HURDZAN, VASYL VASYLYOVYCH (b. January 23, 1926, in the village of Liskovets, Mizhhiria district, Zakarpattia region – d. June 19, 2001, in Kyiv).
Participant in the national liberation and human rights movement.
From a family of poor peasants. His father, Vasyl (1886–1954), and mother, Mariya (1893–1983), struggled for 12 years to build a house. He had two brothers, Ivan (1914–1996) and Fedir (b. 1924), who served in General Svoboda’s Czech Legion, and two sisters, Mariya (1930–1988) and Kalyna (1933–1997).
In 1939, Zakarpattia was occupied by Hungarian troops. Unwilling to endure the oppression, the 14-year-old Hurdzan emigrated in 1940 to Galicia, where he ended up in a Soviet concentration camp in the town of Skole. From there, he was transferred to a camp for minors, and then to the “Novyi Rozdil” orphanage. After six months, Hurdzan persuaded another boy to escape with him. They made it to Lviv, where they were caught by NKVD officers and sent to a factory and plant apprenticeship school (FZO). When the Germans arrived, Hurdzan decided to return home but was captured by the Hungarian military police. He spent two months in a prison in Uzhhorod. He was given a 2-year suspended sentence, requiring him to report to a police station 20 km away every other day.
A teacher in the village of Liskovets noticed Hurdzan’s abilities and prepared him for exams. In 1944, he entered the Uzhhorod Pedagogical Lyceum. In his third year, on October 18, 1946, Hurdzan was arrested at an underground apartment as a member of the organization “Transcarpathian-Ukrainian Insurgents” (ZUP), which was led by Lysenko-Pysanko (later executed in Inta for planning an uprising). Over thirty members of ZUP were arrested at that time.
In May 1947, the Military Tribunal of the Prykarpattia District in Uzhhorod sentenced all members of ZUP to 10 years of imprisonment; Hurdzan and two others received an additional 5 years of deprivation of rights under Article 54, 1-“a”, 11, for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”
He was transported with common criminals for nearly a month. His first concentration camp was the copper mine in Dzhezkazgan, Peschlag camp. Within a month, healthy men there became disabled as copper dust settled in their lungs. Hurdzan refused to go into the mine. He was held in punishment cells until he was completely exhausted. He was saved by a fellow prisoner, a doctor from Zakarpattia named Ivan Korshynsky (later a People's Deputy of Ukraine), who hired him to work in the hospital. Also in Spassk, Hurdzan was accused of retaliating against criminals. He went on a hunger strike for 6 days.
In the camps, he was close to Mykhailo Marchak, historian Yaroslav Dashkevych, a member of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council Mykhailo Stepanyak, and a deputy of the Diet of Czechoslovakia Vasyl Klympush.
On April 5, 1955, a Moscow commission released Hurdzan. He returned home the day after Easter. He went to work in logging. He was invited to work as an artist at the Mizhhiria District House of Culture.
In 1957, the newspaper *Mizhhirska Zirka* wrote that the Soviet authorities had given Hurdzan everything, yet he was painting icons. In response, he typed a protest, making 30 copies, and distributed it in schools and villages throughout the district. During the brief “Khrushchev Thaw,” this resulted only in a summons to the prosecutor and a transfer to a job as an artist at the Khust District House of Culture.
From 1961 to 1963, Hurdzan worked in Kaniv. In 1963, he studied at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Kyiv. He attended evenings of the *shestydesiatnyky* (Sixtiers), met artists, and visited the workshop of Alla HORSKA on Chorna Hora, as well as Lyudmyla Semykina, Veniamin Kushnir, Halyna Zubchenko, and Kutkin. He moved to Kyiv, worked as an artist in movie theaters, and sometimes lived without a residence permit. He actively distributed *samvydav*, which he mostly received from Yevhen Obertas.
After the arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1965, Hurdzan's home was searched several times. Several typewritten copies of Ivan DZIUBA's work “Internationalism or Russification?” were seized. He was subjected to interrogations, but the KGB had no proof that Hurdzan had given *samvydav* to anyone to read.
After the arrests of 1972–73, books by Khvylovy and Hrushevsky were seized from Hurdzan. When the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was formed in 1976, Hurdzan helped Oksana MESHKO transport and hide documents. He was often summoned for questioning by the KGB or simply held for hours at the *militsiya* (police) station whenever significant events occurred, such as on May 22. The *militsiya* threatened to evict Hurdzan from Kyiv for not having a residence permit, but in 1981 he married Yelyzaveta Kosyakova.
With the onset of *perestroika*, Hurdzan participated in the creation of the Ukrainian Culturological Club (1988), which in 1989 joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Union in its entirety. He was one of the organizers of the Constituent Assembly of the Association of Political Prisoners and the Repressed (June 3, 1989), where he was elected deputy chairman of the Association, a position he held for 9 years, as well as deputy editor of the journal *Zona*, which is still published with his cover design. He spoke out in the press as an art critic and a publicist against Russian great-power chauvinism.
In September 1997, late one evening, Hurdzan was severely beaten by unknown assailants for responding to them in Ukrainian. He suffered from a serious illness thereafter, which led to his death.
Bibliography
I.
Hurdzan, Vasyl. *I bil, i slovo... Publytsystyka* [Both Pain and Word... Publicist Works]. Compiled by Yuriy Khorunzhy. Kyiv, 2001, 54 pp.
Interview with V. Hurdzan by V. Ovsienko. *Shliakh Peremohy* newspaper, no. 30 (2465), July 25, 2001.
In loving memory of Vasyl Hurdzan (January 23, 1926 – June 19, 2001) –
Interview with V. Hurdzan. *Shliakh Peremohy* newspaper, no. 30 (2465), July 25, 2001; https://museum.khpg.org/1470513321
II.
“In loving memory of Vasyl Hurdzan (January 23, 1926 – June 19, 2001)” (including an interview from November 8, 1998). *Zona*, 2002, no. 16, pp. 343–353.
*International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former USSR. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part 1.* Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava Liudyny,” 2006, pp. 212–214. https://museum.khpg.org/1128024486
The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960–1990.
*Rukh oporu v Ukrayini: 1960 – 1990. Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk* [The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960 – 1990. An Encyclopedic Guide]. Preface by Osyp Zinkevych and Oles Obertas. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010, pp. 191–192; 2nd ed.: 2012, p. 211.
Vasyl Ovsienko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. February 15, 2005. Last reviewed August 7, 2016.
