War veteran. Teacher at the Uman College of Agricultural Mechanization. Fought against Russification. Political prisoner. Public figure.
In 1932–33, almost the entire Bilous family died of starvation. His father, Kuzma Yakymovych Bilous, managed to escape from Ukraine with Vasyl and his grandmother, Teklia: for three days they hid from Red Army soldiers at the Tsvitkove station, snuck onto a train, and traveled under the benches to Leningrad. His father placed the boy in an orphanage. They returned to Strazhhorod in 1934. Vasyl was raised by his grandmother Teklia, who had once sung in Mykola Leontovych’s choir, and his stepmother, Frosyna Onyskivna Mandybura.
In 1937, NKVD officers shot Vasyl’s third-grade teacher, Hanna Momot. In 1941, he came under German occupation. On March 14, 1944, a field military commissariat mobilized the 17-year-old youth into the active army. He fought against the German occupiers and against Japan. He has awards. Until November 1951, he served in the Marine Corps of the Pacific Fleet.
From 1951, he was a cadet at the mechanization school in Olhopil, an assistant to a tractor brigade leader, and from 1953, a dispatcher at the Teplyk Machine and Tractor Station in Vinnytsia oblast. In 1957, he graduated from the Teplyk evening school, and in 1958, he entered the Faculty of Agricultural Mechanization at the Ukrainian Agricultural Academy, from which he graduated in 1963 with a degree in mechanical engineering.
He worked as an engineer, acting deputy manager, and deputy manager of the Uman district association “Silhosptekhnika.” From 1968 to 1971, he was a teacher of special disciplines (operation of the machine and tractor fleet and repair) at the Uman College of Agricultural Mechanization. From 1971, he was a controller at the district association “Silhosptekhnika.”
At that time, a group of patriotically-minded teachers had formed in Uman, who resisted the Russification of the educational process, opposed Russian-speaking teachers, and awakened the national consciousness of the students. Bilous repeatedly demanded at meetings that the Russian-speaking teachers teach their subjects in Ukrainian.
In 1971, he received a typewritten copy of Ivan DZIUBA’s work “Internationalism or Russification?” from a college teacher, Kuzma MATVIIUK, and gave it to acquaintances to read. He gave money to his colleague K. MATVIIUK and a student of the Uman Agricultural Institute, Bohdan CHORNOMAZ, to make photocopies of this work and other samvydav. When there was a threat of a search in the summer of 1972, Bilous securely hid one copy of DZIUBA’s work (after independence, he transferred parts of it to the Uman and Cherkasy regional history museums).
Bilous, along with K. MATVIIUK, visited Nadiia SUROVTSOVA—a former official of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and a long-term political prisoner.
When Ivan DZIUBA was expelled from the Writers’ Union of Ukraine at a board meeting on March 2, 1972, which was effectively consent for his arrest, Bilous sent a telegram to the Union’s board on March 3: “Glory to Ivan Dziuba! Shame on the Board of the Union! Reader Vasyl Bilous.” When DZIUBA was arrested on April 18, Bilous sent a letter to the newspaper *Literaturna Ukraina* on April 21, calling the Union’s board anti-patriots and cosmopolitans, and asserting that a policy of forced Russification was being carried out in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian language and culture were in decline.
The then-first secretary of the Writers’ Union, Vasyl Kozachenko, returned the letter to the Uman district committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Immediately, at a graduation party, a provocation was staged against the author to accuse him of hooliganism. But no one in his circle gave the required testimony. He was detained for three days, and by a resolution of the Uman District Committee of the CPU, he was given a severe reprimand with a note in his record card “for unworthy behavior, drunkenness, hooliganism in the family, and insulting the staff of the sobering-up station.” Harassment began. Bilous was forced to leave the college and return to “Raysilhosptekhnika.”
On June 20, a conversation was held with Bilous at the district party committee, where he was persuaded that he had adopted the positions of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, and was demanded to repent and provide a written explanation. He wrote a very harsh explanation.
On July 4, at a meeting of the party organization of the Uman district association “Silhosptekhnika,” Bilous was “expelled from the ranks of the CPSU for spreading nationalist views. At the meeting, Bilous behaved defiantly, with a challenge,” as recorded in the meeting’s resolution. Of the 49 party members present, three voted against the expulsion. They also suffered persecution.
On July 13, the Uman District Committee of the CPU confirmed Bilous’s expulsion from the CPSU “for un-party-like behavior, expressed in disagreement with the policy of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine on certain issues of national policy and its gross distortion.”
On July 14, Bilous filed an appeal with the party commission of the Cherkasy Oblast Party Committee. The discussion there lasted three and a half hours. He filed an appeal with the Central Committee of the CPU. To a question from a commission member, the head of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, V. Fedorchuk, “Name at least one party or state document where the Ukrainian language is prohibited,” Bilous said that with the introduction of military training at the college, a directive had come from Kyiv to reduce the number of hours for teaching the Ukrainian language; Russian language teachers were paid 15% more than Ukrainian language teachers; in Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, there were no longer any Ukrainian-language schools. Someone said: “You’re mistaken! There is one.” For a million people... Fedorchuk exclaimed: “Jail him! Jail him! He almost convinced me. Jail him!”
Bilous also appealed to the party commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which was headed by Politburo member A. Pelshe and M. Solomentsev. After listening, they said: “Go home, we will send you the decision.” And someone from the commission remarked: “There they are, the khokhly. We teach them and teach them, and they just get stubborn.”
Soon after the arrest of K. MATVIIUK (July 13, 1972), Bilous took him a food parcel to the Cherkasy investigative isolator. This was regarded by the KGB as helping an “enemy of the people.”
On September 27, 1972, Bilous was summoned to the district prosecutor’s office. There, the regional prosecutor, T.H. Dubovyi, and the investigator, K.S. Yakovlev, announced his detention on suspicion of “spreading deliberately false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system” (Article 187-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR). He was handcuffed and taken to the police station, placed in a cell with criminal prisoners, who assigned the newcomer a spot by the latrine bucket. Bilous, without much thought, used his experience as a marine and, with his fists, established proper order in the cell. After 10 days, he was informed of his arrest and transferred to the Cherkasy investigative isolator.
Before his arrest, Bilous had a good salary, an apartment, a family, a car, and a dacha, but he crossed all that out and defended his people from Russification, meaning he consciously went to prison. The investigation (or rather, the KGB) suspected that he was not of sound mind, and he was sent for an examination to the regional psychiatric hospital in the city of Smila, where he was held for over a month with real criminals and insane people. He was forced to take medication. However, the Smila psychiatrists did not take that sin upon their souls: they gave a positive assessment. Moreover, when Bilous returned to the pre-trial detention center, a captain of the medical service, out of sympathy for the political prisoner, arranged for him to be in the hospital for two weeks.
Bilous was accused, in particular, of falling under the influence of N. SUROVTSOVA, so he had to prove that his protests against Russification were not provoked by SUROVTSOVA, but by reality, and that he had gone to her as an already formed Ukrainian patriot. He saw the poverty in her home, so he brought her a sack of potatoes twice.
The closed trial of Bilous took place on the anniversary of the mass arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, January 12, 1973. A whole bus of witnesses, 30 people, was brought from Uman. Some shied away from accusatory testimony, but when the economics teacher Piskunov said that people like Bilous should be shot, the defendant jumped over the barrier and grabbed the witness by the throat. The guards came to their senses and pushed him back behind the barrier. For this attack, the court gave him 2 years of imprisonment.
Bilous was sent to a general-regime colony in the village of Tahancha, Kaniv raion, where 2,500 prisoners were held. He was put to work making radio parts. He met his quota, sending his family 30 rubles a month. He helped prisoners write cassation appeals, for which he gained great authority. He had a positive influence on the youth. He was the zone’s chess champion. He read a lot of literature there, which was usually removed from civilian libraries. But he also developed a stomach ulcer in captivity.
On October 26, 1973, he was released early by the court. He underwent an operation on his stomach.
After serving his sentence, Bilous was hired at “Raysilhosptekhnika” to wash tractors that came in for repair, for 90 rubles a month. Only when he was about to retire was he transferred to a 120-ruble salary.
He did not restore his former connections, but he organized an amateur choir “Dzin-Bom” at “Silhosptekhnika,” where young people sang patriotic songs, even “Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished.”
When perestroika began, Bilous made two blue-and-yellow flags and traveled with friends to all the Kyiv demonstrations. He began writing articles for samvydav and official press, took part in the Constituent Assembly of the Society of Political Prisoners and Victims of Repression (June 3, 1989) and was the chairman of its Uman organization, participated in the creation of the Society of the Ukrainian Language, “Memorial,” the Human Chain of Unity, the establishment of the People’s Movement of Ukraine, and the Democratic Party of Ukraine. He was the initiator of the creation of their local organizations but did not agree to be the chairman. For example, 127 people signed up for the Uman organization of the Democratic Party of Ukraine with him, but when they started being fired from their jobs, the organization effectively fell apart.
Before the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1990), Bilous invited D. Pavlychko to Uman to nominate him as a candidate. But the communists thwarted this attempt.
During the coup on August 19, 1991, Bilous was the first to go out to the square (the well-known “Hyde Park-an,” a pun on Hyde Park and *parkan*, fence) with the slogan: “Citizens of Ukraine! There is a coup of conspirators in Moscow. A gang of criminals in the person of Yanayev, Yazov, Pugo have staged a coup. Everyone to a protest rally!” He signed it on behalf of the Democratic Party of Ukraine. A rally gathered. Bilous was detained “for disturbing public order” and brought to court. But Judge Mykhailenko released him on his own recognizance not to leave, and when the putsch failed, he closed the case.
In 1995, Bilous initiated the creation of the All-Ukrainian Association of War Veterans, which was headed by I. Yukhnovsky, and he was its deputy for 8 years. In Uman, the organization is called the Uman Congress of Participants of the Second World War—36 war veterans. They collected Soviet anniversary medals (for the 30th, 40th, 50th anniversaries of the victory) in one bucket and took them to the military commissariat, writing a letter asking not to be bothered with Moscow awards anymore.
In the same year, the veterans went to a demonstration with Ukrainian flags and stood at the head of the column. Retired colonels marching with red flags hissed: “Get rid of those blue-and-yellow rags!” Then Bilous and his peers beat up the red colonels.
A security service officer informed Bilous of the arrival of Oleksandr Moroz—Bilous pelted him with tomatoes. He went to a meeting with Petro Symonenko with a slogan “The Hammer and Sickle—Death and Famine!” He twice defaced the Lenin monument in Uman with slogans: “Lenin is the executioner of the Ukrainian people,” “Lenin is a syphilitic,” “Lenin is a bandit,” “Lenin is a robber.”
When the Progressive Socialist Party held a rally near the “Komsomolets” cinema, Bilous, during a speech, struck the head of the local organization, Colonel Bystrov, because he was praising life in the USSR. The police detained Bilous, took him out of the crowd, and let him go: “You didn’t give him enough.”
When the Verkhovna Rada approved V. Yanukovych as prime minister on August 4, 2006, and he immediately declared that the Russian language would be a state language, Bilous announced a political hunger strike in protest. This was at the age of 80, with many illnesses. He refused an IV drip and any medication. On the fourth day, his temperature stabilized, and the pain subsided. In 14 days, he lost 14 kg. When President V. Yushchenko said that there could be only one state language in Ukraine, Ukrainian, Bilous began to come out of the hunger strike. He has not bothered doctors since.
His wife, Nina Ivanivna Petyukh, died on January 15, 2000. Bilous lives alone in Uman but is active in public life. He has a son, Oleksandr, born in 1953, who graduated from Lviv University as a physicist-optician, and a daughter, Antonina, born in 1964, who graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Odesa University.
In 1995, V. CHORNOVIL presented him, as a participant in World War II, with the medal “Cross of the Archangel Gabriel.” In 1999, President L. Kuchma awarded him the Order “For Courage,” III degree.
Bibliography:
Bohdan Horyn. *Not Just About Myself: A Documentary Novel-Collage in 3 books*. Book 2. Kyiv: Univ. vyd-vo PULSARY, 2008, pp. 489-490.
Kuzma Matviiuk. *And We Walked This Path (Memoirs, Testimonies, Assessments of Events)*. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Kharkiv: Prava liudyny, 2010, pp. 92-96, 109-110, 141.
Archive of V. K. Bilous.
Interview with V. Bilous on May 5, 2012: https://museum.khpg.org/1364139301.
BILOUS VASYL KUZMOVYCH