Thirty years ago, on September 14, 1985, George Sajewych’s commentary on the death of poet and human rights activist Vasyl Stus that occurred on September 4, 1985, appeared in The Washington Post. Some of the commentary was not published by The Post, and The Ukrainian Weekly ran the full commentary including the text that was removed.
“On September 4, Vasyl Stus, Ukrainian poet and member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG), died at age 47 in Soviet special-regime labor camp No. 36-1 in the Urals. Once one of Ukraine’s most promising young poets, he knowingly rejected a life of ease and privilege when in 1965 he publicly denounced the Soviet regime’s crackdown against Ukrainian cultural activists,” Mr. Sajewych wrote.
Stus was arrested in 1972 (he served nine months in pre-trial detention before being sentenced to five years in a labor camp followed by three years of internal exile) and again in 1980, for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” He was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, because his poetry had been published in the West; and he was also sentenced to 10 years and five years of internal exile for his membership in the UHG.
“Seriously ill and cynically denied medical care (the KGB’s convenient and quiet way of getting rid of troublesome political prisoners),” Mr. Sajewych wrote, “Stus foresaw his coming death in his ‘Gulag Notebook,’ recently smuggled abroad.”
Stus wrote: “We cannot go on much longer this way. Such pressure can only lead to death. I do not know when death will come for others, but I myself feel it approaching. I think I have done everything I could during my life.”
“A poet died, an uncompromising and principal fighter for justice who was a beacon of courage for the entire Ukrainian movement for human and national rights, a man as worthy of recognition as Sakharov, Shcharansky and Bishop Tutu,” Mr. Sajewych noted. “The Washington Post had not a word about his death. Why such as contrast between The Post’s voluminous coverage of events in South Africa and its silence on the tragic situation in Ukraine? How is truth served by such selective journalism?”
Mr. Sajewych reminded The Post of its scant coverage of the death of four other Ukrainian activists during the previous 12 months, including Oleksiy Tykhy, a founding member of the UHG, with a mere two sentences; Ukrainian poet and UHG member Yuriy Lytvyn, memorialized with four sentences; and human rights activist Valeriy Marchenko, whose death merited just one sentence.
Mr. Sajewych concluded: “For years The Post has ignored the movements for human, national and religious rights in Ukraine, the largest and most assertive of the USSR’s non-Russian republics. Nothing has been written about the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, the largest and most severely repressed of the human-rights monitoring communities in the USSR that were spawned by the 1975 Helsinki Accords. And there has been nothing about Russification, a policy every bit as genocidal and loathsome as South Africa’s apartheid.”
Source: “A poet dies in Ukraine,” by George Sajewych, The Ukrainian Weekly, September 29, 1985.