Tributes are being paid to Volodymyr Yavorivsky, the Ukrainian writer and political and civic figure who died on April 17 at the age of 78.
I also want to say a few words about this impressive man, who left a mark on many of us. Especially as he is linked in my mind to two anniversaries we are about to observe – the 35th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence.
Yavorivsky was one of those unexpected figures who emerged from a seemingly politically pacified, docile and Russified Soviet Ukrainian society in the second half of the 1980s to make common cause with the dissidents and newly freed political prisoners.
Together they did not hesitate to take full advantage of the new window of opportunity that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s relaxation of political controls under the name of glasnost and perestroika opened.
I remember this handsome, eloquent and charming man, who in 1990 became my friend, as a leading patriotic activist who made a significant contribution to Ukraine achieving and consolidating its independence in 1991.
He rose to prominence with a well-received novel inspired by the Chornobyl disaster 35 years ago, on April 26, 1986. which shocked the world but led Ukrainians to ask what kind of system they were living in that had placed a major nuclear power station without their consent so close to their capital and on their main water artery – the Dnipro River.
Fortunately for millions in Kyiv, the wind had blown northwards. What occurred was bad enough – but it could have been a lot worse.
The secrecy surrounding the accident immediately raised other questions about what Soviet rule, for all its claims about having brought industrialization and modernization had actually meant for Ukraine – loss of sovereignty and rule by Moscow, repression, the Holodomor, Russification, and denial of a European future.
Yavorivsky was one of the first of his younger generation, to speak out. In August 1986 he was already drawing attention on the pages of the press to the damage that had been done to Ukraine by the removal of its pro-Ukrainian republican communist leader Petro Shelest in 1972 on ridiculous charges of promoting Ukrainian nationalism.
An able organizer, charismatic, and a very warm personality, he was one of the leaders of Rukh (an alliance of national democratic forces) in the late 1980s. being head of its Kyiv region organization.
In May 1989 he shocked the communist diehards still in control in Ukraine by being elected in the first neo-democratic Soviet elections as a deputy from Kyiv to a newly created Congress of People’s Deputies. There, he and his other Ukrainian democratic colleagues, joined the Russians Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin in a democratic alliance standing for democracy and end of the Soviet empire.
My ties with Volodymyr go back to that time. It was the first time we soke, but over the telephone. On June 14, he was the first non-former political prisoner to agree, courageously, to give an interview to the Ukrainian Service of Radio Liberty, then broadcasting to the Soviet Union from Munich and whose Director I then was.
In September 1989, at the inaugural congress of Rukh in Kyiv, Yavorivsky gave an unforgettable landmark speech, which was both provocative in the positive sense, and witty.
He asked his compatriots who the Ukrainians were at that critical moment – what kind of people are we, as he put it, or rather, who are we as people? – and how should we respond to the opportunity history had given us.
Obviously, his message was that Ukrainians should make the most of the chance history had given them, to overcome the negative and problematic elements in their history and character, and to move forward and to re-take control of their destiny.
Volodymyr continued helping to set the tone and create the backing for the push for independence and democracy.
In October 1990, being a Soviet deputy, he agreed to serve as a shield when I was invited by a group of intrepid Ukrainian journalists to participate in a live radio program being broadcast from the republic’s radio and TV center on Khreshchatyk 26 and allowing listeners to phone in with their questions.
And the following year, after opposing the attempted putsch in Moscow with his colleagues in Rukh, he was one of those who were instrumental in Soviet Ukraine’s declaring its independence on August 24.
I interviewed Volodymyr in September 2019 for Ukraine’s Radio Kultura on the 30 anniversary of Rukh’s Inaugural Congress and his celebrated speech.
I asked him how he would answer today from the question he had posed to all of us then.
The veteran activist was confident that despite everything – achievements, disappointments, zigs zags, and a hostile Russia neighbor which had inflicted war on us – Ukraine would hold its own and pull through.
He was a democrat in outlook, tolerant and optimistic.
Too bad Volodymyr did not make it to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence with us.
But he is one of those authors of that historic event whom we should remember on that day. And in spirit, together with the likes of Levko Lukianenko, Viacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Horyn and Ivan Drach he will, be with us.
Volodymyr, my friend, thanks for everything, and vichnaya pamiat (memory eternal). RIP.
