A hundred and twenty years ago, on October 2, 1906, Ivan Lozoviaha (Lozoviahin) was born near Okhtyrka. He was the writer the world knows by his pen name, Ivan Bahrianyi. The Soviet regime arrested him, tortured him, sent him to labor camps, and then spent decades erasing him from history. Yet he wrote the truth about Stalin’s terror — and did so before Solzhenitsyn. Today, his novels read as if they were written about the occupied territories of Ukraine in the 2020s.
The Crime of Being a Ukrainian Writer
In the early 1930s, Bahrianyi was a young poet whose work appeared in Kharkiv magazines. Official critics accused him of “kulak ideology.” On April 16, 1932, he was arrested in Kharkiv. The charge was “counterrevolutionary agitation,” and the writer himself later explained in his autobiography that he was imprisoned “for a political Ukrainian pro-independence deviation in literature and politics.” In other words, he was jailed for writing as a Ukrainian author rather than a “Soviet” one.
His words are preserved in the 1932 case file: “My mission, and my only one, is—as a Ukrainian writer—to remain one to the very end, working to spread national consciousness through my creative work.” He kept his word.
Eleven months in solitary confinement in the internal prison of the Ukrainian State Political Directorate (DPU). Then exile to the Far East: the taiga, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Ukrainian settlements of Zelenyi Klyn, the “Green Wedge.” In 1937, Bahrianyi escaped to return to Ukraine. He was recaptured in Tomsk, given a new sentence, and sent to the BAMLAG camps.
In 1938, he was arrested a second time. He spent nearly two years in the NKVD investigative prison at Kholodna Hora in Kharkiv, enduring interrogations and torture, but he never admitted to the charges. In the spring of 1940, he was released under surveillance—as Bahrianyi himself wrote, “due to a serious lung disease, and most importantly… due to insufficient evidence for a new conviction.” Over those years, the system robbed him of his health, eight years of his life, and what was most precious to a writer—his manuscripts, which disappeared during his arrests.
Between Two Totalitarian Regimes
The war found Bahrianyi in Okhtyrka, under NKVD surveillance. During the German occupation, he worked as an artist at a local theater and, under a pseudonym, published articles in local newspapers exposing Stalin’s repressions—the very things he had just lived through. The Nazi authorities viewed him with suspicion: according to recollections, the Germans read one of his theater sets, in which dark clouds from the west obscured the sun, as an anti-German allusion.
In the summer of 1943, as the front was moving back, Bahrianyi headed west to Galicia. There he worked in the Ukrainian nationalist underground, wrote and illustrated its publications, and became one of the co-founders of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR), a non-partisan body that fought against both Nazi and Soviet occupation. The novel Zvirolovy (Beast Hunters), later known as Tyhrolovy (Tiger Hunters), written in 1943, won first prize in a literary competition in Lviv and was published in 1944.
Bahrianyi spent the final year of the war on the road, like hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainian refugees, and to the Nazi authorities he was not an ally but a suspect fugitive. Biographers report that in 1944 he was detained in Slovakia during a roundup of emigrants. In the spring of 1945, on a UHVR mission, he found himself in Zagreb, and, by his own account, he witnessed Germany’s surrender from behind bars in Maribor. After the war, Bahrianyi walked to the Austrian Tyrol and eventually settled in displaced persons camps in the American occupation zone of Germany, first near Augsburg and later in Neu-Ulm. It was an escape from Stalin into postwar democratic Europe.
After the Yalta Conference, Soviet missions demanded that the Western Allies forcibly repatriate millions of former Ostarbeiter (forced laborers), prisoners of war, and refugees. For many, “return” meant a labor camp or execution. It was then, in 1946, that Bahrianyi wrote the pamphlet Why I Do Not Want to Return to the USSR. It begins:
“I am one of those hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who do not want to return home, under Bolshevism, much to the surprise of the whole world.”
This was not a rejection of his homeland, but a rejection of a prison. “I dream of it every night, and yet I do not want to return to it now. Why? Because Bolshevism is there,” Bahrianyi writes. The pamphlet was translated into several languages and became an argument in defense of those whom the authorities sought to hand over to Moscow.
In exile, Bahrianyi became the founder and leader of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic Party, a democratic force that challenged both the communists and the radical nationalists. Until his death, he edited the newspaper Ukrainski Visti (Ukrainian News) and was one of the leaders of the Ukrainian National Council, the parliament of the government-in-exile of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). He died on August 25, 1963, at a sanatorium in the Black Forest and was buried in Neu-Ulm. He never returned to Ukraine—not even after his death.
The Garden of Gethsemane: Testimony, Not Fiction
Bahrianyi’s principal novel was written between 1948 and 1950 and published in 1950. Its protagonist, Andrii Chumak, follows the same path as the author: arrest, prison cells, round-the-clock “conveyor” interrogations, torture, and attempts to break a person down to the point where they will sign anything. What is most striking is that the surnames of the NKVD investigators and prison guards in the book are real. The author preserved them deliberately, so that the torturers could not hide behind anonymity and the victims would not remain nameless.
Here, Bahrianyi does what would later become a standard of Europe’s culture of remembrance: he names the perpetrators and gives a voice to the victims. The novel was published two decades before Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. A French translation appeared in Paris in 1961 thanks to the efforts of the family of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a writer and statesman who headed the General Secretariat (the first government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, 1917–1918).
A European Writer, Not a “Soviet” One
The Soviet literary canon judged authors by their loyalty: praise the collective farm and you were a classic; express doubt and you were a “bourgeois nationalist.” If we look at Bahrianyi from this perspective, all that remains of him is the label of “traitor” that Soviet propaganda pinned on him for years. But if we evaluate his work in a European context, the picture is entirely different.
First, the theme. The Garden of Gethsemane stands alongside Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984, books through which Europe came to understand the nature of totalitarianism. The difference is that Koestler and Orwell wrote about the Soviet prison from the outside, while Bahrianyi wrote from inside the cell.
Second, the individual at the center. Socialist Realism demanded a “positive hero” who dissolves into the collective. Bahrianyi’s heroes are individuals who defend their own dignity against the machine. Polish writer and critic Józef Łobodowski described the novel as a testament to “the profound humanism of an author who, at the very bottom of hell, managed to see human traits even in the most bestial individuals.”
Third, the genre. Tiger Hunters (published in English as The Hunters and the Hunted) is an adventure novel in the tradition of Jack London and James Fenimore Cooper: an escape from a death train, the taiga, hunting, love, and freedom. Bahrianyi showed that Ukrainian literature could be gripping, dynamic, and plot-driven, rather than merely the rural drama the imperial lens made it out to be. The novel was published in English (1956), Dutch (1959), and German (1961).
Fourth, his stance. Bahrianyi was a democrat and a consistent anti-totalitarian for whom Nazism and communism were two faces of the same evil. The epigraph to his pamphlet reads like a manifesto:
“I will return to my homeland with millions of my brothers and sisters who are here in Europe and there, in the Siberian concentration camps, when the totalitarian, bloody Bolshevik system is overthrown just as Hitler’s was, when the NKVD follows the Gestapo, when Red Russian fascism vanishes just as German fascism vanished…”
This is the very same logic that underlies Europe’s remembrance today of the crimes committed by both regimes, including the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism on August 23.
Why This Is Relevant Today
For half a century, the Soviet system pretended that this writer had never existed. He was not rehabilitated until 1991, when Ukraine was breaking away from the USSR, and in 1992 the newly independent Ukraine posthumously awarded him the Shevchenko Prize for The Garden of Gethsemane and Tiger Hunters.
But the most chilling thing is that his books have not become mere history. The basement torture chambers in the liberated areas around Izium and Kherson, the filtration camps, the deportations, the abducted journalists and artists in Russian-occupied territories—this is the same garden of Gethsemane, only in a new setting. And the Russian army shelled Bahrianyi’s hometown of Okhtyrka from the very first days of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Today’s Russia is reviving the cult of Stalin and resurrecting the very same language of the enemy: “traitors,” “nationalists,” “agents of the West.” Bahrianyi answered this as early as 1946: a person has the right not to return to prison, even if that prison is called the homeland.
A hundred and twenty years after his birth, Bahrianyi deserves to be read not as a “classic from the school curriculum,” but as a witness—a European writer who saw what an empire is before many others did, and who paid for his truth with his own fate.