Leonid Stepanovych Tanyuk was born in the village of Zhukyn [uk] within Ukraine's central Kyiv Oblast, then part of the Soviet Union.

As a child, Tanyuk was imprisoned in several Nazi concentration camps,[1] as his father had been a leader of the communist underground in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.

In 1962, he and fellow members Vasyl Symonenko and Alla Horska were sent to investigate information about mass graves in Bykivnia from the 1930s terror implemented by Joseph Stalin.

It was at this point that the Soviets began to exert strong pressure on the club, and Tanyuk was removed as president, though he effectively continued to lead the organization until it was closed in 1964.

Tanyuk was reelected in 2002 and 2006 as the 12th and 14th candidate on the proportional representative list of the Our Ukraine Bloc, a coalition that Rukh was a member of.