Antonina Dvoryanets

Antonina Grigorivna Dvoryanets (; ; 23 March 1952 – 18 February 2014) was a Ukrainian hydraulic engineer and political activist. She began her career as an hydraulic engineer at a collective farm in Hornostaipil from 1972 to 1983 and then worked as a senior project group engineer at the Chernobyl Department of Drainage Systems between 1983 and 1987. Dvoryanets worked as a liquidator, clearing the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986. She later worked variously at the Land Reclamation and Water Management, Kyiv, then at the Chornobilvodeksploatsiya in Kyiv and the Chernobyl Special Plant until her retirement in 2014.

As an activist, Dvoryanets took part in the Ukraine without Kuchma mass protest, the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. She was posthumously conferred the title of Hero of Ukraine with the Order of the Gold Star and a street in Brovary was named for her.

Early life and career On 23 March 1952, Dvorianets was born in the village of , Chernobyl Raion, Kyiv Oblast in the Ukrainian SSR. She was the daughter of Paraska Onikievna Nechiporenko and had one sister. Dvoryanets was educated firstly at Chornobyl boarding school since the village she was raised in had just a primary school. Dvoryanets went on to study hydraulic engineering at the secondary-level Boyar Reclamation Technical School from 1967. She graduated from the Ukrainian Republican Correspondence Agricultural Technical School (now the ) with a degree in Hydromelioration in 1972. Her graduation enabled her to select her workplace at a local collective farm. She went on to work as a senior project group engineer at the Chernobyl Department of Drainage Systems between 17 June 1983 and 4 May 1987. Dvoryanets worked as an engineer at the mechanisation department and was also an engineer-dispatcher of the Kyiv Department of Land Reclamation and Water Management, Kyiv water protection works department from 5 May 1987 to 31 March 1988.

From the start of the 2000s, Dvoryanets took part in various activist causes in public. She partook in the Ukraine without Kuchma mass protest that lasted from 2000 to 2001.

Personal life She was married to the plant worker Ivan Grigoryovych Dvoryanets from 1 May 1973 until her death in 2014 and they had two children. and she was buried at a cemetery in Brovary. In November 2014, president Petro Poroshenko posthumously conferred Dvoryanets the title of Hero of Ukraine with the Order of the Gold Star "For civic courage, patriotism, heroic defense of the constitutional foundations of democracy, human rights and freedoms, selfless service to the Ukrainian people, demonstrated during the Revolution of Dignity."

A memorial plaque dedicated to her was unveiled on the facade of her residence in Brovary in April 2015. The Supreme Archbishop of Kyiv-Halytsk UGCC posthumously conferred her an honorary diploma in May 2016. Dvoryanets's name and portrait are engraved on the memorial of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred in Kyiv on Instytutska Street.