Plakhotniuk, Mykola
Plakhotniuk, Mykola [Плахотнюк, Микола; Plaxotnjuk], b 8 May 1936 in Fosforit, Shchigry raion, Kursk oblast, RSFSR, d 5 February 2015 in Kyiv. Physician, dissident, political prisoner, victim of Soviet punitive psychiatry (see Psychiatric hospitals, special), and community activist; husband of Valentyna Chornovil, sister of Viacheslav Chornovil. Plakhotniuk was born into a family of dispossessed peasants who fled the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3 and settled near the border of the Ukrainian SSR, in Kursk oblast of the RSFSR. During the Second World War, the family returned to its native village of Tykhyi Khutir, Zhashkiv raion, Kyiv oblast. Plakhotniuk later wrote that growing up in this picturesque village greatly shaped his identity as a Ukrainian. Plakhotniuk graduated from high school in 1955, but that same year, he contracted tuberculosis and underwent treatment for two years, although the disease flared up again later on. After graduating from the Kyiv Medical College in 1959, he worked as a paramedic in a village near Kyiv, and in 1960 he began to study at the Kyiv Medical Institute. Plakhotniuk served as a Komsomol group leader and was responsible for the culture sector of the faculty’s trade union bureau.
In 1963 Plakhotniuk became heavily involved in the activities of the ‘Suchasnyk’ Creative Youth Club (KTM), which played an important formative role in the activities of members of Kyiv’s shistdesiatnyky generation. That same year Plakhotniuk wrote a letter to the Ministry of Higher Education of the Ukrainian SSR in which he proposed that the Ukrainian language be used as the language of instruction in the Kyiv Medical Institute, since the institute was attended primarily by Ukrainians or those who had studied Ukrainian in school. The letter was forwarded to the rector of the medical institute, Vasyl Bratus, who told Plakhotniuk that teaching in Ukrainian was not possible because the institute had foreign students who needed to be taught in Russian. On 23 March 1963 Plakhotniuk organized a poetry evening in Kyiv featuring Vasyl Symonenko, Mykola Vinhranovsky, and other shistdesiatnyky poets. Later that year he attended Symonenko’s funeral and soon afterwards he organized a memorial evening in his honor, although Communist Party and Komsomol authorities attempted to ban the event and criticized Plakhotniuk’s activities.
During a wave of arrests in August 1965 targeting the Ukrainian intelligentsia, among those arrested was one of Plakhotniuk’s fellow students and a close friend, Yaroslav Hevrych. Plakhotniuk was given permission to testify in court on Hevrych’s behalf, but once he found out that it was an unlawfully closed-door trial, he addressed Hevrych with some words of support but refused to testify. Later this was considered one of the signs of ‘illness’ that eventually led to Plakhotniuk’s detention in a special psychiatric hospital.
Plakhotniuk completed his medical studies in 1966, and worked at a tuberculosis clinic in Pushcha-Vodytsia and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Dymer, near Kyiv. He frequently visited Kyiv, and on 22 May 1967 he participated in the annual commemoration of Taras Shevchenko’s reburial in Ukraine. After those attending this event were dispersed by the militia and four participants were arrested, Plakhotniuk helped organized a public protest demanding the release of those detained. The protest was successful, but a few days later Plakhotniuk was fired from his job. He was interrogated in the case of fellow dissident Ivan Sokulsky, arrested in June 1969, but he refused to cooperate and on 1 September 1969 he was encouraged to resign ‘of his own accord’ from the Department of Neuropathology at the Kyiv Medical Institute, where he was employed at the time. Plakhotniuk refused, and was dismissed ‘due to staff reductions.’ When the trial of Sokulsky took place in Dnipropetrovsk, Plakhotniuk sent an open letter in his defense to the local papers which had slandered Sokulsky prior to the trial. Sending the same letter to Sokulsky’s mother was considered by the authorities as ‘distribution of anti-Soviet materials.’
Plakhotniuk was arrested on 12 January 1972 and charged, in accordance with Article 62-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, with ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.’ In September he was sent for a ‘psychiatric evaluation’ to the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow and given a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia with delusions of persecution, leading to periods of insanity.’ The Kyiv oblast court subsequently ruled that Plakhotniuk be sent for compulsory treatment to a special psychiatric hospital.
Beginning on 24 November 1972 Plakhotniuk was detained in the special psychiatric hospital in Dnipropetrovsk, one of several Soviet hospitals where political dissidents were incarcerated and abused under the guise of medical treatment. In September 1976 he was transferred to the Kazan Psychiatric Hospital, Tatar ASSR, RSFSR, similarly notorious for the political abuse of psychiatry. Repeated recommendations by medical commissions to terminate his involuntary treatment (1974, 1976, 1977) were rejected by the Kyiv oblast court. Finally, in February 1978, following another petition from a medical commission, Plakhotniuk was transferred to a general hospital. It was not until August 1978 that he arrived at the Cherkasy Psychiatric Hospital (in the city of Smila). In 1979, a medical commission recommended him for discharge from the hospital, but the Kyiv oblast court again refused. In November 1980 Plakhotniuk was taken to the Serbsky Center, where he was told that it was high time for him to be sent home. Members of a medical commission assured him that they would petition the court to have him discharged. On 5 March 5 1981 Plakhotniuk was discharged from the Cherkasy hospital.
Following his release, Plakhotniuk was unable to find work in Kyiv or nearby, and was sent to take advanced training courses at the inpatient ward of the regional tuberculosis dispensary in Cherkasy. On 6 September 1981 he was arrested on trumped-up charges as an ordinary criminal, and on 30 September 1981 he was sent for observation to the Cherkasy Psychiatric Hospital. Here a psychiatric evaluation found him to be of sound mind, and on 30 December 1981 he was sent to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow. Here he was also assessed to be sane, and in April 1982 he was sentenced to 4 years of imprisonment. He served the first part of his sentence in Voroshylovhrad oblast, and in April 1984 he was employed as a forced laborer working under supervision on the construction of a hospital in Voroshylovhrad. In June 1984 he was released on parole, and for two years, he worked as a phthisiologist at the Voroshylovhrad Tuberculosis Dispensary. From May 1989 onwards Plakhotniuk worked in Kyiv as a doctor in the city’s tuberculosis hospital.
In 1991 Plakhotniuk became a member of the Helsinki-90 Ukrainian Committee and a member of the Executive Board of the All-Ukrainian Association of Political Prisoners and Victims of Repression. In 1994 he also became chairman of the board of the public organization Museum of the Sixties. After many delays this museum opened its doors in Kyiv on 24 August 2012, and Plakhotniuk was its first director until his passing in 2015.
Most of Plakhotniuk’s personal archives, as well as some archival materials and publications pertaining to his brother-in-law Viacheslav Chornovil, were destroyed during the short-lived Russian occupation of Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022. Plakhotniuk’s wife, Valentyna Chornovil, compiled a collection of articles by her husband, as well as a documentary chronicle of his efforts to establish the Museum of the Sixties and published it under the title Kolovorot (The Turning Gate, 2012).
Ivan Jaworsky
[This article was updated in 2026.]