from RT
Last weekend, Irina Farion, a notorious Ukrainian far-right
politician and academic was shot in the head by an unidentified assassin
not far from her house in the western city of Lviv. She died some time
later in hospital.
The killer has not been found yet, but the main
suspect is an unidentified young man who, according to the accounts of
neighbors, had been watching Farion’s house for several weeks. The
motives remain unknown, but it is no secret that the victim – a former
MP in the national parliament for the ultra-nationalist Svoboda – had
many enemies.
Farion’s scandalous, offensive, and chauvinistic
views were so radical that she even became involved in a public conflict
with right-wing radicals from the Ukrainian army. Now her murder has
shaken the country.
In February 2010, as a deputy of the Lviv Regional Rada, Farion visited a
kindergarten and insulted children whose names she considered
insufficiently “Ukrainian”. The deputy claimed that a boy named Misha should be called Mykhailyk, that the name Liza comes from the word “lick”, and told girls named Alyona to “pack [their] bags and go to Moscovia (Russia).”
Despite causing a public uproar, however, the incident did not affect
Farion’s political career, something quite typical for modern Ukraine.
The future champion of the “purity” of the Ukrainian
language was born in Lviv in 1964, to a librarian mother and machine
fitter father. After graduating from school, she briefly worked in a
regional library herself, and in 1982 entered Lviv’s Ivan Franko
National University, where she studied at the Department of Ukrainian
Philology. While at university, Farion worked as an assistant at the
Department of General Linguistics and was the head of the Center for
Ukrainian Studies at the Department of Folklore Studies.
Farion
was definitely no dissident at the time. She was a member of the
All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, a member of the group’s
Komsomol bureau, headed the club of general linguistics and
Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, and was a member of the department’s
International Friendship Club, where she helped foreign students learn
Russian.
Farion was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union (CPSU) until 1989. Later, after launching a political career with
the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, she stubbornly denied this fact, but was
later forced to admit it after the corresponding evidence was published...
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