25 May is The International Day of Heroes of the Fight against Totalitarianism

On 25 May, the world marks the International Day of Heroes of the Fight against Totalitarianism and commemorates those who fought against the evil called totalitarianism. This date was chosen in honour of Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer who voluntarily entered the Auschwitz concentration camp to collect evidence of Nazi crimes. After the war, the communist regime executed him on 25 May 1948.

This day, we honour those who did not surrender to the millstones of tyranny. One of these heroes was Levko Lukianenko, a symbol of resistance to Soviet totalitarianism, a Ukrainian dissident, politician, and author of the Act of Independence of Ukraine.

In 1961, the Soviet regime sentenced him to death for “anti-Soviet agitation” but, in fact, for creating the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union, which peacefully advocated for Ukrainian independence. Only thanks to international pressure did the sentence change to 15 years in camps. Lukianenko spent his best years in camps, isolation centres and exiles. He even spent a month in a psychiatric hospital. Mordovia, Vladimir Central, camps in Trans-Urals – these and other “dots on the map” became painful marks in Levko Lukianenko’s biography.

After his release, he was not silent again. In September 1976, he co-founded the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and was arrested again in 1977. In June 1978, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and recognised as a particularly dangerous recidivist.

However, even this did not break Lukianenko. After being released, the dissident continued his active work, joined political life, and was elected to the parliament and became the author of the Act of Independence of Ukraine. He was awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine and remained a moral compass for many generations of Ukrainians.

Lukianenko was one of the first politicians in independent Ukraine to call the Holodomor of 1932-1933 a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians openly. In 2002, speaking at a scientific conference, he stated: “We have a large number of documents proving that Moscow deliberately planned and carried out the Holodomor in Ukraine to suppress the national liberation movement, reduce the number of Ukrainians and dissolve the Ukrainian ethnic group among Muscovites.”

Today, as we honour the memory of Levko Lukianenko, Vasyl Stus, Oksana Meshko, Valerii Marchenko, and other heroes of the spirit, we remember that freedom is not a gift but an achievement that we pay for with our lives.