Alla Horska

Alla Horska

1929 - 1970

Alla Horska was a Ukrainian artist of the 1960s, monumentalist painter, one of the first representatives of the underground art movement, dissident, and human rights activist of the Sixtiers movement in Ukraine.

In 1962 Alla Horska became one of the founders and active members of the Club of Creative Youth.

In 1962 Alla Horska, Vasyl Symonenko and Les Tanyuk revealed the unmarked mass grave sites of those "enemies of the Soviet state" disposed by NKVD in Bykivnia, Lukyanivsky and Vasylkivsky cemeteries. The activists declared it to the Kyiv City Council ("Memorandum II").In 1965-1968 she took part in protests against the repressions of Ukrainian human rights activists: Bohdan and Mykhailo Horyn, Opanas Zalyvakha, Sviatoslav Karavansky, Valentyn Moroz, Vyacheslav Chornovil, and others. Because of this, she was persecuted by the Soviet security services. However, a kind of protection for her was that she, together with a group of artists, worked on monumental works of art in Donetsk and Krasnodon (now Sorokyne), which were considered important and had an ideological bias.

In 1967 Horska attended Viacheslav Chornovil's trial in Lviv. There was a group of Kyiv activists who protested against the illegal conduct of court proceedings. The next year she signed Protest Letter 139 addressed to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union demanding to cease such illegal proceedings. Consequently, the KGB began pressuring and threatening the signatories of this letter.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023