CHUBYNSKY, VOLODYMYR DMYTROVYCH (born December 1, 1930, in the village of Hostomel, Kyiv-Sviatoshyn Raion, Kyiv Oblast – May 20, 1987).
Poet. Songwriter. Educator. Victim of punitive psychiatry.
He was the great-grandson of Pavlo Platonovych Chubynsky, the ethnographer and author of the national anthem. His parents were teachers who were forced to move frequently in the 1930s due to persecution. He completed the 10th grade in Kryvyi Rih. His father was killed at the beginning of the war.
In 1948, Chubynsky enrolled in the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, in the engineering and pedagogical faculty. The administration demanded that the starving students subscribe to a state loan from their meager stipends. Chubynsky defended them. He was nearly expelled from the Komsomol for “aggressive criticism aimed at Komsomol activists.” He had a passion for music and was a member of the KPI’s choral chapel.
After graduating in 1953, he worked as a design engineer at the Kyiv Machine Tool Plant. A year later, he began teaching specialized disciplines at the Kyiv Mechanical Technical College. From 1960, he taught descriptive geometry at the Zhytomyr branch of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. His students loved him—Chubynsky proved to be a talented educator. But in 1965, he was forced to resign. The reason was a conflict with certain instructors in the descriptive geometry department; the raion party committee also disliked that Chubynsky had dared to raise the issue of finally providing promised apartments to the branch’s employees. To avoid involving the entire staff in the conflict, Chubynsky submitted his resignation “of his own accord.” 168 students openly came to his defense. The educator sought justice at the Ministry of Higher Education, leaving his diploma on the minister's desk in protest. But this did not help. After that, he survived on odd jobs.
In 1971, a criminal case was opened against Chubynsky under Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“parasitism”). Chubynsky insisted on a public trial, demanding reinstatement at his previous job, which would have meant a final resolution to the conflict in the branch’s department. Instead, he was sent to work as a general laborer at one of Zhytomyr's enterprises. After Chubynsky’s firm refusal of the humiliating offer, a psychiatric evaluation was conducted, and he was forcibly confined to the Zhytomyr Psychiatric Hospital with a diagnosis of “paranoid personality development.” On February 15, 1972, he was registered at the Zhytomyr psychiatric dispensary; at the P. Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital in Moscow, he was diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia.”
For a long time, Chubynsky had no official employment. He lived an ascetic life, earning money here and there with geological expeditions or with a student construction brigade in the Virgin Lands. Spiritually, these were rich, creative years. He wrote poems and songs and was an idol to the youth, especially the student choristers of the KPI chapel.
In the 1980s, Chubynsky was “remembered”—following a senseless slander about his supposed negative moral influence on the youth. This spurred him to continue his struggle. Beginning in January 1982, Chubynsky produced photographic leaflets and distributed them in Moscow, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, and other cities. He was arrested on May 25, 1982. On December 7, 1982, the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Court found Chubynsky’s poems and leaflets to have slandered the Soviet state and social system (Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR) and insulted leaders of the Communist Party and government. The court ordered Chubynsky’s forced confinement to the Dnipropetrovsk special psychiatric hospital. He was held in Ward 2, Room 11. Six months later, a court deprived him of the apartment where he had lived before his arrest. In the psychiatric hospital, Chubynsky was injected with neuroleptics that suppressed his will. But even there, he managed to secretly write poems on scraps of newspaper with a pencil stub. He was discharged from the special psychiatric hospital in April 1987. He was already a tormented ‘dokhodyaga’ [goner], who seemed to have undergone irreversible changes. Believing that he would never return to his former intellectual and spiritual state, on May 20, 1987, Chubynsky left a suicide note and took his own life.
On November 22, 1990, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR “annulled the ruling of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Court of December 24, 1983, regarding Chubynsky and closed the criminal case due to the absence of public danger in the actions of the accused. Citizen V. D. Chubynsky is rehabilitated in this case.”
Chubynsky became known in 1995 when journalist and political prisoner Viktor Baranov published the article “Dusha, ubitaya nevoley” [“A Soul Killed by Captivity”] in Poland, Serbia, and Russia. In 1996, the literary association ‘Radosyn’ (Kyiv) published the book ‘Vichnyi bii’ [‘The Eternal Battle’] (compiled by engineer and writer Serhiy Tsushko). It contains Chubynsky’s poems and diaries, as well as memoirs by people who knew, respected, and still remember him, including Anatoliy Mokrenko, People’s Artist of the USSR and Ukraine.
Bibliography:
1. Volodymyr Chubynsky. Vichnyi bii. Virshi, rozdumy, shchennykovi zapysy, pisni. Spohady pro V. Chubynskoho [The Eternal Battle. Poems, Reflections, Diary Entries, Songs. Memoirs of V. Chubynsky]. – Radosyn, 1996. – 178 pp.
2. Volodymyr Chubynsky. Poyot gitara. Pisni V. Chubynskoho ta na yoho virshi [The Guitar Sings. Songs by V. Chubynsky and to his poems].
3. Leaflet “Kritikuesh? – V sumasshed. dom!” [“You criticize? – To the madhouse!”] with poems by V. Chubynsky.
4. Volodymyr Ihnatovych. Chubynsky, Volodymyr Dmytrovych. Politekhnik, poet, pedahoh [Chubynsky, Volodymyr Dmytrovych. Polytechnic, Poet, Educator].
