Vasyl Volodymyrovych Barladianu was a Ukrainian human rights activist, journalist, and poet.
16 Facts About Vasyl Barladianu
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Vasyl Volodymyrovych Barladianu was born on 23 August 1942 in the village of Sipca, in the present-day region of Transnistria.
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Vasyl Barladianu was the grandson of Andrii Hulyi-Hulenko, a brigadier general of the Ukrainian People's Army.
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Vasyl Barladianu worked as an art historian at museums in Moscow, Leningrad, Prague, and western Ukraine throughout the mid-1960s.
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Vasyl Barladianu worked in the Russian language from 1960 to 1965, afterwards writing exclusively in Ukrainian.
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In May 1972, Vasyl Barladianu began being investigated by the KGB of Ukraine, and he was subject to interrogation on 28 January 1974 after being accused of nationalism.
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Vasyl Barladianu was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 11 March 1974, and removed from his position as an instructor at Odesa University on 5 May.
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Vasyl Barladianu was arrested on 2 March 1977 by the Odesa Prosecutor's Office, and he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for "slandering the Soviet state" on the basis of his poetry.
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Vasyl Barladianu spent a total of 13 months and 17 days of his three-year sentence engaging in various hunger strikes.
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Vasyl Barladianu continued to write while imprisoned, including a collection of poems, two series of short stories, and several articles condemning the Soviet government for its treatment of dissidents.
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On 29 February 1980, three days before his scheduled release, Vasyl Barladianu was arrested while imprisoned.
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Vasyl Barladianu was sentenced to a further three years of imprisonment on 13 August 1980 for the same charges as his first sentence.
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Vasyl Barladianu served this sentence at various prisons in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk Oblast, before being released in 1983.
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Amidst Perestroika, Vasyl Barladianu resumed his activities in the dissident movement.
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Vasyl Barladianu began working for Radio Liberty, as well as The Ukrainian Herald, in 1987, and he was a co-founder of the Ukrainian Initiative Group for the Liberation of Prisoners of Conscience, alongside Mykhailo Horyn, Viacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Gel, Stepan Khmara, and Zorian Popadiuk.
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Vasyl Barladianu was awarded the Order of Merit on 25 November 2005 by President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko.