Yuriy Badzyo

Yuriy Vasyliovych Badzyo (Ukrainian: Бадзьо Юрій Васильович) (25 April 1936 – 1 September 2018) was a Ukrainian literary critic, activist, and political prisoner. He was the founder of the Democratic Party of Ukraine and its first chairman.

Early life and career

Badzyo was born into a peasant family of ten children in the village of Kopynivtsi, located in the Mukachevo Raion, Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine.

In 1958, Badzyo graduated from the Faculty of Ukrainian Language and Literature of the Uzhhorod National University, becoming a teacher of the Ukrainian language and literature before serving as a director of a school located in Mukachevo.

In 1961, he began studying for his PhD at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences located in Kyiv. In 1964, he married Svitlana Kyrychenko, a fellow student at the institute whom he had met the previous year, and successfully defended his PhD, becoming an assistant researcher at the institute.

In 1993, Badzyo became an editor at the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

In 1996, he became a member of the National Writers' Union of Ukraine.

Dissident activity and imprisonment

During his time in Kyiv, Badzyo became a member of the Klub tvorchoyi molodi or Club of Creative Youth, a cultural organisation founded during the Khrushchev Thaw that became a centre for dissident members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, collectively known as the Shistdesyatnyky or "Sixties". Here, he came into contact and became friends with Vasyl Stus, a fellow student and dissident, among others.

On September 4 1965, Badzyo participated in a protest against the arrests of political activists in Ukraine alongside Ivan Dzyuba, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Stus, Kyrychenko, and others, at the premiere of Armenian director Sergei Parajanov's "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" at a cinema in Kyiv. Badzyo was subsequently dismissed from his position at the institute, expelled from the Communist Party, and gradually deprived of the opportunity of further work in the academic field. From 1965 to 1974, Badzyo worked as a teacher, proofreader, and editor between periods of unemployment, and as a loader at a bakery from 1974 to 1979.

In 1971, Badzyo wrote a letter to the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine in which he criticised the cultural policy of the government and argued that Ukrainian literature and culture held inferior positions in relation to their Russian counterparts.

The arrests of political dissidents close to Badzyo, including Dzyuba and Stus, as well as a KGB raid on his apartment in 1972 prompted him to begin writing a treatise on the Soviet political system, Soviet historiography, Russification, and the subjugation of the Ukrainian nation, titled "Pravo zhyty", or "The right to live". In 1977, the 1,400 page draft manuscript, encompassing four out of a planned five chapters, disappeared. Badzyo set about writing a new version and had completed 452 pages when Soviet authorities raided his apartment again in February 1979 and seized the second manuscript. He was arrested two months later in May.

On December 12 1979, Badzyo was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment, which he served at the Dubravlag labour camp, and a further five years in exile in Khandyga, Republic of Sakha, for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" under Article 62 of the Ukrainian SSR's Criminal Code (Article 70 in the Russian SFR).

Due to factors such as the death of Anatoly Marchenko in prison, a dissident and founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, continued international pressure, and the beginning of perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet authorities began to grant amnesties and early releases to prisoners in 1986. However, prisoners had to pledge to refrain from future "anti-Soviet authorities" or write letters requesting pardons to be released, which Badzyo refused to do. As a result, he was only allowed to return from exile on December 9 1988, two days after Gorbachev publicly asserted at the United Nations General Assembly in Geneva that all political prisoners in the Soviet Union had already been freed and allowed to return home.

The national-democratic movement and Ukrainian independence

Badzyo and his wife Kyrychenko actively participated in politics upon their return to Kyiv in January 1989. That year, Badzyo authored the political programme for a hypothetical "Ukrainian Party for Democratic Socialism and State Independence", in which he outlined the need to establish a democratic socialist (in opposition to the "real socialism" of the Soviet Union, which Badzyo also labelled "feudal socialism"), independent Ukrainian state. This programme did not come to fruition. Instead, Badzyo was involved in the formation of the more moderate, social democratic Democratic Party of Ukraine, an offshoot of the People's Movement of Ukraine or Rukh, becoming its first chairman on September 22 1990.

During Ukraine's first presidential election held in 1991, Badzyo led the pro-Leonid Kravchuk national-democratic bloc against the candidacy of Rukh's leader, Viascheslav Chornovil. Badzyo's decision to support Kravchuk, a member of the nomenklatura and chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, put him at odds with many of his contemporaries, members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and dissidents. Badzyo criticised them for prioritising "ideology" over "national liberation", arguing not only that it was impossible to construct a new state without the cooperation of the nomenklatura, as they controlled Ukraine's political, economical, and social institutions, but that it was necessary in order to secure Ukrainian statehood from the threat of anti-Ukrainian Russophilia.

On August 8 1992, sixteen political parties and organisations came together to form the Congress of National-Democratic Forces, a pro-Kravchuk political coalition. It was led by a troika of Badzyo, leader of the Ukrainian Republican Party, Mykhailo Horyn, and the leader of the women's wing of Rukh, Larysa Skoryk. The coalition positioned itself against federalising Ukraine and advocated for exiting the Commonwealth of Independent States. In December that year, Badzyo stood down as chairman at the 2nd Congress of the Democratic Party.