This week in history

April 23 1919: The Council of People’s Commissars (Radnarkom) of the Ukrainian SSR adopts a decree whereby all private schools and institutions of higher learning are to be financed by the central budget.

1949: The Taras Shevchenko State Literary Memorial Museum opens in Kyiv.

April 25 1908: In Lviv Myroslav Sichynsky, a student, assassinates the Austrian Governor General Andrzej Potocki as a sign of protest against his anti-Ukrainian policies.

1994: President Leonid Kuchma signs an edict instituting the National Television and Radio Council.

April 26: Chornobyl Remembrance Day

1986: Power Unit 4 explodes at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station, contaminating some 150,000 m? of the territory of the Soviet Union with a population of 6,945,000. This is the worst man-made disaster of the 20th century.

April 27 1906: The first issue of the Russian-language Ukrainian political journal Ukrainskii vestnik [The Ukrainian Herald] comes off the presses in St. Petersburg.

1995: The Verkhovna Rada adopts Ukraine’s first government decoration, the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

April 28 1887: A convention of sugar manufacturers in southern Russia establishes Ukraine’s first monopoly, a sugar syndicate.

1958: A schedule of visa-free cultural exchanges between the Ukrainian oblasts of Lviv, Drohobych, Volyn, and the Polish provinces of Lublin and Rzeszow is signed in Warsaw, a first for Soviet Ukraine’s border cooperation.

April 29 1990: A convention of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group is called to order in Kyiv. It resolves to dissolve its organizatons and institute the Ukrainian Republican Party on the group’s basis.

1992: The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passes a bill on the status of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea.

April 30 1615: A print shop is founded on the grounds of the Kyivan Cave Monastery.

1956: The Crimean State Fine Arts Museum (Vorontsov Palace) is instituted in Alupka.