Her father, Petro Platonovych Vozny (1910–1984), studied at the Zhytomyr Agricultural Institute, and her mother, Nadiia Antonivna Smulska (1909–1992), attended a pedagogical technical school. They married in 1930. Her father was drafted into the army, while her mother taught in the village of Fasova in the Zhytomyr region, where she and her child endured the famine with great hardship. When her father was sent to the Military Transport Academy in Moscow in 1934, he brought his family with him. In 1937, they moved to Khabarovsk, and in 1945, to Sakhalin.
In 1948, the family moved to Kyiv, where Halyna finished the 10th grade. From 1949 to 1954, she studied at the Faculty of Biology at Kyiv University. From 1957 to 1960, she worked at the Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and was a postgraduate student at the Institute of Agriculture. In 1963, she defended her candidate dissertation in microbiology.
Even then, Vozna had a reputation as a “nationalist” because she had written a letter to state authorities protesting the plan to erect a monument to A. Pushkin near the Kyiv Opera House. At that time, the Ukrainian public, including Maksym Rylsky, was demanding (and succeeded in ensuring) that a monument to Mykola Lysenko be placed there instead.
From 1962, Vozna became an active member of the KTM—the “Suchasnyk” Creative Youth Club—where she was appointed treasurer. She collected dues for regular events and excursions (traveling with H. Lohvyn to Korets, Ostroh, Pochaiv, Buchach, and Sokyryntsi) and for a wheelchair for Yevhen Kontsevych, whom she frequently visited starting in 1962. Vozna attended Vasyl Symonenko’s funeral in January 1963. The KTM collected and gave his mother a considerable sum of money for a monument in Cherkasy. Vozna took on the responsibility of notifying people about the club’s upcoming meetings and events.
She became acquainted and friends with Nadiia, Leonida, and Ivan Svitlychny, Alla Horska, Halyna Zubchenko, and Ivan Honchar, and participated with them in organizing artistic evenings, art exhibitions, and Christmas caroling.
In 1962, she met the artist Veniamin Kushnir, whom she later married. They stored and organized the distribution of samvydav literature. (Vozna preserved what is likely the largest collection: 67 works by various authors, which she later donated to the Museum of the Sixtiers. Among them were photocopies of Lina Kostenko’s 1963 book “The Star Integral,” which had been censored, and a book by B.-I. Antonych, which was also never published). This collection survived because she kept it not at her own home, but at her father’s, a military officer. The couple repeatedly noticed that KGB agents had conducted searches of their home in their absence, sometimes demonstratively leaving cigarette butts as a form of intimidation. Since they found nothing, no official searches were conducted.
Yuliia Perhova and Tetiana Yarmolova typed samvydav on typewriters with modified fonts. The first materials were the article “The Cult of Personality in Biology,” which Vozna proofread with Yevhen Proniuk, and Yevhen Sverstiuk’s article “On the Occasion of the Pogruzhalsky Trial.” Incidentally, Vozna witnessed the fire at the V. I. Vernadsky National Library on April 24, 1964. She was sent from work to sort through the books. She was struck by the enormous, ceiling-high pile of wet books, which were later dried on clotheslines. She attended the Pogruzhalsky trial. In 1968, she twice saw books burning in St. George's Church at the Vydubychi Monastery.
She participated in a torchlight procession on June 8, 1963, from the Institute of Food Industry on Volodymyrska Street to the monument of Ivan Franko. Every year on May 22, she went to the Taras Shevchenko monument, including in 1967, when the procession heading to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine was sprayed with water from fire engines.
Despite this, the young intellectuals also knew how to have fun. On September 20, 1964, as a member of the famous Central Jubilee Committee (TsYUK: Chornovil, Riabokliach, Bilokin, and Vozna), she took part in a joint 70th birthday celebration for I. Svitlychny and A. Horska.
Shortly after getting married, she traveled with her husband to the Carpathians. In Ivano-Frankivsk, they went to visit Panas Zalyvakha, only to learn he had been arrested on August 27, 1965. V. Kushnir traveled to Mordovia hoping to get a visit with his friend, but afterward, he himself began to face persecution: he was denied exhibitions and publications. Vozna also faced harassment: her professional certification and promotion to senior researcher were delayed, and she was eventually forced into early retirement for being politically “unreliable.”
She sent letters and parcels to political prisoners. In 1972, she was summoned for questioning in the case of N. Svitlychna.
From 1966 for over 20 years, Vozna worked at the Botanical Garden of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, where she founded the first laboratory in Ukraine for the clonal propagation of tropical and subtropical plants. After retiring in 1986, she wrote three monographs and methodological recommendations.
During the establishment of Ukraine's independence, she was an active participant in rallies, meetings, community groups, and actions.
She was buried on February 17, 2017, next to her husband at the Sovske Cemetery in Kyiv.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Okhrimovych, A. “From the Cohort of the Sixtiers.” *Suchasnist*, no. 12 (1992), pp. 129–136.
*International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former USSR*. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part I. Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava Liudyny,” 2006, pp. 1–516; Part II, pp. 517–1020; Part III, 2011, pp. 1021–1380: Vozna: pp. 1070–1072.
*Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960–1990. An Encyclopedic Guide*. Foreword by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2012, pp. 120–132.
Interview with H. Vozna on March 6, 2011.
Vasyl Ovsienko,
February 17, 2017.