Ukrainian human rights activist
As I approached the door of the drab Moscow apartment, it opened suddenly, to reveal a blaze of colour. The room was full of bishops of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, crammed into a small space, and every one of them dressed in full regalia. In the Soviet Union, in 1988, every cleric I could see was "illegal", representing a church which had been suppressed by Stalin 40 years earlier. The only layman in the room was the journalist and campaigner Ivan Hel, who has died aged 73.
Hel's earlier activism in the cause of human rights and of Ukrainian independence had led to 16 years in a prison camp and five years in internal exile. As a young man, he risked all for his beliefs. Now he had become the principal spokesman for religious liberty in Ukraine when there seemed to be hope at last. When I met him on that day in Moscow in 1988, he was bursting with confidence that at last the legalisation of the Ukrainian Catholic church (as it is now known) was in sight. The church had survived underground. There were clandestine ordinations, ensuring the apostolic succession; the circulation of samizdat keeping isolated cells of activists in touch; and even, according to rumours, a secret seminary.
With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and his new policy of change, the Ukrainian church leaders came to Moscow in June 1988 hoping to contact world Christian leaders assembled to celebrate the millennium of the baptism of the eastern Slavs. Hel led the mission, hoping for links with the Vatican delegation. I was leading a British party to the celebrations, and after visiting Hel and his group, it was my privilege to pass on the message that the Ukrainian Catholic church was there in more than symbolic force.
The Ukrainian Catholic Action Group, of which Hel was the leader, soon announced that there were now 10 underground bishops to lead some 4 to 5 million clandestine believers. They achieved their first objective when Gorbachev visited the Vatican on 1 December 1989, bringing news of the legalisation of the church as a kind of offering to Pope John Paul II.
The restored church, large and particularly influential in western Ukraine, played an important part in unifying the region, which in turn became the spearhead of the drive towards Ukrainian independence, achieved just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Hel was born near Lviv at a time when western Ukraine was precariously under Polish rule, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Successively to be occupied by the Nazis and then the Soviets, the region became the cradle of Ukrainian nationalism. In post-second world war years, this influenced Hel to such an extent that he became a leading activist in what seemed a hopeless quest for independence. Prison prevented him from developing his chosen career in journalism, but in 1987, he was at last able to benefit from political changes and became a leading staff member of the magazine Ukrainian Herald.
He played a major role in organising a demonstration in Lviv in 1989 which brought 300,000 people on to the streets to draw attention to a five-month hunger strike by Ukrainian believers.
After independence, Hel became an active politician and in 2009 the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, awarded him the Order of Liberty for his "significant contribution to the revival of the Ukrainian Catholic church".
• Ivan Andriyovych Hel, journalist and human rights campaigner, born 17 July 1937; died 16 March 2011