island life- in a monastery: HISTORY REPEATED- ARTIST/ACTIVIST IN UKRAINE

Monday, November 27, 2023

HISTORY REPEATED- ARTIST/ACTIVIST IN UKRAINE

ALLA HORSKA born in 1929 in Yalta (on the Crimea) was a Ukrainian artist of the 1960s, monumentalist painter, one of the first representatives of the underground art movement, dissident, and human rights activist of the Sixtiers movement in Ukraine. She was the wife of painter Viktor Zaretsky (See previous Blog). Not only did she paint, she also designed many mosaics, found today throughout the Ukraine.

Highly intelligent, motivated, and talented, she graduated from art school with honors and later joined the Kyiv Art Institute. It was through relationships developed there, including the meeting of her future husband, that she became involved with the Creative Youth Club “Suchasnist,” the center of Ukrainian culture in Kyiv. In the early 1960s Alla joined the national revival movement in Ukraine which counted numerous intellectuals and artists of her generation.

They exhibited paintings, performed plays, read poems, and mentioned everyone and everything that was stamped out by the Soviet authorities. Ukrainian culture and history were created there.

She was a fiery student of Ukrainian history and its cultural legacy, in particular folk art, academic and monumental painting, and the avant-garde of the beginning of the century. But her passion did not end with art.

After the artist and other dissidents discovered a mass grave in Bykivnia in the Kyiv region in 1962 (referring to the victims of NKVD), Alla’s human rights activity quickened in pace. She participated in protests. Political prisoners asked her for help, and dissidents often found shelter in her apartment. All of this resulted in an appeal to the Soviet authorities to stop the persecution.

Of course, neither her artistic nor the human rights activities could stay unnoticed by the authorities. The artist’s apartment was watched; her phone was tapped, and her every step was monitored. She was repeatedly questioned by the KGB and unsuccessfully “recruited” to their ranks.

On November 29, 1970, Alla was found dead in her father-in-law’s house in Vasilkiv, Kyiv Oblast where she arranged to collect an old family sewing machine. The investigation, led by the Kyiv prosecutor’s office, concluded that her father-in-law had killed her out of personal animosity, and then committed suicide. However, from the outset, friends and acquaintances suspected political murder at the hands of the KGB for her sustained activism. An independent investigation in the 1990s revealed an incomplete criminal file ridden with contradictions carried out with falsifications. Although the case remains officially unsolved, no one has any serious doubt as to who was responsible for Alla’s death. Alla Horska was only 41 when her life was tragically cut short. She left behind a husband and a young son.

Her funeral on December 7, 1970, turned into a civil resistance campaign. Her associates – the literary critic Yevgen Sverstiuk, poet Vasyl Stus, human rights advocate Ivan Gel, and civil activist Oles Sergienko made speeches. The event was not allowed by the investigative commission and all of those who spoke were arrested a short time later. Two years after the death of the artist, mass arrests began among the Ukrainian intelligentsia. As a result, for some, it was the beginning of the end. For example, the literary critic Ivan Svitlychny and the poet Vasyl Stus were both arrested, and both of their lives ended as a direct result of Soviet imprisonment.

Her works are housed in the collections of the National Art Museum in Kyiv, the National Museum in Lviv, the Central State Archive Museum of Literature and Art, the Museum of the Sixtiers, the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art at Rutgers University, and the Checkpoint Charlie Berlin Wall Museum, among others.