This week in history

April 22 1918: The All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsVK) adopts the text of the first and only military oath.

1922: The Ukrainian Husbandry Academy is founded in Podebrady, Czechoslovakia.

April 23 1848: The Ukrainian nobility in Lviv starts publishing its own newspaper, Ruskyi sobor.

1991: The Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR passes a law on freedom of conscience and religious organizations.

April 24 1919: The Council of People’s Commissars (Radnarkom) of the Ukrainian SSR adopts a decree transferring all private institutions of higher education and schools to the state.

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

April 25 1908: The Lviv student Myroslav Sichynsky assassinates the viceroy of Galicia, Andrzej Potocki, in protest against his anti-Ukrainian policies.

1994: President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine signs an edict founding the National Council on Television and Radio.

April 26 Chornobyl Disaster Day

1986: As a result of an accident at reactor no. 4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station, radioactive agents contaminate 150,000 km? of the former USSR. This accident, which affects 6,945,000 people, is the worst catastrophe caused by human error in the 20th century.

April 27 1906: Ukraine’s first Russian-language political journal Ukrainskii vestnik starts publishing in St. Petersburg.

1995: The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine approves Ukraine’s first national decoration: the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

April 28 1887: A convention of sugar manufacturers from Southern Russia founds Ukraine’s first monopolistic association, a sugar syndicate.

1958: For the first time in the Soviet Union’s practice of border cooperation, a visa-free cultural exchange plan is signed in Warsaw between Lviv, Drohobych, and Volyn oblasts and the Polish voivodeships of Lublin and Rzeszow.