Surgeon and poet. Persecuted and imprisoned for expressions of national consciousness.
Of Cossack lineage, from a family of hereditary doctors. His father, Roman Dmytrovych (1895–1990), a non-commissioned officer, suffered a concussion on the front in the autumn of 1915 and was a German prisoner of war until 1925. He managed the family estate and did not join the SOZ (Joint Cultivation of Land), for which he was “dekulakized” and imprisoned in 1929. He served his sentence near Arkhangelsk. In 1937, he was released as “technically incorrectly convicted.” He lived under German occupation. His eldest son Mykola (from his first marriage) died as a soldier of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army). With the arrival of the Red Army, his father was mobilized, fought, was wounded in Moldavia, returned from the hospital in the summer of 1945, and on January 7, 1947, was imprisoned under Article 54 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR for 25 years (“treason to the motherland”); while in captivity in 1950, he was sentenced to another 25 years for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” In 1954, he was released and, in 1957, rehabilitated.
Meanwhile, the five children of the “enemy of the people” suffered from hunger, working alongside their mother, Oleksandra (1908–1973), on the collective farm “Wealthy Life.” Dmytro finished the seven-year school in his village and, in 1956, with great difficulty (there was no money to pay for tuition), graduated from the neighboring Mokiyivka secondary school.
In 1956, in Kyiv, Sh. lost a notebook containing his poem “The Scales,” which touched upon political issues. From that time on, he became an object of surveillance by the KGB. In 1956, he managed to enter the Admiral Makarov Technical College in Sevastopol. There, in the “closed city” of Sevastopol, he was repeatedly interrogated by the KGB about the poem. On May 1, 1958, he was detained during a May Day picnic outside the city and held for three days for questioning at a border post. That same year, Sh. enrolled in the Simferopol Medical College, where KGB agents soon interrogated him in the office of the head of the regional health department and offered him the chance to inform on students, which he refused. He was then removed from his position as head of the college’s trade union committee. Although Sh. was always an excellent student, he did not graduate from the medical college with honors.
Only on his fourth attempt, in 1961, did he manage to enroll in the evening division of the Crimean Medical Institute. Three years later, he was transferred to full-time study. He specialized in the “general medicine” faculty.
Provocations, harassment, slander, and rummaging through his personal belongings and notebooks to gather compromising material became constant. Sh. had to change jobs frequently, which affected his studies. He was “dressed down” at Komsomol meetings for not participating in *subbotniks* (unpaid weekend labor) and not attending meetings. Subsequently, they arranged for him to be evaluated by a psychiatrist with the aim of discrediting him and expelling him from the medical institute. A lecturer, Serhiy Mykolayovych Yatsenko, told him that his name was on the “blacklists” of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.”
From a young age, Sh. was passionate about literary creation, writing satirical and humorous works accompanied by his own illustrations. But lyric poetry prevailed. His first poems appeared in the Crimean press, including the collective anthologies “Rays, Which Are Hot,” “Young Voices,” and “Hello, Morning.” For a long time, he headed the literary association “Hrono” in Simferopol, under the regional writers’ organization.
In May 1963, Sh. participated in the All-Ukrainian Seminar for Young Writers at the Odesa Writers’ House of Creativity, where he met Vasyl STUS, Borys Necherda, Bohdan HORYN, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Vasyl Zakharchenko, and others.
Every year, starting in 1963, a book of his was included in the plan of the “Krym” publishing house, and every year it was removed from the plans. In 1967, the manuscript of his poetry collection “My Ukraine” was torn apart at a meeting of the publishing house’s board, where the critic Degtyaryov accused him of existentialism, formalism, pessimism, and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.
One day, Sh. received a typewritten copy of Ivan DZIUBA’s work “Internationalism or Russification?” in the mail from an unknown sender. Later, in 1983, it mysteriously disappeared. He continued to be summoned to the KGB and urged to work for them, with promises of an apartment, a teaching position at the medical institute, regular publication of his poetry collections, and more.
In 1969, Sh. graduated from the Crimean Medical Institute with honors but did not receive a work assignment. He returned to his native village of Kurinka with the intention of opening a medical outpatient clinic there. But the “seditious” doctor was not needed even here.
In 1968, his first collection of poems, “Harbingers of Bloom,” was finally published by “Molod” publishing house in Kyiv. Simultaneously, the collection “Flame of Melodies” was published by “Krym” publishing house in Simferopol.
In 1969–70, Sh. studied for six months at the Kharkiv Institute for the Advanced Training of Doctors, completing a course in surgery with an “excellent” grade. Before that, he submitted a manuscript of poetry to the “Prapor” publishing house. Upon visiting, he learned that the book had received an editorial conclusion signed by Lopatin: “D. Shupta’s poems are hostile to the socialist system; they are imbued with the spirit of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism...” At home, however, he received the manuscript with an encouraging letter.
At the hospital in Pyriatyn, where he worked, Sh. was categorically denied a position as a surgeon and was offered a job as a doctor in a district rural hospital. However, the Poltava regional health department sent him to Hradzyhzk, where, on the condition of cooperation with the KGB, he was to take the position of head of the surgical department. Since he did not agree, he did not get the job. He managed the therapeutic department of the railway hospital at Poltava-Pivdenna station, worked as a surgeon at the Pyriatyn district hospital, briefly at the Hrebinka railway hospital, and then as a staff surgeon at the Yahotyn central hospital.
In Yahotyn, Sh. was placed under constant surveillance, absurd slander and libel were spread about him, and he endured prosecutorial terror (his medical records were seized in search of criminal evidence), KGB interrogations, sophisticated provocations, brutal humiliation, and vile machinations aimed at undermining his authority, disgracing him as a person, destroying his family, and accusing him of nationalist and anti-Soviet activities. His case was overseen by KGB agents Borys Mykolayovych Sukachov, Dmytro Hryhorovych Sereda, and Vasyl Vasylyovych Tereshchenko. The head physician, Dmytro Oleksiyovych Aleksieiev, started a special file on Sh., which he kept in a safe, filling it with denunciations, slander, and his own résumés, and forced provocateurs to write pasquinades at his dictation. Provocateurs were often sent to him as patients. He was sometimes sought out as “the surgeon who speaks Ukrainian,” and it was said that he operated in his own way and even applied nationalistic stitches after surgery.
A visit to Leningrad (at the invitation of the Writers’ Union) during the Shevchenko Days in 1983 (?) was deemed a grave violation of labor discipline.
The constant persecution caused conflict in his family: his wife left Yahotyn with their two children. She later returned, but the family was never restored, although they lived in the same apartment. Sh. would lock his room, but the lock was broken several times, and he saw signs of searches.
On October 25, 1983, Sh. was summoned for questioning at the raion party committee, and on October 29, at the police station. There, state security investigators accused him of possessing weapons, ammunition, dollars, and a radio station, and of having ties with the Polish “Solidarity.” Sh. was taken in a “voronok” (paddy wagon) to the Lukianivska pre-trial detention center. He was held sometimes in solitary confinement, sometimes with planted “stool pigeons.”
Sh. was repeatedly tortured: he was “forced to sit on concrete,” struck on the head, and had his fingers slammed in doors, causing the skin to peel off. For a surgeon, this meant a future loss of professional capacity. He had no visits or parcels.
Sh.’s “accomplices” were some brothers named Yevseyenkov from the Kursk Oblast. Gradually, the absurd accusations were dropped. To somehow cover up the baseless arrest, the Yahotyn Raion Court, presided over by N. N. Koshchiy, on January 11, 1984, passed a sentence whereby Vasyl and Valentyn Yevseyenkov were punished under Article 222, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR (“illegal possession of a weapon”) with a two-year suspended sentence with a 2-year probationary period and were sent for re-education in labor collectives. Sh. was punished under the same article with two years of correctional labor without imprisonment, with 20% of his earnings to be withheld by the state at his place of work.
Poets Volodymyr Zabashtansky and Petro Zasenko acted as Sh.’s public defenders from the Writers’ Union at the trial.
Released from prison with crippled fingers and a bad back, having partially lost his hearing and sight, Sh. could not find a job as a surgeon anywhere to at least restore his reputation. He managed to get a job as a surgeon-expert at the VTEK (Medical and Labor Expert Commission). He had to commute from Yahotyn to Kyiv by electric train, which took a lot of time. When he began to stay overnight in Kyiv with acquaintances, a nationwide search was declared for him in the USSR! He had to pay alimony until his sons came of age. Consequently, he left Yahotyn, lived in his native village of Kurinka, and then moved to Odesa, while retaining his rural residence registration. His parents’ house was robbed countless times.
Numerous appeals to the authorities to at least clarify whether he was a victim of political repression have yielded nothing. The answer is always the same: “The KGB has never had any files on you. You have a criminal record, for a weapon.” For this reason, he has not yet been rehabilitated.
He has been a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine since 1986 and the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine since 2002.
From 2000 to the present, he has been a senior lecturer in the Department of Ukrainian Philology and the Department of Journalism at the Taras Shevchenko Dniester State University.
He is the author of nearly three dozen books, including: “Harbingers of Bloom” (1968), “Flame of Melodies” (1968), “Cradle of Generations” (1976), “Sign of Summer” (1981), “Pain of the Stem” (1985), “Customs of the Land” (1987), “Seagull Lake” (1989), “Worldview” (1989), “Comprehension” (1993), “Jerusalem of Flowers” (1995), “Maple Leaves” (1998), “Birds of Ash” (1998), “Woman and Night” (1998), “Low Water” (2000), “Sunflower of Sonnets” (2001), “Marigolds of Transnistria” (2002), “Autumn Edge” (2006), “Short Sentence of the Age” (2007), “Kangaroo and Jerboa” (in production). He has several separate musical publications.
He is a laureate of the Hryhoriy Skovoroda International Literary Prize and a Merited Worker of Culture (2007).
He is a member of the All-Ukrainian Society of Political Prisoners and Repressed Persons and head of the Odesa regional organization of the OUN. On the Orange Maidan, he was deputy chief of staff of the Cossack formations and participated in the blockades of the Cabinet of Ministers and the presidential building. Since April 4, 2007, he has been a member of the public commission for the support of publishing activities of public organizations in Odesa. He is a member of the “Ukraine–NATO” committee.
He lives in Odesa.
Bibliography:
1.
KHPG Archive: Interview with D. Shupta on February 12, 2001.
Shupta, Dmytro. “Meetings with Vasyl Stus.” // Almanac “Young Nation,” No. 1 (38), 2006. – pp. 316–327.
Shupta, Dmytro. “A Criminal, Because He Didn't Become a Stool Pigeon.” // *Odeska khvylia. Dokumenty, tvory, spohady v’iazniv sumlinnia* (Odesa Wave: Documents, Works, and Memoirs of Prisoners of Conscience) / Comp. by P. Otchenashenko, O. Riznykiv, D. Shupta. – Odesa: Druk, 2006. – pp. 145–154.
Shupta, Dmytro. “A Prisoner-Great Martyr of the German-Soviet Concentration Camps.” // *Odeska khvylia*. 2. *Dokumenty, tvory, spohady v’iazniv sumlinnia* / Comp. by P. Otchenashenko, O. Riznykiv, D. Shupta. – Odesa: Druk, 2007. – pp. 149–164.
2.
Shevchuk, Fedir. “Dmytro Shupta—Poet and Dissident…” / newspaper *Poshtova vulytsia* (Post Office Street), (Bershad, Vinnytsia Oblast), No. 4 (277), 2008.
V. Ovsiyenko. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Corrections by D. Shupta entered on March 30, 2008.
SHUPTA DMYTRO ROMANOVYCH