Malynkovych, Volodymyr (Малинкович, Володимир; Malynkovyč), b 28 August 1940 in Sumy. Physician, dissident, political activist, journalist, and author. Born into a military family, Malykovych completed his secondary education in Kyiv and then worked for two years as a lathe operator. Over time he became increasingly disillusioned by growing evidence of the abuses committed under Joseph Stalin, as well as by the Soviet invasion of Hungary. After he enrolled in the law faculty of Leningrad University in 1959, Malynkovych soon became active in student debates critical of the political status quo, and in 1961 he was expelled from the university because of his student activism.
Upon returning to Kyiv Malynkovych enrolled at the Kyiv Medical Institute and completed his studies there in 1967. He was then drafted into the armed forces as a military doctor, but after he criticized the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he was condemned by an officers’ ‘court of honor’ (see also Comrades’ court) and expelled from the military. Initially he had difficulty finding work, but in 1970 he began serving as a raion physician, followed by employment as a radiologist at Kyiv’s Institute of Endocrinology. He defended his candidate of sciences dissertation in 1973.
Malynkovych’s initial circle of acquaintances included Viktor Nekrasov, Yosyf Zisels, Mark Bilorusets, and others who were members of the liberal intelligentsia in Kyiv. His connection to national democrats of the Ukrainian ‘Sixtiers’ generation (shistdesiatnyky) was initially marginal, but in 1969 he began to participate in rallies near the Taras Shevchenko monument and at Babyn Yar, and circulated samvydav materials. In 1970 he began providing information to the Chronicle of Current Events in Moscow and became an important link between the dissident circles in Kyiv and Moscow. Also, his connection to Ukraine’s national democrats increased after the mass arrests of Ukrainian dissidents in 1972–3. In October 1978, soon after Malynkovych met Oksana Meshko, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
From 1975 to 1979 Malynkovych had constant conflicts with the authorities. He was warned against continuing his activities; there were clandestine searches of his quarters; he was attacked several times by unknown assailants, etc. Nonetheless, he continued to behave and express himself quite openly and he regularly informed human rights circles in Moscow about the situation in Ukraine. In September 1979 there was a more serious provocation; a woman falsely claimed that Malynkovych had raped her. An ultimatum was issued by the KGB: if Malynkovych and his family did not emigrate, he and his wife would be arrested. On the night of 31 December 1979 Malynkovych and his family left for Germany.
In January 1980 he joined the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Soon afterwards Malynkovych began to serve as a senior editor of the Russian-language programs of Radio Liberty in Munich; several of the programs for which he was responsible dealt with nationality issues and nationality policy in the USSR. From 1982 to 1990 Malynkovych also edited the Russian-language magazine Forum (associated with the journal Suchasnist’) which was intended to foster a dialogue between the Ukrainian and Russian émigré communities. He was a founding member of the International Helsinki Association, and co-chair of the Democratic Association of Political Emigres from the USSR.
On 31 December 1992 Malynkovych returned to Kyiv and became an active politician. During the 1994 presidential elections, he headed the Information and Analysis Center on Leonid Kuchma’s campaign team. Following Kuchma’s victory in July 1994 Malynkovych was appointed an advisor to the President of Ukraine, but he left the Kuchma administration after the appointment of Volodymyr Radchenko as Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs. During the period when Malynkovych and his family suffered greatly as a result of official persecution, Radchenko served in a number of senior roles in the Ukrainian branch of the KGB, including in the posts of investigator, senior investigator, deputy chief of division, and chief of division for the city of Kyiv and Kyiv oblast. Radchenko was personally involved in the case against Malynkovych prior to the latter’s emigration.
From 1995 to November 1997 Malynkovych headed the Institute for Integration Studies at the Kyiv Center for Political Studies and Conflictology. In 1997 he co-founded the SLON (Social-Liberal Union) party, but left it at the beginning of the 1997 parliamentary election campaign, objecting on ethical grounds to certain candidates on the party list. Malynkovych then joined the Party for the Regional Revival of Ukraine (soon to be renamed the Party of Regions), and was an (unsuccessful) candidate for the 1988 parliamentary elections from the Party of Regions. A few years later he strongly criticized this party. In 1998 Malynkovych became director of the Ukrainian branch of the International Institute for Humanitarian and Political Studies, based in Moscow and headed by a Russian dissident originally from Ukraine, Viacheslav Igrunov.
Malynkovych considers himself an internationalist, a supporter of European norms based on social-democratic principles. After he returned to Ukraine he underlined his democratic and human rights credentials by strongly condemning all local manifestations of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and intolerance. But Malynkovych’s erratic political behavior as a ‘perpetual oppositionist,’ and his controversial positions on a variety of issues of significance to the national democrats who dominated the dissident movement in Soviet Ukraine, led to him increasingly being shunned and criticized by many of his former dissident colleagues. Malynkovych consistently supported granting Russian the status of a second official language in Ukraine, argued that Ukraine should evolve into a ‘multicultural civil society,’ and favored close and friendly ties between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
Malynkovych left Ukraine for a second time in 2008 and settled in Munich, Germany. In addition to his academic publications in the field of medicine, Malynkovych is the author of numerous articles on political and socio-economic topics, sometimes using the pseudonym Mikhail German. He is also the author of, among others, the following books: Tri revoliutsii i dve perestroiki. Etiudy na temy sovetskoi istorii (Three Revolutions and Two Perestroikas: Essays on Soviet History, 2008), Vek vyvikhnut… Raspalas' sviaz' vremen (The Century is out of Joint… The Bond between the Ages Has Broken, 2008), Ocherki dukhovnoi istorii velikikh narodov (russkie i nemtsy) (Essays on the Spiritual History of Great Nations (Russians and Germans), 2010), and Ocherki istorii evropeiskoi kul'tury novoho vremeni (Essays on the History of Modern European Culture, 2011).
Ivan Jaworsky
[This article was updated in 2026.]