Jaroslav Alexandrovich Galan was a Ukrainian Soviet writer, journalist, public and political figure. Jaroslav Galan was born on July 27, 1902, in Dynow (now in Poland) to a family of an official. During World War I, he evacuated with his family to Rostov-on-Don, and after the war, he returned to his homeland. In 1923, he graduated from the gymnasium in Przemysl and studied at the Higher School of Commerce in Trieste, Italy. From 1923 to 1928, he received higher education at the Universities of Vienna and Krakow. During his student years, he joined the leftist movement and participated in underground activities. From 1929 to 1932, he was one of the organizers and a member of the editorial board of the magazine "Vikna" ("Windows"). The 1920s also marked the beginning of his creative career as a writer. He was one of the organizers of the group of Ukrainian proletarian writers "Gorno". In 1927, he completed work on his first significant play "Don Quixote of Etengheim". In the comedy "99%" (1930), first staged by the semi-legal Lviv "Workers' Theatre", Galan exposed the corruption of nationalist and chauvinistic parties. The theme of class struggle and condemnation of national segregation are prominent in the plays "Cargo" ("Vantazh", 1930) and "Bunker" ("Osederok", 1932), calling for unity of action and class solidarity among Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish proletariat. For his political stance, the writer was repeatedly persecuted, imprisoned (in 1934 and 1937). Jaroslav Galan was one of the organizers of the anti-fascist congress of cultural figures in Lviv in 1936. He also participated in the largest political demonstration on April 16, 1936, in Lviv, shot by the Polish police (thirty Lviv workers were killed, and two hundred demonstrators were injured). Galan dedicated the story "Golden Arch" to the memory of the fallen comrades. After the Communist Party of Poland and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, as its autonomous organization, were closed in 1938 on fabricated charges of espionage for Poland, Galan's wife Anna Didyk, sent to the USSR, was arrested in Kharkov and executed during Stalinist purges. In his post-war satirical pamphlets, Jaroslav Galan criticized nationalist and clerical reaction (specifically the Greek Catholic Church and the anti-communist official doctrine of the Vatican): "Their Face" (1948), "In the Service of Satan" (1948), "In the Face of Facts" (1949), "Father of Darkness and His Followers" (1949), "Vatican Idols Thirst for Blood", "Twilight of Foreign Gods", "What is Not Forgotten", "Vatican Without a Mask", and others. In the tragedy "Under the Golden Eagle" (1947), he compared crimes against humanity committed in Nazi concentration camps with the arbitrariness of American occupation forces in Western Germany. In the play "Love at Dawn" (1949, published in 1951), he portrayed the triumph of socialism in the post-war Western Ukrainian village. Jaroslav Galan died on October 24, 1949, in his study in an apartment on Gvardeyskaya Street in Lviv as a result of an attack (11 axe blows). The murder of the writer by Ukrainian nationalists Mykhailo Stakhur and Ilarion Lukashevych, associated with the OUN, was carried out shortly after the release of his anti-clerical satire "I Spit on the Pope!", which was a response to Galan's excommunication from the church by Pope Pius XII. After Galan’s murder, measures against the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which continued armed resistance against Soviet power, were intensified. Vasyl Kuk, commander of the UPA, and modern researchers suggest that the assassination was organized by KGB officers to discredit the nationalist underground in the eyes of the public. Nikita Khrushchev personally informed Stalin of the death of J. Galan, and for "color", he mentioned that the murderers used a Hutsul axe-bartka.
