Nadia Svitlychna would have turned 90 on 8 November 2026. She belonged to the Sixtiers, the Ukrainian intellectuals who, after Joseph Stalin’s death, tried to revive Ukrainian literature, language and historical memory under a Soviet order the writer describes as a barely disguised continuation of Russian imperial rule. Asserting the right to be Ukrainian, to write in Ukrainian and to reclaim Ukraine’s history was, in that account, a political challenge as well as a cultural one.
Born in Polovynkyne, in the Luhansk region, she studied philology at Kharkiv University and worked as a teacher, editor and journalist. Her brother, the literary critic Ivan Svitlychny, was a central figure in the Ukrainian national revival from the first half of the 1960s. Through him she joined intellectuals who refused censorship, political persecution and the suppression of national culture. After a wave of arrests in 1965, Ivan was among about 20 Ukrainian dissidents imprisoned. Nadia helped defend arrested colleagues, circulated uncensored writings and documented abuses. Her close friend, the artist Ala Horska, was murdered in suspicious circumstances in 1970.
Nadia was arrested in April 1972 during a major crackdown on Ukrainian intellectuals. In March 1973 she was sentenced to four years in a labour camp in Mordovia for so-called anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Ivan received imprisonment and internal exile totalling 12 years. Her release in May 1976 did not end her opposition. In 1978 she was allowed to leave the Soviet Union with her two children and eventually settled in the United States.
The writer’s own link to the family began while both were political prisoners. In spring 1978 a profile of Ivan appeared in the London journal Index on Censorship. From the second half of 1978 until 1982 the writer headed Amnesty International’s Soviet unit in London, responsible for the defence of political prisoners across the Soviet Union, most of them then Ukrainians. One early assignment was to meet Nadia in Rome in October 1978, after she arrived by air with her two sons and was received at a Ukrainian Catholic convent. The writer later conducted her first interview in the West and describes her as having come not to withdraw but to speak for colleagues still persecuted, including her brother.
Correspondence with Ivan followed, under a pseudonym, while he was in internal exile after the camps. He suffered two strokes in exile and, released in 1984, returned to Kyiv permanently crippled.
In the United States, Svitlychna worked with the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, pressing the cases of Ukrainian political prisoners before international organisations and Western governments. She edited the Bulletin of Repressions in Ukraine, recording arrests, trials, sentences and abuses. From 1983 to 1994 she worked for the Ukrainian Service of Radio Liberty in New York. In 1989, after becoming director of the service — then based in Munich and funded by the United States — the writer asked her to prepare programmes on fellow Sixtiers. She also promoted the Museum of the Sixtiers in Kyiv and gave it photographs, documents and personal materials. She prepared Vasyl Stus’s collection Palimpsests for publication in Munich in 1986; Stus, a poet, had died in a Soviet labour camp in 1985. In 1994 she received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize for journalism and publicist writing, shared with Ivan, who was honoured posthumously.
The writer argues that Russia’s war against Ukraine shows the same imperial determination to deny Ukrainians their identity and political independence. In occupied territories, Ukrainian civilians, journalists and activists face persecution, imprisonment and torture, while books, language, cultural institutions and historical memory are again suppressed, and political prisoners and prisoners of war remain exposed to brutal treatment. Svitlychna’s generation, the piece says, saw before independence in 1991 that national freedom could not be separated from individual rights, free expression and human dignity, and that abuses had to be documented rather than set aside for diplomatic convenience.
She died in the United States on 8 August 2006 and, following her wishes, was buried in Kyiv. The writer, marking the 90th anniversary of her birth, remembers a soft-spoken, humorous and determined colleague whose courage showed in letters to prisoners, saved manuscripts, radio programmes and a refusal to abandon people in need. Ukraine, the piece concludes, has particular reason to remember her and Ivan as patriots from the Luhansk region of Donbas, occupied by Russia since 2014.