(Born March 31, 1935, in Kremenets, Ternopil oblast – Died March 11, 2001, in Lviv).
Repressed on a baseless charge of having connections with the insurgent underground. Poet, member of the Sixtiers movement, public figure.
Hordasevych's mother graduated from a teacher's seminary, and her father from a theological seminary in Kremenets. Her father had a parish in the village of Yazvenky, then in Parakhonsk in the Pinsk region, and later in Dibrovytsia in the Rivne region. Fleeing persecution first by the Germans, then by the Bolsheviks, he moved to the village of Horodets, then Krychylsk, where he was arrested in July 1946 for refusing to violate the secrecy of confession and imprisoned under Article 54-1"a" in Siberia for 10 years. He returned to Ukraine only in 1959. He died on September 15, 1990, and is buried in the village of Mykhailivka near Cherkasy, by the church.
In 1950, Hordasevych graduated with honors from the seventh grade in the village of Krychylsk and was admitted to the Ostroh pedagogical school without exams. Because she had concealed the truth about her father, she fell under the baseless suspicion of the NKVD for having connections with the underground. She lived on the brink of starvation, surviving only on a stipend. To be closer to her grandmother, she transferred to the pedagogical school in Kostopil for her second year. On March 13, 1952, she was detained by the police for three days on a provocative charge of theft. During a search, her diary and poems were discovered, and the case was transferred to the Rivne regional department of the KGB, where the 16-year-old girl was pressured to confess to anti-Soviet sentiments. She was the only one in her group not admitted to the Komsomol.
To justify the wasted expense of two years of surveillance, Hordasevych was arrested on June 20, 1952. The investigator, Shustov, understood the baselessness of the accusations, sympathized with the detainee, and even fed her, but he still fabricated a case of “anti-Soviet agitation” under Article 54-10. The case centered on a single leaflet, which a friend had provoked her to write, and poems like, “A rose bloomed green in the field, and I, smiling, go to meet an unknown fate.” Soviet people know that one must go towards communism. On July 31, 1952, the Rivne Regional Court sentenced Hordasevych to 10 years in prison. When the verdict was read to her, she thanked them that it was not 25.
As a minor, she was not sent outside of Ukraine but was held near Chernihiv in a camp for disabled women. Due to the Beria amnesty, almost all the women—criminal offenders—were released, so on April 29, 1953, the girls who had turned 18 were transferred to Odesa, so that a factory that sewed underwear for soldiers would not stop production. When the criminals returned to the zone with new sentences, the political prisoners were transferred in September 1953 to Kuibyshev, where they worked at a factory producing construction parts. Hordasevych also had to unload barges of cement (bags weighing 50 kg).
Under a 1954 decree, Hordasevych's sentence was reduced by two-thirds by the court because she was a minor and had a good work record. She was released on December 24, 1954. Since her mother and sister had gone to Siberia to join her father, Hordasevych had nowhere to return. She was not registered to live in Rivne. She stayed with her grandmother in Kostopil, and a few days later, she signed up for work in the Donbas, in Stalino. She worked as a general laborer on a construction site, lived in a dormitory, and attended an evening school in order to later enroll in the physics department of the polytechnic institute. However, since her passport was issued based on a certificate of release, she appealed to the Supreme Council of Ukraine to have her criminal record expunged. It turned out that her record had already been cleared by the Supreme Court. She received a new passport. Nevertheless, the KGB's attention to Hordasevych did not wane. She studied and worked in a printing house. She married, but her first child died. In 1961, she gave birth to a son, Bohdan. She divorced her husband, who was a stranger to her in spirit.
From September 1963, she attended the literary society “Obriy” (Horizon) at the newspaper “Komsomolets Donbassa,” led by Yosyp Kurlak. There she met Vasyl STUS, Vasyl Zakharchenko, Volodymyr Mishchenko, Leonid Talalai, and Anatoliy Harmatyuk. In prison, she had not written a single poem, but here they flowed from her. Hordasevych realized that her calling was literature, not physics. Because she spoke Ukrainian with her son, in 1965, she caught the attention of artists who were creating mosaic panels near an experimental school, including Hryhoriy Synytsia, Alla HORSKA, Viktor Zaretsky, and Nadiya SVITLYCHNA, with whom Hordasevych became friends.
In 1965, Hordasevych enrolled in the correspondence department of the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. In connection with the preparation for the publication of her book of poems “Rainbows on the Sidewalks” (edited by Volodymyr Pidpalyi), she came to Kyiv on December 13, 1965, and N. SVITLYCHNA introduced her to Oles Serhiyenko, Oksana MESHKO, Viacheslav CHORNOVIL, Ivan SVITLYCHNY, and Yevhen SVERSTYUK at his birthday party, and later to Ivan DZIUBA. She read I. Dziuba's work “Internationalism or Russification?”
The KGB attempted to recruit Hordasevych to inform on her new friends, even sending her with a group of miners to Poland, but she flatly refused. In 1968, the publishing house “Donbas” canceled the production of a new collection of her poems that had already been approved for printing. In 1971, the Kyiv publishing house “Molod” destroyed the layout of her next book. Donetsk writers ostracized the “inveterate nationalist and Banderite”: she was admitted to the Writers' Union only 17 years later.
In the 1980s, Hordasevych wrote letters to V. CHORNOVIL in his exile and to the Yakut camp.
In 1988, Hordasevych became involved in public activities: she was one of the organizers of the Society of the Ukrainian Language in Donetsk, the People's Movement of Ukraine (Rukh), “Memorial,” and the Democratic Party of Ukraine (DemPU).
In 1990, she moved to Lviv. She worked as a publicist, novelist, and poet, hosted radio programs, and ran for the Verkhovna Rada. She was a three-time winner of the “Sixtiers” literary competition, and a laureate of the Oleksandr Biletsky Prize and the V. Marchenko Prize. She published over 30 books, including “Stepan Bandera – The Man and the Myth,” and “The Unconquered Guardians” – about Ukrainian heroines and female political prisoners. She worked with inspiration, to the point of exhaustion. She had planned to publish 15 collections of poetry but managed to publish only 7; the rest are being prepared by her son Bohdan, a philologist.
Bibliography:
I.
A Moscow Detective Story. The most mysterious adventure of my life, which I propose the readers to solve // Literaturna Ukraina, 1992. – August 13.
Hordasevych, Halyna. Not of This World. – Literaturna Ukraina – No. 2 (4619).– 1995. – January 12 (and a selection of poems by L. Terekhovych).
Stepan Bandera: The Man and the Myth. – Lviv: “SPOLOM” Publishing House, 2000 – 192 p., illustrated.
KHPG Archive: Interview with H. Hordasevych, February 3, 2001. https://museum.khpg.org/1185442425
Solo for a Girl's Voice. Autobiographical novel. – Lviv: Dobra sprava, 2001.
Halyna Hordasevych, Bohdan Hordasevych. The Unconquered Guardian. A Documentary Anthology-Martyrology of Ukrainian Women Political Prisoners in the USSR. – Lviv: Piramida, 2002.
II.
Klavdia Bachynska. The Star of Volyn Has Faded. – Ukrainske Slovo, No. 20 (3072), 2001. – May 17.
Petro Hots. Halyna Hordasevych Among Us. – Shliakh Peremohy, No. 13 (2500), 2002. – March 21.
Nadiia Romaniuk. “She Lived. She Loved. She Cried. She Laughed.” – Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, No. 314 (389), 2002. – April 13.
International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former USSR. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part 1. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava liudyny,” 2006. – pp. 151–154. https://museum.khpg.org/1185442425
Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960 – 1990. Encyclopedic Guide / Foreword by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. – K.: Smoloskyp, 2010. – pp. 157–158; 2nd ed.: 2012, – pp. 173–175.
On July 31, 1952, the underage Halyna Hordasevych was sentenced to 10 years in the camps:
http://maidan.org.ua/2016/08/31-lypnya-1952-roku-nepovnolitnyu-halynu-hordasevych-zasudzheno-do-10-rokiv-taboriv/
Sydir Kiral. “…Halyna Hordasevych, a Ukrainian, takes the floor…” Sketches for a biography and creative work // Ukrayinska Literaturna Hazeta, Nos. 12 and 13 (174 and 175). – 2016.
Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. March 2, 2004. Last reading August 4, 2016.
