Donetsk: the Memorial Plaque to Vasyl Stus

Until May 2015 there had been a memorial plaque to the Ukrainian poet and human rights activist Vasyl Stus attached to the building of the Faculty of Philology of Donetsk National University, Universitetskaya Street, 24. Stus studied at the Ukrainian department of this faculty from 1954 to 1959.

Vasyl Stus is an iconic figure for the generation of the sixties in Ukraine, for the human rights and social movements. He was born in 1938 in the village of Rakhnovka, Vinnytsia region. A peasant family, impoverished as a result of collectivization, had to move from the Vinnitsa region to Donetsk. As a high school student, while working on the railroad, Stus became acquainted with the literature of the “Executed Renaissance,” which was banned in the Soviet Union (“Розстрiляне Вiдродження” – the common name for a group of Ukrainian writers and scientists of the 1920s and 1930s who were executed during the years of Stalin’s terror). After school, in 1954, he entered the historical and philological faculty of the Stalin Pedagogical Institute (now Donetsk National University).

His graduation coincided with the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw, one of the symbols of which the poet and human rights activist Vasyl Stus was to become in Ukraine.

After having been graduated, Stus taught literature at the Gorlovka school. In the early 1960s he entered postgraduate school at the Kyiv Institute of Literature and immediately became involved in the cultural and social life of the city, which was rapidly reviving after Stalin's “frosts.”

In 1965, together with famous Ukrainian intellectuals Ivan Dzyuba and Vyacheslav Chernovol, he spoke at the Kiev cinema “Ukraine” before the Parajanov’s film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” screening, protesting against the arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Soon after this, Stus was expelled from the postgraduate school.

Vasyl Stus actively opposed the restoration of the cult of personality. There are his wide-known letters to the presidium of the Writers Union of Ukraine, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the KGB, to the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR, in which he argued the harmfulness of the infringement of the democracy and the violations of the human rights.

In January 1972, Vasyl Stus was arrested along with several other Ukrainian dissidents. In September, a trial was held and they were charged under Art. 62 of the Criminal Code “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”.

After having served five years at a remote prison camp in Mordovia, he remained in exile in the Magadan region for two more years and only then returned to Kyiv in September 1979. He worked as a moulder, wrote and translated poetry and continued to defend political prisoners. Upon returning from prison, Stus joined the half-defeated Ukrainian Helsinki Group (an association of Ukrainian human rights activists that arose in Kyiv in 1976 to monitor the Soviet government’s implementation of the Helsinki Agreements, which guaranteed respect for human rights). Considering the unprecedented pressure on dissidents in the republic at that moment, declaring joining an independent public group was, according to the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alekseeva, “an act of a kamikaze”.

Vasyl Stus understood well what he was doing and why. “Seeing that the Group was virtually left without help, I joined it because I simply could not do otherwise. <...> Psychologically, I understood that the prison gates had been already opened for me and that one of these days they would be closed behind me – for a long time. But what could I do?.. This is fate, and you don’t choose your fate. It is to be accepted no matter what it is. And if it isn’t accepted, it forcibly chooses you itself”, he wrote later.

Stus remained free for only eight months.

At the beginning of the 1980, he was arrested for the second time. The second accusation was based on his own poems, articles and membership in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. His appointed lawyer was a young lawyer, Viktor Medvedchuk, later a famous Ukrainian politician (after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, he was detained by Ukrainian special forces and subsequently exchanged for Azovstal defenders). Stus, in violation of procedure, was deprived of the last word and removed from the courtroom; his sentence was read out in his absence: 10 years in prison and 5 years in exile.

This verdict caused a wide international outcry. The German writer and humanist Heinrich Böll demanded his release. From Gorky’s exile, Andrei Sakharov conveyed an appeal in defense of Stus: “The inhumanity of the sentence against the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus is a disgrace to the Soviet repressive system. This is how a person’s life can be broken irrevocably – this is the price to pay for basic decency and non-conformism, for loyalty to one’s convictions, to one’s self”.

Stus served his sentence in the Perm-36 camp. He continued to write and translate poetry. Poems were confiscated, Stus was deprived of meetings with his family. In 1983, the camp administration forbade him to send poems and translations in letters to his relatives.

On August 27, 1985, Vasyl Stus went on a hunger strike, and on the night of September 3-4, he died in a camp punishment cell under unclear circumstances.

There was a year and a half left before the mass release of political prisoners in the USSR began.

After the start of perestroika (‘political reform’), in November 1989, a ceremonial reburial of three Ukrainian political prisoners took place in Kyiv – Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tikhy and Yuriy Lytvyn, who died in the mid-1980s in Perm camps. The funeral procession resulted in an unprecedented mass procession through the center of Kyiv, in which tens of thousands of people from all over Ukraine took part. These events launched a powerful wave of public protests for change, for the openness of archives, for revealing the truth about the crimes of the Soviet secret service.

In 1990, Vasyl Stus was posthumously rehabilitated.

In 2005, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Vasyl Stus the title of Hero of Ukraine.

In 2001, a memorial bas-relief to Stus was installed on the building of the philological department of Donetsk University. Its authors are Donetsk sculptor Viktor Piskun and architect Leonid Brin. On the memorial plaque it was written: “The famous Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus studied in this building from 1954 to 1959”). And next to the figure of the poet his poem is embossed:

How good it is that I’ve no fear of dying
Nor ask myself how ponderous my toil
Nor bow to cunning magistrates, decrying
Presentiments of unfamiliar soil…
(Trans. by Marco Carynnyk)

In April 2015, the People’s Council of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic decided to dismantle the bas-relief. In its place it was planned to erect a monument to the Soviet secret service agent.

On May 5, 2015, the memorial plaque with the bas-relief of Stus was dismantled. In a number of Ukrainian media and also in social networks it was suggested that the plaque would be taken to Vinnitsa, where Donetsk University had moved.

A few days later, a refutation appeared on the website of the Donetsk city administration. The administration reported that “the memorial plaque is in the municipality’s warehouse for safekeeping during restoration work”.

The current location and state of the memorial plaque is unknown.

Since 2016, Donetsk National University, evacuated to Vinnitsa, is named in honor of Vasyl Stus.

Writer Olga Kannunikova

Translation Ekaterina Zakharkiv

Cover Lilya Matveeva