SHEVCHENKO ANNIVERSARY: The death at Tarasova Hora (03/09/03)

SHEVCHENKO ANNIVERSARY: The death at Tarasova Hora

by Orysia Paszczak Tracz

We never knew a thing about it. Even in Ukraine no one knew, it being 1978 and all. Only after independence did an article appear in Literaturna Ukraina, on February 20, 1992. And the full story came out as one chapter of the book "Sviatynia: Naukovo-Istorychnyi Litopys Tarasovoyi Hory" (Shrine: an Academic-Historical Chronicle of Taras' Hill," Kyiv: Rodovid, 1998) by Zinayida Tarakhan-Bereza, a researcher at the Shevchenko Museum in Kaniv.

During the night of January 21-22, 1978, a man set himself afire at the foot of Taras Shevchenko's grave at the museum preserve in Kaniv, on Chernecha Hora (Hill). By early morning, the militia and secret police had secured the site, and had ordered the few authorities involved to strict silence about the event. All the thousands of hand-written leaflets (almost all of them) that the man had strewn about the gravesite and the whole hillside preserve had been confiscated and destroyed.

The leaflets read: "Protest against the Russian occupation of Ukraine! Protest against the Russification of the Ukrainian nation! Long live the Independent Sovereign Ukrainian State! Soviet, but not Russian. Ukraine for Ukrainians! On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine by the Central Rada. January 22, 1918 - January 22, 1978. As a sign of protest, Hirnyk Oleksa of Kalush self-immolated. Only in this manner can one protest in the Soviet Union!?"

He was Oleksa Mykolayovych Hirnyk, born in Bohorodchany, living in Kalush. The investigation showed that he had doused himself with gasoline, lit the fire, and then stabbed himself in the abdomen. The official decision was that this was a suicide. But, as Tarakhan-Bereza writes, Hirnyk could have taken his own life any place, not so far from his home. He was not a drunk, nor deathly ill from cancer, nor insane, as the local authorities wanted the record to show.

As was later revealed, this act was the result of long, meticulous planning on Hirnyk's part. It was a clearly calculated, final, desperate political protest against Russian rule of Ukraine. As Tarakhan-Bereza relates, Hirnyk was not a famous government or community activist, nor a renowned writer, politician, nor an academic:

"He was one of the hundreds, millions of industrious, modest and not very talkative countrymen, upon whose shoulders rested the nation. While they may not have openly talked about their love for their homeland, they also never betrayed Ukraine, and never renounced the language, faith and traditions of their ancestors.

"They were simple in appearance, but saw further than the politicians, and understood much better than they that their nation should be as other nations of the world, having the right to freely speak their own language, to feel as masters in their own land, and not to fear anyone in their own home. They had learned from Shevchenko, that "v svoyii khati svoya pravda, i syla i volia' (in one's own home is one's own truth, power and freedom)."

These were the words with which he began so many of his leaflets.

Hirnyk could have been any one of our fathers, grandfathers or uncles of the time. He lived through the history and the horrors of the 20th century. Born in 1912 to a patriotic Ukrainian family in Bohorodchany, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, he was the only one of five children to be able to attend the gimnazia (secondary school) in Stanyslaviv, graduating in 1933. Two years later he was conscripted into the Polish army and served in Zolochiv.

In 1937 he was arrested by the gendarmes and held until 1939. His offense was reading Ukrainian newspapers, and refusing to call himself a "rusyn" instead of a Ukrainian. This was taken to mean that he was a Ukrainian nationalist. He was incarcerated in Polish jails in Krakow, Drohobych and Tarnowa. Released when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Hirnyk hoped for freedom for himself and his country.

But the Soviet "liberators" exposed the nationalists imprisoned by the Poles, and punished and tortured them even more severely. Hirnyk enjoyed a month and a half of freedom between the Polish and the Russian prisons. His trial was held in December 1940, with sentencing to eight years in the far labor camps [Kuibyshev oblast'], and subsequent five years of no right to vote. Tarakhan-Bereza writes that only after 50 years of his first unjust incarceration, and 10 years after his fiery death in Kaniv, did the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR withdraw the sentence against him as "there was no evidence of a crime committed."

He returned to his village in 1948, with no one of his family left to await him. He was married at the age of 37 to Karolina Petrash, who also had been exiled to Siberia. Hirnyk still was not a free man, because of the taint of previous imprisonment. He finally found menial work in Stanyslaviv, where he lived with friends, visiting his home only on days off. People remember him as very industrious, one who loved gardening, beekeeping and pigeons. He provided his children with a higher education, and took care of his family.

Unfair imprisonment had a marked effect on his personality. He became melancholy, sensitive, quick-tempered, unfriendly and withdrawn. He never told anyone about his experiences in prison. Hirnyk found solace in the works of Taras Shevchenko; rereading the "Kobzar" and memorizing it healed his soul. He was especially interested in Shevchenko's work on Jan Hus, the Czech heretic who was burned at the stake in 1415.

Hirnyk had visited Kaniv with his wife in the 1960s, and was deeply moved by the shrine and all it symbolized. He was embarrassed that Ukrainians had not heeded Shevchenko's teachings.

Hirnyk's plan for the eve of January 22, 1978, began a few years earlier. He did not share it with anyone in his family. In 1973 he announced that he wanted to build a summer kitchen near his house. The family stated later, at the inquest, that while there was no need at all for such a structure, they helped him. He hid away in its attic, handwriting the thousands of leaflets he would later strew at Shevchenko's feet. The leaflets were on very thin paper, and were not all the same - the gist was the same, but each leaflet varied in the presentation of the message.

Hirnyk exhibited a deep knowledge of Ukrainian history, literature and philosophy, quoting Hrushevsky, Kostomarov, Kulish, Shevchenko, Franko, Ukrainka. He discussed the times of Khmelnytsky and Mazepa, and the events of the 20th century in Ukraine. He mentioned Khvylovyi and Skrypnyk, who also committed suicide in protest against Russian rule.

The text of three leaflets is given in "Sviatynia." These are not rantings of a deranged mind, but the anguished epistles of a patriotic Ukrainian wondering why his country was not free and why it was so persecuted.

"...According to your law (i.e., Russian), one is not even permitted to think about any independence of Ukraine. Let us live. Do not give us our own bread, like a master gives a dog. Don't build! Don't tell us that we already have all we need. We will build it ourselves, as good proprietors (hospodari), just let us live, leave us alone. ... Enough of you...," he wrote on one leaflet. In another leaflet he noted: "...A person in the Soviet Union is the cheapest being. You do with him/her what you wish. And with the labor of prisoners you built the White Sea Canal, the Moscow Canal, the northern railway and many, many other construction projects... You sent people to Siberia, to Karaganda... throughout all of Russia... You made Ukraine Russian, and her cities Russian."

Hirnyk did not involve his family in his actions. His last note to his wife read, "I have gone to Lviv. Don't worry, I'll return in a day or two. To our sweet meeting. Oleksa. 19.1.1978." Back in Soviet prison he had told a fellow inmate: "For me, death for Ukraine, in defense of the Ukrainian people, would be good fortune for me."

The book "Sviatynia" is available from www.Rodovid.net.

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