1985–2014
Bohdan Solchanyk
Historian and university lecturer
He studied how a small town in western Ukraine voted, and he wrote poems. Bohdan Solchanyk, a historian from Staryi Sambir, taught at the Ukrainian Catholic University and in November 2013 led a column of Lviv students. He was killed on Instytutska Street in Kyiv on 20 February 2014, aged 28.
Key accomplishments
- Historian and sociologist; taught modern and contemporary Ukrainian history at the Ukrainian Catholic University
- Worked on a doctoral thesis on voting practices in a small western Ukrainian town (1965–2006) as a graduate student at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw
- Pora! activist in the Orange Revolution of 2004; co-organizer of the Lavriv summer school for students
- On 22 November 2013 led a column of several thousand Lviv students in support of closer ties with the EU
- Hero of Ukraine (posthumously, 2014); his poems came out as the collection Kitchens of My Generation (2014)
A historian who studied elections
How did people in a small town in western Ukraine vote, in Soviet times and after? Bohdan Solchanyk set out to answer that in his thesis, “Voting practices in a small western Ukrainian town, 1965–2006”. He studied history at Lviv University, earned a master’s degree in sociology there with a thesis on the “post-Soviet person”, and from 2008 to 2012 was a graduate student at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He taught modern and contemporary Ukrainian history at the Ukrainian Catholic University, worked as a tour guide, loved the mountains and wrote poems.
From Staryi Sambir
Bohdan was born on 25 July 1985 in Staryi Sambir in Lviv region. In his home town he and his brother started a movement called “Old Town”, and in 2007 he organized a five-a-side football tournament.
From Pora! to the Euromaidan
As a student activist in the youth group Pora!, Solchanyk helped bring students out for the Orange Revolution in 2004. In the summer of 2013 he organized a picket outside the regional police headquarters in Lviv in solidarity with the people of Vradiivka, who had risen up against police abuse. On 22 November 2013, after the government halted preparations to sign the EU Association Agreement, Bohdan led a column of several thousand Lviv students carrying EU flags. He went to Kyiv several times and organized pickets in Lviv, but he was against radical action: a friend recalled that on 18 February 2014 he tried to talk people out of storming the security service (SBU) building in Lviv, because people could be killed.
Bohdan Solchanyk was killed on Instytutska Street in Kyiv on 20 February 2014. He was 28. Ihor Kostenko, a Lviv University student, was killed on Instytutska that same morning. In 2023 the Sviatoshynskyi District Court of Kyiv found three former officers of the Berkut riot police guilty of killing protesters on the Maidan; back in 2019 they had been released from custody in a prisoner exchange with russia.
Why it matters today
Bohdan Solchanyk showed that a historian can not only study history but make it. He studied how ordinary people vote, and then led students out himself to stand up for Ukraine’s European choice. Yet he cared that protest should not cost lives. Every student and teacher who stands up for their choice today, peacefully and persistently, carries on his work.
