He was assassinated in 1949 in what the Soviet government claimed was an attack by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, though the organisation's responsibility has since become a source of dispute.

He enjoyed a large collection of books gathered by his father, and was greatly influenced by the creativity of the Ukrainian socialist writer Ivan Franko.

At the beginning of the First World War his father, along with other "unreliable" elements who sympathised with the Russian Empire, was imprisoned at the Thalerhof internment camp by the Austro-Hungarian authorities.

During the next Austrian offensive, in order to avoid repressions, his mother evacuated the family with the retreating Russian army to Rostov-on-Don, where Yaroslav studied at the gymnasium and performed in the local theatre.

While in Rostov-on-Don, he discovered the works of Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Vissarion Belinsky, and Anton Chekhov.

On the eve of the premiere, Polish authorities launched a campaign of mass arrest against Western Ukrainian communists, sending them to the Lutsk prison.

[4] In 1932 he moved to Nyzhniy Bereviz, the native village of his wife, located in the Carpathian mountains, close to Kolomyia, and kept working on his own plays, stories and articles there.

In the village he spread communist agitation among peasants, creating cells of the International Red Aid and the Committee for Famine Relief.

Together with the young communist writer Olexa Havryliuk, Halan organized safe houses, wrote leaflets and proclamations, and transferred illegal literature to Lviv.

[10] Halan also took part in a major political demonstration on 16 April 1936 in Lviv, in which the crowd was fired on by Polish police (in total, thirty workers were killed and two hundred injured).

[7] Participation in the Anti-Fascist Congress forced him to escape from Lviv to Warsaw, where he eventually found work at the left-wing newspaper Dziennik Popularny, edited by Wanda Wasilewska.

In 1937, the newspaper was closed by the authorities, and on 8 April Halan was accused of illegal communist activism and sent to prison in Warsaw (later transferred to Lviv).

After the Communist Party of Poland and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, as its autonomous organization, were dissolved by the Comintern on trumped-up accusations of spying for Poland in 1938, Halan's first wife Anna Henyk (also a member of the CPWU), who was studying at the Kharkiv Medical Institute, USSR, was arrested by the NKVD and executed in the Great Purge.

A group of writers such as Yaroslav Halan, Petro Kozlaniuk, Stepan Tudor and Olexa Havryliuk [...] treated the liberation of Western Ukraine [by the Red Army] as a logical conclusion of the policy of the Communist Party, which fought for the reunification of the Ukrainian people.

[16] When the war on the Eastern Front began, Halan arrived in Kharkiv and went to the military commissariat, having a strong desire to become a volunteer of the Red Army and to go to the frontline, but was denied.

The opportunity to fight like this – immediately, without paper [and censorship] – demonstrates a high confidence given to him by the government and the Central Committee of the CPSU(b).In 1943, in Moscow, he met his future second wife Maria Krotkova, who was an artist.

[4] In October 1943, the publishing house Moscovskiy Bolshevik released a collection of 15 war stories by Halan under the title Front on Air.

A few months ago, on Easter Night, armed people came to a peasant house in a village close to the town of Sarny, and stabbed its inhabitants with knives.

One of the gangsters put a knife blade to the child's neck, but at the last moment a new "idea" came to his mind: "Live in glory to Stepan Bandera!

In a few minutes a mountain of meat made from the bleeding father and mother grew up in front of the horror-struck girl...In his last satirical pamphlets Yaroslav Halan criticized the nationalistic and clerical reaction (particularly, the Greek Catholic Church and the anti-Communist doctrine of the Holy See): Their Face (1948), In the service of Satan (1948), In the Face of Facts (1949), Father of Darkness and His Henchmen (1949), The Vatican Idols Thirst for Blood (1949, in Polish), Twilight of the Alien Gods (1948), What Should Not Be Forgotten (1947), The Vatican Without Mask (1949) etc.

[neutrality is disputed][19] When the Holy See discovered that Halan planned to publish his new anti-clerical pamphlet The Father of Darkness and His Henchmen, Pope Pius XII excommunicated him in July 1949.

In the pamphlet he ironised on the Decree against Communism released by the Vatican on 1 July, in which the Holy See had threatened to excommunicate all members of the Communist parties and active supporters of the Communists: My only consolation is that I am not alone: together with me, the Pope excommunicated at least three hundred million people, and with them I once again in full voice declare: I spit on the Pope!Halan was assassinated on 24 October 1949 in his home office, which was situated at Hvadiyska street in Lviv.

[16] His blood spilled on the manuscript of his new article, Greatness of the Liberated Human, which celebrated the tenth anniversary of the [Soviet annexation of western Ukraine.

The killers – two students of the Lviv Forestry Technical Institute, Ilariy Lukashevych and Mykhailo Stakhur – were accused of orchestrating the assassination at the behest of the OUN's leadership.

The Ministry of the State Security (MGB) accused the Ukrainian nationalists of his murder, while the OUN claimed that it was a Soviet provocation in order to start a new wave of repressions against locals.

[22] In 1951, the MGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky infiltrated into the OUN underground network and managed to find Stakhur, who himself bragged about the assassination of Halan.

Petro Duzhyi, a soldier of the UPA, claimed in a 1993 interview with historian Mykola Oleksyuk that Timofei Strokach expressed a desire to have Halan killed; according to Duzhyi, Strokach had said during an interrogation that Halan's support for arresting the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's leadership had sparked a popular uprising.

[18] Vasyl Kuk, the leader of the UPA, would continue to claim that the assassination had been organised by the MGB in interviews after the Soviet Union's dissolution.

[26]In 1962, in Toronto, Olexandr Matla, aka Petro Tereschuk, a pro-nationalist historian from the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, published the brochure History of a Traitor (Yaroslav Halan), in which he accused Halan of being an informer of both Polish and Soviet intelligence services, and of helping them to oppress nationalists and even some pro-Soviet writers from Western Ukraine such as Anton Krushelnytsky, who moved from Lviv to Kharkiv in the 1930s and was killed during the Great Terror.

An outrageous egoist, egocentrist, money lover, slanderer, cynic, provocator, agent of two intelligence services, misanthrope, falsificator, speculator, and an informer are all the characteristics of Yaroslav Halan.