Opanas Zalyvakha

Opanas Zalyvakha (Ukrainian: Опанас Іванович Заливаха; 26 November 1925 – 24 April 2007) was a Ukrainian artist and Soviet dissident, member of Artistic Youths' Club (1960 - 1964).

He spent his youth in Siberia, where his family fled from the Holodomor of the 1930s. The father of the family made two hives for the village elder to get permission to leave for the Ussuriysk region.

The young man developed a love for drawing and planned to enrol in art school. These plans were thwarted by World War II, as the educational institution was closed. Opanas moved to Irkutsk.

In 1946, he tried again to get an education and enrolled in the Leningrad Academy of Arts.

In 1947, he began studying at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He was expelled for ‘behaviour unworthy of a Soviet student’: Opanas failed to attend a meeting with a candidate for deputy, thereby showing disrespect for the Soviet authorities. He was only able to resume his studies and complete his education in 1960.

In 1957, he completed his training in Kosiv (Hutsul region). After completing his studies, he worked for a year as an artist at the Tyumen Art Fund, after which he moved to Ivano-Frankivsk. Here, the artist's first exhibition took place at the regional museum of local history. It lasted two weeks. Opanas Zalyvaha placed a notebook for comments in the hall and received mixed reviews. The exhibition was closed early by order of the head of the regional party committee's culture department, and Zalyvaha was criticised for ‘causing a rift in the friendly community of artists’. Some of his early works found their way abroad and gained some popularity, and Zalyvaha received an invitation to organise an exhibition in New York.

In 1962, he became acquainted with a group of young artists in Kyiv and became actively involved in human rights activities. In 1964, he collaborated with Alla Horska, Lyudmila Semykina, Galina Sevruk, and Galina Zubchenko to create the stained glass window "Shevchenko. Mother" for the 150th anniversary of Taras Shevchenko in the lobby of the Red Building of Kyiv National University. A commission convened after this qualified it as ideologically hostile, so the stained glass window was destroyed by the university administration.

From 1965 to 1970, he served a sentence under Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (‘for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’) — five years in Camp No. 385 (Mordovia). At the end of 1964, he was arrested for suspicious activity, trips to Kyiv, and ‘propaganda’ activities for five years. In prison, he was forbidden to paint, and his bookplates were confiscated. Although his colleagues repeatedly appealed for Opanas to be allowed to paint, they never received permission.

He recalled his imprisonment: "I was already living in a general prison called the USSR. First there was boarding school, then university in Leningrad. And everywhere they gave you food rations, of course, if you were “obedient”. And then in prison they also gave you rations. The authorities always tried to allocate rations in everything: in food and in creativity. That's how the state was. Everything was allocated according to the quota."^[1]

In 1968, he signed the ‘Letter of 139’ (an open public letter addressed to Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny demanding an end to the practice of illegal political trials).

In the winter of 1969, Alla Horska visited Opanas Zalyvaha in the Mordovian concentration camp zone. On 28 August 1970, when he was released from prison, she played an active role in organising a grand welcome for him at the 'Natalka' restaurant in Kyiv. She was murdered that same year.

He married Daryna Voznyak (Stepan Bandera's niece), and the couple raised a son, Yaroslav, and a daughter, Yaryna.

In the late years of perestroika and after Ukraine declared independence, his work received well-deserved recognition, and exhibitions of his works were organised in Ukraine and abroad. In 1995, Zalyvaha was awarded the Taras Shevchenko State Prize of Ukraine.^[2] Zalivakha's first album was released in 2003 by 'The Smoloskyp' publishing house.

Illustrated books:

• Palimpsests by Vasyl Stus,
• The Prodigal Sons of Ukraine by Yevhen Sverstiuk.

Exhibitions In 2024, an exhibition opened at the Mercury Art Centre in Lviv.^[3]

On 23 November 2017, a monument to the artist (sculptor Igor Semak) was erected on the pedestrian part of Nezalezhnist Street in Ivano-Frankivsk.

In 2023, Matrosov Street in Kyiv was renamed Opanas Zalyvaha Street.

In 2024, Griboedov Street in Druzhkivka was renamed Opanas Zalyvaha Street.

• Soviet dissidents
• Vasyl Stus
• Ukrainian underground

• "Хто такий Опанас Заливаха та чому його має знати кожен українець | Vogue UA". vogue.ua. Retrieved 2026-01-02.