5 Hryven The Executed Renaissance. Ivan Padalka

Ivan Padalka was a Ukrainian avant-garde painter associated with the Boichukist movement — a school of monumental art founded by Mykhailo Boichuk that attempted to synthesize Byzantine tradition with modernist form. Soviet authorities initially promoted the group, then destroyed it. Padalka was arrested during the Stalinist terror and shot in 1937, one of countless Ukrainian cultural figures liquidated in what historians now call the Executed Renaissance — the systematic annihilation of an entire generation of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, and artists between roughly 1917 and 1941.

The NBU's commemorative series on this subject began appearing in the 2020s as part of a broader official rehabilitation of figures erased from Soviet-era memory.