Levko Lukianenko

Levko Hryhorovych Lukianenko (Ukrainian: Левко́ Григо́рович Лук'я́ненко; 24 August 1928 – 7 July 2018) was a Ukrainian Soviet dissident and politician. 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 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." After 72 days, his sentence was later commuted to 15 years in a prison camp. Lukianenko served his sentence at first in Mordovia (Dubravlag, OLP #10, in Sosnovka, Zubovo-Polyansky District) and then in Vladimir, at the Vladimir Central Prison (infamous for its brutality). Soon after his release in 1976, he moved to Chernihiv and became a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. In 1977, he was arrested again and was sentenced by Chernihiv Oblast Court to 10 years in a camp and 5 years of internal exile for "Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

In 1988, Lukianenko was released in the wave of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. He refused to emigrate as a condition for his release, but he was released anyway in November 1988. In total, he had spent 27 years in prison.

Lukianenko was elected a member of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament) in March 1990 and became the head of the new Ukrainian Republican Party the following month. He was the co-author of Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine and the author of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, adopted in 1991. In the 1991 Ukrainian presidential election, Lukianenko finished third with 4.5% of the vote.

From May 1992 to November 1993, Lukianenko was the first Ukrainian ambassador to Canada. In protest of government policies, he resigned.