Born in 1903, Volodymyr Lopushanskiy was a writer, newspaper editor and military historian who grew up during Ukraine’s many struggles for independence, from the time of the last czar through two world wars and the repressive Soviet era. He told “stories of liberation” in books. He wrote plays. He ran a bookstore. In 1952, Lopushanskiy was arrested for allegedly anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to 10 years in a gulag.
“I come from a family that has deep roots in Ukrainian nationalistic history,” says Marta Lopushanska, his 42-year-old granddaughter in Baltimore. “My grandfather was a writer who was sent to Siberia for writing essentially a memoir. He got back to Lviv completely a changed man and never spoke to anyone about what happened to him when he was in prison.”
Volodymyr Lopushanskiy died in 1987, a couple of years before the collapse of the Soviet Union that had imprisoned him.
