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Yaroslav Halan | |
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| Native name | Ярослав Олександрович Галан |
| Born | (1902-07-27)27 July 1902 Dynów, Galicia-Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary (now Poland) |
| Died | 24 October 1949(1949-10-24) (aged 47) Lviv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Ukraine) |
| Resting place | Lychakiv Cemetery |
| Pen name | Comrade Yaga, Volodymyr Rosovych, Ihor Semeniuk |
| Occupation | writer, playwright, publicist, politician, propagandist, radio host |
| Language | Ukrainian |
| Alma mater | |
| Genres | plays, pamphlets, articles |
| Subject | social contradictions |
| Literary movement | socialist realism |
| Years active | 1927–1949 |
| Notable works |
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| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | |
| Signature | |
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Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan (Ukrainian:Ярослав Олександрович Галан, party nicknameComrade Yaga; 27 July 1902 – 24 October 1949) was aSoviet Ukrainian writer, playwright, and publicist.
A member of theCommunist Party of Western Ukraine from 1924, he played a role in the 1946Synod of Lviv that merged theUkrainian Greek Catholic Church into theRussian Orthodox Church and was controversial for theanti-Catholicism in his writings.
He was assassinated in 1949 in what the Soviet government claimed was an attack by theUkrainian Insurgent Army, though the organisation's responsibility has since become a source of dispute.
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Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan was born on 27 July 1902 inDynów, then part of theKingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria withinAustria-Hungary. to the family of Oleksandr Halan, a minor post-office official. As a child, he lived and studied inPrzemyśl. He enjoyed a large collection of books gathered by his father, and was greatly influenced by the creativity of the Ukrainian socialist writerIvan Franko. At school, Yaroslav's critical thoughts brought him into conflict with priests who taught theology.
At the beginning of theFirst World War his father, along with other "unreliable" elements who sympathised with theRussian Empire, was imprisoned at theThalerhof internment camp by the Austro-Hungarian authorities.[1] Galicia wastaken by the Russians.
During the nextAustrian offensive, in order to avoid repressions, his mother evacuated the family with theretreating Russian army toRostov-on-Don, where Yaroslav studied at the gymnasium and performed in the local theatre. Living there, Halan witnessed the events of theOctober Revolution. He became familiar withLenin's agitation. Later, these events formed the basis of his story,Unforgettable Days.
While in Rostov-on-Don, he discovered the works of Russian writers such asLeo Tolstoy,Maxim Gorky,Vissarion Belinsky, andAnton Chekhov. Halan often went to the theatre. Thus, his obsession with this art was born, which in the future determined his decision to become a playwright.
After the war, Halan returned to Galicia, which was annexed into theSecond Polish Republic after theTreaty of Riga. In 1922, he graduated from thePeremyshl Ukrainian Gymnasium. He then studied at theTrieste Higher Trade School in Italy, and in 1922 enrolled in theUniversity of Vienna. In 1926, he transferred to theJagiellonian University ofKraków, from which he graduated in 1928 (according to some sources he didn't pass the final exams[2]). Halan then began working as a teacher of thePolish language andliterature at a private gymnasium inLutsk.[3] However, ten months later he was banned from teaching due to political concerns.[4]
In his student years, Halan became active in left-wing politics. While at the University of Vienna he became a member of the workers' communityEinheit ("Unity"), overseen by theCommunist Party of Austria. From 1924, he was actively involved in resisting Polish rule in western Ukraine as a member of theCommunist Party of Western Ukraine.[5] He joined the CPWU when he was on vacation in Przemyśl. Later, while studying in Kraków, he was elected a deputy chairman of theŻycie student group, which was controlled by theCommunist Party of Poland.[6]
In the 1920s, Halan's creative activity also began. In 1927 he finished work on his first significant play,Don Quixote from Ettenheim. In his play99% (1930), he condemned Ukrainian nationalism. This was followed by emphasis of class conflict in the playsCargo (1930) andCell (1932), which argued for the Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish proletariat to work together.[7]
Halan's play99% was staged by the semi-legal Lviv Workers' Theatre. On the eve of the premiere, Polish authorities launched a campaign of mass arrest against Western Ukrainian communists, sending them to the Lutsk prison. As the theatre's director and one of the key actors were arrested, the premiere was on the verge of failure. Despite the risks of being arrested, the workers continued rehearsing so that the play was presented with a delay of only one day. About 600 workers attended the premiere; for them, it was a form of protest mobilisation against repression and nationalism.[4]
Halan was one of the founders of the Ukrainian proletarian writers' groupHorno. From 1927 to 1932, along with other communist writers and members of the CPWU, he worked for the Lviv-based Ukrainian magazineVikna, being a member of its editorial board, until it was closed by government censors.[8]
Living in thePolish-controlled city of Lviv, Halan frequently had to earn money by translating novels fromGerman into Polish.[4] In 1932 he moved to Nyzhniy Bereviz, the native village of his wife, located in theCarpathian mountains, close toKolomyia, and kept working on his own plays, stories and articles there. In the village he spread communist agitation among peasants, creating cells of theInternational Red Aid and the Committee for Famine Relief. Without opportunities to find work, he lived in the countryside until June 1935, when he was summoned by the CPWU to return to Lviv.[6]
Halan was deniedSoviet citizenship in 1935.[9]
In 1935, Halan traveled extensively aroundPrykarpattia, giving speeches to peasants. He became an experienced propagandist and agitator. Addressing the city workers, Halan explained to them the main points ofMarxist theory. In particular, he held lectures onFriedrich Engels'sSocialism: Utopian and Scientific, andKarl Marx'sWage Labour and Capital. Together with the young communist writerOlexa Havryliuk, Halan organized safe houses, wrote leaflets and proclamations, and transferred illegal literature to Lviv.[4]
Throughout his political career the writer was repeatedly persecuted, and twice imprisoned (for the first time in 1934). He was one of the organizers of theLviv Anti-Fascist Congress of Cultural Workers in May 1936.[10] Halan also took part in a major political demonstration on 16 April 1936 in Lviv, in which the crowd was fired on by Polish police (in total, thirty workers were killed and two hundred injured).[11] Halan devoted his storyGolden Arch to the memory of fallen comrades.[7]
Participation in the Anti-Fascist Congress forced him to escape from Lviv toWarsaw, where he eventually found work at the left-wing newspaperDziennik Popularny, edited byWanda Wasilewska. In 1937, the newspaper was closed by the authorities, and on 8 April Halan was accused of illegal communist activism and sent to prison in Warsaw (later transferred to Lviv). Released in December 1937, Halan lived in Lviv under strict supervision by the police,[4] and remained unemployed until 1939.[6]
In 1937, his elder brother, a member of the CPWU, died in Lviv. After theCommunist Party of Poland and theCommunist Party of Western Ukraine, as its autonomous organization, were dissolved by theComintern on trumped-up accusations of spying for Poland in 1938, Halan's first wife Anna Henyk (also a member of the CPWU), who was studying at theKharkiv Medical Institute,USSR, was arrested by theNKVD and executed in theGreat Purge.[1][4][5][9][12]
After the Soviet Unionannexed Western Ukraine andWestern Belarus in September 1939, Halan worked for the newspaperVilna Ukraina,[13] directed theMaria Zankovetska Theatre, and wrote more than 100 pamphlets and articles on changes taking place in the reunified lands of Western Ukraine.
A group of writers such as Yaroslav Halan,Petro Kozlaniuk,Stepan Tudor andOlexa Havryliuk [...] treated the liberation of Western Ukraine [by the Red Army] as a logical conclusion of the policy of the Communist Party, which fought for the reunification of the Ukrainian people. In this, they actively helped the party in word and deed. In return, they have already had experience with Polish prisons and oppression from their fellow countrymen. Now [after it happened] they could breathe a sigh of relief. That is why their smiles were so sincere and celebratory."
In November 1939 Halan went to Kharkiv to try to locate his vanished wife Anna Henyk. Together with the writerYuri Smolych he came to the dormitory of the Medical Institute, and asked the porter for any information about her fate. The porter only gave him back a suitcase with Anna's belongings and said that she had been arrested by the NKVD, in response to which Halan burst into tears.[15]
In June 1941, being a journalist of the newspaperVilna Ukraina, he took his first professional vacation inCrimea. This was interrupted by the beginning ofOperation Barbarossa on 22 June of that year.[16]
When the war on theEastern Front began, Halan arrived in Kharkiv and went to themilitary commissariat, having a strong desire to become a volunteer of theRed Army and to go to the frontline, but was denied.[15]
He was evacuated toUfa. In September 1941,Alexander Fadeyev summoned him toMoscow for working at the Polish-language magazineNowe Horyzonty. In the days of theBattle for Moscow, on 17 October, he was evacuated toKazan.[6]
Later the writer arrived inSaratov, where he served as a radio host at the Taras Shevchenko Radio Station. Then he was a special front-line correspondent of the newspaperSovietskaya Ukraina, and thenRadianska Ukraina.[5]
The majority of his radio-comments have been born spontaneously. He listens to the enemy's radio shows, thinks for a while, then goes to the studio with an open microphone and without any preparations responds, expressing everything what he feels. That was a true radio-battle with all Hitler's propagandists starting fromGoebbels,Dietrich, and others. The opportunity to fight like this – immediately, without paper [and censorship] – demonstrates a high confidence given to him by the government and theCentral Committee of the CPSU(b).
— Vladimir Belyaev, Literaturna Ukraina, 1962[4]
In 1943, in Moscow, he met his future second wife Maria Krotkova, who was an artist.[4]
In October 1943, the publishing houseMoscovskiy Bolshevik released a collection of 15 war stories by Halan under the titleFront on Air. At the end of the year, Halan moved to therecently liberated Kharkiv and worked there on the frontline radio station Dnipro.
Halan, as a correspondent of theRadianska Ukraina newspaper, represented the Soviet Union at theNuremberg trials in 1946.[16][17]
Halan often wrote about theOrganisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, condemning them as murderers and war criminals. He privately expressed resentment for this as outside of his field, but continued to write and publish anti-nationalist literature.[18]
The fourteen-year-old girl can't calmly look at meat. She trembles if someone is going to cook cutlets in her presence. A few months ago, on Easter Night, armed people came to a peasant house in a village close to the town ofSarny, and stabbed its inhabitants with knives. The girl having the eyes widened of fear was looking at the agony of her parents. The girl with horror in her eyes was looking at the agony of her parents. One of the gangsters put a knife blade to the child's neck, but at the last moment a new "idea" came to his mind: "Live in glory toStepan Bandera! And to avoid you being starved to death we will leave you some food. Guys, slice pork for her!" The "guys" liked such a proposal. In a few minutes a mountain of meat made from the bleeding father and mother grew up in front of the horror-struck girl...
— Halan, With Cross or Knife, page 70
In his last satirical pamphlets Yaroslav Halan criticized the nationalistic and clerical reaction (particularly, theGreek Catholic Church and the anti-Communist doctrine of theHoly See):Their Face (1948),In the service of Satan (1948),In the Face of Facts (1949),Father of Darkness and His Henchmen (1949),The Vatican Idols Thirst for Blood (1949, in Polish),Twilight of the Alien Gods (1948),What Should Not Be Forgotten (1947),The Vatican Without Mask (1949) etc.[neutrality isdisputed][19]
When the Holy See discovered that Halan planned to publish his newanti-clerical pamphletThe Father of Darkness and His Henchmen,Pope Pius XII excommunicated him in July 1949.[10][20] In response to this, Halan wrote a pamphletI Spit on the Pope, that caused a significant resonance within the Church and among believers. In the pamphlet he ironised on theDecree against Communism released by the Vatican on 1 July, in which the Holy See had threatened to excommunicate all members of the Communist parties and active supporters of the Communists:
My only consolation is that I am not alone: together with me, the Pope excommunicated at least three hundred million people, and with them I once again in full voice declare: I spit on the Pope!
— Halan, With Cross or Knife, "I Spit on the Pope!", page 112
Halan was assassinated on 24 October 1949 in his home office, which was situated at Hvadiyska street in Lviv. He received eleven blows to the head with an axe.[16] His blood spilled on the manuscript of his new article,Greatness of the Liberated Human, which celebrated the tenth anniversary of the [Soviet annexation of western Ukraine.
The killers – two students of theLviv Forestry Technical Institute, Ilariy Lukashevych and Mykhailo Stakhur – were accused of orchestrating the assassination at the behest of the OUN's leadership. On the eve of the murder Lukashevych gained the writer's confidence, so the students were let into the house. They came to the apartment under the pretext of being discriminated against at the university and seeking his help.[1] When Lukashevych gave a signal, Stakhur attacked the writer with the axe.[21] After Stakhur was convinced that Halan was dead, they tied up the housekeeper and escaped.
TheMinistry of the State Security (MGB) accused the Ukrainian nationalists of his murder, while the OUN claimed that it was a Soviet provocation in order to start a new wave of repressions against locals.
Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Ukrainian SSR at that time, took personal control of the investigation.[22] In 1951, the MGB agentBohdan Stashynsky infiltrated into the OUN underground network and managed to find Stakhur, who himself bragged about the assassination of Halan.[23] He was arrested on 10 July, and afterwards fully admitted his responsibility for the crime during the trial. According to Stakhur, he did that because of the writer's critical statements on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists,Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Vatican.[21]
On 16 October 1951 the military tribunal of theCarpathian Military District sentenced Mykhailo Stakhur to death by hanging. He was executed that day.
Since thedissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the UPA in Halan's assassination has increasingly come under scrutiny.[2] HistorianDavid R. Marples has noted that the methods of the assassination were more similar to the prior killing ofLeon Trotsky, which was organised by Soviet intelligence, than typical OUN or UPA assassinations; in contrast to the usage of an axe by Halan's killers, the OUN usually conducted its killings with firearms. Petro Duzhyi, a soldier of the UPA, claimed in a 1993 interview with historian Mykola Oleksyuk thatTimofei Strokach expressed a desire to have Halan killed; according to Duzhyi, Strokach had said during an interrogation that Halan's support for arresting the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's leadership had sparked a popular uprising.[5] Ukrainian literary historian Yuliia Kysla also describes the assassination as a false-flag operation, referring to Lukashevych and Stakhur as being part of one of many groups which were supposedly part of the UPA, but were actually under the control of the Soviet government.[18]Vasyl Kuk, the leader of the UPA, would continue to claim that the assassination had been organised by the MGB in interviews after the Soviet Union's dissolution.[24]
The possibility that he was assassinated by the OUN or UPA, however, has not been conclusively ruled out. Dmitry Vedeneyev and Sergei Shevchenko, writers for the Ukrainian newspaper2000, compared Halan toSalman Rushdie in 2002 in reference to the latter'sSatanic Verses controversy and noted that Halan's criticism of the Catholic Church made him extremely unpopular in deeply-religious Galicia.[24] Marples also notes that there are several problems with most accounts of Halan's assassination and the aftermath, arguing that it is effectively impossible to determine who was responsible for his assassination given that he was equally loathed by both the Soviet government and the UPA at the time of his death.[5]
The assassination of Halan resulted in increased repression of the UPA, which continued its insurgency against the Soviet government. All the leadership of the MGB arrived in Lviv,Pavel Sudoplatov himself worked there for several months. One of the consequences of the murder of Halan was the elimination of the UPA leaderRoman Shukhevych four months later.[25]
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"Yaroslav Halan is a talented publicist, was a progressive writer in the past. Nowadays he still is the most advanced one among [local] non-party writers. But he's infected with the Western European bourgeois "spirit". Has little respect for Soviet people. Considers them not civilized enough. But just inwardly. In general terms, he understands the policy of the party, but in his opinion, the party makes great mistakes with regards to peasants in Western Ukraine. Halan places responsibility for these mistakes on the regional committee of theCPSU(b), local institutions of theMinistry of Internal Affairs and the local Soviet authorities. Believes in Moscow. Doesn't want to join the party (he was advised to) due to being an individualist, and also in order to keep his hands, mind, and words free. He thinks if he joins the party, he will lose this [freedom]."
Extract from the report of the literary critic G. Parkhomenko to the Central Committee of theCommunist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, 15 December 1947.[26]
In 1962, inToronto, Olexandr Matla, aka Petro Tereschuk, a pro-nationalist historian from theUkrainian diaspora in Canada, published the brochureHistory of a Traitor (Yaroslav Halan), in which he accused Halan of being an informer of both Polish and Soviet intelligence services, and of helping them to oppress nationalists and even some pro-Soviet writers from Western Ukraine such asAnton Krushelnytsky, who moved from Lviv to Kharkiv in the 1930s and was killed during theGreat Terror.
"[Halan] has used his undeniable publicistic talent to serve the enemy, thereby placing himself outside the Ukrainian people. He has directed his energy and creative mind against his own people and their interests. An outrageous egoist, egocentrist, money lover, slanderer, cynic, provocator, agent of two intelligence services, misanthrope, falsificator, speculator, and an informer are all the characteristics of Yaroslav Halan."
Petro Tereschuk, History of a Traitor (Yaroslav Halan), Canadian League for Ukraine's Liberation, Toronto, 1962.[2]
"Yaroslav is an erudite, artist, polemicist, politician and undoubtedly an international-level journalist. I was amazed at his knowledge of the languages: German, French, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Russian. Picking up any newspaper or document he leafs through, reads it and writes something down. I was also surprised by his efficiency in work, interest in everything, an exceptional ability to "seek" and "raise" topics, problems, his persistent work on processing the material."
Yuri Yanovsky, a Ukrainian Soviet writer, who worked with Halan at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946.[27]
"n 1949 I witnessed an unusual event. On 2 October Yaroslav Halan spoke in Lviv University. It turned out to be his last speech. We condemned him but his presentation surprised me. He spoke as an intelligent person defending Ukrainian culture. It had nothing to do with the series of his pamphlets "I spit on Pope!" Halan turned out to be a totally different man. Several days later he was killed."
Mykhailo Horyn, a Ukrainian anti-Communistdissident.[28]
English
Spanish
German
Russian
Ukrainian
Azerbaijani
(English translation) Halan, Yaroslav.Reports from Nuremberg. Kyiv: Dnipro Publishers, 1976
(English translation) Halan. Yaroslav.I Spit on the Pope!
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)