Searching
for her way
In the early 1960s, authorities allowed the Creative Youth Club "Contemporary" to be created in Kyiv. The goal was to show critics of the USSR that there were informal organizations in the country that were not controlled by the Communist Party. The Club held discussions, art evenings and exhibitions, they even copied forbidden books. In the open exchange of ideas between young artists, the style of Alla Horska was born, and it did not quite fit into the framework of the dominant "socialist realism." Her portfolio includes monumental art, paintings, drawings, and prints. The works were made in the tradition of the Kyiv Academic School of Folk Art, Ukrainian Avant-Garde and Boychukism (a school of Ukrainian art of 1910-1930s associated with the artist Mykhailo Boychuk).
All members of the Club, including Horska, were later called the "Sixtiers." They were not hostile to the Soviet Union, but they wanted change and truth. In 1962, eyewitnesses' accounts led Horska and her friends to Bykivnia, an area near Kyiv where Soviet punitive authorities shot 50,000 to 100,000 "enemies of the state" in 1937-1941, according to various estimates. They found a skull shot twice. Alla cried. "Imagine," she pointed towards the burials, "we are there... We could all be there…"