[13] He simultaneously worked as an editor for the Kyiv-based newspapers Young Guard and Second Reading,[5] and was part of the Artistic Youths' Club, an informal group of intellectuals affiliated with the counter-cultural Sixtier movement.

However, he also advises that the speech was far from the most important work of the Sixtier movement and that Chornovil's role was minimal in comparison to individuals such as Ivan Dziuba, writer of Internationalism or Russification?, and Yevhen Sverstiuk.

In this period, he worked various jobs, including as a technician in expeditions of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to the Carpathian Mountains, as an advertiser for KyivKnyhTorh, and as a teacher at the Lviv Regional Centre for Protection of Nature.

[20] In addition to Woe from Wit Chornovil also wrote letters to the head of the Ukrainian KGB and the Prosecutor General of Ukraine complaining that investigators had violated the laws during the arrests of Sixtiers.

During this time period, Chornovil, alongside Svitlychnyi and Sverstiuk, also led a donations campaign to prevent Moroz (unable to find employment due to his criminal record) from falling into poverty.

[33] The Vertep ceremony had been organised as a protest against Soviet cultural and religious policy, additionally serving as a fundraising effort for The Ukrainian Herald and for political prisoners and their families.

Chornovil was imprisoned at the KGB pre-trial detention centre in Lviv, alongside Iryna Kalynets, Ivan Gel, Stefaniia Shabatura, Mykhaylo Osadchy and Yaroslav Dashkevych.

[42] B. Azernikov and L. Kaminskyi, two individuals who were imprisoned at the same camp as Chornovil, also described him as having "great authority among all political prisoners," and wrote an open letter to global society urging his release after they left the Soviet Union in 1975.

[47] Alongside Boris Penson, he wrote the samvydav booklet "Daily Life in the Mordovian Camps", which was smuggled to Jerusalem and published in Russian before being translated into Ukrainian in the Munich-based Suchasnist journal the next year.

Referring to themselves as "Helsinki monitors", they found support from the United States Congress, which established the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in July 1976 to organise responses to human rights violations.

[13] Chornovil continued to write in prison, including a February 1981 open letter to the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in which he accused General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov of orchestrating massive purges against the UHG.

On 24 February 1987 he travelled to the Lubyanka Building, the KGB's headquarters in Moscow, where he spoke to employees and demanded the release of all political prisoners, the clearing of their sentences, and the return of objects seized from them during searches.

The two joined Vasyl Barladianu, Gel, Zorian Popadiuk, and Stepan Khmara in advocating for the removal of anti-Soviet agitation from the criminal code and the release and rehabilitation of all political prisoners.

In one instance, Chornovil was blocked from attending a planned December 1987 seminar on the rights of non-Russian nations within the Soviet Union by being called to a "preventive" interview in Lviv, where he was warned against involvement in "anti-social" activities.

In response, the Soviet Ukrainian leader launched a public relations campaign against Chornovil and other dissidents, accusing the Herald's editorial board of being supported by "foreign subversive services".

[72] Chornovil responded with a letter upbraiding the writers of one such article in the Lviv newspaper Free Ukraine [uk], saying that the treatment of himself and Horyn was comparable to that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 15 years prior.

[82] Chornovil additionally supported the spread of Memorial, a human rights movement in the Soviet Union, to Ukraine, writing a positive letter to the presidium of the group's Ukrainian chapter upon its founding in March 1989.

Crimea was to exist as either an independent state or an autonomous republic of Ukraine, and the Central Rada was to be reestablished as a bicameral body including deputies elected in equal numbers by proportional representation and from the lands.

Chornovil subsequently revealed that several deputies had received instructions to amend the draft law on sovereignty in order to strip it of measures such as the establishment of an independent military or legal system.

In order to achieve this, he co-founded the Military Collegium of Rukh alongside Ihor Derkach, Mykola Porovskyi, Vitalii Lazorkin and Vilen Martyrosian, which was tasked with creating the Armed Forces of Ukraine and preventing the usage of Ukrainian troops in Soviet government crackdowns.

Upon learning that a putsch had occurred, he immediately returned to Kyiv and began calling for an emergency session of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR; he also banned the Communist Party's activities in Lviv Oblast.

[121] The national democratic camp was fractious, with three major candidates (Chornovil, Yukhnovskyi and Levko Lukianenko), while Kravchuk was already a well-established figure as the incumbent, if de facto, head of state.

Appealling to both Russophone and Ukrainian-language audiences by speaking in both languages, Chornovil argued for a programme in which he would transition from a planned economy to free-market capitalism within a year via a series of decrees and acquiring the attention of Western investors,[124] as well as membership in the European Economic Community and a hypothetical pan-European collective security organisation.

[124] Northwestern Ukraine (Khmelnytskyi, Rivne and Volyn oblasts) served as a significant battleground from October, as surveys initially forecasted a practical tie before later giving Chornovil a slight lead.

Pro-Russian activist Yuriy Meshkov became the impromptu leader of the movement for Crimea's annexation into Russia, forming an army comprising soldiers of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and seizing control of police and media buildings with supporters.

[140] The increasing perceived threat from Moscow over Crimea led the Ukrainian population to favour maintaining the nuclear weapons that had come under its control following the Soviet Union's dissolution.

Chornovil was among the politicians who supported an independent nuclear arsenal, or alternatively membership in the NATO military alliance, which he felt was the only possible deterrent to Russian expansionism in the case that they were required to relenquish their weapons.

[142][143] Chornovil initially chose to contest a Kyiv seat in the parliamentary election, as he felt this would establish him as a national figure and give him the opportunity to tour all of Ukraine to spread his ideological vision.

Rukh gave a reluctant endorsement of Kravchuk's call to postpone the elections under the justification that not doing so without reform of electoral laws would lead to a political crisis, though Chornovil refused to back an expansion of his powers and argued that he would use it to empower former communist officials and agree to hand over both nuclear weapons and the Black Sea Fleet (the ownership of which was disputed) to Russia.

Zdorovylo also notes that Kravchuk's government launched a politically-motivated investigation into the finances of Rukh during the election and placed both Chornovil and high-ranking party member Oleksandr Lavrynovych under a security escort, which monitored their conversations.