“My father, Taras Antoniak, born on July 5, 1899, was a graduate of the Peremyshl Ukrainian Gymnasium, class of 1918. He was mobilized for service as part of the Austrian, Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Armed Forces on the Italian front. Due to Austria’s capitulation, he was taken prisoner in Italy, where he remained for several years. He returned to Lviv and became a student at the Secret Ukrainian University until it was ultimately disbanded and dispersed by the Poles. He studied law and intended to continue his education in Vienna, but the Poles refused to issue him a passport. As a result, he remained here, within the then-territory of the Polish Republic. He completed teacher training courses and, after long struggles, managed to secure some work in the heart of Poland, in Mazovia [a historical region in mid-north-eastern Poland]. Eventually, he returned here sometime before World War II. And so, as a result of all the upheavals, he was convicted. He was the director of a school — he took the position under the Germans. He was the director of a lower secondary school in the village of Hostyntseve, Mostyska District, Lviv region. In December 1949, the Soviets arrested him, sentencing him to 10 plus 5 years for ‘Treason against the Motherland.’ What was he accused of, according to the case materials I was able to review at the Lviv Regional SBU [Security Service of Ukraine]? He was accused of collaborating with the German occupiers, which consisted of leading the Ukrainian National Self-Defense for two months in the summer of 1941 in the village of Staryava, in what was then the Mostyska County, now a district. Once a district, now no longer, in the Lviv region. He served his sentence until [19]56 and has not been rehabilitated to this day. So I am the son of an ‘enemy of the people’ or ‘vrag naroda,’ which, generally speaking, I am proud of.”
“Those were my parents. And I was utterly astonished — everyone was — when I managed to secure a job in Sovoboronprom [People's Commissariat of Defence Industry] after graduating from university. Initially, it was a ministry, the USSR State Committee for Standards. Later, it became the Ministry of the Shipbuilding Industry of the USSR. That is, I worked in various classified, restricted-access institutions, yet, for some reason, my parents’ biography was not considered during my employment. Although, later on, I was told that when I transferred to the Lviv branch of the Kyiv Research Institute of Hydro-Instruments, our director, Anatoliy Chaban, personally traveled to Moscow to get permission to hire me.”
“It was the night of [February] 18 to 19, [2014], calls coming in from Donetsk. That same Max Sydorenko keeps calling and calling, saying, ‘Yurko, are you an idiot? Get the guys out of there and run — they’ll kill you all.’ So we discussed it, ‘We’ll wait a little longer.’ The next call, ‘Well, you’re an old idiot — you can die if you want. Get the youth out. Get the youth out of the Maidan, those in your zone of responsibility. Get the young out, and then do whatever you want yourselves.’ — ‘Alright, alright.’ — ‘So? Did you get the young ones out?’ — ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s simple: I offered them the chance to leave, and they, to put it mildly, told me to get lost.’ And that was the end of that. That was night, there were [Molotov] cocktails, throwing things, cooking. We held our ground that night. Passing things along, in those human chains — when people from Kyiv had already arrived — cobblestones, everything else. We made it through that night. And sometime around 3:30 AM, I think, Max Sydorenko from Donetsk calls me and says, ‘Yurko, you know, I get the impression that you held out.’ I said, ‘Max, you know, I get the impression that we held out, too.’ ”
“In the morning, we got up — well, as I said, at night we went to sleep because we were exhausted. Basically, [February] 18, [February] 19, and a part of the night on [February] 20, [2014] we were already… we were already collapsing. We went to sleep, then a call, ‘Get out, there’s an assault on Maidan.’ We went out, watched as they were already driving the Berkut [riot police] forces back. The order was not to leave the perimeter. We defended everything a bit, the perimeter of the area. And when they started carrying in the bodies of the dead and the wounded, we had a team that went around trying to determine what exactly they were being shot with. Because there were different theories. We went to the Ukraine Hotel, where Olha Bohomolets had set up a field hospital, trying to find out if anything had been recovered. Later, some guys went around to the morgues to document the details of the massacre. Practically, we weren’t able to obtain any artifacts, that is, physical evidence, at that time.”
“The mood was singular — to win." — "And did you believe in victory?" — "Of course. We believed in victory, we were resolute. When it all reached our tents, when it was already the last line of fire, when literally nothing remained between us and them except that blazing barricade, nothing at all… All the tents above us had already burned down. People were pouring whatever oil there was left on the curbs. So we consulted among ourselves, ‘Well, what do we do? Run? No. If we run, they’ll hunt us down like rats in a week or two, in our homes in the Lviv region or wherever else, and that will be it. We stand as long as we can. If absolutely necessary, we set the barricade on fire across Khreshchatyk — it would have burned down half of Khreshchatyk for sure.’ We had enough supplies, including flammable materials. We set the barricade on fire and retreat toward the stage. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. There was practically no thought of retreating or running away.”
Yuriy Antoniak has participated in the Ukrainian political movement from the late 1980s to the present. He was born on January 31, 1958, in the village of Hostyntseve, Lviv region. In 1973, he graduated from Horodok Secondary School No. 2 and that same year became a student at the Department of Physics of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, completing his studies in 1978. He worked in various organizations and institutions related to information processing and statistical hydroacoustics. His places of employment included the USSR State Committee for Standards, the Ministry of the Shipbuilding Industry of the USSR, and the Lviv branch of the Kyiv Research Institute of Hydro-Instruments. He joined the organized Ukrainian socio-political movement in 1989 when the first rallies began in Lviv. At the enterprise where he worked at the time, he became a member and leader of a local branch of the People’s Movement of Ukraine. He headed the regional secretariat of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. He served as deputy chairman of the Lviv Regional Election Commission for the 1991 referendum and the first presidential elections in Ukraine. In 2004, he was the head of Viktor Yushchenko’s election campaign headquarters in one of Lviv’s districts. A participant in the Revolution of Dignity, he continues to engage in public activities and is a board member of the Hromadska Varta NGO. He teaches physics at Secondary School No. 97 in Lviv.
