burned beyond recognition. There was nothing left of his apartment, a
dormitory-type dwelling in a building that housed quite a number of
State television and Radio workers.
News of Vadim's death spread quickly among fellow journalists - many of
whom had attended Kiev State with Vadim, many of whom worked with him on
numerous projects.
He was an elected democratic deputy from Kremenchuk, Poltava Oblast. He
had come from the neighboring town in Kirovohrad oblast, just across the
Dnipro River, arriving in the capital city of Kiev in the early 1980s to
obtain a college education.
And from then on, he gained popularity as the founder and host of
"Hart," one of the first serious investigative shows on Ukrainian
television, reporting on everything from Chornobyl to Shcherbytsky.
After he was elected a deputy to the Ukrainian Parliament in March 1990,
he was appointed vice chairman of the standing parliamentary Committee
on Glasnost and the Mass Media, a job he took very seriously, often
going to Moscow to discuss problems of disinformation in Ukraine, as
presented by central television.
But Vadim never forgot his first vocation - journalism - and he would
often join his colleagues, including a few of us foreign correspondents,
on the press balcony of Parliament during the sessions to give us some
inside news or highlights of his commission's work.
He was our friend, and with his death, our circle has been broken. Many
of us - Ukrainian journalists and foreign correspondents, as well as a
few of his close friends outside this journalistic fraternity - spent
last week trying to come to terms with the tragedy that has struck us.
We cannot believe that his death was just pure accident; although it is
reported that 8,000 people a year in the former Soviet Union die due to
their television sets exploding, we all believe that Vadim would have
survived this kind of accident.
We have gone through the story over and over. Most of us saw him in
Parliament on Wednesday afternoon; he was excited and invigorated by new
opportunities: he was applying for a National Foundation internship for
the spring in Washington, D.C., he was going to travel on business with
Ukraine's deputy prime minister. His dancing blue eyes were smitten
with the possibilities of new TV shows and programs in an independent
Ukraine.
None of us saw Vadim in Parliament on Thursday or Friday, February
13-14; he missed a few meetings he had scheduled on Friday.
Currently, there are many rumors flying around Kiev surrounding Vadim's
death, based on political, business and personal motivations.
Parliamentary committees have promised to work on an investigation,
although no special committee has been formed to investigate what many
democratic deputies, among them Les Taniuk and Stepan Khmara, have
labelled as murder. Some speculate that Vadim's TV work in Chornobyl
may have triggered an early death...
On Friday, February 14, Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) in
Moscow ran an interview with Vadim on journalists' responsibilities and
cooperation between Moscow and Kiev.