29 Facts About Yaroslav Halan

Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan was a Soviet Ukrainian writer, playwright, and publicist.

Yaroslav Halan was assassinated in 1949 in what the Soviet government claimed was an attack by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, though the organisation's responsibility has since become a source of dispute.

Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan was born on 27 July 1902 in Dynow, then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria within Austria-Hungary, to the family of Oleksandr Halan, a minor post-office official.

Yaroslav Halan enjoyed a large collection of books gathered by his father, and was greatly influenced by the creativity of the Ukrainian socialist writer Ivan Franko.

Yaroslav Halan then studied at the Trieste Higher Trade School in Italy, and in 1922 enrolled in the University of Vienna.

Yaroslav Halan then began working as a teacher of the Polish language and literature at a private gymnasium in Lutsk.

Yaroslav Halan joined the CPWU when he was on vacation in Przemysl.

Yaroslav Halan was one of the founders of the Ukrainian proletarian writers' group Horno.

In 1935, Yaroslav Halan traveled extensively around Prykarpattia, giving speeches to peasants.

Together with the young communist writer Olexa Havryliuk, Yaroslav Halan organized safe houses, wrote leaflets and proclamations, and transferred illegal literature to Lviv.

Yaroslav Halan was one of the organizers of the Lviv Anti-Fascist Congress of Cultural Workers in May 1936.

Yaroslav Halan took part in a major political demonstration on 16 April 1936 in Lviv, in which the crowd was fired on by Polish police.

Yaroslav Halan devoted his story Golden Arch to the memory of fallen comrades.

In 1937, the newspaper was closed by the authorities, and on 8 April, Yaroslav Halan was accused of illegal communist activism and sent to prison in Warsaw.

In November 1939, Yaroslav Halan went to Kharkiv to try to locate his vanished wife Anna Henyk.

Yaroslav Halan 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.

Yaroslav Halan often wrote about the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, condemning them as murderers and war criminals.

Yaroslav Halan privately expressed resentment for this as outside of his field, but continued to write and publish anti-nationalist literature.

Yaroslav Halan was assassinated on 24 October 1949 in his home office, which was situated at Hvadiyska street in Lviv.

Yaroslav Halan received eleven blows to the head with an axe.

Yaroslav Halan's 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.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the UPA in Yaroslav Halan's assassination has increasingly come under scrutiny.

Petro Duzhyi, a soldier of the UPA, claimed in a 1993 interview with historian Mykola Oleksyuk that Timofei Strokach expressed a desire to have Yaroslav Halan killed; according to Duzhyi, Strokach had said during an interrogation that Yaroslav Halan's support for arresting the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's leadership had sparked a popular uprising.

The assassination of Yaroslav Halan resulted in increased repression of the UPA, which continued its insurgency against the Soviet government.

One of the consequences of the murder of Yaroslav Halan was the elimination of the UPA leader Roman Shukhevych four months later.

Yaroslav Halan thinks if he joins the party, he will lose this [freedom].

In 1962, in Toronto, Olexandr Matla, aka Petro Tereschuk, a pro-nationalist historian from the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, published the brochure History of a Traitor, 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 as Anton Krushelnytsky, who moved from Lviv to Kharkiv in the 1930s and was killed during the Great Terror.

Yaroslav Halan has directed his energy and creative mind against his own people and their interests.

Yaroslav Halan spoke as an intelligent person defending Ukrainian culture.