KYIV – Controversy is swirling over a biopic film about the last days of Ukrainian poet and human rights activist Vasyl Stus, who died in 1985 at the age of 47 in a forced labor camp, where he was imprisoned for defying Soviet authorities and advocating Ukraine’s self-determination.
Civic and governmental pressure followed after August 10, when the wider public discovered that the filmmakers of the movie, “Stus,” had excluded courtroom scenes with the dissident’s Soviet-appointed public defender, Viktor Medvedchuk, that were initially part of the screenplay.
Ukrainian actor Genadii Popenko, who unsuccessfully tried to be cast for the role of the poet, learned that the scenes had been removed after talking to the movie’s actors and shared the information on his Facebook timeline the same day. (Actor Dmytro Yaroshenko was given the lead role.)
The social-media post garnered more than 13,000 shares in less than three days.
The Ukrainian Weekly file photo
Vasyl Stus (January 1, 1938-September 4, 1985).
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman subsequently ordered the Ministry of Culture and state-run movie company Derzhkino to ensure that “the history of my fellow countryman – a true patriot and fighter for Ukraine’s freedom, Vasyl Stus, is conveyed honestly, truthfully and without distortion.”
The next day, “Stus” filmmakers announced that they would shoot the courtoom scenes that were omitted, according to their official Facebook page.
Concurrently, through his lawyer, Mr. Medvedchuk – a political heavyweight who boasts Russian President Vladimir Putin as the godfather to his daughter, and who headed Ukrainian ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s staff in 2002-2005 – threatened to sue the film’s makers should the scenes misrepresent him. His reaction came in a statement published on August 12 on the civic group Ukrainian Choice’s website.
Mr. Medvedchuk, a current arbiter in the failed Minsk peace process that seeks to end the Donbas war that Russia started, is under U.S. sanctions for “threatening the peace, security, stability, sovereignty or territorial integrity” of his country.
Activists, including members of the legal community, assert that Mr. Medvedchuk failed to properly defend Stus during his second show trial in 1980. The political prisoner died five years later in the Soviet gulag.
Oleg Babanin, the spokesman for Mr. Medvedchuk’s Ukrainian Choice group, which also played a prominent role in advocating for the Kremlin’s illegal takeover of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the dissident poet’s son, Dmytro Stus, reneged on his February promise to the film’s co-producer, Artem Denisov, and director, Roman Brovko, to not interfere with the movie about his father after the revelation that the scene depicting Mr. Medvedchuk would be included.
As the copyright owner of his father’s written works, Dmytro Stus said in an August 15 telephone interview with The Ukrainian Weekly that now he won’t give permission to cite his father’s poetry in the movie.
“It’s because of moral and ethical reasons,” he said without offering an explanation.
In 2013, Dmytro Stus was a jury member for a poetry contest that Mr. Medvedchuk’s Ukrainian Choice had organized, according to a YouTube video published on March 27, 2013. In the clip, Mr. Stus is seen criticizing a poetess who critiqued Mr. Medvedchuk while a banner reading “Ukrainian Choice” hangs on the stage.
“It’s a movie about Vasyl Stus, not about Viktor Medvedchuk,” the dissident’s son commented.
Producer Mr. Denisov whose 50-percent partner is the Ukrainian State Film Agency (Derzhkino), said he is “feeling pressure from all sides.”
In a telephone interview with The Ukrainian Weekly on August 15, Mr. Denisov said the scenes with Mr. Medvedchuk and the courtroom were part of the original screenplay.
Then he and the director, Mr. Brovko, decided that the movie would be “highly politicized if the scenes were kept and that it would be difficult to distribute in the movie theaters,” among the reasons for their decision to omit the courtroom segment of the story.
Now, “we are feeling public and government pressure, as well as litigation threats from Medvedchuk and [copyright refusal from] Stus’s son,” the producer said. “As a producer, the main goal is to get this film released and into the movie theaters.”
“Stus,” whose budget is $1.375 million, is scheduled to premiere on February 28, 2019.
Co-screenwriter Artemiy Kirsanov told The Ukrainian Weekly that the courtroom scenes with Mr. Medvedchuk where the poet was being tried “for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” wouldn’t have been initially included if they weren’t “important and needed,” adding, “although they’re not key.”
Together with co-screenwriter Serhiy Dziuba, they crafted a plot where Vasyl Stus is in the gulag during his second incarceration and living out his final days before dying of heart failure while examining his life through biographical scene flashbacks.
“We built a screenplay of conflict. Stus fought the Soviet Union, the system… one flashback was the courtroom where his lawyer Medvedchuk was present – and this scene portrayed the essence of what the USSR was,” Mr. Kirsanov said.
Stus, who was a member of the human rights monitoring organization the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, was a nominee for the Nobel Prize for literature at the time of his death.
stusfilm.com.ua
A line at a fruit stand along Kyiv’s main thoroughfare, the Khreshchatyk, during the Soviet era, as seen in the upcoming film about the last days of Ukrainian poet and Soviet dissident Vasyl Stus’s life.
His Soviet-appointed public defender, Mr. Medvedchuk, has always asserted in interviews and even in video blogs that he properly represented the poet’s rights. He has also denounced the Soviet Union and said the legal system was rigged to such an extent that no lawyer could succeed in winning his client’s acquittal.
“Viktor Medvedchuk always spoke and stands for the preservation of historical truth, and objective coverage of historical facts,” his lawyer Ihor Kyrylenko said in the August 12 statement released by Ukrainian Choice. “Therefore, in the event of the release of the film ‘Stus’… with inaccurate information about Viktor Medvedchuk, I reserve the right for appropriate legal action, including those aimed at prohibiting through litigation the screening of such a film.”
During Stus’s second and last trial, Mr. Medvedchuk didn’t object or file any motions in his client’s defense, according to a legal analysis based on the original court documents that was conducted by Kyiv lawyers Roman Tytykalo and Illya Kostin.
The dissident, who spent his formative years in Donetsk Oblast, had actually requested that Mr. Medvedchuk, as well as any other “Soviet attorney,” cease representing him, according to court documents.
Instead, Stus asked for an “international lawyer from an international organization like or from [the human rights group] Amnesty International.”
In response, Mr. Medvedchuk deferred to the judge’s ruling; Stus’s request was denied.
Stus also said that the KGB had tortured him before the trial – he was kept in a pre-trial detention center operated by the Soviet police.
It is noteworthy also that the Stus trial was closed. Not even his spouse was allowed to attend the proceedings during which the human and national rights advocate said he didn’t acknowledge the court’s authority or its ability to give him a fair trial.
One witness, Svitlana Kyrychenko, received a three-month forced labor sentence in a Soviet prison camp for refusing to give testimony.
“I won’t respond to any questions in a court that Stus doesn’t recognize as legitimate,” she said. “I will give testimony in a court where Vasyl Stus will be the accuser and not sit in the dock.”
Again, Mr. Medvedchuk deferred to the judge’s ruling.
Mr. Medvedchuk agreed with the prosecutor that Stus was guilty of the charges against him, but in his final argument asked that the maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment and five years’ exile be reduced due partially to the defendant’s health and employment record.
Stus wasn’t allowed to address the court with a concluding statement as foreseen by law. He received the maximum for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”
He wrote afterwards: “I do not acknowledge or confess guilt. Until my death, I will stand for the defense of truth from lies, honest people from murderers, and Jesus Christ from the devil.”
Vasyl Stus died on September 4, 1985, after he went on a hunger strike in the notorious Perm Camp 36.