HATALA, MARIAN PETROVYCH (born August 25, 1942, in the village of Pidzvirynets, Horodok district, Lviv oblast – died May 25, 1972, in Lviv). Engineer. An organizer of samvydav printing and distribution in Lviv. He was born into a large family. His father, Petro Hatala, and mother, Kateryna (née Pikas), had five sons, including Marian, from their second marriage. Petro also had two sons, Fedir and Stefan, from his first marriage.
Fedir and Stefan were participants in the national liberation movement during and after World War II. Fedir was killed (details unknown), while Stefan was captured after a battle with NKVD troops near the town of Bibrka (Lviv oblast) in September 1944. After enduring horrific torture, he was sentenced to 10 years in labor camps and 5 years in exile, with no right to return to the western regions of Ukraine. He served the full 15 years in various locations in Siberia and Kazakhstan, after which he illegally returned to Lvivshchyna (see: *Narodna Hazeta*, 1991, No. 18).
Stefan died in 2006 in the village of Livchytsi (Lviv oblast). Clearly, the biography of the elder sons could not but affect the Hatala family, which was constantly under the surveillance of punitive state organs. On the other hand, the fate of his older brothers served as an example for Marian, who was the second-youngest child in the family and knew about the UPA’s struggle firsthand, not from Soviet propaganda. After the arrest of his eldest half-brother, UPA soldier Oleksa, the family fled to Lviv to avoid deportation to Siberia and later legalized their status as “resettlers from Poland.”
In 1959, Marian entered Lviv Polytechnic. After his third year, he switched to evening studies and began working at the Lviv Kinescope Plant. He was already working as a process engineer by the end of 1962. There, he met and befriended Ivan HEL, who was a high-class lathe operator foreman. HEL brought the first collections of poetry by the Sixtiers and early samvydav works to the plant. A group of young engineers and workers formed at the plant who did not consider distributing samvydav, tending the graves of the Sich Riflemen, or circulating leaflets to be the most important tasks, although they did these things as circumstances required. They pooled their money for a typewriter, which Marian bought in Leningrad during a business trip.
Marian’s girlfriend, a student named Natalia, agreed to type in a clandestine apartment. She retyped poems by the Sixtiers, Ivan Franko’s articles “What is Progress?” and “Beyond the Realm of the Possible,” and the books “A Deduction of the Rights of Ukraine” and “Moscow and the Ukrainian Policy of Moscow” by Myroslav Prokop. The core of this group was Marian. One day, at the information department of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Marian saw a rotator. With a single glance, he grasped its working principle, later recreating the design from memory. HEL and a worker, Mykhailo Cheryba, ordered the parts, and some they made themselves. At first, the rotator did not work. Hatala reworked the drawings, and after some adjustments, the device began producing high-quality copies. However, it only worked as long as they could get their hands on the factory’s stencil paper, which was a strictly controlled material in state institutions. The rotator had to be dismantled and hidden. For the unveiling of the Ivan Franko monument in Lviv, scheduled for October 4, 1964, Natalia printed 100 copies of a leaflet with a text composed by Ivan HEL: “Ukrainians! Remember that Franko wrote this about us and for us,” followed by the “Prologue” from the poem “Moses” and four lines from the anthem “It’s Not Time, Not Time, Not Time…”
Hatala’s group distributed the leaflets throughout the buildings of the Polytechnic and the university, and at night, they pasted some on the walls of buildings and on trees in the park near the monument. Natalia unwisely kept the remaining leaflets at her apartment, where one of her parents saw them during a visit. As her fiancé, Marian took responsibility before her parents. After the arrests of intellectuals in 1965, the parents began to reproach Natalia, saying she could ruin the entire family. She refused to continue typing. Her parents forbade her from seeing Marian. The young woman did not dare to marry without her parents’ blessing. In the autumn of 1966, Natalia was diagnosed with leukemia, and she died in the spring of 1967. Marian suffered greatly from this tragedy. He continued to do the typing himself. In early September 1968, as troops moved through all the roads of Galicia toward Czechoslovakia, Marian and a few friends unscrewed the fasteners on a railway track in the Carpathians and used jacks to spread the rails apart. This was their act of solidarity with the Czechs and Slovaks. There were no reports of an accident. In October 1968, Hatala told Ivan HEL, who had returned from prison, that he had decided to self-immolate in Lviv on the square near the Opera House, close to the Lenin monument. He asked his friend to write the text of a leaflet and distribute it. His friend treated this intention as an escape from the battlefield, as desertion, and refused to help.
Hatala returned to this subject after the self-immolation of the Czech student Jan Palach on January 16, 1969. In 1969–1971, Hatala printed works by Ivan DZIUBA (“Internationalism or Russification?”), Yevhen SVERSTIUK (“The Cathedral in Scaffolding” and “Ivan Kotliarevsky is Laughing”), and all five issues of Viacheslav CHORNOVIL’s *Ukrainskyi Visnyk* (*Ukrainian Herald*). Ivan HEL introduced Hatala to like-minded people. With them, he attended art exhibitions, concerts, Shevchenko evenings, and went caroling in the guises of various Vertep characters (a photo by Yaroslav Lemyk from January 1, 1972, survives, showing Marian in Hutsul attire next to Stefa SHABATURA—dressed as a gypsy). On January 12, 1972, several dozen members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, including Hatala’s close friends, were arrested. The KGB had operational data that Hatala “is a contact for the arrested Hel, I., Stus, V., Kalynets, I., Shabatura, S., and others.” However, the first “informal conversation” with him was not held until May 18, and the second on May 20. The KGB knew virtually nothing about his clandestine printing activities. Hatala demanded a meeting with S. SHABATURA, although he knew that meetings were not granted to those under investigation, especially not to non-relatives. On May 25, 1972, Hatala was summoned to the KGB at 4 p.m.—it is likely they were planning a confrontation or merely wanted to show him to Stefania from a distance in the company of KGB officers to compromise him. Sensing something was wrong, Hatala went instead to his workshop around 3 p.m., as the first shift was finishing work and the second was preparing to start.
Marian was a leading technologist, and everyone there knew him. He gathered people around him and spoke briefly about the occupation of Ukraine and the arrests of those fighting for Ukrainian statehood. After the words, “Only my blood can wash the filth of the occupiers from my land,” Hatala stabbed himself in the heart with a pair of scissors. The KGB was alarmed by Hatala’s suicide—this is evidenced by three memoranda from the Head of the Ukrainian KGB, V. Fedorchuk, to the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, V. Shcherbytsky. Deputy Chairman of the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, N.Z. Troyak, was dispatched to Lviv. The KGB “took measures to prevent possible excesses related to the suicide of Hatala M.P.” That is, they cynically fabricated and spread false rumors about the motives for his suicide, suggesting, for instance, that he was passed over for a promotion or had personal problems. Hatala’s funeral took place on May 27, 1972, on one of the central avenues of the Lychakiv Cemetery, with a large crowd in attendance. Many were summoned to the KGB, where, using “carrot and stick” methods, they were forced to spread false rumors about the deceased or to remain silent. The investigator cynically told the arrested Ivan HEL that Hatala had carried out his own death sentence, and now they had no more trouble with him. The interrogation records of S. SHABATURA regarding Hatala disappeared from her case file.
Bibliography: Cherniha, Roman. *Ternystyi shliakh voiaka UPA* [The Thorny Path of a UPA Soldier]. – *Narodna Hazeta*, 1991. – No. 18 (26).
Interview with Ivan Hel by V. Kipiani and V. Ovsiienko on June 25, 2003: https://museum.khpg.org/1348418185
Interview with Stefania Shabatura by V. Ovsiienko on August 26, 2008: https://museum.khpg.org/1314388686.
Ivan Hel on Marian Hatala, an organizer of samvydav in Lviv. – KHPG Website https://museum.khpg.org/1284583590.
*Mizhnarodnyi biohrafichnyi slovnyk dysydivtiv krain Tsentralnoi ta Skhidnoi Yevropy i kolyyshnoho SRSR*. Vol. 1. Ukraina. Part 1. [International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe and the Former USSR. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part 1]. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava liudyny.” – 2006. – pp. 1–516; Part 2. – pp. 517–1020; Part 3. – pp. 1021–1380; M. Hatala: pp. 1083–1085: https://museum.khpg.org/1338899551
*Rukh oporu v Ukraini: 1960–1990. Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk* [The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960–1990. An Encyclopedic Guide] / Foreword by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. – K.: Smoloskyp, 2nd ed., 2012. – 896 p. + 64 ill.; Hatala: p. 146.
Special report from the KGB of the Council of Ministers of the UkrSSR to the Central Committee of the CPU dated 26.05.1972 regarding the suicide of M.P. Hatala, a witness in the case of S.M. Shabatura. 26.05.1972.
Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine – GDA SBU. – F. 16. – Op. 3 (1975). – Spr.14. – Ark. – 345-347; 27.05.1972 – Ark. 352-353; 29. 05.1972 – Ark. 366-367..Vasyl Ovsiienko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 15.10.2010. Last reading 23.05.2016. Characters 7,988, Hatala
Image by Yaroslav Lemyk in the Sadovsky home on January 1, 1972. Standing: Liubomyra Popadiuk, Vasyl Stus, Olena Antoniv, Iryna Kalynets, Maria Sadovska, Hanna Sadovska, Mykhailo Horyn. Seated: Stefa Shabatura, dressed as a gypsy, Marian Hatala, Oleksandr Kuzmenko.
