Vasyl Semenovych Stus (Ukrainian: Василь Семенович Стус; 6 January 1938 – 4 September 1985) was a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and an active member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. For his political convictions, his works were banned by the Soviet regime and he spent 13 years in detention until his death in Perm-36—then a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners, subsequently The Museum of the History of Political Repression—after having declared a hunger strike on 4 September 1985. On 26 November 2005, the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded him the highest national title: Hero of Ukraine. Stus is widely regarded as one of Ukraine's foremost poets.
Vasyl Semenovych Stus was born on 6 January 1938 in the village of Rakhnivka, in Podolia (in the west of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the time) as the fourth and youngest child in a family of peasants. Prior to Vasyl's birth, the Stus family had, along with other peasant families throughout Ukraine, experienced the Soviet famine of 1930–1933. As landed peasants (kurkuls), the Stus family was subjected to local harassment and encouraged to join the kolkhoz in Rakhnivka, which they eventually did. In 1937, however, Stus's father, Semen, was given an offer to move to the Donbas, where there was a shortage of factory workers. After Vasyl's birth, Semen was joined by his wife Yilyna and their children, who moved to Stalino (now Donetsk), with the rigid, patriarchal social structure of rural Ukraine further encouraging the family's decision to move. Vasyl, however, did not initially join his parents and siblings, living in Rakhnivka with his grandparents as a child. Two years after his birth, Vasyl joined the rest of his family in Stalino.
In Stalino, Stus received a Russian-medium education. His knowledge of Ukrainian primarily came from Ukrainian folk music, which he learned from his mother. According to literary historian Georges Nivat, Stus displayed significant aptitude in school, but his educational prospects were hampered by his family background, and he was barred from entering the faculty of journalism at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University in 1954. He instead studied at the Stalino Pedagogical Institute (now Donetsk National University), where he found a freer political climate. After graduating, he served in the Soviet Army for two years. In 1961, Stus was first published in the Literaturna Ukraina literary magazine.
After his military service, Stus worked as an editor for the newspaper Sotsialistychnyi Donbas (Socialist Donbas) between 1960 and 1963. In 1963, he entered a doctoral program at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kyiv. At the same time, he published his selected poetry.
In 1965, Stus married Valentyna Popeliukh; his son, Dmytro was born in 1966.
Dissident activities and first arrest
On 4 September 1965, during the premiere of Sergei Parajanov's film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in Kyiv's Ukrayina cinema, Vasyl Stus took part in a protest against the arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia. As a result, he was expelled from the Institute on September 30 and later lost his job at the State Historical Archive. After that, he worked on a building site, a fireman, and an engineer, continuing his intensive work on poetry. In 1965, he submitted his first book Circulation (Круговерть) to a publisher, but it was rejected due to its discrepancy with Soviet ideology and artistic style. His next book of poetry Winter Trees (Зимові дерева) was also rejected, regardless of positive reviews from the poet Ivan Drach and the critic Eugen Adelgejm. In 1970, the book was published in Belgium.
On 12 January 1972, Stus was arrested for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". His essay "Fenomen
doby (skhodzhennia na Holhofu slavy)" (A Phenomenon of the Times (Ascending the Golgotha of Fame)), dedicated to Pavlo Tychyna, was used as the main evidence at his trial. He served a five-year sentence in a labor camp, and two-years in exile in Magadan Oblast.
Even in prison, Stus continued to write poetry, sending a handwritten book of verse to fellow dissident Nadiya Svitlychna. In 1978 the poet publicly renounced Soviet citizenship, claiming that being a citizen of the USSR equalled to slavery. In August 1979, having finished his sentence, Stus returned to Kyiv and worked in a foundry. He spoke out in defense of members of the Ukrainian Helsinki group (UHG). Stus himself joined the UHG in October 1979.
"In Kyiv I learned that people close to the Helsinki Group were being repressed in the most flagrant manner. This at least had been the case in the trials of Ovsiyenko, Horbal, Lytvyn, and they were soon to deal similarly with Chornovil and Rozumny. I didn’t want that kind of Kyiv. Seeing that the Group had been left rudderless, I joined it because I couldn’t do otherwise … When life is taken away, I had no need of pitiful crumbs. Psychologically I understood that the prison gates had already opened for me and that any day now they would close behind me – and close for a long time. But what was I supposed to do? Ukrainians were not able to leave the country, and anyway I didn’t particularly want to go beyond those borders since who then, here, in Great Ukraine, would become the voice of indignation and protest? This was my fate, and you don’t choose your fate. You accept it, whatever that fate may be. And when you don’t accept it, it takes you by force … However I had no intention of bowing my head down, whatever happened. Behind me was Ukraine, my oppressed people, whose honour I had to defend or perish". ("Z tabornoho zoshyta" ["From the camp notebook"], 1983).
On 14 May 1980, prior to the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, he was arrested and received a 10-year sentence for "anti-Soviet activity". Viktor Medvedchuk, who was later influential in Ukrainian politics, defended Stus during this trial in 1980. In the closing speech from the defence Medvedchuk stated all of Stus' crimes deserved punishment; however, he also told the court that the defendant fulfilled his daily norm at the factory where he worked at the time, despite serious stomach problems. Stus' requests to get another public defender were dismissed by the court.
In a 2018 interview with The Independent dissident Yevhen Sverstiuk recalled: "When Stus met with his appointed lawyer, he immediately felt that Medvedchuk was a man of the Komsomol-aggressive type, that he did not protect him, did not want to understand him and, in fact, was not interested in his case." Medvedchuk claimed he could not have operated differently: "Stus denounced the Soviet government, and didn’t consider it to be legitimate. Everyone decides their own fate. Stus admitted he agitated against the Soviet government. He was found guilty by the laws of the time. When the laws changed, the case was dropped. Unfortunately, he died."
In November 1980 Stus was transferred to a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners at Perm-36 near the village of Kuchino, Perm Oblast, Russian SFSR. According to his cellmate Vasyl Ovsiyenko, the camp functioned de-facto as a maximum security prison, surrounded by an electric fence and a 21-meter-wide safety zone; the inmates were forced to work in the prison building, only being allowed to spend one hour a day in a court measuring 2 to 3 meters, covered with barbed wire. Every prisoner was permitted to keep a maximum of 5 books in own cell, and inmates were regularly searched by prison guards, who forced them to undress upon leaving their cells. Violations of camp rules could be punished by up to 5 years additional sentence. As an "especially dangerous recidivist", Stus was allowed to send one letter per month to his family, but his writings were strictly censored by authorities due to being written in the Ukrainian language. He was legaly permitted to be visited by his family once a year, but in reality only one visit took place, as Stus refused to undergo the humiliating search procedure for a second time. Despite this, Stus used his time in imprisonment to receive French lessons from his cellmate Mart Niklus.