Dissident Spotlight: Georgiy Gongadze
Georgiy Gongadze was murdered in 2000 for honestly reporting about Ukraine's corrupt post-Soviet dictator. His wife continues working as a journalist today.

On September 16, 2000, Georgiy Gongadze was pushed into a taxi, then beaten by several police officers before one of them killed him by strangling him with a belt.
Gongadze’s body wasn’t found until about two months later. It was in a shallow grave in eastern Ukraine, about 70 kilometers outside of the nation’s capital.
The year before, Gongadze confronted Ukraine’s president, Leonid Kuchma, on TV during the presidential campaign:
"The Minister of Internal Affairs is not doing his job fighting corruption, and you are rewarding him. If he’s incompetent, he shouldn’t be in his position. Either you don't know what he’s doing and you need to find out and possibly replace him, or you do know and you’re just covering for him!"
After being unable to find work for being incorruptible, Gongadze founded a new online magazine, Ukrainska Pravda. He launched it in April 2000 and faced harassment throughout his remaining tenure.
Once Gongadze was murdered a handful of police officers were eventually arrested, and Kuchma was never investigated for his role in instigating or allowing Gongadze’s murder. A 2021 documentary revealed a tape in which Kuchma, his chief of staff, and interior minister discuss ways to silence Gongadze for “going too far.”
None of the four people imprisoned for Gongadze’s murder were in that recording.
Remaining Skeptical of the Powerful
Gongadze’s wife, Myroslava Gongadze, was and is an accomplished journalist. Before marrying Gongadze, Myroslava held high positions in various media companies that challenged the new regime. Today, she’s a journalist and human rights worker who fights for freedom of the press and protection for journalists in Ukraine.
In his 2022 book The Fight is Here about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the author visited Myroslava Gongadze to see how the press was returning to its job of criticizing the administration after the initial invasion was repelled. She was irritated that President Zelensky hadn’t sat for an interview with her or other journalists since the war began and normalcy was returning to Keiv. Myroslava told the author:
“Don’t be too generous to him…You don’t know what he will become.”
Few people are better positioned to criticize the powerful than Myroslava Gongadze. She hasn’t lost her skepticism of people who rise to power, no matter how well they’ve done in power or how little they seem to have been corrupted by power.
It’s a reminder of how much power can reveal a person’s existing character and change a person as power seeps into his approach to the world.