completed his term in 1985, and once he was released continued to serve as editor of The Ukrainian Herald and became active in various unofficial organizations.

He was a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union (which evolved from the Ukrainian Helsinki Group), the Memorial Society and the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society, and was director of the UNVIS information service (Ukrainska Nezalezhna Vydavnycho-Informatyvna Spilka).

During 1989, a time of renewed ferment in the USSR, a number of activists became victims of so-called "administrative terror" that included fines, 10- to 15-day prison terms, and other harassment for their activities; Mr. Chornovil spent 15 days in a Lviv prison in late May on charges of "petty hooliganism."

In 1989 he became one of the founding members of the Popular Movement of Ukraine for Perebudova, known as Rukh. At its second congress in 1990 Rukh declared that its goal no longer was simple perebudova (perestroika), but renewal of the independent statehood of Ukraine. The citizens' organization was later transformed into the Rukh Party and Mr. Chornovil was elected its leader. He also served as editor of the Rukh newspaper Chas-Time.

In March 1990 he was elected a people's deputy of the Ukrainian SSR and to the Lviv Oblast Council. The next month he was elected chairman of the Lviv Oblast Council, and later was elected to head the Galician Assembly, which comprised three western oblast councils, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil, the most independence-minded regions of Ukraine.

Mr. Chornovil ran unsuccessfully in independent Ukraine's first presidential election in 1991. He was re-elected to the Verkhovna Rada twice, in 1994 and 1998.

On February 12 of this year, Mr. Chornovil was ousted as head of the Rukh faction in the Verkhovna Rada, and a little more than two weeks later was removed as party chairman during an extraordinary party congress. Then, on March 7, a regularly scheduled congress of Rukh reasserted Mr. Chornovil's position as its leader.

After Mr. Chornovil's tragic death in an automobile accident at just before midnight on March 25, his faction of Rukh, which dubbed itself Rukh-I, elected Hennadii Udovenko as its leader.

Mr. Chornovil leaves behind his wife, Atena Pashko, sister, Valentyna Chornovil, and two sons, Andrii and Taras.

Vyacheslav Chornovil will be remembered, above all else, as a "champion of independent Ukraine." Rukh member Mykhailo Kosiv observed: "He was a man of ideas. You could agree with his ideas or not ... but all his life he lived and fought for a single idea."

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