Ivan Hryhorovych Sokulskyi was born on 13 July 1940 in the khutir of Chervonyi Yar, in Synelnykove Raion within Ukraine's southern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

His father volunteered for frontline Red Army service after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa and was declared missing in action in February 1944.

[2] He joined the Lviv branch of the Artistic Youths' Club[1] and began publishing poetry in multiple periodicals, including the almanac Vitryla [uk], and the Flag magazine.

He collaborated with Petro Rozumnyi, a teacher in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, on printing Ivan Dziuba's Internationalism or Russification?,[7] and he also worked alongside other dissidents from Lviv and Kyiv.

[5] The letter condemned the Soviet government, in particular Chairman of the Council of Ministers Volodymyr Shcherbytsky,[6] for targeting Honchar and for Russification in Ukraine.

[2] Specifically, Sokulskyi and Skoryk noted the closure of Ukrainian-language schools and churches in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, as well as the persecution of intellectuals.

[5] Sokulskyi's prison sentence only hardened his devotion to activism, with historian Svitlana Martynova saying he "went to the camps as a poet [...] and returned from there a human rights activist.

[4] The wives of Ivan Sokulskyi and dissident Mykola Horbal launched a hunger strike on 13 July 1988 with the intention of bringing about their husbands' release from prison.