Vasyl Makukh
Vasyl Omelianovych Makukh was a Soviet veteran of World War II, political prisoner and Ukrainian activist, and member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
Having been conscripted into the Red Army, in November 1944 Makukh defected and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In February 1946 he was wounded and captured after a shootout with Soviet and Polish border guards at the Soviet-Polish border. On 15 February 1946, Makukh was taken to the district precinct of the KGB in Velyki Mosty and later to Lviv Prison No. 4. On 11 July 1946, the Military Tribunal of Lviv garrison sentenced him to 10 years of hard labour with five years of detention plus the confiscation of all his property. Makukh served his sentence in Dubravlag and other GULAG camps in Siberia. On 18 July 1955, he was freed and exiled to a local settlement, where he met a woman who had also served 10 years imprisonment. In 1956, both managed to return to Ukraine, and being forbidden to return to their own region, they settled in Dnipropetrovsk, where they married and Makukh worked as a schoolteacher.
On November 5, 1968, he committed suicide by self-immolation on Khreshchatyk, Kiev's main street, in protest against the Soviet rule of Ukraine as well as the Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia. Before his death, Makukh shouted 'Long live free Ukraine!' On 6 November 1968 the prosecutor's office of the Leninsky District of Kiev city opened a criminal case against him because of the suicide, the outcome of which was never made known.
