5 Hryven The Executed Renaissance. Maik Yohansen

Maik Yohansen — poet, linguist, and central figure of the 1920s Ukrainian literary movement known as the Rozstriliane Vidrodzhennia, or "Executed Renaissance" — was shot by Soviet secret police in 1937 during Stalin's Great Terror. The broader group he belonged to represented the most concentrated literary flowering in Ukrainian cultural history, and the most concentrated Soviet destruction of it: hundreds of writers, artists, and intellectuals liquidated within a decade.

This coin is part of an ongoing NBU series commemorating individual victims of that purge. Yohansen's inclusion is notable given that his experimental prose and linguistic theory remained effectively banned in Soviet Ukraine for decades after his execution.