1931–2012
Atena Pashko
Poet, Union of Ukrainian Women leader
The poems she wrote at school became insurgent songs. Atena Pashko, a Lviv poet and engineer, helped put out the samvydav Ukrainian Herald, lived for years under KGB watch, and in 1991 became head of the revived Union of Ukrainian Women.
Key accomplishments
- Helped produce the samvydav journal Ukrainian Herald (1969–1972)
- Head of the revived Union of Ukrainian Women, elected at its founding congress in Kyiv (1991)
- Poetry collections At the Crossroads (1989), On the Tip of a Candle (1991), I Believe (1994), The Blade of My Path (2007)
- President of the Viacheslav Chornovil International Charitable Foundation (from 1999), which published his works in 10 volumes
- Order of Princess Olga, 3rd class (1997), and Order of Freedom (2009)
Poems that became songs
Did you know that some poems written by a schoolgirl from a village near Drohobych were sung as insurgent songs? Atena Pashko was born in 1931 in Prusy, now Bystrytsia in the Lviv region, into a patriotic family. At school she wrote insurgent poems, and several of them became songs.
An engineer among poets
In 1953 Atena graduated from the Lviv Forestry Institute and worked in her field, from 1958 at Lviv University. She also wrote poetry and was close to the Sixtiers: Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, the Horyn brothers, Iryna and Ihor Kalynets, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska.
The price of speaking up
Atena Pashko openly defended persecuted figures of Ukrainian culture. In return she was banned from publishing, reprimanded at work, and had her home searched. In 1970 she signed an appeal to the Supreme Court of Soviet Ukraine to overturn the sentence of Valentyn Moroz, and lost her job for it.
From 1969 to 1972 she helped produce the samvydav journal Ukrainian Herald, started by her husband, Viacheslav Chornovil. After Chornovil’s arrest in 1972, the sixth issue he had prepared came out in Lviv thanks to Mykhailo Kosiv and Atena Pashko. Investigators threatened Chornovil that they would arrest her too. In 1973 she was called as a witness at his trial and at the trial of Iryna Senyk. She was kept under constant KGB watch, and lived through not only searches and the loss of her job but imprisonment as well. Her collections could not come out at home, so from the 1980s her poems were printed abroad, where At the Crossroads appeared in 1989.
The union that came back
The Union of Ukrainian Women was founded in Lviv in 1921, and between the wars it was the largest women’s organisation in western Ukraine. The Polish authorities disbanded it in 1938, and it was shut down for good after the Soviet occupation of Galicia in 1939. It was revived in Lviv in February 1990, and in December 1991, at its founding congress in Kyiv, Atena Pashko, who had lived in Kyiv since 1990, was elected its head.
After her husband’s death in 1999 she led the foundation named after him, which published Chornovil’s works in ten volumes. Atena Pashko died in Kyiv on 20 March 2012.
Why it matters today
Atena Pashko was more than the wife of a famous political prisoner: she chose for herself to stand up for the persecuted, and paid for it with her job, her right to publish and her peace of mind. When her husband was jailed, she would not let his journal fall silent. In independent Ukraine she brought back to life a women’s organisation the Soviet regime had banned. Her life shows that fighting for Ukraine is not only about bold deeds but also about everyday loyalty to those who are persecuted.
