Олекса Гірник

Activity: Human rights advocacy
Date of birth: March 28, 1912
Date of death: January 21, 1978
Navigator: Post-war USSR

Ukrainian political prisoner and dissident, Hero of Ukraine (posthumously). Born on March 28, 1912, in Bohorodchany, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. On January 21, 1978, he committed an act of self-immolation near Shevchenko’s grave on Chernecha Hora (Monk’s Hill) in Kaniv, protesting against the Russification of Ukraine.

Oleksa Hirnyk descended from an educated Boyko family actively involved in cultural and educational work (Prosvita). His father, Mykola Hirnyk, suffered hardships throughout his life in both Polish prisons and Russian camps; he instilled in his son a deep love for Ukraine and a lifelong dream of an independent Ukrainian state.
Even in his youth, Hirnyk stood out for his active civic stance: he was a member of Plast (the Ukrainian scouting organization) and Prosvita, worked in the youth society Sokil, and belonged to the ranks of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). He dreamed of studying at the Faculty of Philosophy in Lviv, but this dream was not meant to be: the young man was drafted into the Polish army and later put on trial for speaking out against the Polish government and calling for the struggle for Ukrainian independence.
On March 25, 1937, Hirnyk was sentenced to five years and three months in prison on charges of high treason. He served his sentence in the Bereza Kartuska concentration camp, in the Brygidki prison in Lviv, and later in prisons in Tarnów and Kraków. In 1939, following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland, Hirnyk escaped from prison. However, his freedom was short-lived: at the railway station in Stryi, he witnessed the forced deportation of Poles to Siberia. Unable to ignore the cries of women and children being shoved into freight cars like cattle by Soviet soldiers, he intervened—and ended up in the hands of the NKVD.
Due to overcrowded prisons in Galicia, Hirnyk was transferred to the NKVD directorate of the Zhytomyr region. Realizing who they were dealing with, the investigators beat him, demanding that he betray other members of the OUN underground, but Hirnyk did not give in. He was then accused of maintaining foreign contacts, based on older files from the Polish secret services where he figured as the leader of a group of Ukrainian nationalists. Ultimately, Hirnyk was sentenced for treason against the homeland to eight years in prison followed by five years of deprivation of civil rights, and was sent to a camp in the Urals.
Returning home in the autumn of 1948, Hirnyk found a job at a brick factory in Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk). A year later, he married Karolina Petrash; she, like her brother, the Greek Catholic priest Mykhailo Petrash, also had bitter experience with the GULAG. In 1953, the couple moved to Kalush. Two sons were born to them: Markiyan and Yevhen, the latter of whom would eventually become the head of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists and a member of the Verkhovna Rada of an already independent Ukraine.
“In the third grade, he urged me to memorize the poem Rozryta mohyla (‘The Plundered Grave’), which was banned at the time. I recited it, and my parents had trouble with the teacher,” Yevhen Hirnyk recalled of his father.
Until his retirement, Hirnyk led a modest, unremarkable life as a brick factory worker. However, his close ones knew him as a man deeply concerned about the fate of the Ukrainian language and culture; it was excruciatingly painful for him to witness the total Russification of Ukraine. Gradually, a desperate intention matured within Hirnyk, which he did not share with a single living soul.
In 1976, he built an extension to his house, where he set up a hiding place. There, he kept leaflets that he wrote by hand using carbon paper in eight different versions. These were calls to resist Russification and fight for an independent Ukraine, accompanied by lines from Taras Shevchenko; in total, he wrote about a thousand of them.
On January 18, 1978, Oleksa Hirnyk packed his things and left his home, leaving a note for his family saying that he had gone to Lviv and would return in a few days. In reality, however, he went to Kyiv, visited the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, and on January 21 took the last bus to Kaniv. Having climbed Chernecha Hora, he bowed to Shevchenko’s grave, scattered all his leaflets around, poured gasoline over himself, and set himself on fire.
The charred body of the dissident was found in the morning. The KGB meticulously gathered the leaflets and did everything possible to hide the truth about Hirnyk’s death even from his family, spreading rumors about the accidental death of a drunk homeless man warming himself by a campfire. However, the truth could not be concealed—not least thanks to police officer Oleksandr Hnuchyi, who worked at the scene and managed to hide several of Hirnyk’s proclamations in the pocket of his tunic.
The story of the man who burned himself out of love for Ukraine became known to the general public only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2007, President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Oleksa Hirnyk the title of Hero of Ukraine.

Author: Olha Herasymenko