Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan (Ukrainian: Ярослав Олександрович Галан, party nickname Comrade Yaga; 27 July 1902 – 24 October 1949) was a Soviet Ukrainian writer, playwright, and publicist.
A member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine from 1924, he played a role in the 1946 Synod of Lviv that merged the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church and was controversial for the anti-Catholicism in his writings.
He was assassinated in 1949 in what the Soviet government claimed was an attack by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, though the organisation's responsibility has since become a source of dispute.
Yaroslav Oleksandrovych Halan was born on 27 July 1902 in Dynów, then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria within Austria-Hungary, to the family of Oleksandr Halan, a minor post office official. As a child, he lived and studied in Przemyśl. He enjoyed a large collection of books gathered by his father and was greatly influenced by the creativity of the Ukrainian socialist writer Ivan Franko. At school, Yaroslav's critical thoughts brought him into conflict with priests who taught theology.
At the beginning of the First World War his father, along with other "unreliable" elements who sympathised with the Russian Empire, were imprisoned at the Thalerhof internment camp by the Austro-Hungarian authorities.
During the next Austrian offensive, in order to avoid repressions, his mother evacuated the family with the retreating Russian army to Rostov-on-Don, where Yaroslav studied at the gymnasium and performed in the local theatre. Living there, Halan witnessed the events of the October Revolution. He became familiar with Lenin's agitation. Later, these events formed the basis of his story, Unforgettable Days.
While in Rostov-on-Don, he discovered the works of Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Vissarion Belinsky, and Anton Chekhov. Thus, his obsession with this art was born, which in the future guided his decision to become a playwright.
After the war, Halan returned to Galicia, which was annexed into the Second Polish Republic after the Treaty of Riga. In 1922, he graduated from the Peremyshl Ukrainian Gymnasium. He then studied at the Trieste Higher Trade School in Italy, and in 1922 enrolled in the University of Vienna. In 1926, he transferred to the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, from which he graduated in 1928 (according to some sources he didn't pass the final exams). Halan then began working as a teacher of the Polish language and literature at a private gymnasium in Lutsk. However, ten months later he was banned from teaching due to political concerns.
In his student years, Halan became active in left-wing politics. While at the University of Vienna he became a member of the workers' community Einheit ("Unity"), overseen by the Communist Party of Austria. From 1924, he was actively involved in resisting Polish rule in western Ukraine as a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. He joined the CPWU while he was on vacation in Przemyśl. Later, while studying in Kraków, he was elected a deputy chairman of the Życie student group, which was controlled by the Communist Party of Poland.
Creativity and political struggle in Poland
In the 1920s, Halan's creative activity also began. In 1927, he finished work on his first significant play, Don Quixote from Ettenheim. In his play 99% (1930), he condemned Ukrainian nationalism. This was followed by emphasis of class conflict in the plays Cargo (1930) and Cell (1932), which argued for the Ukrainian, Jewish and Polish proletariat to work together.
Halan's play 99% was staged by the semi-legal Lviv Workers' Theatre. On the eve of the premiere, Polish authorities launched a campaign of mass arrest against Western Ukrainian communists, sending them to the Lutsk prison. As the theatre's director and one of the key actors were arrested, the premiere was on the verge of failure. Despite the risks of being arrested, the workers continued rehearsing so that the play was presented with a delay of only one day. About 600 workers attended the premiere; for them, it was a form of protest mobilisation against repression and nationalism.
Halan was one of the founders of the Ukrainian proletarian writers' group Horno. From 1927 to 1932, along with other communist writers and members of the CPWU, he worked for the Lviv-based Ukrainian magazine Vikna, being a member of its editorial board, until it was closed by government censors.
Living in the Polish-controlled city of Lviv, Halan translated novels from German into Polish to earn a living. In 1932, he moved to Nyzhniy Bereziv, the native village of his wife, located in the Carpathian mountains, close to Kolomyia, where he worked on his own plays, stories and articles. In the village he spread communist agitation among peasants, creating cells of the International Red Aid and the Committee for Famine Relief. Without opportunities to find work, he lived in the countryside until June 1935, when he was summoned by the CPWU to return to Lviv.
Halan was denied Soviet citizenship in 1935.
In 1935, Halan traveled extensively around Prykarpattia, giving speeches to peasants. He became active as a communist propagandist and political agitator. Addressing the city workers, Halan explained to them the main points of Marxist theory. In particular, he held lectures on Friedrich Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Karl Marx's Wage Labour and Capital. Together with the young communist writer Olexa Havryliuk, Halan organized safe houses, wrote leaflets and proclamations, and transferred illegal literature to Lviv.
Throughout his political career, the writer was repeatedly persecuted, and twice imprisoned (for the first time in 1934). He was one of the organizers of the Lviv Anti-Fascist Congress of Cultural Workers in May 1936. Halan also took part in a major political demonstration on 16 April 1936 in Lviv, in which the crowd was fired on by Polish police (in total, thirty workers were killed and two hundred injured). Halan devoted his story Golden Arch to the memory of fallen comrades.
Participation in the Anti-Fascist Congress forced him to escape from Lviv to Warsaw, where he eventually found work at the left-wing newspaper Dziennik Popularny, edited by Wanda Wasilewska. In 1937, the newspaper was closed by the authorities, and on 8 April, Halan was accused of illegal communist activism and sent to prison in Warsaw (later transferred to Lviv). Released in December 1937, Halan lived in Lviv under strict supervision by the police, and remained unemployed until 1939.