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Ivan Fedorovych Drach (; 17 October 1936 – 19 June 2018) was a Ukrainians poet, screenwriter, literary critic, politician, and political activist.
Drach played an important role in the founding of Rukh – the People's Movement of Ukraine – and led the organisation from 1989 to 1992.
Drach made his debut in 1961 with the publication of his poem-tragedy Knife in the Sun in the Kyiv literary newspaper. He worked in the newspapers "Literary Ukraine" and "Fatherland." Ivan Dziuba introduced Knife in the Sun in Literaturna hazeta as a sign the last vestiges of Stalinism were falling.
In January of 1962, Ivan Drach spoke at the Third Plenum of the Ukrainian Writers' Union. Toles Honchar, Soviet Ukrainian poet-laureate and president of the Union welcomed the Sixtiers to the Union and Drach served as unofficial spokesperson for the young poets:
create the art of communism, of which Soviet Ukrainian will form a part; that young intellectuals are enthusiastic about Western European and that several "forgotten" Ukrainian writers and artists of the past ought to be remembered and treated with dignity.
On March 20, 1962 Ivan Drach, and three other members of the Shestydesiatnyky were invited to join the Ukrainian Writer's Union. They would then hold literary events that were well attended. Then following a meetÍng of the Presidium of the Ukrainian Writers Union on June 23, 1962 party officials bagan a crackdown. At the meeting At this meeting the editors of the Journal's "Vitchyzna", "Prapor" and "Dnipro" and the newspaper "Literaturna Ukraina" were chastised for letting authors deviate from socialist realism.
At the Fourth Plenary Session of the Soviet Writers' Union, in March of 1963, Drach fell under criticism of Leonid Novychenk who compared Drach to Yevhen Yevtushenkoa a Russian poet of Ukrainian background who Novychenk calle a " very uneducated man, both generally and in the sense of Marxist education, and Marxist worldview."
On April 8, 1963 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) condemned Drach because "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalistic counter-revolutionaries abroad" spread his poetry. At Kievan Writers' Organization held in April of 1963 the rejection of the Sixtiers was complete. Drach's work was singled out as "confused" and for being published by bourgeois nationalists in the West. In response Drach published a satirical poem "Ode to an Honest Coward."
Drach complied with new reality and his second collection of poetry "Solar Prominences of the Heart" was noted by critics as returning to social realism and losing the literary devices and focusing on transmitting important socialist ideals. Other shestydesiatnyky did not follow suit, and many were arrested. Drach spoke up against these arrests, and in fact mentioned them while speaking at the United Nations. Legend has it Drach escaped his KGB handlers in New York City and wandered into a Cafe where he met Alan Ginsberg.
The Fifth Congress of the Ukrainian Hriters' Union, held in November, 1966 would defend Drach's work and declare it free of formalism and literary twists. Drach's later work, once complying with Party demands is considered to have declined in quality.
Drach also worked as a screenwriter in the film studio O.P. Dovzhenko. He wrote A Spring for the Thirsty; filmed in 1965. The film was not released until 1987 after it was censored by the Soviet government.
In 1976, he won the USSR State Prize for his work, The Root and the Crown. In the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Drach was involved in a growing movement of Ukrainian dissident intellectuals that demanded larger cultural autonomy for Ukraine and an honest conversation in the Soviet Union about the Stalinism government's actions in Ukraine, particularly the Holodomor.
After the beginning of Perestroika, he resumed contacts with dissident circles. Together with Vyacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Horyn, and a number of other Ukrainian activists, in 1989 he created Rukh or People's Movement of Ukraine, first official Ukrainian pro-reform organization. Ivan Drach was the first chairman of Rukh from September 8, 1989 to February 28, 1992.
At the 29 March 1998 elections to the Verkhovna Rada member Drach (NRU party) ran for parliament from Ternopil (No. 167) constituency and voting results (21.04% of the vote), the second time he was elected to Parliament. In the parliamentary elections of March 2002, Drach appeared in the Our Ukraine party at number 31. Thus, the third time he became a deputy. After a long dispute with the party leadership NRU, Drach in March 2005 left the party and joined the Ukrainian People's Party Yuri Kostenko. In the parliamentary elections of March 26, 2006, he was number 14 on the electoral list "Ukrainian National Bloc of Kostenko and the Ivy". But the bloc lost the election and Drach was not elected to Parliament.
From August 1992 to May 19, 2000, he headed the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council. Other positions included the chairmanship of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia Congress and heading the Writers' Union.
Drach, according to interviews drew on many sources. World War II, Taras Shevchenko,Alexander Pushkin, Walt whitman and Pablo Neruda played the strongest role informing his style. Drach also said Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall as influences, as well as other modern poets in different languages.
He made his debut in 1961, when the Kyiv Literary Gazette published his poem-tragedy Knife in the Sun. Seeing himself as someone striving for universal socialism by returning to Leninist norms, Drach wrote entire cycles of poems dedicated to Lenin and the Communist Party to which he belonged. His works were known in the USSR and abroad. His poetry has been translated into Russian (several separate editions), Belarusian, Azerbaijani, Latvian, Moldavian, Polish, Czech, German and other languages.
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