Why Stus?

Dear Editors,

I would like to add my voice to all those supporting the Donetsk students’ initiative.

The Donbas is my native land. I was born in the town of Makiivka and graduated from school there in 1957. At present, I live in Novosibirsk. I have a Ph.D. and work as a professor. I miss Ukraine and feel very concerned about it.

I read the news about Ukraine online every day. When browsing the site intv-inter.net, I couldn’t help adding my commentary on the events in Donetsk. I am attaching a copy with my comment and those of other visitors (my nick is Svyryd).

For me, Stus is a high ideal of struggle for human dignity in general and Ukrainian dignity in particular. I am proud that he was Ukrainian. Every nation should be proud of such a son. It is very sad to realize that the Donetsk authorities and university professors have such a low inner cultural standard. I do hope, however, that most of my fellow countrymen are different.

I listened to a radio program with Larysa Ivshyna and Dmytro Stus, the son of Vasyl Stus. It was said, among other things, that this matter can further divide the people, so it shouldn’t be pressed. I disagree. We can’t give up our moral stand if we want to lead the people somewhere. Most people seek lofty things. Note how people’s attitude changes if the emphasis is in the right place. In the website comments attached, Tatiana from St. Petersburg first wrote about Stus with contempt and then apologized, saying she didn’t know the truth. I would be happy if you add my opinion to the voice of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. My surname is Russian, but I am Ukrainian (my mother’s last name is Svyrydenko), and my parents spoke Ukrainian at home.

Who is Vasyl Stus for us?

In critical moments every people seeking freedom and wishing to remain on this earth fo­re­ver begets sons and daughters who sacrificially defend it and selflessly dedicate their talent, and sometimes their very lives, to this cause.

The last century marked one such critical period in our history, when an exhausted Ukraine was thrown into the Russian imperial melting pot in which its people had to transform into “a new historical community, the Soviet people,” which in reality meant turning into humus, building material for the stronger, more aggressive ethnos. “A few more years and the connection will be broken,” Vasyl Stus told us, ordinary citizens, prophesying our national death with an aching heart.

When our people was also on the verge of death in the 19th century, God sent us Taras Shevchenko and his genius helped this nation return to life. Last century, God sent us another great son to save this nation, Vasyl Stus.

He was born on Christmas Eve in 1939, in Vinnytsia oblast, to an ordinary Ukrainian family. “To make life calmer, I would work the land,” said this great Ukrainian in whose veins ran Ukrainian farmers’ blood. Life, however, refused to calm down. The ethnos was being annihilated through the destruction of its language, so Vasyl Stus rose in defense of his mother tongue. After graduating from Donetsk Pedagogical Institute (today: National University), he took up a postgraduate course at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.

As an ordinary citizen, the road to Soviet “nobility” lay open for him. However, at the time (1965) the Soviet colonial system had started throwing nationally conscious Ukrainian intellectuals behind bars. With his “bare nerve of the epoch” Stus sensed that defending the language was not enough. On Sept. 15, 1965, after the screening of the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, he add­re­s­s­ed the audience: “Will those who oppose the revival of Stalinism please rise from their seats?” The entire audience did.

That was an unheard-of challenge to the Soviet system, yet the times demanded such protest, even if on the part of individuals. Several days later he was expelled from the graduate school and had to earn a living as a boiler room stoker.

Several years later he was arrested and sentenced to five years in a maximum security corrective labor camp for his poems (there are few other countries in the world where people receive prison terms for their poetry). He courageously lived through the years of camps in Mordovia and exile in the Far North.

Returning to Ukraine in the early 1980s, he saw that there were very few people prepared to resist the criminal regime. He joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and was again arrested. This time his Fatherland gave him ten years of maximum security and five years of exile. He was sent to the concentration camps in Perm. There, being transferred from one camp to the next, working in boiler rooms, he wrote brilliant poems. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985.

The Russian colonial system could not allow a conscious Ukrainian, a brilliant Ukrainian poet, to become a Nobel laureate. The award ceremony was scheduled for November 1985, but on Sept. 4, 1985, he was beaten to death in a punishment cell of a Perm concentration camp.

“My people, I shall return to you,» Stus wrote in a far-away land. He returned to Ukraine after his death. We have his literary works, which are filled with pain for us «the living and the unborn.” We, the living, must feel tremendous respect and pride that in time of ordeal the Lord sent us this great martyr, who laid down his life for us.

Furthermore, we, who remain “in our glorious Ukraine,” our native land that is really ours now, must feel greatly indebted to Vasyl Stus. The students and graduates of Donetsk National University were keenly aware of this when they drew up a petition requesting that the university be named after Vasyl Stus.

On the face of it, in view of all the circumstances, this ought to have been a simple matter. Unfortunately, in the 18th year of national independence, “we don’t even have a home of our own, all our doors are open for the prison guards,” to quote from Lesia Ukrainka. The mayor of Moscow freely tours Ukraine and makes anti-Ukrainian statements; in Odesa the Russian chauvinists freely erected a monument to Catherine II, a Russian empress who ordered the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich and instituted serfdom in Ukraine. By treacherously taking advantage of the Ukrainian inherently peaceful character and the current democratic system, all anti-Ukrainian forces are resisting the naming of a university located in a Ukrainian city after Vasyl Stus, a brilliant poet and a national hero and martyr.

Is it true that Ukrainian authorities are concerned only about redistributing factories, seaports, land, and natural resources, and that they will do nothing to stop the insolent strangers who are acting as though they were masters of our national home?