Viacheslav Chornovil

Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil (В'ячесла́в Макси́мович Чорнові́л; 24 December 1937 – 25 March 1999) was a Ukrainian politician and Soviet dissident.

In 1958, due to conflict in the university, he took a break from studying and went for construction project in Zhdanov (now Mariupol) for a blast furnace, and later worked for the Kyiv Komsomolets.

Chornovil was a member of the Komsomol of Ukraine.

As a prominent Ukrainian dissident in the Soviet Union, he was arrested multiple times in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s for his political views.

He graduated in 1960 with honours, and defended his diploma with a thesis titled "Publicist Work of Borys Hrinchenko".

Chornovil worked for various newspapers and in television in Lviv and Kyiv between 1960 and 1964.

In 1964, he moved to Vyshhorod and participated in the construction of the Kyiv Hydroelectric Station (see Kyiv Reservoir).

During the same year, Chornovil also enrolled as a postgraduate student (see Candidate of Sciences) of the Drahomov National Pedagogical University, but was not allowed to study.

On 5 September 1965, with Ivan Dzyuba and Vasyl Stus, Chornovil protested at the premier of Sergei Paradjanov's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" outside the Ukraina Movie Theatre.

This led to him being sacked from his job and searched by the police.

For refusing to be a witness and testify at the trials of the Horyn brothers, Chornovil was given three months of forced labour.

He acquired the reputation of a dissident after documenting the illegal imprisonment of certain Ukrainian intellectuals.

Later, he covered a similar story about twenty Ukrainians ("Woe from Wit").

Charged with libel and sentenced to three years in a maximum security prison, Chornovil was released after 18 months under a general amnesty in 1967, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution.

The Times awarded him the Nicholas Tomalin Prize for the documentation of the trials.

During his exile in 1969, Chornovil married to Atena Pashko.

In 1970, he managed to find a job at the meteorological station in Zakarpattia, provided a manual labour for an archaeological expedition to the Odessa Region, and at the railroad station "Sknyliv" in Lviv.

At the same time Chornovil created an underground magazine Ukraine Herald.

From 1971 onwards, he worked for the Lviv department of the Ukraine Nature Conservation Society.

He was imprisoned a second time in 1972 for being involved in Ukrainian independence movements and affiliated publications.

This time, Chornovil was given six years of imprisonment and three more years of exile.

He served this term of imprisonment in Mordovia, in camps for political prisoners in the villages of Ozernoye and Barashevo, where he frequently took part in protests, demonstrations and hunger strikes.

Chornovil spent half of his term at Camp 17 in the punishment cell or in solitary confinement in the camp prison.

Chornovil renounced his Soviet citizenship and decided to move to Canada in 1975, but was not permitted to do so.

In 1976, he joined the newly-formed Ukrainian Helsinki Group, set up to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords.

In 1978, Chornovil was exiled to the Soviet Far East, travelling the thousands of miles by train, and on foot to the village of Chappandu, in Yakutia.

There, he worked as a labourer at a local state farm (sovkhoz), later as a supplier in Nyurba.

In 1978, he was admitted to the International PEN society.

One of the most prominent political figures of the 1980s and 1990s, Chornovil paved the way for contemporary Ukraine to regain its independence.

Born in Kyiv Oblast, Chornovil was originally a journalist in newspaper and television before he was fired and sentenced to forced labour due to his dissident activism.

Chornovil became one of Ukraine's foremost independence activists, and was an early member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

Chornovil was arrested yet again in April 1981, on charges of "attempted rape" and sentenced to five years imprisonment.

In protest he went on a 120-day-long hunger strike.

In 1988, he founded the People's Movement of Ukraine, the first non-communist party in Ukraine, and ran unsuccessfully to be the first president of independent Ukraine in 1991, losing to Leonid Kravchuk.

Chornovil has been remembered as one of the most significant figures in Ukraine's regained independence in 1991.

Viacheslav Maksymovych Chornovil was born in Yerky, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Chornovil enrolled into the University of Kyiv initially at the College of Philology (faculty), but after the first semester transferred to the College of Journalism.

From 1992 onwards, Chornovil was one of the leaders of Rukh, the People's Movement of Ukraine, which was the first opposition party in democratic Ukraine, and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Chas-Time (Chas) from 1995.

Following the 1994 Ukrainian presidential election, Chornovil became one of President Leonid Kuchma's foremost critics.

Though he was expected to face Kuchma in the 1999 Ukrainian presidential election, his sudden and mysterious death in a car accident brought an end to his campaign.