The murder of Leontovych: who shot the author of Shchedryk

The composer the world sings

Mykola Leontovych was an outstanding Ukrainian composer, author of “Shchedryk.” His arrangement of an old Ukrainian carol traveled the world as the Christmas “Carol of the Bells” and resounds every year “from every television, radio, and corner of the internet”^[1]. Ironically, the world knows the author’s name far less well than the melody.

The Markivka tragedy

On the night of 23 January 1921, Leontovych was staying at his father’s house in the village of Markivka in Podillia. The historian Larysa Semenko reconstructed the circumstances of the “Markivka tragedy” from two rare documents — the notes of Hnat Yastrubetskyi, the composer’s friend, whom the committee to honor his memory sent to gather testimony while the trail was still fresh, and the diary of Stepan Vasylchenko^[2]. The killer asked to spend the night, passing himself off as a Chekist fighting banditry — and in the morning he robbed the house and shot the composer.

Whose agent was it

The first person to openly name the killer as a Bolshevik agent-Chekist was Telezhynskyi — an acquaintance of Leontovych who published a memorial pamphlet abroad^[3]. Later research confirmed this: the killer was the Cheka agent Afanasii Hryshchenko, and the text of the report bearing his name was made public only in the 1990s.

How the truth was concealed

The Soviet authorities did everything to hide their trail. They called the killer anything at all — a “Petliurite,” a “Denikinite,” a “nationalist,” or simply a “bandit” — but never once a Chekist. The first report in the newspaper Izvestia claimed that Leontovych “died at the hands of a bandit”^[4].

The very “muteness” of the archives is telling: in the reports of the Haisyn Cheka for January–February, which note down absolutely everything — even how much liquor was drunk and who fired a revolver — there is not a single word about the murder of the famous composer. Meanwhile, the police officers who searched for the killer Hryshchenko anyway were later subjected to repression^[5].

What this means

The murder of Leontovych is a beginning. Already at the dawn of Soviet rule (1921), the system was destroying Ukrainian culture through its creators, and then concealing its handwriting by shifting the blame onto the victims — “Petliurites” and “nationalists.” This is the very model that would later produce the Executed Renaissance and the Holodomor: first the bullet or the famine, then the lie about who was to blame. The “quiet genius” whose carol is sung by the whole world died from the bullet of an empire that to this day pretends it had nothing to do with it.