Antoniuk, Zynovii

Antoniuk, Zynovii [Антонюк, Зиновій; Antonjuk, Zynovij], b 24 July 1933 in Depultychi (Depułtycze Królewskie), Kholm county, Lublin voivodeship, d 28 April 2020 in Kyiv. Engineer, economist, dissident, political prisoner, translator and journalist, and human rights and civil rights activist. Antoniuk graduated from an elementary school in Kholm in 1944, and in late August of that year his family moved from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR, first to Lutsk, and then to Lviv in the fall of 1945. In 1952 Antoniuk graduated from the Lviv Technical School of Railway Transport. From 1953 to 1958 he was a mechanical engeeneering student at the Lviv Polytechnical Institute and from 1960 to 1964 he was a part-time graduate at the same institute. Antoniuk initially worked as an engineer-economist at the Lviv Machine Building Plant, and was employed by the research sector of Lviv Polytechnical Institute from 1959 to 1960. He moved to Kyiv in May 1960, and prior to his arrest in 1972 he was employed, in various engineering positions, at the All-Union Scientific Research and Design Institute of Oil Refining and Petrochemistry (NVO “MASMA”).

In 1962 Antoniuk met the prominent dissident Ivan Svitlychny, who had a profound influence on him; in particular, Svitlychny impressed upon him that patriotism should be civic-minded, rather than narrowly ethnic. At this time Antoniuk began to participate in the preparation and distribution of samvydav, and at the request of Svitlychny he translated, from Polish into Ukrainian, several major articles on the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations. He also initiated, in 1964, a lecture series, devoted to the history of Ukraine, headed by the prominent historian Mykhailo Braichevsky.

The arrests of 1965 among the Ukrainian intelligentsia spurred Antoniuk to even greater civic activism. He was heavily involved in obtaining information about political repression in Soviet Ukraine and subsequently smuggling it, as well as samvydav articles, abroad. As a result he was arrested on 13 January 1972 during a major purge of Ukraine’s dissidents. Antoniuk’s trial, which was formally open but effectively closed, took place on 8–15 August 1972. Antoniuk was charged in accordance with Article 62-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’), and sentenced by the Kyiv oblast court to 7 years of imprisonment in a strict-regime labor camp and 3 years of exile.

Antoniuk served his sentence in the Perm-35 strict-regime camp, Chusovoi raion, Perm oblast, RSFSR. He actively participated in hunger strikes and other camp protests, and was a key figure involved in preparing and smuggling the protests of political prisoners, and other materials, out of this camp. As a result, Antoniuk was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in Vladimir prison (Moscow). In July 1978, after completing his prison sentence, he returned to the Perm-35 camp, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis but did not receive appropriate medical treatment.

On 18 January 1979 Antoniuk arrived at his place of exile—the town of Bodaybo, Bodaybo raion, Irkutsk oblast, RSFSR. Here a medical commission diagnosed him with pulmonary tuberculosis, and Antoniuk was sent to the oblast hospital for long-term treatment. But after he was visited by fellow exile Viacheslav Chornovil, the doctors treating him ‘recommended’ that he not communicate or correspond with ‘certain people.’ When Antoniuk refused to follow this ‘advice,’ he was discharged and sent back to Bodaybo.

Upon competing his term of exile, Antoniuk returned to Kyiv in December 1981. He worked as a production planner at a local factory, but in 1982 he was convicted, on trumped-up charges of ‘parasitism’ (Article 214-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR), and sentenced to one year of imprisonment in a strict-regime zone: he served 6 months in Bila Tserkva (Zone 35) and 6 months in Kharkiv (Zone 43). From 1983 to 1993 he worked as a mechanic in Kyiv at the Dzerzhinsky Electric Transport Repair Plant.

In 1990 Antoniuk was elected to the Kyiv City Council, and from 1992 to 1996 he served as a member of this Council’s Commission on the Restoration of Rights for Rehabilitated Persons. From December 1992 to March 2003 Antoniuk served as co-chair of the Public Council of the Ukrainian-American Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights, a member of the editorial board of its information and analysis bulletin Human Rights in Ukraine, and an expert with the International Renaissance Foundation’s Civil Society program. He wrote numerous articles on human rights, civil society, and religious issues. In his works he consistently emphasized the primacy of individual rights over group rights, and the importance of inter-ethnic and inter-religious dialogue in Ukraine. Antoniuk thus served as an important bridge between the human rights activism of the 1960s–1980s in Soviet Ukraine, and human rights activity in post-Soviet Ukraine.

Apart from numerous articles, Antoniuk was the author of Konspekt samousvidomlennia (Notes on Self-Awareness, 2 vols, 2007), Refleksii identychnosti (Reflections on Identity, 2007), Refleksii pravozakhystu (Reflections on the Protection of Human Rights, 2nd ed. 2026), and the co-author, with Semen Hluzman and Myroslav Marynovych, of the collection of articles Lysty z voli (Letters from Freedom), 1999.

Ivan Jaworsky

[This article was written in 2026.]