In Ukraine, Serhiy Paradzhanov, who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for Ukrainian nationalism, has been rehabilitated

The National Rehabilitation Commission has rehabilitated the Ukrainian-Armenian director Serhiy Paradzhanov 50 years after a politically motivated sentence. Anton Drobovych, the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, announced this on Facebook.

On the centenary of the birth of the key author of Ukrainian poetic cinema, Serhiy Paradzhanov, it became known that the National Rehabilitation Commission, upon the submission of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory on December 20, 2023, rehabilitated the prominent film director. This happened 50 years after his conviction. In 1973, the Soviet authorities accused Paradzhanov of "Ukrainian nationalism and homosexuality" and sentenced him to 5 years in strict regime labor camps.

As Drobovych noted, the President's Office and Ukrainian human rights activists, including the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, supported the review of the case.

"However, the main words of gratitude should be addressed to Roman Podkuru (a researcher of the history of Soviet special services) and his colleagues from the National Rehabilitation Commission for their professionalism, thoroughness, and responsibility. Thanks to them, historical truth prevails over oblivion and repression, and hope arises that other complex and resonant cases of Ukrainian dissidents, who were tried in the USSR for both political and fabricated criminal charges, will be considered in the future," shared the director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.

Paradzhanov is best known as the director of the film "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," based on the work of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, which brought him international recognition. During the premiere of his film, which won 39 international awards, on September 4, 1964, at the Kyiv cinema "Ukraine," a protest took place. The creative intelligentsia publicly condemned the political repression taking place in Ukraine.