10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE UKRAINIAN HELSINKI GROUP

"I have no fear of dying" - the late Vasyl Stus

by Wolodymyr T. Zyla

My people. It is to you I am returning.

In death I somehow find my fate.

Vasyl Stus wrote these prophetic words in his short poem "How Good It Is,"_1_ a poem that escaped the vigilant eye of the KGB and reached the West before his death. He was then serving the fifth year of a 10-year sentence in a labor-camp, which was to be followed by five years' internal exile, on charges of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." He died on September 4, 1985, at the age of 47.

A State Department communiqué on September 6 said that the department "deeply regrets the death of Vasyl Stus, which appears to have occurred as a direct result of the harsh treatment he received during his imprisonment."

A statement issued on September 11 by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Helsinki Commission, called Stus "a courageous and indefatigable fighter for the rights of all individuals and a victim of the Soviet Union's pernicious and brutal system for the suppression of human rights." It went on to say that "the KGB is responsible for his death." Of course, all of the Soviet Union, the KGB included, does precisely what it is told to do by its leadership, and Mikhail Gorbachev is the maximum leader. The tragedy of Stus's death is a human one. A relatively young man, he was sentenced to a slow death in prisons and labor camps by a system which further refused him the medical attention he so desperately needed, by a system unspeakably callous in its treatment of anyone it deems undesirable, in its treatment, indeed, of an entire citizenry. Stus's is a human tragedy also because he left behind a family, including a newborn grandson whom he would never see.

In the broadest terms, Stus's death was a tragedy for humankind because of the blow it dealt to the human-rights movement, a movement which is indistinguishable in Ukraine from that right which Americans in particular hold inalienable to all humanity, the right to national self-determination. He is, furthermore, the fourth Ukrainian rights activist to die in Soviet custody in the last 28 months. His death followed that of his fellow Helsinki Group member Oleksiy Tykhy, by Yuriy Lytvyn ,who committed suicide while serving his fourth term in prison, and by Valeriy Marchenko, whose kidneys failed him soon after he was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp.

There is an insidious logic to these deaths. Put simply, it is that the Soviet Union is enjoying admirable success in destroying its most powerful critics, especially Ukrainians, who, though they constitute 20 percent of the Soviet population, account for 40 percent of all political prisoners.

Humanity will feel Stus's death in yet another way, for he was a great poet. His poetry was first published in 1959, when he was 21 years old; even these first poems demonstrate that he sought above all things to express the truth. His first major work appeared in the Kievan journal Dnipro in 1963.

In 1965, while searching for truth, he inevitably became involved with the Ukrainian dissident movement. As a result he was barred from graduate study at the university, blacklisted as a writer, and denied employment. In 1972 he was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labor camp plus three years of internal exile.

In August 1979, upon the completion of his sentence, he returned to Kiev, but his freedom was of short duration. In Kiev he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and, in May 1980, was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp and five years' exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." His treatment in the camps on both occasions was barbaric.

Stus's plight quickly attracted the attention of Amnesty International. The English section of International PEN made him an honorary member. Several American universities invited him to lecture, in vain of course. The Writer and Human Rights Congress in Toronto in 1981 reserved for him one of seven honorary chairs on the platform.

Stus's poetry consists of three collections - "Winter Trees," "A Candle in a Mirror," and "Palimpsests" (forthcoming), all published - inevitably - in the West. In addition to a "Notebook" which has survived, he wrote approximately 600 poems and translations which the ever thorough KGB has confiscated and destroyed.

As a critic and frequent reviewer of modern Ukrainian literature as well as comparative literature for American, Canadian, German and Ukrainian journals, I am honored to testify that Vasyl Stus's poetry touches the depths of the human soul. It thereby elevates him to the ranks of the most talented writers, not merely in Ukrainian literature, but in world literature.

His innovative elements and his profound idealism are the moving forces in his creativity. His poetry is the authentic voice of man's legitimate pride in his own human integrity. Despite the horrendous obstacles placed in the poet's way it says that man's spirit can rise above physical and political enslavement. It expresses an unquenchable sense of individual honor and glory. And it offers a vision of true freedom, one enhanced by the resonance brought forth through the poet's mastery of sound as well as syntax.

Stus's poetry gains much of its force because he makes effective use of sound in poetry. He bends sound to his will and creates a unique symmetry of form and meaning, together with form as meaning. This refinement of form, this distillation of it into an essence at once visionary and highly aural, definitely points the way to a frontier not opened before.

Because the voice of truth in Stus's poetry could not help but make him one of the most outspoken critics of the Soviet regime, he was treated with particular severity in the labor camps. When an ulcer led to the removal of most of his stomach, he was denied medical care. He described this and other experiences in his "Notebook" which reached the West in 1983. Let me now cite some excerpts.

"And so, on March 5 (1977) I arrived at Kolyma in Northeastern Siberia. Behind me were 53 days, almost two full months, of transit. I remember the cell at the prison in Cheliabinsk and the swarms of roaches on the walls; as I looked at them I felt my whole body itching. Then came the Novosibirsk transit prison and the terrible jail at Irkutsk. The drunken guards at Irkutsk seemed to have been snatched from a cohort of despotic gendarmes from the time of Nicholas I or Alexander II."

From Magadan (on the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk) Stus was driven to Ust-Omchug, some 248 miles yet farther north in the vast barren and frozen tundra and set to work in a mine. He writes:

"The dust in the mine was terrible because there was no ventilation: blind vertical drifts were being drilled. The hammer weighed about 110 pounds, the bar 190. When 'windows' were being drilled, we had to use shovels. The respirator (a gauze mask) would become wet and covered with a layer of dust within half an hour. Then you would take it off and work without protection.

"You cannot see the shovel you are working with because of the dust. When you finish work, there isn't a dry thread left on you, and you step out into the icy air of the unheated cage. Pneumonia, myositis and radiculitis are the scourge of every miner. And then there are the vibrations of the silica dust.

"The accident rate at the mine is quite high. Ceilings cave in, crushing miners; drillers fall down slopes or under trucks; almost every second man has had his arms, legs or ribs smashed.

"I would come back to my cell and collapse with exhaustion. There was only work and sleep - nothing in between. I endured this for three months and then had to declare that with my health I was not up to work like this. The militia was angry, and the first persecutions began.

"Several drunkards were put in my cell. (They would be witnesses at my next trial.) They drank in my cell, and one of them even urinated into my teapot. When I protested, they said, 'Keep quiet, or you'll find yourself where you were.' I demanded that they be moved - in vain.

Now my situation became even more dramatic. But I was prepared not to bow my head no matter what happened. Behind me stood Ukraine and my oppressed people, whose honor I had to defend to the death.

"All this time I received no medical treatment. On coming back from work, with no sensation in my feet, I would heat water in a basin with an electrical heater and soak my feet in a salt bath. My left foot was permanently crippled: the surgeon had simply not noticed. I had to put on the paraffin applications by myself.

"Later I learned that the militia had decided to sign me up for compulsory alcoholism treatment and needed some small pretext. That was when they offered 1,500 rubles for getting me drunk. But the trick didn't work. I would often find the door broken in when I came back from work and had to check my belongings in my cell to make sure that no rifle, knife or pornography had been planted.

"So I submitted a declaration to the procurator's office: if weapons, explosives or gold dust were found among my belongings, that would be the result of a provocation. Driven to the very limit, in late 1978, I sent a declaration to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in which I again renounced my Soviet citizenship. I wrote that the ban on writing, the constant denigration of my human and national dignity, the conditions in which I was made to feel a property of the KGB, and in which my Ukrainian patriotism was regarded as a crime against the state, the national and cultural pogrom in the Ukraine - all these compelled me to declare that holding Soviet citizenship was quite impossible for me. To be a Soviet citizen means to be a slave. I am not fit for such a role. The more I am tortured and abused the greater is my resistance to my slavery and to the system of abuse of a man and his elementary rights."_2_

Charged again with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," Stus were sentenced in 1980 to 10 years' imprisonment and five years' exile. This time he was sent to a concentration camp in the Perm region on the Kama River at the west base of the Ural Mountains. He writes the following about his new imprisonment:

"The present prison conditions are worse than people remember from Mordovia [in the middle Volga Basin], the black zones, or Sosnovka. The police regimen has reached its peak. A law of complete lawlessness is what regulates our so-called relations. Searches are conducted in the most arbitrary fashion: they seize anything they like without any notice or official record. We have lost every right to be ourselves, not to mention the right to have books, notebooks and writings.

"There is a saying that when God wishes, to punish someone, he deprives him of reason. We [Ukrainians] cannot go on in this way much longer. Pressure such as this is possible only before death."

And here Stus became prophetic, for he wrote: "I do not know when death will come for the others, but I personally feel it approaching."

At this point he speaks about his own contributions to the cause of fighting Soviet brutality and about the annihilation of the Ukrainian past and its cultural and national values. He says:

"Writing is absolutely out of the question: every poem I write is confiscated. I'm forced to study languages. If I master French and English during this interregnum, there will be at least that small benefit. Actually, there's absolutely nothing to read. The gifted writers are either silent or are doing God knows what. The times require of every artist bovine patience and resistance. When the authorities began their tortures, the first to be broken were the talented ones: There are gifted writers, but to what can they apply their gifts? And so they decorate public toilets - because that is the only form permitted to Ukrainian artists.

"Isn't the so-called Ukrainian intelligentsia tired of trampling the old resting place of professing a philosophy of national betrayal? Doesn't it have enough of what we already have? When you have been deprived of your history, your culture, your entire spirit ..., how can such servility lead to anything good? Only the insane can believe that the official form of national life can lead to anything. Everything created in the Ukraine in the last 60 years has been infected by bacilli. How can the national tree grow when half its crown has been cut down? What is Ukrainian history when there are no historians, no Kozak chronicles, no history of Kievan Rus'? How can there be a literature when more than half its writers are missing? [The Soviet regime has destroyed at least some 150 Ukrainian writers and poets in the last 60 years.] And so we have fiction by collective-farm teenagers, all of them sweet and mellifluous, all of them writing in the language of a village granny. In other words, a typically colonial literature of a nation that numbers close to 50 million people.

"Importance in the face of injustice is insulting. How can you remain silent?"_3_ concluded Stus, thus assuring finally his own destruction by a Soviet regime which continues daily to destroy the sons and daughters of the Ukrainian nation.

Stus's profound belief in human rights and dignity and his binding patriotism are superbly expressed in his short poem "Weep, sky, weep...":

Who knows what might have been, could Stus have written freely. But it was his misfortune to live in a society where a poet cannot survive if he chooses to speak the truth instead of what the Kremlin demands. The death of this courageous Ukrainian poet and patriot must be credited to the Soviet leadership's campaign aimed at wiping out the intellectuals and human-rights activists of the young generation. Free people everywhere must be made to understand that this campaign parallels that of the 1930s, when literally thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals were annihilated.

Stus's suffering and death communicate more to the world community about Gorbachev than any of his stage-managed "celebrity" appearances. Human rights and national rights are the key issues of our times and they must be carefully observed and protected. Therefore, what is important is not style, but substance. Thus far we have every reason to believe - and no reason not to believe - that Mikhail Gorbachev is cast from the same mold as his predecessors. For all his smiles, he is a ruthless leader ready to destroy everyone and everything that offer an obstruction to the Soviet aim of world domination.

1. Trans. Marco Carynnyk, The Ukrainian Weekly, September 15, 1985, p. 7. [Back to Text]

2. Excerpts from Vasyl Stus's "Notebook," trans. Marco Carynnyk and George Luckyj, The Ukrainian Weekly, September 15, 1985, pp. 7 and 12. The original text of Vasyl Stus's "Notebook" appeared in Suchasnist in November 1983. [Back to Text]

3. Excerpts from Vasyl Stus's "Notebook," trans. Marco Carynnyk and George Luckyj, The Ukrainian Weekly, September 22, 1985, pp. 7 and 10. [Back to Text]

4. Trans. Marco Carynnyk, ibid., p. 10. [Back to Text]

Dr. Wolodymyr Zyla is a professor emeritus of languages at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. The above is adopted from a lecture delivered in March before the 820th Air Force ROTC Cadet Group.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 9, 1986, No. 45, Vol. LIV

| Home Page |