[4] Born and raised during the Great Purge, Viacheslav's childhood was dominated by Soviet repressions; his paternal uncle, Petro Iosypovych, was executed, while his father lived as a fugitive.

[14] He simultaneously worked as an editor for the Kyiv-based newspapers Young Guard and Second Reading,[6] 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.

[21] 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.

[34] 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.

[43] 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.

[48] 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.

[14] 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".

Newspapers throughout the country, including Soviet Ukraine [uk], Evening Kyiv, and Lviv Pravda were mobilised to attack the dissident movement, as were radio and television stations.

[73] 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.

The fragmented nature of the dissident movement (now united under the label of National Democracy) led Chornovil to begin the process of bringing the organisations together into one unified structure in April 1988.

[83] 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.

He published a pre-election programme for himself in August 1989, ahead of the March 1990 Supreme Soviet election, in which he called for "statehood, democracy, and self-government", cooperation with non-ethnic Ukrainians, and federalism.

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.

Ivan Plyushch, who was elected as Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, wrote in 2010 that the communist majority was unable to command the same influence at a parliamentary level as the Democratic Bloc was.

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.

This revelation led acting Supreme Soviet chairman Ivan Plyushch to launch an investigation, which intensified after it was discovered that several deputies had quoted the instructions word-for-word.

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.

[122] 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,[125] as well as membership in the European Economic Community and a hypothetical pan-European collective security organisation.

[125] 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.