25 Years Without George Gongadze: Otar Dovzhenko’s Speech at the Opening of an Exhibition Dedicated to the Journalist
On September 16, 2000, George Gongadze, Ukrainian journalist and founder of Ukrainska Pravda, disappeared. On the 25th anniversary of his death, the George Gongadze Award opened a street exhibition, The Diary of George Gongadze — a series of the journalist’s iconic quotes accompanied by context and illustrations by artists Inga Levi and Anton Logov.
We publish the speech of Otar Dovzhenko, creative director of the Lviv Media Forum, delivered during the opening of the exhibition.
"On this day 25 years ago, George Gongadze was kidnapped and murdered.
We are here in Lviv, a city that held great importance for George. He lived here intermittently from 1989 to 1995.
It was a brief chapter of his life — as his life itself was tragically brief; he died at just 31. Yet those years shaped him as a Ukrainian journalist and as an engaged citizen. Here, he found friends, love, and his profession.
Like many young people in Lviv, George often came to this very place, where today we are opening the street exhibition “Gongadze's Diary.”
This exhibition allows those who never knew George personally to learn more about him and to understand him better: who he was, how he viewed Ukraine, and what kind of country he dreamed of and fought for.
In an ideal world, journalism is not about fighting. It is a profession that should be safe. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a world.
George’s death was not the last violent death of a journalist in Ukraine.
After the outbreak of the full-scale war in 2022, Russia killed dozens of Ukrainian and foreign civilian journalists — as well as many journalists who took up arms to defend Ukraine from the invasion.
Today, we remember George Gongadze and all the journalists who have died in Ukraine, whether while doing their job or defending their country.
Personally, I did not know George Gongadze — our lives were slightly out of sync. Yet I remember those times vividly and often discuss them with younger generations. That is why I keenly feel the threat to our institutional memory: young people know the names, but they do not always grasp the essence of the events.
When we speak of George and his death, it is crucial to remember that this was not an accident or a private tragedy. It was a political assassination, aimed at silencing his critical voice.
This murder was carried out in the interests of the authorities at the time — President Leonid Kuchma and his inner circle. The crime was initially denied, and attempts were made to cover it up.
Years of pressure from civil society and the media eventually forced law enforcement agencies to find and bring some of the perpetrators and organizers to justice — people who called themselves law enforcement officers but were, in reality, hired killers.
Yet no government in the past 25 years has dared to name the person who ordered the killing. Instead, mythological explanations have been circulated: claims of a special operation by enemy intelligence framing the innocent President Kuchma.
George Gongadze was a journalist and a member of the opposition movement against an authoritarian, corrupt, opaque, and undemocratic government — a Soviet-style regime that blocked Ukraine’s progress. To preserve itself, this government created a system of total censorship and election fraud, a system that, at the time, was known as “Kuchmaism.”
Even back then, there was a well-known saying: unpunished evil grows.
Unfortunately, after two revolutions and several changes of power, this phenomenon has not yet been fully overcome. Recently, we witnessed mass protests “with cardboard signs” against the same injustices — only now they are no longer called “Kuchmaism.”
Today, we face a great evil — Russia — which is trying to destroy us. Russia is killing Ukrainians while claiming it has attacked no one, bears no ill will, and is “healing” us so that we can once again be one people.
I have no doubt that this evil will seek to go unpunished, to evade responsibility, and to invent new myths and false narratives.
Therefore, as in the story of George’s murder, it is crucial to remember clearly:
who kills,
who gave the order to kill,
and for what real purpose".
The program for George Gongadze Remembrance Week can be found here.
Photo: Iryna Sereda.