Today is the day of memory of Vyacheslav Chornovil – a famous Ukrainian politician, journalist, dissident, leader of the People’s Movement of Ukraine.
Kiev. Ukraine. Ukraine Gate – March 25, 2021 – Society
Thanks to his intelligence, energy, and extraordinary ability to work, he could become a successful entrepreneur or scientist, he could make a brilliant career as a clerk. But Chornovil did not have the character to be guided by such attitudes. He lived on the diametrically opposite principle – “if not me, then who?”. It was this attack of principled news that prompted him during the Soviet-Brezhnev silence to express his own position, which could in no way coincide with the official one. For this, of course, he was “not patted on the head”: for a start, he was expelled from graduate school, and seeing that intimidation did not work, they began to take more effective measures – to judge for “anti-Soviet propaganda.”
He spent a total of 15 years in Soviet concentration camps. After each of his returns, he worked with redoubled vigor – despite the perpetual lack of money and problems with work, despite the threat of another imprisonment. Chornovil was the initiator of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. After Gorbachev’s “thaw” he plunged headlong into politics and became one of the founders of the People’s Movement of Ukraine. His active civic stance, his uncompromisingness, and his directness irritated many. And not only in Ukraine.
Chornovil’s death in a car accident on March 25, 1999, put an end to this. The tragedy occurred on the 5th kilometer of the Boryspil-Zolotonosha highway when a Toyota Chornovola crashed into a KamAZ with a trailer turning in the middle of the highway. Vyacheslav Chornovil and his driver Yevhen Pavlov died on the spot, and the press secretary of the NRU leader Dmytro Ponamarchuk was hospitalized with serious injuries.
Many years have passed since then, but the clarity and clear answers in this story have not increased. The official version is an accident, and the popular version, which is supported by Chornovil supporters, is a political assassination on the eve of the upcoming presidential election. The day after the accident, the then head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Yuriy Kravchenko, stated that the accident on the Boryspil highway was an accident and that the investigation would not consider any other version. The Minister did not even wait for the official conclusions of experts. Ivan Sholom, one of KamAZ’s three passengers, died suddenly of a heart attack. KAMAZ driver Volodymyr Kudel was initially convicted – the investigation established that he had committed a crime – an accident with serious consequences, but was soon released on amnesty.
The case of Vyacheslav Chornovil’s death was closed in June 1999, but this did not mean that the case was over. Investigative actions began and stopped several times: in 2001, in 2005, in August 2006. In June 2011, with the permission of Taras Chornovil, his father’s body was even exhumed, but the light of the politician’s mysterious death did not shed light. Finally, in March 2012, the Boryspil Court of Kyiv Oblast began a hearing in the case of Vyacheslav Chornovil’s death, and on January 21, 2014, closed the case, declaring the accident an accident.
And now many continue to believe that it was not an ordinary accident. All his life Vyacheslav Chornovil taught Ukrainians to get rid of the inferiority complex, to squeeze out a slave and a soviet “homo sovieticus”. And he had every right to do so – a proud, brave and straightforward, truly free citizen of a free country.
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Source: Ukrgate
