Turning the pages back... March 28, 1999 (03/26/00)

Turning the pages back...

March 28, 1999

It was a year ago that Vyacheslav Chornovil, a Verkhovna Rada national deputy, long-time leader of the national-democratic Rukh Party and a former Soviet political prisoner persecuted for his human and national rights activity, died in a car accident. News of his tragic death in the early morning hours of March 26, 1999, reached The Weekly as the paper was going to press that morning.

The catastrophe occurred just before midnight near the village of Horodysche, on the Boryspil-Zolotonoshna highway close to Boryspil International Airport (located outside of Kyiv), when the Toyota in which the Rukh leader was traveling collided with a Kamaz tractor-trailer truck. Mr. Chornovil and his driver, who was not identified, were killed instantly. Mr. Chornovil's press secretary, Dmytro Ponomarchuk, was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Traveling in a separate vehicle that was following the Chornovil car was former Minister of Foreign Affairs Hennadii Udovenko, whom Mr. Chornovil's Rukh Party was supporting as a presidential candidate in the October elections. The car in which Mr. Udovenko was traveling was not involved in the collision.

Mr. Chornovil, who was born in Cherkasy Oblast in 1937, spent many years in the Soviet gulag for his outspoken views in support of Ukrainian national aspirations. The human and national rights advocate served three terms for "anti-Soviet activity."

His first came after he spoke out about the 1965-1966 secret trials of leading Ukrainian intellectuals and compiled eyewitness documentation of the proceedings. The result was a book, "Lykho z Rozumu," (The Misfortune of Intellect), published in English as "The Chornovil Papers."

In 1972, as the editor of the underground samvydav journal Ukrainian Herald (Ukrainskyi Visnyk), he was imprisoned once again during the wave of arrests that swept Ukraine. He became a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1979. In 1980, while still serving his previous term, he was rearrested and sentenced yet again by Soviet authorities. In 1988 he became a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union.

With the beginning of glasnost, Mr. Chornovil became a key founder of Popular Movement of Ukraine (Rukh), an organization that called for Ukraine's independence, and is considered a primary catalyst in the social upheaval that consumed the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was elected to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine in 1990 and re-elected in 1994 and 1998. In 1991 he was a candidate for president of Ukraine.

On February 12, 1999, Mr. Chornovil was ousted by fellow national deputies as head of the Rukh faction in Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and 16 days later was removed as Rukh Party chairman in what he described as an illegitimate Rukh Congress. A week later, however, a separate regularly scheduled congress of Rukh reasserted Mr. Chornovil's position at the top of the organization (then dubbed Rukh-I) he had led for nearly a decade.

Tens of thousands of people bid a final farewell to Mr. Chornovil on March 29 in an emotional display of respect for the former political dissident and Rukh leader. As Ukraine observed a national day of mourning, people from all over the country traveled to the nation's capital to join with tens of thousands more Kyivans in what many consider the largest funeral this city has ever seen.

Officially, Ukraine was represented by President Leonid Kuchma, who arrived with Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Oleksander Tkachenko to pay his respects. Official delegations from the United States, led by Ambassador Steven Pifer, and Poland, which included members of the Polish Parliament, also paid their respects and offered condolences to the bereaved.

Mr. Chornovil's fellow former dissidents were present in abundance, among them Lev Lukianenko, Ivan Hel, Yurii Badzio, the Horyn brothers and Iryna Kalynets.

The common people lining the streets - some 50,000 turned out - best expressed the love that the Rukh leader evoked in a large portion of the populace. They tossed flowers and sang hymns as the casket proceeded up Volodymyrska Street from the Teacher's Building (once the headquarters of the Central Rada) to St. Volodymyr Sobor, where Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Kyiv Patriarchate led the funeral service, and afterwards along the route from the cathedral to Baikove Cemetery, the historic final resting place of many of Ukraine's cultural, religious and political elite.

Then, as the casket was lowered into the ground, the army orchestra struck the first notes of the Ukrainian national anthem and a seven-gun salute went off in honor of the man about whom Mykhailo Horyn had said just moments before: "History will show that without him today's independent Ukraine would not have been possible."

Sources: "Chornovil killed in car accident," by Roman Woronowycz (with Roma Hadzewycz), The Ukrainian Weekly, March 28, 1999, Vol. LXVII, No. 13; "Ukraine mourns Chornovil," by Roman Woronowycz, The Ukrainian Weekly, April 4, 1999, Vol. LXVII, No. 14.

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