Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan (, party nickname Comrade Yaga; 27 July 1902 – 24 October 1949) was a Soviet Ukrainian writer, playwright, and publicist.
A member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine from 1924, he played a role in the 1946 Synod of Lviv that merged the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church and was controversial for the anti-Catholicism in his writings.
He 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.
Early life
Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan was born on 27 July 1902 in Dynów, then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria within Austria-Hungary, to the family of Oleksandr Halan, a minor post office official. As a child, he lived and studied in Przemyśl. He enjoyed a large collection of books gathered by his father and was greatly influenced by the creativity of the Ukrainian socialist writer Ivan Franko. At school, Yaroslav's critical thoughts brought him into conflict with priests who taught theology.
At the beginning of the First World War his father, along with other "unreliable" elements who sympathised with the Russian Empire, were imprisoned at the Thalerhof internment camp by the Austro-Hungarian authorities.
During the next Austrian offensive, in order to avoid repressions, his mother evacuated the family with the retreating Russian army to Rostov-on-Don, where Yaroslav studied at the gymnasium and performed in the local theatre. Living there, Halan witnessed the events of the October Revolution. He became familiar with Lenin's agitation. Later, these events formed the basis of his story, Unforgettable Days.
While in Rostov-on-Don, he discovered the works of Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Vissarion Belinsky, and Anton Chekhov. Thus, his obsession with this art was born, which in the future guided his decision to become a playwright.
Student years After the war, Halan returned to Galicia, which was annexed into the Second Polish Republic after the Treaty of Riga. In 1922, he graduated from the Peremyshl Ukrainian Gymnasium. He then studied at the Trieste Higher Trade School in Italy, and in 1922 enrolled in the University of Vienna. In 1926, he transferred to the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, from which he graduated in 1928 (according to some sources he didn't pass the final exams). Halan then began working as a teacher of the Polish language and literature at a private gymnasium in Lutsk. However, ten months later he was banned from teaching due to political concerns.
In his student years, Halan became active in left-wing politics. While at the University of Vienna he became a member of the workers' community ("Unity"), overseen by the Communist Party of Austria. From 1924, he was actively involved in resisting Polish rule in western Ukraine as a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. He joined the CPWU while he was on vacation in Przemyśl. Later, while studying in Kraków, he was elected a deputy chairman of the student group, which was controlled by the Communist Party of Poland.
Creativity and political struggle in Poland
In the 1920s, Halan's creative activity also began. In 1927, he finished work on his first significant play, Don Quixote from Ettenheim. In his play 99% (1930), he condemned Ukrainian nationalism. This was followed by emphasis of class conflict in the plays Cargo (1930) and Cell (1932), which argued for the Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish proletariat to work together.
Halan's play 99% was staged by the semi-legal Lviv Workers' Theatre. On the eve of the premiere, Polish authorities launched a campaign of mass arrest against Western Ukrainian communists, sending them to the Lutsk prison. As the theatre's director and one of the key actors were arrested, the premiere was on the verge of failure. Despite the risks of being arrested, the workers continued rehearsing so that the play was presented with a delay of only one day. About 600 workers attended the premiere; for them, it was a form of protest mobilisation against repression and nationalism.
Halan was one of the founders of the Ukrainian proletarian writers' group Horno. From 1927 to 1932, along with other communist writers and members of the CPWU, he worked for the Lviv-based Ukrainian magazine Vikna, being a member of its editorial board, until it was closed by government censors.
Living in the Polish-controlled city of Lviv, Halan translated novels from German into Polish to earn a living. In 1932, he moved to Nyzhniy Bereziv, the native village of his wife, located in the Carpathian mountains, close to Kolomyia, where he worked on his own plays, stories and articles. In the village he spread communist agitation among peasants, creating cells of the International Red Aid and the Committee for Famine Relief. Without opportunities to find work, he lived in the countryside until June 1935, when he was summoned by the CPWU to return to Lviv.
Halan was denied Soviet citizenship in 1935.
In 1935, Halan traveled extensively around Prykarpattia, giving speeches to peasants. He became active as a communist propagandist and political agitator. Addressing the city workers, Halan explained to them the main points of Marxist theory. In particular, he held lectures on Friedrich Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Karl Marx's Wage Labour and Capital. Together with the young communist writer Olexa Havryliuk, Halan organized safe houses, wrote leaflets and proclamations, and transferred illegal literature to Lviv.
Throughout his political career, the writer was repeatedly persecuted, and twice imprisoned (for the first time in 1934). He was one of the organizers of the Lviv Anti-Fascist Congress of Cultural Workers in May 1936. Halan also took part in a major political demonstration on 16 April 1936 in Lviv, in which the crowd was fired on by Polish police (in total, thirty workers were killed and two hundred injured). Halan devoted his story Golden Arch to the memory of fallen comrades.
Participation in the Anti-Fascist Congress forced him to escape from Lviv to Warsaw, where he eventually found work at the left-wing newspaper Dziennik Popularny, edited by Wanda Wasilewska. In 1937, the newspaper was closed by the authorities, and on 8 April, Halan was accused of illegal communist activism and sent to prison in Warsaw (later transferred to Lviv). Released in December 1937, Halan lived in Lviv under strict supervision by the police, and remained unemployed until 1939.
In 1937, his elder brother, a member of the CPWU, died in Lviv. After the Communist Party of Poland and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, as its autonomous organization, were dissolved by the Comintern on trumped-up accusations of spying for Poland in 1938, Halan's first wife Anna Henyk (also a member of the CPWU), who was studying at the Kharkiv Medical Institute, was arrested by the NKVD and executed in the Great Purge.
In Soviet Lviv After the Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in September 1939, Halan worked for the newspaper Vilna Ukraina, directed the Maria Zankovetska Theatre and wrote more than 100 pamphlets and articles on changes taking place in the reunified lands of Western Ukraine.
In November 1939, Halan went to Kharkiv to try to locate his vanished wife, Anna Henyk. Together with the writer Yuriy Smolych he came to the dormitory of the Medical Institute and asked the porter for any information about her fate. The porter only gave him back a suitcase with Anna's belongings and said that she had been arrested by the NKVD, in response to which Halan burst into tears.
In June 1941, being a journalist of the newspaper Vilna Ukraina, he took his first professional vacation in Crimea. This was interrupted by the beginning of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June of that year.
War period When the war on the Eastern Front began, Halan arrived in Kharkiv and went to the military commissariat, having a strong desire to become a volunteer of the Red Army and to go to the frontline, but was denied.
He was evacuated to Ufa. In September 1941, Alexander Fadeyev summoned him to Moscow for working at the Polish-language magazine Nowe Horyzonty. In the days of the Battle for Moscow, on 17 October, he was evacuated to Kazan.
Later the writer arrived in Saratov, where he served as a radio host at the Taras Shevchenko Radio Station. Then he was a special front-line correspondent of the newspaper Sovietskaya Ukraina, and then Radianska Ukraina.
In 1943, in Moscow, he met his future second wife Maria Krotkova, who was an artist.
In October 1943, the publishing house Moscovskiy Bolshevik released a collection of 15 war stories by Halan under the title Front on Air. At the end of the year, Halan moved to the recently liberated Kharkiv and worked there on the frontline radio station in Dnipro.
Post-war Halan, as a correspondent of the Radianska Ukraina newspaper, represented the Soviet Union at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.
Halan often wrote about the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, condemning them as murderers and war criminals. He privately expressed resentment for this as outside of his field, but continued to write and publish anti-nationalist literature.
In his last satirical pamphlets Yaroslav Halan criticized the nationalistic and clerical reaction (particularly, the Greek Catholic Church and the anti-Communist doctrine of the Holy See), in pieces such as: Their Face (1948), In the service of Satan (1948), In the Face of Facts (1949), Father of Darkness and His Henchmen (1949), The Vatican Idols Thirst for Blood (1949, in Polish), Twilight of the Alien Gods (1948), What Should Not Be Forgotten (1947), The Vatican Without Mask (1949) etc.
When the Holy See discovered that Halan planned to publish his new anti-clerical pamphlet The Father of Darkness and His Henchmen, Pope Pius XII excommunicated him in July 1949. In response, Halan wrote the pamphlet I Spit on the Pope, which attracted considerable attention within the Catholic Church and among believers. In the pamphlet he ironised on the Decree against Communism released by the Vatican on 1 July, in which the Holy See had threatened to excommunicate all members of the Communist parties and active supporters of the Communists:
Assassination
Halan was assassinated on 24 October 1949 in his home office, which was situated at Hvadiyska street in Lviv. He received eleven blows to the head with an axe. His 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.
The killers – two students of the Lviv Forestry Technical Institute, Ilariy Lukashevych and Mykhailo Stakhur – were accused of orchestrating the assassination at the behest of the OUN's leadership. On the eve of the murder Lukashevych gained the writer's confidence, so the students were let into the house. They came to the apartment under the pretext of being discriminated against at the university and seeking his help. When Lukashevych gave a signal, Stakhur attacked the writer with the axe. After Stakhur was convinced that Halan was dead, they tied up the housekeeper and escaped.
The Ministry of the State Security (MGB) accused the Ukrainian nationalists for his murder, while the OUN claimed that it was a Soviet provocation in order to start a new wave of repressions against locals.