Yurii Shukhevych

Yurii-Bohdan Romanovych Shukhevych (, 28 March 1933 – 22 November 2022) was a Ukrainian far-right politician. Son of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander Roman Shukhevych, Yurii was separated from his family at the age of 12 due to being a son of an "enemy of the people" and spent over 30 years in Soviet prisons. A member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, he was a long-serving leader of the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defence. He received one of his names in memory of his maternal uncle Yurko (Yurii) Berezynskyi, who had been a member of OUN and died in 1932 during a raid against a Polish post office in Horodok. He was released under an amnesty in 1954, after the death of Joseph Stalin, but the USSR Procurator General ordered that he be sent back to prison to complete his sentence. On the day of his release, in 1958, he was rearrested, charged with having conducted "anti-Soviet agitation" in prison, and sentenced to another ten years, in a labor camp in Mordovia.

After his release in August 1968, he was forbidden to live in Ukraine. He settled in Nalchik, in the North Caucasus, married, had two children, worked as an electrician, and wrote an account of his 20 years in prison. In February 1972, he was arrested in Nalchik after anti-Soviet literature was discovered during a police raid on his rooms and handed over to the KGB in Kyiv, then sent back to Nalchik, and sentenced to another nine years in labor camps, followed by five in exile. In 1973, he wrote a letter to the UN from a labor camp in Mordovia, for which another year was added to his sentence. He was held in Vladimir Prison, then transferred to the Tatar prison. During his time as a prisoner, Shukhevych went blind.

During his exile, Shukhevych became a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union.

Shukhevych failed to register as a candidate in the 1991 Ukrainian presidential election because of a failure to collect 100,000 signatures.

In the 1994 Ukrainian parliamentary election Shukhevych failed to win after receiving no more than 7.44% of the votes in single-member districts in Zolochiv.

In August 1994 Shukhevych retired from active political life because of health problems and relationships with other leaders of the party had finally deteriorated.

On 19 August 2006, Shukhevych was awarded the title Hero of Ukraine "for civil courage, long-term social, political and human rights activities in the name of independence of Ukraine".

In February 2014 Shukhevych signed a petition that asked to respect the Russian language and Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine lifestyle "so they do not feel like strangers in Ukraine".

As a deputy, Shukhevych issued a petition to the president, demanding to declassify the information on pensions received by former members of party nomenklatura, secretaries of the Central Committee, Politburo and representatives of Soviet police organs. In 2015 he was instrumental in the drafting and passing of the Ukrainian decommunization laws.

He died in the night of 21 to 22 November 2022 in Munich, where he was undergoing medical treatment.

Family

Following the beginning of German-Soviet War, Yurii lived with his mother, sister and grandmother. He met his father only several times, asking for permission to enter the insurgent force, but Roman Shukhevych denied his appeal, not wishing to sacrifice the lives of the younger generation.

Yurii's mother Natalia was arrested in 1946 and sentenced to 10 years of prison camps. After her liberation from imprisonment in 1956, she returned to Lviv, but was unable to find a home due to the lack of official registration, which led to another arrest. In 1958 she was finally able to settle in Lviv. During her second arrest, Natalia met her daughter Marusia, who had been also put into an orphanage and came to visit her in prison. Natalia spent the rest of her life in Lviv, dying in 2002.

During his exile, Shukhevych married, and in 1970 his wife Lesia gave birth to son Roman (died in 2002). Lesia also had a son from her previous marriage called Yurii.