Alla Horska


Alla Horska — Ukrainian artist of the sixties, monumentalist painter, one of the first representatives of the underground art movement, dissident and a well-known activist of the human rights movement of the 1960s in Ukraine. Wife of the artist Victor Zaretsky. Murdered by the KGB.

Biography

In 1962 Alla Horska became one of the founders and active members of the Club of Creative Youth.
In 1962 Alla Horska, Vasyl Symonenko and Les Tanyuk revealed the unmarked mass grave sites of those “enemies of the Soviet state” disposed by NKVD in Bykivnia, Lukyanivsky and Vasylkivsky cemeteries. The activists declared it to the Kyiv City Council.
In 1965-1968 she took part in protests against the repressions of Ukrainian human rights activists: Bohdan and Mykhailo Horyn, Opanas Zalyvakha, Sviatoslav Karavansky, Valentyn Moroz, Vyacheslav Chornovil, and others. Because of this, she was persecuted by the Soviet security services. However, a kind of protection for her was that she, together with a group of artists, worked on monumental works of art in Donetsk and Krasnodon, which were considered important and had an ideological bias.
In 1967 Horska attended Viacheslav Chornovil’s trial in Lviv. There was a group of Kyiv activists who protested against the illegal conduct of court proceedings. The next year she signed Protest Letter 139 addressed to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union demanding to cease such illegal proceedings. Consequently, KGB began pressuring and threatening the “signers” of this letter.

Death

Alla Horska died in 1970. On December 7, 1970, her funeral took place. The funeral turned into a civil resistance campaign in which such well-known dissidents as Yevgen Sverstiuk, Vasyl Stus, Ivan Gel, and Oles Serhienko made their speeches.

Art

She has created dozens of works: mosaics, murals, stained glass, etc.

Honoring the memory

Films

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