Mykola Matusevych

Mykola Ivanovych Matusevych (; born 19 July 1947) is a Ukrainian human rights activist and former Soviet dissident who was a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. For his human rights activities, he was sentenced to seven years of corrective labour and five years of internal exile in 1978, and listed as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.

Early life and career Mykola Ivanovych Matusevych was born on 19 July 1947 in the village of , in Ukraine's central Kyiv Oblast, to an agronomist father and a biology teacher mother. From an early age, he expressed interest in dissident activities; he was expelled from Kyiv State University in his fourth year of study for laying flowers at the monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv and supporting arrested dissidents, though the official reason for his expulsion was due to a "lack of progress". Following his expulsion, Matusevych worked as a historian and editor of medical literature journals.

Arrest After Berdnyk's arrest, Matusevych, along with Myroslav Marynovych, was arrested on 23 April 1977 and charged with anti-Soviet agitation and hooliganism. The charges were based on a March 1977 event in which Marynovych and Matusevych had disrupted a ceremony at the Kyiv Philharmonic calling on those present to recite Shevchenko's Testament poem.

Matusevych served out his prison sentence at VS-389/35 near Chusovoy, Perm Oblast, in the Russian SFSR. In 1980, he was transferred to Chistopol prison for a further three years' imprisonment, and his wife, Olha Heiko Matusevych, was also arrested and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

On 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pardoned Matusevych from his internal exile as part of a broader campaign of reform. At first, Matusevych refused to leave exile, insisting on a full rehabilitation to clear his name. However, after a year, he returned to Ukraine. In 2023, he also was one of several signatories to an open letter urging for Jews and Ukrainians to unite against Russia after controversy erupted over a monument to soldiers of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS in Philadelphia.