Ivan Bahriany

I will return to my homeland with millions of my brothers and sisters here in Europe and the Siberian concentration camps when the totalitarian bloody Bolshevik system is demolished, just as Hitler’s was.

Ivan Bahriany

Ivan Bahriany (real name Lazoviahin) was a Ukrainian writer, publicist, social and political activist, the founder of “camp prose” in Ukrainian literature, one of the founders of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party (URDP), Vice President of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) in exile, and a representative of the third (political) wave of emigration.

The activist was born on October 2, 1906, in Okhtyrka, then Kharkiv province. In 1923, he graduated from the Krasnopilsk Art, Industrial, and Ceramic Vocational School. He worked in the mines of the Donetsk region, in various newspapers, and the Okhtyrka Children’s Town (an orphanage) while simultaneously writing poetry. In the second half of the 1920s, he studied at the photography and film department of the painting faculty of the Kyiv Art Institute, which he did not graduate from due to financial difficulties.

In the late 1920s, he joined the Workshop of the Revolutionary Word (MARS), which opposed the Soviet government. The censors banned his poem “Ave Maria” (1929). In 1932, Bahriany was arrested and sentenced to exile in the Far East. Later, he described his experiences in his novels “Tyhrolovy” (Tiger Hunters / The Hunters and the Hunted, 1943) and “Sad Hetsymanskyi” (The Garden of Gethsemane, 1950), which marked the beginning of “camp prose” in the history of Ukrainian literature.

During the Second World War, he joined the Ukrainian underground movement, worked as a regional propaganda officer for the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and took part in the creation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR).

From 1945, Bahriany lived in West Germany. He took an active part in Ukrainian life in DP camps. His main goal during the German period was to restore Ukraine’s independence. He was one of the founders, leader, and theorist of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party, which in the late 1940s and early 1960s was one of the largest parties of Ukrainian emigration. He took an active part in the State Center of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Exile activities. He published the newspaper “Ukrainski Visti” in Neu-Ulm (Ukrainian News), wrote articles (more than 200), and a pamphlet, “Chomu ya ne khochu povertatysia do SSSR?” (Why I am not going back to the Soviet Union?). He published his works of fiction in foreign languages and planned to write screenplays for Hollywood. Bahriany also made business visits to the United States, Canada, and England.

Bahriany was buried in the city of Neu-Ulm. The words from the poem “Zolotyi bumerang” (The Golden Boomerang) are engraved on the tombstone: “We are. We were. And we will be / And our Motherland is with us”.