Alla Horska
Horska persistently fought the Soviet totalitarian regime and made a major contribution to the development and preservation of Ukrainian culture and identity.
During the early years of Alla's life, Horskyi worked as an actor in the Yalta Ukrainian theater troupe directed by Pavlo Deliavskyi.
[2] Horska's mother, Olena Bezsmertna, worked as a caregiver in Yalta children's sanatoriums and later as a costume designer in Leningrad.
[3] From autumn 1939 to spring 1940, Oleksandr Horskyi was involved in the Soviet-Finnish War, and shortly before Germany's attack on the USSR, he went to Mongolia as the leader of a group for filming the movie "His Name is Sukhe-Bator".
[2] Between 1946 and 1948, Alla Horska studied at the Kyiv Art Secondary School named after T. Shevchenko, where she graduated with a gold medal.
Along with Vasyl Symonenko and Les Tanyuk, Alla discovered the burial sites of thousands of victims of the NKVD (Bykivnia, Lukyanivske, and Vasilkivske cemeteries).
The most horrifying aspect of this story is that it was children playing football with a human skull with a hole in the back who helped make this discovery.
After this incident, a commission classified the stained glass as ideologically hostile and deeply incompatible with the principles of socialist realism.
[10] 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.
[10] The letter, written in a restrained and tolerant manner, demanded an end to the practice of illegal political processes and drew attention to the departure from the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and violations of socialist legality.
Several days before her murder, she wrote a protest to the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR regarding the illegality and cruelty of the verdict.
[citation needed] On 28 November 1970, Alla Horska went to the town of Vasylkiv near Kyiv to pick up a sewing machine from her father-in-law and never returned.
[5] Investigators quickly reported the official cause of events - the father-in-law, due to personal animosity, killed his daughter-in-law and then committed suicide by throwing himself under a train.
[6] Only 38 years later, the State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine declassified the so-called Fund 16, which contained documents related to the case of the murder of Alla Horska (many materials were destroyed in 1990).
These documents were processed and published in 2010 by the son of Alla Horska, a linguist, culturologist, and researcher of his parents' work, Oleksiy (Oles) Zaretsky.
Bold elongated compositions, monumental flat forms, vibrant color schemes (she may have used tempera technique for the first time, which later became her favorite), indicate the emergence of a new phenomenon in Ukrainian art that contradicts official socialist realist standards.
