Hel, Ivan [Гель, Іван; Hel'], b 17 July 1937 in Klitsko, Horodok (Lviv region) county, Lviv voivodeship, Galicia, d 16 March 2011 in Lviv. Human rights activist, publicist, samvydav distributor, and leading figure in the national rights and Ukrainian Catholic church movements in Ukraine. Hel was born into a highly patriotic family. His father, a former soldier in the Ukrainian Galician Army, was sentenced in 1950 to 20 years of exile for working with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and his mother (maiden name Tershakovets) was from a family of intellectuals who were active in Ukraine’s national movement. Hel’s first confrontation with the Soviet authorities was at the age of thirteen when, during his father’s arrest, NKVD officers beat his mother and Ivan himself, since he had tried to protect his parents. In his first intentional act of civil disobedience Hel refused to join the Komsomol, as a result of which he was expelled from Komarno’s secondary school in 1952. After graduating from night school in Sambir, he attempted to enroll at Lviv University, but his application was rejected on the grounds that he was the son of an OUN supporter. Hel then went to work as a mechanic at the Lviv Forklift Factory. From 1956 to 1959 he served in the Soviet Army. After his discharge he tried to enroll in the law school of Lviv University, but he was denied admission and enrolled in the correspondence program of this university’s history department. In his second year of studies he transferred to an evening program and began working as a mechanic at the Lviv Electrovacuum Plant. At the time he also became increasingly committed to civic activism.
In the early 1960s Hel became acquainted with Mykhailo Horyn, and began to actively distribute samvydav publications. On 24 August 1965 he was arrested along with a number of other Ukrainian dissidents, and during his trial on 24–25 March 1966, in accordance with Articles 62-1 and 64 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, he was sentenced by the Lviv oblast court to three years in a strict-regime labor camp for distributing Ukrainian samvydav and other ‘organizational activities.’ From 1966 to 1968 Hel was imprisoned in Mordovian strict-regime camps. While imprisoned, he wrote twice, in 1967, to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in defense of the Ukrainian Catholic church and demanding the repeal of Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR.
After his release Hel was not allowed to resume his university studies. Unable to register as a resident of Lviv, he lived in Sambir, where he began to reproduce and distribute a large number of samvydav works. On 7 December 1970 he spoke at the funeral of Alla Horska in Kyiv, and as a result he received a severe reprimand at work for ‘absenteeism.’ On 12 January 1972 he was arrested for a second time. During his trial on 4–7 August 1972 Hel was sentenced by the Lviv oblast court, in accordance with Article 62-2 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR, to 10 years in special-regime labor camps and 5 years of exile as a particularly dangerous repeat offender.
He served his sentence in special-regime camps in Mordovia (Sosnovka) and in Perm oblast (Kuchino); afterwards he was exiled to the village of Milva, Troitsko-Pecherskii raion, Komi ASSR, RSFSR. In the camps Hel participated in many protests and hunger strikes. One of his hunger strikes lasted 100 days, and in total Hel engaged in hunger strikes for over 300 days. In prison Hel wrote a lengthy text, Hrani kul'tury (Facets of Culture), an analysis of the state of Ukrainian culture under Russian occupation, which was smuggled out of the camp and made its way abroad. It was published in London under a pseudonym, Stepan Hoverlia, in 1984.
Hel was released from imprisonment and returned on 17 January 1987 to Ukraine, where he lived in his native village for a year working as a shepherd. In the spring of 1987 he was a member of a group which revived the Ukraïns’kyi visnyk samvydav journal, and co-founded the Ukrainian Initiative Group for the Release of Prisoners of Conscience.
Hel was strongly committed to the revival and legalization of the Ukrainian Catholic church. Thus in 1987 he established and led the Committee for the Defense of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. He edited the magazine Khrystyians’kyi holos and organized the first mass religious and political rallies in western Ukraine, notably a gathering of 250,000 Ukrainian Catholic faithful on 17 September 1989 near Saint George's Cathedral in Lviv. He played an active role in establishing the All-Ukrainian Memorial organization as well as the Popular Movement of Ukraine, and secured official recognition from regional authorities of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as a belligerent party in the Second World War. From 1990 to 1994 Hel served as first deputy chairman of the Lviv Regional Council of People’s Deputies and, until 2002, he headed the regional commission for the restoration of rights of rehabilitated persons.
For a lengthy collection of publications by and interviews with Hel, as well as documents about the cases mounted against him and memoirs of his colleagues, see Yurii Zaitsev, compiler, Ivan Hel': Interv’iu, dokumenty, tvory, spohady (Ivan Hel: Interviews, Documents, Works, Memoirs, 2022). Hel was the author, under the pseudonym Stepan Hoverlia, of Hrani kul'tury (Facets of Culture, 1984, republished in Ukraine in 1992) and Vyklyk systemi: Ukrains'kyi vyzvol'nyi rukh druhoi polovyny XX stolittia (Challenge to the System: The Ukrainian Liberation Movement of the Second Half of the 20th Century, 2013).
Ivan Jaworsky
[This article was written in 2026.]