Nina Antonivna Karavanska[a] (née Strokata[b]; 31 January 1926 – 2 August 1998) was a Ukrainian dissident, Soviet microbiologist and immunologist.
She was a member of the dissident movement in the USSR, a co-founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and one of the leading human rights activists in Odesa during the Soviet period.
According to the distribution, Nina Strokata was sent to the local district hospital for two years in Tatarbunary Raion, and later as the head of the medical department.
In 1961, Strokata met one of the activists of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, Sviatoslav Karavanskyi, who at that time had just returned to his homeland after 16 years in prison.
[3] In December 1966, Nina Karavanska appealed to the head of the camp where her husband was staying, as well as to Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, and to the French communist newspaper L'Humanité.
Attempts to defend the man in court led to the judge issuing a separate decision, which he sent to the Odesa Medical Institute, "to take measures of public influence against Nina Antonovna Strokata in order to instill in her a sense of high patriotic duty as a citizen of the USSR.
In the autumn of the same year, she exchanged her apartment in Odesa for housing in Nalchik, and on 5 December, she settled there with the family of Yuri-Bohdan Shukhevych.
All three were charged with anti-Soviet agitation, distributing and reading samizdat, and raising funds to help political prisoners.
In connection with this arrest, Ihor Kalynets and Viacheslav Chornovil set up a Public Committee in Lviv to protect Strokata, which included Vasyl Stus, Leonid Tymchuk, Pyotr Yakir and others.
[1] On 19 May 1972,[3] Karavanska was sentenced under Part 1 of Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR to four years in a maximum security camp on charges of "conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
The woman was serving her sentence in the women's department of the ZhKh-385/3 camp, located in the village of Barashevo, Tengushevsky District, Mordovia.
There Karavanska spoke, wrote articles, told the Ukrainian diaspora and other Americans the truth about the national liberation movement in Ukraine, organized moral and material support for Soviet prisoners and their families, and conducted public work.
[1] In 1980 she published the book "Ukrainian Women in the Soviet Union: Documented Persecution," and in 1981 - "A Family Torn Apart.
[3] Strokata published two books about her public work: On 8 November 2006, President Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Strokata the Order for Courage of the First Degree "for civil courage, devotion in the struggle for the establishment of the ideals of freedom and democracy, and on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Ukrainian Public Group to promote the implementation of the Helsinki Accords.