On July 15, Ukraine celebrates the Day of Ukrainian Statehood.
Ukrainian Statehood is the invisible chain that connects the glorious history of Kyivan Rus, the Galician-Volhynian principality, the Ukrainian Cossack state, the Ukrainian People's Republic, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and modern independent Ukraine. Ukrainian Statehood is not only laws and administrative apparatus; it is the millennia-long history of a multi-million people, of dozens of generations with their native language, customs, traditions, and culture. Ukrainian Statehood is hundreds, thousands, millions of people who day by day shaped, fought for, defended, and passed on to their descendants the values that today unite us as the Ukrainian people.
On the occasion of the Day of Ukrainian Statehood, the Donetsk Regional State Administration publishes a series of stories about outstanding figures from Donetsk region – fighters for the idea of Ukrainian statehood and the independence of Ukraine.
Vasyl Stus was born in 1938 in Vinnytsia region in the village of Rakhnivka. But we know the writer as a representative of Donetsk region, as when he was 3 years old, his parents moved to Stalino (now Donetsk) to avoid forced collectivization. There, his father found work at a chemical plant, and little Vasyl went to school.
Stus graduated from school with a silver medal and, having a great desire to become a journalist, went to enroll at Kyiv University. But it didn't work out — at the university, he was told that he was still too young. So Vasyl returned home and became a student at the historical and philological faculty of Donetsk Pedagogical Institute.
After finishing his studies, he worked as a teacher at the Tauzhnyanskaya rural secondary school in the Haisyn district of Kirovohrad region. In 1959-1961, Vasyl Stus served in the army in the Urals. In 1961-1963, he taught Ukrainian language and literature at secondary school No. 23 in Horlivka. Later, he worked as an underground plate worker at the "Oktyabrskaya" mine in Donetsk.
When did Stus become a dissident? In response to this question, researchers of his biography recall several events.
The first of them is September 4, 1965, the premiere screening of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" by Serhiy Paradzhanov at the "Ukraine" cinema in Kyiv, which spontaneously turned into an openly dissident demonstration against the repression of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.
In the hall, there was the film crew, including Paradzhanov, journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, and writer Ivan Dziuba spoke into the microphone: "The reaction of 1937 has come. Now in Ukraine, arrests of the intelligentsia – writers, poets, artists – are taking place."
After this, Stus and Chornovil called out to the audience: "Who is against tyranny – stand up!" – and they themselves were the first to rise.
This day actually marked the beginning of Stus's active involvement in the sixtiers' movement. For this act, he was expelled from graduate school and later from the State Historical Archive, where he was working at that time.
In 1970, Vasyl Stus was the first to publicly call the murder of artist, human rights activist, and dissident Alla Horska a murder. According to the official version of the investigation, she was killed by her father-in-law (who was found a few days later on the railway tracks with his head cut off by a train) due to family discord, but in the family and dissident circles, everyone was convinced that it was a political murder. However, at that time, it was impossible to prove the truth or achieve justice in the authorities. Therefore, the funeral of Horska in Kyiv turned into a protest rally against the ruling communist regime.
Vasyl Stus became an increasingly prominent figure: he wrote open letters to the Communist Party, the Writers' Union, and the Verkhovna Rada, criticizing human rights violations and the arrests of colleagues. Soon, the regime arrested him as well, turning him from a defender of political prisoners into a prisoner: on January 12, 1972, there was a whole wave of "Christmas" imprisonments of Ukrainian dissidents, which went down in history under the name "arrested carol."
The writer was held in a pre-trial detention center for almost 9 months. As a result, he received a 5-year prison sentence and 3 years of exile in the camps of Magadan and Mordovia for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Almost all of Stus's manuscripts were confiscated and destroyed during his exile.
When his term ended, Stus was exiled to the settlement named after Matrosov in Magadan region. There, the poet worked for 2 years in gold mines. He was released in 1979, but his views did not change after that.
Vasyl Stus wrote a statement refusing Soviet citizenship, explaining that the defense of democratic values is incompatible with the Soviet system.
When in the summer of 1979 Stus returned from exile to Kyiv, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group of human rights defenders. He openly spoke out in defense of the repressed members of the group. At that time, Stus worked as a laborer in factories, including as a molder in a foundry, on the conveyor of a shoe association. Initially, he was placed under surveillance, and then he was arrested again.
Stus was sentenced to 10 years in strict regime camps and 5 years of exile. He served his term in the village of Kuchino, Perm region.
The conditions of detention were terrible: constant harassment from the administration, prohibition of visits, illnesses. Stus went on hunger strikes in protest, and he was locked in a solitary cell for a year. The writer did not live to the end of his term: on September 4, 1985, Vasyl Stus died in a punishment cell, where he was thrown for reading a book while leaning on the upper bunks — this was classified as a "violation of regime."
For a long time, neither his family nor friends knew about Vasyl Stus's death. It became possible to bring the body to Ukraine only after four years, as the writer died before the time when his term of imprisonment was supposed to expire — at least, that was the argument of the Soviet authorities. Later, with great effort, Stus was reburied along with dissidents Oleksa Tykhyi and Yuriy Lytvyn at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. Thousands of people took to the streets of Kyiv to bid farewell to the political prisoners. The demonstration took on a political character, becoming a spontaneous but massive act of defiance against the Soviet system — yellow-blue and even red-black flags waved over the protesters.
Nine volumes of Vasyl Stus's poetic works were published after his death. In 1990, Vasyl Semenovych was posthumously rehabilitated, and in 2005 he was awarded the honorary title of Hero of Ukraine.