Concept

Levko Lukianenko

Summary
Levko Hryhorovych Lukianenko (Левко́ Григо́рович Лук'я́ненко; 24 August 1928 – 7 July 2018) was a Ukrainian politician, Soviet dissident, and Hero of Ukraine. He was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976 and was elected a leader of the Ukrainian Helsinki Association in 1988. Lukianenko is the author of the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine. Lukianenko was born on 24 August 1928 in the Khrypivka village of Horodnia Raion, Soviet Union. During World War II in 1944, he was recruited in the Soviet Red Army aged 15, as he could prove that he was underage (to get drafted he lied that he had been born in 1927) and served in Austria and then in the Caucasus region (cities Ordzhonikidze and Nakhichevan). In Austria, he observed the arrival of Ukrainian wheat in Baden bei Wien, which reminded him of the removal of grain from Ukraine when he almost starved in the 1930s during the Holodomor. That event made Lukianenko to "follow Severyn Nalyvaiko's path - I would fight for an independent Ukraine." In 1953, Lukianenko enrolled in the Law Department of Moscow State University and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). (Lukianenko later claimed that he had joined the CPSU only "to do the highest for Ukraine.") In university, Lukianenko later claimed, he was nicknamed khokhol, an ethnic slur against Ukrainians. Soon after he graduated in 1958, Lukianenko was directed as a propagandist to Radekhiv Raion Communist Party committee. Lukianenko claimed that after the 1956 20th Congress, "I stopped pretending I was a party member." In 1959, during the Khrushchev Thaw, he organized a dissident movement in Hlyniany, the Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union, along with Ivan Kandyba and others. Lukianenko defended the right of secession of Ukraine from the rest of Soviet Union, a right that was theoretically granted by the 1936 Soviet Constitution (Articles 17 and 125). In May 1961, he was expelled from the party, arrested, tried, and sentenced by the Lviv Oblast Court to death for separatism, "undermining the credibility of the CPSU, and defaming the theory of Marxism-Leninism.
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