# Alla Horska

Alla Horska (Ukrainian: Алла Горська; 18 September 1929, Yalta, Crimean ASSR, Russian SFSR, USSR – 28 November 1970, Vasylkiv, Kyiv Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, USSR) – was a prominent Ukrainian painter, graphic artist, and monumental artist. She was also an active representative of the Ukrainian underground and human rights movement in the 1960s. Horska persistently fought the Soviet totalitarian regime and made a major contribution to the development and preservation of Ukrainian culture and identity. She was murdered at the age of 41.

## Biography
### Early life and family

Alla Horska was born on 18 September 1929 in Yalta, which was part of the Crimean ASSR, which at that time was part of the USSR. Her father, Oleksandr Horskyi, was a leading manager and organizer of Soviet film production. During the early years of Alla's life, Horskyi worked as an actor in the Yalta Ukrainian theater troupe directed by Pavlo Deliavskyi. In 1931, he became the director of the Yalta Film Studio.
In 1932, he moved with his family to Moscow, where he took on the role of head of production at the "Vostokfilm" trust. Later, he was transferred to Leningrad (St. Peterburg today), where he first became the deputy director and then the director of the "Lenfilm" studio.
Horska's mother, Olena Bezsmertna, worked as a caregiver in Yalta children's sanatoriums and later as a costume designer in Leningrad.
From autumn 1939 to spring 1940, Oleksandr Horskyi was involved in the Soviet-Finnish War, and shortly before Germany's attack on the USSR, he went to Mongolia as the leader of a group for filming the movie "His Name is Sukhe-Bator". During the war, Horskyi was in Almaty, employed at a collaborative film studio. Meanwhile, 11-year-old Alla, along with her mother and her brother Arsen, who was 10 years older, met the war in Leningrad. Arsen was the son of Alla's mother from her first husband, who died in the war in Ukraine in 1918–1919. Alla and her mother survived two blockaded winters in Leningrad and were evacuated to Almaty in the summer of 1943. Arsen was killed during the war in 1943.
At the end of 1943, Alla's father was offered to lead the Kyiv Film Studio of Feature Films. This made the family to move to the capital of Ukraine. They settled in the centre of Kyiv. Later, their apartment, along with Alla Horska's workshop, became a sort of headquarters for dissidents.

### Education
#### 1946-1948

Between 1946 and 1948, Alla Horska studied at the Kyiv Art Secondary School named after T. Shevchenko, where she graduated with a gold medal. One of her art instructors was Volodymyr Bondarenko, a former student of Fedir Krychevsky.

#### 1948-1954

During this period, Horska studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute, particularly in the workshop of Serhiy Hryhoriev. It was during her studies that she met her future husband, Viktor Zaretsky.

### Activity

Two years after completing her education, Alla Horska began her career in monumental painting. She often traveled to Donbas with her husband. In 1959, she was admitted to the Union of Artists for her series of paintings on the mining industry.
During the Khrushchev Thaw, Ukrainian culture began to revive, and Alla Horska actively participated in the process of national revival, alongside the young generation of creative intelligentsia in Kyiv in the early 1960s. In that period, she consciously transitioned to the Ukrainian language. By the way she was raised in a Russian-speaking family and hadn't even studied Ukrainian at school. Therefore, she had to start learning the language from scratch, under the guidance of the journalist and public figure Nadiya Svitlychna.
In the early 1960s, Alla Horska, together with Viktor Zaretsky, Vasyl Stus, Vasyl Symonenko, and Ivan Svitlychny, organized the Creative Youth Club "Suchasnyk" in Kyiv. In addition to them, Ivan Drach, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Iryna Zhylenko, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Les Tanyuk, and Ivan Dziuba were also involved. The young artists held discussions, artistic evenings, organized exhibitions, engaged in self-publishing ("samvydav"), and provided each other with moral and material support.
The activities of "Suchasnyk" extended beyond literary events. Along with Vasyl Symonenko and Les Tanyuk, Alla discovered the burial sites of thousands of victims of the NKVD (Bykivnia, Lukyanivske, and Vasilkivske cemeteries). They immediately reported their findings to the Kyiv City Council. The most horrifying aspect of this story is that it was children playing football with a human skull with a hole in the back who helped make this discovery.

#### Stained glass "Shevchenko. Mother"

In 1964, Alla Horska, together with Opanas Zalyvakha, Lyudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk, and Halyna Zubchenko, created the stained glass "Shevchenko. Mother" in the vestibule of the main building of Kyiv University. It depicted a poet with a woman leaning against him symbolizing Mother Ukraine. However, shortly before the unveiling, at the direction of the party leadership, the university administration destroyed it. After this incident, a commission classified the stained glass as ideologically hostile and deeply incompatible with the principles of socialist realism. Horska and Semykina were expelled from the Artists' Union, but they were reinstated a year later.

#### Second half of 1960s

In 1965, many of Horska's friends were arrested. This period marked the beginning of her active involvement in the opposition movement, leading to her artistic activities being relegated to the underground. On 16 December 1965, Horska wrote a letter to the prosecutor of the Ukrainian SSR regarding the arrests. Alla Horska corresponded with those who were in camps or experienced other forms of punishment, especially with Opanas Zalyvaha. After returning from the camps, human rights activists turned to her for support, sometimes even staying at her apartment in Kyiv.
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.
In 1968, Alla Horska joined the signing of a public letter addressed to Leonid Brezhnev, Oleks Kosygin, and Mykola Pidgorny, known as "Letter of Protest 139". The letter, written in a restrained and tolerant manner, demanded an end to the practice of illegal political processes and drew attention to the departure from the decisions of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and violations of socialist legality. Administrative repression began against those who signed the letter. Alla Horska was expelled from the Union of Artists for the second time. The woman was under round-the-clock surveillance. She often received threatening calls and encountered intimidation right on the street.
In 1970, Alla Horska was summoned for questioning to Ivano-Frankivsk in the case of the arrested Valentyn Moroz, but she refused to answer any questions. Several days before her murder, she wrote a protest to the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR regarding the illegality and cruelty of the verdict.

### Death

Alla Horska was murdered in 1970 while under surveillance by the KGB. Her funeral was on 7 December 1970.
On 28 November 1970, Alla Horska went to the town of Vasylkiv near Kyiv to pick up a sewing machine from her father-in-law and never returned. Several days later, her body was found in the house of her father-in-law, Ivan Zaretsky. The cause of death was stated as blunt force trauma from a hammer. Ivan Zaretsky was already deceased at that time - his mutilated body was found on the railway tracks on 29 November.
Investigators quickly reported the official cause of events - the father-in-law, due to personal animosity, killed his daughter-in-law and then committed suicide by throwing himself under a train. The criminal case was closed within a month.
Only 38 years later, the State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine declassified the so-called Fund 16, which contained documents related to the case of the murder of Alla Horska (many materials were destroyed in 1990). These documents were processed and published in 2010 by the son of Alla Horska, a linguist, culturologist, and researcher of his parents' work, Oleksiy (Oles) Zaretsky. The materials unequivocally demonstrate that the murder of the human rights activist was planned and organized by the authorities at that time. Friends of Horska had no doubts: it was an organized assassination carried out by the security services. The authorities wanted to bury Alla Horska in Baikove Cemetery, but they were not allowed, and she was forced to be buried in Berkivtsi Cemetery.

## Art

Alla Horska created dozens of works: mosaics, murals, stained glass, etc. She left behind a significant artistic legacy, including a series of portraits of Ukrainian figures from the 1960s - Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Symonenko, Yevhen Sverstyuk, paintings such as "Alphabet", "Self-Portrait with Son", as well as monumental compositions like "Tree of Life" in Mariupol (jointly with other authors), "Bird-Woman" and "Prometheus" in Donetsk (jointly with other authors), mosaic panel "Flag of Victory" in the "Young Guard" museum in Krasnodon (jointly with other authors), and others.
After graduating from the university, she actively participated in the country's artistic life: she exhibited her works at exhibitions (in 1957, at three exhibitions, including the International Exhibition of Fine and Applied Arts as part of the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow); she also fulfilled orders from the Ministry of Culture of the Ukrainian SSR (in 1957 - the painting "My Donbas", in 1959 - a group portrait of the communist labor brigade led by P. Polshchykov).
During the period from 1960 to 1961, she worked in the village of Hornostaipil in the Chernobyl (now Ivankiv) district of the Kyiv region. The son of the artist, Oleksiy Zaretskyi, believes that it was during this time that she "fully found her artistic language—not only artistic, but also the emotional component of life." This idea is supported by works such as "Collective Farm Woman Portrait", "Geese," "Pripyat. Ferry" (all in 1961). Bold elongated compositions, monumental flat forms, vibrant color schemes (she may have used tempera technique for the first time, which later became her favorite), indicate the emergence of a new phenomenon in Ukrainian art that contradicts official socialist realist standards.

### Selected works

* "Sancommission", diploma painting
* "Self-Portrait", drawing, 1960s
* "Self-Portrait with Son"
* Portrait of miner Vasyl Kryvynets, late 1950s
* "Song about Donbass", 1957
* Portrait of father, 1960
* Painting in memory of deceased mother "Children (Hania, Mykhailo, Petro)"
* "Alphabet", 1962
* "Pripyat. Ferry", 1962–1963
* "Duma" (T. Shevchenko), 1963
* Portrait of Oleksandr Dovzhenko, graphic art, 1960s
* Portrait of theater director Les Taniuk, drawing, early 1960s
* Portrait of B. Antonenko-Davydovych, drawing, early 1960s
* "Sunflower. Portrait of Son", drawing, early 1960s
* "Mother by the stove", early 1960s
* "Mother-Ukraine in chains", early 1960s
* "Say, that the truth will revive", 1963
* Portrait of V. Symonenko, 1963
* Portrait of I. Svitlychny, 1963
* Portrait of Y. Sverstyuk, 1963
* "By the river", decorative composition, 1964
* Composition (male figure in profile), 1963–1964

## Honoring the memory
### Films

* A Soviet Ukrainian Alla Horska | Beyond East and West