VASYL SEMENOVYCH STUS

THE LIGHT OF PEOPLE

Memoirs of Vasyl Stus

MORDOVIA

February 6, 1976. Mordovia, the village of Ozerne, strict-regime colony ZhKh-385/17-A. The afternoon frost is 46 degrees below zero. The work detail assignment. We are standing in rows of five before the gates of the industrial zone. With a vile little smile, Lieutenant Ulevaty approaches:

“Citizen-convict, a hat should be tied under the chin or on top, not at the back. Come with me.”

But he leads me not to the headquarters, but to the storage room.

“Pack your things.”

“All of them? Where are you taking me?” The anxiety that always slumbers in a prisoner’s subconscious shoots sharply into my conscious mind.

Contrary to his usual habit, Ulevaty answers that I’m being taken to the hospital. I had long sought this, but had already lost hope. They lead me with my things to the guardhouse. But there, it turns out, the paddy wagon and the convoy haven’t arrived yet, so I have to wait in some nook. Behind a door, in the same corridor, is the visitation room. An older woman of Caucasian appearance and a girl so thin she seems translucent are led inside. A minute later, Paruyr Hayrikyan’s voice calls out from behind the door. He says they also pulled him from the ranks and just brought him for a visit with his mother and his sister, Lusine. Through a crack, he passes me some treats (it was chewing gum, which I had never seen before) and whispers:

“They’re hiding you from Vasyl Stus. He was brought to our camp today.”

From Vasyl Stus? So, after his surgery, he wasn't returned to "Number Three" in Barashevo, where they took him from last autumn, but to our 17-A. We knew that on the night of August 1–2, 1975, he had suffered a perforated stomach ulcer, meaning internal bleeding. They said that Stus had tried to leave the barracks at night but fell unconscious. Chornovil and someone else laid him on bedsheets and carried him to the guardhouse, demanding a doctor, while from the watchtower the guard shouted: “Halt, or I'll shoot!” The authorities, first and foremost, called not for a doctor, but for a convoy to take Stus to the hospital, which was within the same camp, a few dozen meters away, but behind a fence. Prisoner-orderlies carried Stus on a stretcher, accompanied by guards with machine guns and dogs. But no one attended to him there until morning. Soon Stus was returned to the camp, and then taken for transport. They said a new search method was used on him: you turn in all your belongings and clothes for inspection the evening before departure, take a temporary set, and get dressed in your own things the next day. After changing, Stus went out into the yard to talk with Viacheslav Chornovil.

“Wait, did you check what they gave you?”

They felt the pea coat and discovered a listening device the size of a five-kopek coin with two small wires. They smashed it so it couldn't be found by its signal and hid it. The next day, Stus was taken for transport, and Chornovil began to bargain with the administration:

“If you grant me the visit you illegally deprived me of, I’ll return your little toy.”

“Alright, I'll report it,” said a lieutenant who was not from the camp.

He returned some time later:

“You can keep it. If we need to, we’ll plant ten on you, too.”

And they did, later. In Yakutia, in exile, where they scared people away from him so much that there was no one to even talk to.

So, as we had heard, they had transported Stus to the Ivan Haass Central Hospital of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs in Leningrad (the prisoners simply called it “the Gaazy”), and after the surgery, for “higher operational considerations,” it was decided not to keep him with Chornovil and Vasyl Lisovyi in camp 3/5 near the hospital in Barashevo, but to bring him to this backwater, to Ozerne (Umor in Mordvin), where at that time there were only about 70 prisoners, among whom I was the only Ukrainian dissident. A pity that they are taking me away from here now…

I hadn’t met Stus when we were free, but we had already seen each other from a distance in the 19th camp, where I was until October 30, 1975. But Stus probably wouldn’t have remembered me. They brought him to our punishment cell (it was the only one for three camps) several times. On Thursdays, they would march the punishment cell inmates across the entire camp to the bathhouse. Those who could would go out to watch, hoping to exchange a word or pass along something to eat. Once, the youngest of the political prisoners, 19-year-old Lyubomyr Starosolsky, lit a cigarette and walked toward Vasyl, offering it to him. The guard snatched the cigarette and stomped it out. Vasyl later recalled this incident. To be honest, with my nature, I was not suited for such acts. I just stood among the people and admired his tall, almost majestic figure. I already knew several of his poems from Zoryan Popadiuk, who had carried them out in his memory from that same punishment cell. I had also read a few of his poems when I was free, knew he had a great essay about Pavlo Tychyna, “Phenomenon of the Age,” read his open letter in defense of the creative youth of Dnipropetrovsk, and heard about his speech on September 4, 1965, at the “Ukraina” cinema in defense of the 21 “Sixtiers” arrested on August 25... In a word, for me, a recent student and novice teacher, Vasyl Stus was one of the near-demigods, on the level of Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Viacheslav Chornovil, Valentyn Moroz, Levko Lukianenko, Mykhailo Horyn, Ivan Kandyba… I had access to Ukrainian samvydav and was content with that, not seeking personal acquaintance with its authors, as it would have inevitably led to expulsion from the university, as happened before my eyes to my colleagues Mykola Rachuk, Nadiyka Kyrian, Mykola Vorobyov, Slavko Chernylevsky... Halia Palamarchuk barely held on.

The crackdown on the “Sixtiers” on January 12, 1972, I, then a fifth-year student of Ukrainian philology at Kyiv University, experienced as a personal tragedy. This crackdown put everyone in their place: some behind barbed wire, some into oblivion, while others, with a cry of “Glory to the CPSU!” heroically ran for the bushes, and still others—through broken spines to false repentance, and then to Shevchenko Prizes for, to use camp slang, “bitchy” little poems... Vasyl Stus received a non-standard sentence of 5 years in a strict-regime camp and 3 years of exile—the norm then was 7 plus 5. (For what “crimes”—anyone is now free to read the protest in the order of supervision by the Prosecutor of the Ukrainian SSR M. O. Potebenko on the verdict in the case of V. Stus, published in the newspaper Literaturna Ukrayina on April 28, 1990).

Back in the 19th camp, I once noticed that the Lithuanians spoke of our Stus with particular respect. They explained why. It turns out that when the Lithuanian partisan Klemanskis, who was serving a 25-year sentence, died in Barashevo, Vasyl proposed honoring his memory with a minute of silence at the evening roll call. This, of course, was regarded as a “violation of the detention regime,” almost as organizing a rally—and Vasyl was sent for six months to the PKT (“cell-type facility”—one of the masterpieces of the ideologues of “developed socialism”: they didn’t have concentration camps, but “colonies,” “institutions”; they didn’t have guards, but “citizen-controllers”; they didn’t have political prisoners, but “especially dangerous state criminals”...)

All this ran through my mind as I waited for the paddy wagon. So, they’re hiding me from Stus’s “corrupting influence”… I wait for about four hours, listening in that nook to all the sounds—when you’re locked up, you see almost nothing, so your hearing becomes the main source of information about the surrounding world. I hear the voice of the unit chief, Captain Oleksandr Zinenko. The door opens:

“There’s no transport and no convoy. Go back to the camp.”

I gladly grab my backpack, but a phone call—and Zinenko stops me. Half an hour later, they finally take me in a paddy wagon to the Shale station, put me on a railcar like a great lord, and around midnight deliver me to the hospital in the village of Barashevo, which is one of the sections of colony ZhKh-385/3. Some escort, probably a KGB officer, kept asking me on the way if I was cold, how I felt. Strange. But I didn’t have to wonder for long: at the guardhouse, I peeked at the accompanying document: “Sentenced Ovsienko V. V. is being directed to the surgical department…” and corrected: “Psych.” A chill ran through me.

“So where are you headed, with what illness?”

“Probably the surgical department, because the illness is, as the gypsy said, the worst kind: you can’t look at it yourself, and you can’t show it to another—hemorrhoids.”

“Well, alright, there are no beds in surgery. It's Saturday now, there are no doctors, so go to the therapeutic ward, and they’ll sort it out on Monday.”

…They sorted me out on Tuesday, but until then and after, all sorts of thoughts had crossed my mind. It was the height of Soviet punitive psychiatry. For about a month and a half after my arrest (March 5, 1973), I tried not to give the investigation any testimony, only explaining a few things. Then the Kyiv region KGB investigator Mykola Pavlovych Tsimokh told me the sacrosanct, carefully weighed words: “Some people here have doubts about your mental competence. We’ll have to conduct a psychiatric evaluation.” A few days later, he quoted some things from my notebooks. They were mostly drafts for various literary ideas—who in their youth didn’t want to play with words? But the most dangerous were the entries from the autumn of 1972. After the January events, after the arrest of my dearest friends, particularly Vasyl Lisovyi, after losing hope of entering graduate school, after my own heartaches, I had fallen into despair and wrote that it wasn’t worth living in this world. And I began to imagine how it might happen. Feeling and thought grew into words—and I saw a literary work budding from it. That’s probably how things get written. But for the investigation, this last part became grounds for blackmail: this, they said, is the raving of a madman. And I already knew that Borys Kovhar, Leonid Plyushch, and Mykola Plakhotniuk had been thrown into a psychiatric hospital for refusing to testify; I knew why Mykola Kholodnyi had written his shameful “recantation”… A white wall of fear rose before me: to end up in a psychiatric hospital at 24, where they would turn you into a human-like animal, seemed more terrifying than death. And I began to give in. I said from whom I had received samvydav and to whom I had given it to read. No one was imprisoned because of me, but some of my friends suffered. When I later thought about why so much misfortune had befallen me, I came to the conclusion: for this sin. People seemed to have forgiven me, but only the Lord Himself can determine the measure of sin and penance: maybe I still owe a million years of purgatory for that sin?

At the time, at the price of sin—confession and a deceitful admission of guilt—I managed to get out of trouble and my soul was revived upon entering the favorable environment of political prisoners, where I was not the only one of my kind. But now, in February 1976, I was once again gripped by fear at the prospect of ending up in that 12th block, the one behind the fence. The horror stories told about it were not made up…

It wasn’t until a month later that the surgeon Skrynnyk somewhat dispelled my fear when I cautiously asked for an explanation.

“I didn't even pay attention to that referral. Your Antipov wrote that so they wouldn't send you back to Ozerne, because there really were no beds in surgery then. But they always take you in the psychiatric ward!”

Antipov was the head of the medical unit of the 17th colony. Stus later called him Antypko—there is such a little devil in Ukrainian mythology. That's how easily one could end up in a madhouse back then, where it was useless to prove you weren't a “schizo.” And at that time, everyone accused of “conducting anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” was sent for a psychiatric evaluation, including myself—I spent 18 days in the “Pavlivka” hospital.

We started talking with Skrynnyk about Stus. Skrynnyk had a reputation here as a sensitive man and a good surgeon, thanks to his ample practice and the lack of accountability for failures. He was displeased that Stus had supposedly refused to go under his knife. The memory of the Russian dissident Yury Galanskov, who died in 1972 as a result of a carelessly performed operation and lack of care, was still fresh.

But it later turned out that no one had even asked Stus about his wishes, and his road to “the Gaazy” had not been a direct one…

I was returned from the hospital to the 17th camp only on May 8, 1976. I walk into my section in the same felt boots I had left in—Stus is not here. In the second section, a lanky man in a white shirt lies on a bunk with a book in his hands. He looks at me with penetrating dark-brown eyes and says:

“Thank God… I've been missing you.”

“How so, you don’t know me?”

“I figured it out. It’s hard for me here with this international crowd without a single kindred spirit.”

He put his book aside, got dressed, and we went out to the “orbit”—a twin path along the edge of our small camp, alongside the “forbidden zone” (it's harder for informers to overhear conversations when you're walking).

Vasyl told me that they had taken him to “the Gaazy” via the Kyiv KGB, thinking that in his condition he would be more compliant and perhaps write a “recantation.” The impression from that trip to Ukraine was reflected in this poem, which was probably composed then, because, God as my witness, Vasyl told it to me in almost these exact words:

  What an unbearable native foreign land…

  This ruin of paradise, a temple defiled.

  You have returned. But the land does not return,

  For it, a stone darkness is a coffin…

This was about Kyiv, devastated by the arrests of 1972. He told me that on the day of his arrival, his wife Valentyna was detained at work, and their 9-year-old son Dmytro was summoned to the juvenile department of the police, even though they had no idea he was coming. Then his almost 80-year-old mother came from Donetsk for a visit. But they didn't grant a visit to anyone:

  How hard to arrive and not

  To see. How hard, not—to meet…

  Carefully, Kyiv, you hid me

  In black chambers, vaults, and crypts…

Later, reading this poem, I vividly felt all those circumstances, because I myself had spent over 13 months in those chambers at 33 Volodymyrska Street. A deathly silence: the guards walk the corridor in slippers, a carpet laid on the floor, they peer into the peephole every minute. You are only allowed to lie in a way that your face is visible. You can only cover your eyes from the light with a handkerchief, folded into a strip a quarter of its width. If you need to be taken to the investigator, the “feeding hatch” (a hole in the door for passing food) opens and the guard whispers:

“To the ‘O’.”

You must answer: “Ovsiyenko.” This is so your cellmate doesn't go in your place. Leading you with your hands behind your back through the corridor and yard to the investigation building, the guard loudly snaps his fingers. And some click with their mouths—that’s professional skill! Because a non-professional claps his hands or jingles his keys: hide, everyone, an especially dangerous criminal is being led through! In all 13 months, I saw a tall man in the corridor only once—could it have been Stus? They shoved me into an empty cell, an argument broke out between the guards who had misunderstood each other. An extraordinary event…

Further in this poem, there was a somewhat desperate note, which Vasyl later rejected:

  How hard to arrive and to leave,

  Suppressing a meager tear of insult!

  Rejoice, you hypocrites and icon-smearers,

  That I have neither hope nor goal.

But then came the angry lines:

  But I myself exist, and my chest’s pain exists,

  And there is a tear that sears right through

  The stone wall, where a flower blooms

  In three screams of color, in three screams of madness.

Vasyl was very pleased with this “flower” as a good find, when he read me this poem a few years later in the Urals. He thundered in his powerful voice, and you were pierced by his pain, because it was your pain too:

  Your soul collapsed right here,

  Half of your chest is gone,

  For the charm of your Ukraine is fading

  And a black octopus sucks at your ailing heart.

After this poem, Vasyl would always read another, about his departure from Ukraine. There, in the KGB, he had categorically refused to speak with the KGB officers, and had a sharp exchange with the prosecutor—and they put him on a transport. Imagine, reader—I don’t have to imagine, for I was transported like that twice myself: they put handcuffs on you in the prison yard, lock you in the “box” of a paddy wagon, where you sit squeezed by metal on all sides, bring you to Boryspil airport, where the roar of a plane rolls over the roar, they position guards with machine guns and dogs and lead you to the plane's ramp, you have a step to take, you look around for someone to say goodbye to, because maybe you will never see Ukraine again, and all you see is this convoy and somewhere on the horizon, poplar trees:

  “Kraykil!”—a cry from the left—

  “Intercept him! Intercept!”

  …Ukraine! Be happy!

  Sleep-poplar! Farewell!

  …The thunder’s great masses come crashing

  headlong down on you…

  Be damned, you aerodromes!

  Turn to ash in your hundred sorrows!

  …The blood surged… To stay behind!..

  To remain!.. At the edge!..

  …We'll dance yet, brother-sir,

  On an unsheathed knife.

You feel your blood surge toward your native land, but they grab you under the arms, lead you to the tail of the plane, soldiers sit on both sides, an officer in front. Only then do they let the passengers on. They give you sidelong glances: look what kind of murderer they're transporting! But they are transporting a poet, tortured for a word of truth. The soldier shyly covers your handcuffs with your hat. If you move your hands a little, they—click!—tighten. Your hands turn blue, and you don’t want to move. They lead you off the plane last and remove the handcuffs only in the paddy wagon.

Stus's poem “Today, today the plane departs…” is probably about these same travels.

That is how they brought Vasyl from Moscow to Kyiv (from Mordovia to Moscow by a “Stolypin” prisoner car), and that is how they took him back to Moscow. He said he was in transit for about two weeks:

“By God’s grace I didn't perish on the road on that bread and herring. And what a day they chose for the surgery—December 10th…”

“And what momentous dates someone has marked for me…”

Indeed, Vasyl came into this world on the very Christmas of the year of our Lord 1938. His mother was afraid to register his birth on the seventh of January, so she registered it as the sixth. Once, in the last year of his life, in the Urals, in Kuchino, in my presence, Vasyl asked the deeply religious self-taught theologian, old Semen Pokutnyk (Skalych):

“What does it mean for a man to be born on such a great holiday?”

“It is an additional grace from God, a happiness,” said the old man. “But to whom much is given, much will be required.”

And so it was, for he was arrested on the Orthodox New Year, January 12, 1972. The perforated ulcer occurred just as the signing of the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference was being solemnly read on the radio—August 2, 1975. He was operated on Human Rights Day—December 10, 1975. And he died on a memorable date: on September 5, 1918, the Sovnarkom decree on the Red Terror was signed—it lasted 73 years. At that time, Vasyl did not yet know that the 20th anniversary of his speech at the “Ukraina” cinema (September 4, 1965) in defense of the arrested “Sixtiers” would become the day of his death. And it happened exactly one year after the death of Yuriy Lytvyn (September 4, 1984). Such “momentous dates.”

  What lay beyond death, I came to know,

  the full force of that mysterious action,

  all the gloom of heavens and the mire of the restless earth.

  And it is hard to live, buttressing with this knowledge

  my dwelling, rotted to a wasteland…

The operation was severe: they left Vasyl with only a quarter of his stomach, as the ulcer was of a wandering kind. To write such otherworldly poems—one had to have been t h e r e. Now, the poem “How good it is that I do not fear death…” is often quoted. They say that everyone is afraid, and whoever says they aren’t is lying. Fear is a natural reaction of a living organism to danger. But courage lies in how a man is able to overcome his fear. Vasyl, it seems, overcame it. And so, it was decided to tighten his regime.

This 17-A camp was also a strict-regime one, but the regime in it was far stricter than in camps 3/5 and 19. And quite famous, to be sure. It was here that Valentyn Moroz wrote his “Report from the Beria Reserve.” Daniel and Sinyavsky were imprisoned here. Viacheslav Chornovil began his term here. Not long ago, they had sent the Latvian Gunars Rode, the Russian Yevgeny Pashnin, the Moscow democrat Kronid Lyubarsky, and the Ukrainian Dmytro Kvetsko to the Vladimir Prison from here, and the day before my arrival—the fine fellow from Sambir, Zoryan Popadiuk. On October 30, 1975, they settled me in his well-lived-in spot, which was now surrounded by informers. For a sharp conversation with KGB agents and “representatives of the Ukrainian public”—such people visited us from time to time.

Now Vasyl and I would be here together… Naturally, in our subsequent interactions, we were not equal partners, but Vasyl, it seems to me, always treated me with particular kindness. Now I understand why: it was a credit extended to my youth. The older simply love the younger, and so they forgive them much, and are even inclined to praise them, remembering themselves at that age.

On one of the very first days of our acquaintance, Vasyl and I went behind an abandoned barrack to a rosehip bush and a patch of ground dug up for a flowerbed. I knew that on this spot Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka had died, a participant in the Ukrainian underground, a prisoner of Polish, Stalinist, Khrushchev-era, and Brezhnev-era concentration camps. It was he who, upon his release in the late forties, received a mission from the Main Command of the UPA to gather data on the locations of concentration camps and the conditions of political prisoners. Soroka fulfilled the task, but for this, he was imprisoned for another 25 years. However, his data was used by the US government to expose the former Prosecutor General of the USSR, Vyshinsky, who had come to America to represent the USSR at the UN. They said that Vyshinsky, upon hearing this, gave up the ghost.

Mykhailo Soroka was one of the organizers of the political prisoners' uprising in the northern camps (Kengir, 1954). A legendary figure, the greatest authority among Ukrainian prisoners for a quarter of a century. Memoirs have been written about him abroad, even in Japan (for who hasn't been imprisoned in Soviet concentration camps!), but here—nothing. (A book has now been published: Lesia Bondaruk. Mykhailo Soroka. Drohobych: Vidrodzhennia, 2001. - 296 p.). No less legendary was the figure of his wife, Kateryna Zarytska (she headed the UPA's medical service). After torture, she received a 25-year prison sentence, which she served together with Darka Husyak and Halyna Didyk. Only in the last years of their imprisonment did these women serve time in Mordovian concentration camps, including Kateryna, who for a time was in this very 17th camp, but in the women's section. The camps were separated only by a few wire and board fences. Soroka would secretly climb onto some elevation and sometimes see his wife. Many people told me about these people with admiration as some of the best ever born of a Kozak mother. But let those who knew them personally write about them. No one will do it for them.

So, it was along this path on June 16, 1971, that Mykhailo Soroka was walking with Mykhailo Horyn. Here, Horyn went on ahead, as Soroka usually descended the hill second, so it wouldn't be obvious that his heart was aching... Here he sat down, feeling a sudden sharp pain, while Horyn walked on, talking about something. He looked back, rushed to help him lie down on the grass, ran for a doctor, but there was only a prisoner-orderly who knew nothing of medicine. Instead of giving the heart patient medicine, seating him against a wall, and leaving him in peace, he began to perform artificial respiration. Only a sorrowful tear rolled from Mykhailo Soroka's eye... This flowerbed is like his grave, for who knows where he was buried. (He was buried in Barashevo. From there, his ashes were transported to Lviv and on September 28, 1992, reburied in the Lychakiv Cemetery, along with the transported ashes of his wife, Kateryna Zarytska).

Vasyl Stus, as soon as it warmed up, dug up the flowerbed. Seeds of marigolds and stocks were found. We began to care for the flowers, and by God's will and our efforts, they bloomed profusely, delighting our eyes and souls. But Zinenko was informed that the Ukrainians had created a sanctuary for themselves here (we were joined by the 25-year-term insurgents Ivan Chapurda and Roman Semenyuk, who was transferred here from the 19th). So Zinenko ordered two “stooges,” Kononenko and Islamov, to uproot the rosehip bush while we were at work, tear the bush to pieces, and plant it opposite the headquarters, and to trample the flowers. It was painful to watch such desecration.

However, even after this, shoots sprouted in the flowerbed; the bush would have revived. And some of the flowers recovered. But I had to tend to them without Vasyl, as he was periodically in the punishment cell, and it was impossible to protect it from desecration. Everyone here who could pass information to the outside world about our existence is deprived of visits.

...Two barracks, one of which is already abandoned. Headquarters and a dining hall. Beyond the gates—the industrial zone, where we sew work gloves. In the middle of the camp—a depression full of rainwater. Here, they say, executed prisoners are buried, which is why it has sunk. In the camps, when they started any construction, they often found human bones. Ivan Palamarchuk, convicted on charges of collaborating with the Germans, showed me a small wood behind the camp:

“My father lies there. And in Barashevo, where the hospital is, there are eight thousand nuns. The burial site was planted with pine trees.”

This poem must be about the 17th camp:

  Winter. A fence and a black cat

  on the white snow.

  And a raven among the willow boughs

  bends into an arc.

  Two hunched pines

  feel a mortal cramp.

  All around are the dead, and their dreams

  stand, like pines, erect.

  Two gates, sunk into the earth, darkness.

  The watch bell tolls.

  And there is no breath, no relief

  from the mourners, from the phantoms.

  Winter. A fence. And a black post.

  A net of spikes.

  And a golden gallop of horses.

  A fiery thunder of hooves.

There were only about 70 prisoners left in this camp, so the kitchen was “downsized.” Leftovers from another unit are brought in thermoses by a mare named Masha. Though, it seems, it was already a horse that had inherited the name of its deceased predecessor. “Masha the mare” knows her route from camp to camp by heart. They open the gates for her without asking her name, article, or sentence. With a sideways glance, as the cart moves, she turns around in the yard and stops right by the building where the kitchen used to be. A handful of grass or some leftovers await her there. The news flies around the camp: “Masha has arrived!” You take a spoon, a ration of bread, and go to slurp the thin soup. The zeks say: “Masha is our joy.” And Valeriy Graur, who had a penchant for aphorisms, once proclaimed: “Masha is the best person in the administration.”

The administration of the unit consists of Captain Oleksandr Zinenko, who looks ready to burst out of his uniform, and his assistant, Lieutenant Ulevaty, who likes to stop a zek and, while talking, rummage through his pockets. We rarely see the colony chief and his deputies: they don't get involved in “politics,” their three thousand criminals are enough for them.

The majority of the prisoners were older men, serving time for wartime offenses. For collaboration with the Germans, for partisan struggle against the Soviet occupation—Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians. And, of course, Belarusians and Ukrainians. There were about 15 dissidents.

Here is Ivan Andriyovych Chapurda, a man of good peasant stock from the Chortkiv district in the Ternopil region (I have now forgotten the name of the village, but after my release, I wrote a letter to his sons). He feeds pigeons from his meager ration and mumbles something to them. Lieutenant Ulevaty, saving the people's property, put the old man in the punishment cell for 15 days. There he fell ill and soon died in the hospital in his 23rd year of imprisonment. Vasyl Stus mentions him in his now-famous letter to his son Dmytro dated April 25, 1979. That he would like to live like that old man, so that pigeons would land on his shoulders.

In the harsh winter of early 1976, pigeons and sparrows indeed flew right into our hands, begging for food. They would fall in mid-flight. We picked them up and warmed them in the workshop. This enraged the authorities. A guard with the characteristic surname Kyshka (Guts) tells how they brought the zeks, they stand in the enclosure, stamping their feet in the cold. “And I tell them: my geese walk barefoot all winter, and it's nothing. Ha-ha-ha!” What does such a man care about a pigeon. I am sure this poem is about Ivan Chapurda:

  If you had, o pigeons,

  even a little heart—you would on your wings

  take him to you and carry him over

  to Ukraine, which has long been pining for him.

  To you he will raise a kind hand

  and call out—generously and invitingly:

  “Come to me—here is food and drink for you:

  crumbs on the path, in a shard—water.

  Come now, little one, who on your sore leg

  so often limps—let me

  pull the splinter from your paw, right from my lips

  I will feed you, you yellow-beaked thing,

  and let you fly into the sky from my hand.

  …That God of birds, and of early spring, and clouds,

  and of the rustling young greenery,

  rejuvenated in a hundred streams

  of heavenly spring—He sees it all,

  and hastens life, and hastens the resilient flight

  to eternity, to the eternal abyss.

Here is the Lithuanian Petras Paulaitis, tall in stature and spirit. He washes dishes in the kitchen. He is a former Lithuanian ambassador to Italy, Spain, and Portugal. During the German occupation, he edited a Lithuanian newspaper. The Germans closed it, and the editor had to go underground. However, the red “liberators” accused him of collaborating with the German occupiers and gave him 25 years. They released him in 1956, but, it turned out, “by mistake”—a few months later they gave him another 25.

August Reingold. Doctor of Law from the University of Tartu. For some reason I can't recall, Lieutenant Ulevaty said to Reingold: “You and I will yet meet on a narrow path.” “If we meet, I will aim carefully,” the Estonian replied slowly but clearly, articulating the Russian words. The verdict: “Threatened a superior.” 15 days in the punishment cell. Since Reingold was already disabled and didn't sew gloves, there was no point wasting thin soup on him. This meant he was given the punishment cell without being sent to work, and for such prisoners, hot food is given once every two days. Without fats or sugar. And 400 grams of bread, boiling water, and salt every day. After the New Year, he and I were in the punishment cell together in the 19th camp. I was the same kind of “terrorist”: I told Ulevaty that he would not escape justice. Also “threatened a superior.” And also “failed to show up for political instruction, and arrived 5 minutes before the end.” I had accidentally stayed too long with old Volodymyr Kaznovsky.

Old Volodymyr—towering, emaciated, with a huge bald skull, leaning on a crutch and groaning with every breath, makes his journey to the latrine. He covers the 50-meter path and back in half an hour. He is kept in the medical unit. Every evening he crawls out onto the porch to listen to the news, which always began like this: “This is Moscow. We are broadcasting the latest news. Today, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev…” The old man waits for someone to come and talk. He said little about himself, fearing to worsen his situation. But he wanted at least to die free. Under the Germans, he had served in the Ukrainian police, helping the insurgents. He was imprisoned sometime in 1957. Vasyl and I spent a lot of effort to get him to agree to have his name included in our lists of political prisoners, which were circulated in the West. And—a miracle—it turned out the old man had a son abroad! He began to demand his medical certification for release. There is such a form of release: a medical commission declares a prisoner chronically ill, then a court can release him early. But few of those certified ever made it home, and those who did, did not live long. The calculation was reliable. Some even began to fear certification: here in the camp, you could still linger on, but after enduring the shock, you wouldn't be able to adapt to the new conditions. This was precisely the fate that befell Kaznovsky: he reached his sister in Yaremche and died, already holding a plane ticket to go abroad (or perhaps on the plane itself).

Roman Semenyuk, born in 1928. A peasant boy from near Sokal was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1949, but they discovered he had collaborated with the insurgents. 25 years of imprisonment. In the early 60s, he escaped with Anton Oliynyk. Anton was shot, with “newly discovered crimes” attributed to him, and Roman was given an additional 3 years of prison on top of his 25. Mr. Roman was one of the few prisoners of the old guard who openly sided with the dissidents and took part in our protest actions.

Paruyr Hayrikyan. Almost my age, he had already become the recognized leader of the National United Party of Armenia. Stus was the first to join in observing April 24 with a hunger strike in memory of the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide—thus was born the idea of admitting non-Armenians as sympathizing members of the party. Vasyl sincerely loved Paruyr, as he did all the Armenians he knew in other camps, and they reciprocated his feelings. Paruyr is exceptionally talented precisely as a politician, as a public figure. This was already evident in how he could organize actions, what complex combinations he played out to trap an informer or pass information to the outside world. (See: Mikhail Kheyfets. Selected Works. In three volumes. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. – Kharkiv: Folio, 2000. Essay “The POW Secretary” in vol. 3, pp. 198–282). Moreover, he is a poet and a singer. How mournfully and penetratingly his voice echoed in the punishment cell corridor when we were there at the same time. Even the guards listened, mesmerized, and did not shout.

Vitaliy Lysenko and Yuriy Butenko—these guys aroused some distrust, as they were accused of espionage, so it was difficult for them to defend themselves against the administration, and they had to be quieter. However, when it came to defending Vasyl, they participated in the protests.

Vasyl loved to chat with Ivan Musiyovych Palamarchuk. He was well-versed in music. The accusation of collaborating with the German occupiers did not give such people the opportunity for self-defense in the political camps. They worked silently, waiting for the end of their 25- or 15-year terms. Knowing they were defenseless, the administration tried to use them against us as informers, and some went along with it. But this snitching was repugnant to almost everyone, even to people like our brigadier, Prykmeta.

I will speak of Mikhail Kheyfets separately. (See also the essay “The Tortured Union”).

There, in the 17th camp, Stus let me read some of his poems, among which the impression of this one remains memorable:

  Allow me today, around six o’clock,

  When evening falls all around

  and the transport rumbles at rush hour—

  suddenly, out of longing, out of the stifling sky,

  out of oblivion, out of boundless separation,

  intoxicated by long vexation,

  I will fall onto Brest-Lytovsky Prospekt,

  onto that estranged Fourth Clearing,

  where only the mocking roar of the highway

  will tell me that the fearful thumping of my heart

  beats in unison with my native land.

All these are Kyiv realities that surfaced in memory: somewhere there, his wife Valentyna struggles with hardship, somewhere there, his son Dmytro, the house at 62 Lvivska Street, with its “paradisiacal”—because it is home—gate. All of that has now been renamed, destroyed (where their house was, there is now a road across from the “Dachna” bus station leading to the Ring Road), but it remains a poetic image that wrings a tear from the heart, as if it were about your own pain:

  From the human anthill, from separation

  I will tear out the memory of long-forgotten days,

  that have become a dream and a sorrowful reality,

  like wounds, completely covered with scars.

  You do not object, my love, you do not object?

  Oh, do not be afraid: among the human crowd

  I will disappear, dissolve, be lost,

  so that your frightened gaze, by chance,

  does not plunge into my heart like a knife.

  So do not be terrified—I will pass like a shadow…

  I will touch with a burnt wing, with lips

  scorched—or with the corner of my mouth

  to partake of your sorrow.

  So do not be terrified: I will pass like a shadow.

  And then, when like a pensive little girl,

  who has wronged the entire world

  with the childlike purity of her gaze

  and the helplessness of her commanding chastity,

  you emerge unhurriedly from the tram

  and cross the road, to dive

  into the gnarled dusk of the vigilant pines,—

  then I will tear my heart out for you,

  wounding myself on the thorny thickets,

  watching your trail, which from the edge

  of my soul stretched across the whole world.

  I will follow in your steps, like a feral dog,

  hiding in the hollows of your footsteps

  my shame, my fear, my offense,

  and joy, and passion, and fierce pain…

  I will be but a shadow of a shadow,

  I will fall from my face, from experience, from years,

  as a single, sinewy leaf of my heart

  I will roll in the wind of my own storms.

  …Here is our porch. You are already at the door.

  You pressed the bell and so lightly

  opened the heavy paradisiacal gate.

  Our son called out. I should have shouted. But

  I had no strength to raise my voice.

And then—the painfully familiar entourage of our camp:

  …The dream broke. On the wall swayed

  a road bisected by a noose

  to my yard. And the barbed wire,

  swollen with night, ran like spiders

  across the frozen wall. A dull ceiling lamp

  stirred the slop of the night. The dawn

  hung over the palisade. A screeching

  bell, like a corkscrew, uncorked from the bottle of slumber

  the mire of a new day…

  …To die on the road of return

  is too sweet for the Lord

  not to have placed it as a headrest in our fate.

“The mire of a new day…” Reveille, roll call, thin soup, work detail, sewing gloves, thin soup, work, roll call, thin soup… You get a little relief in the evening. You can read for 2–3 hours, chat with people. But a loudspeaker blares over it all. Both in the section and outside. Nowhere to concentrate. And to write—absolutely nowhere. A movie, something like “Lenin in October”—once a month. And rare letters:

  …where the greatest of rewards—are letters,

  for our exodus, for our arrival…

You have the right to write two letters a month, and receive them without limit, but they find “forbidden information” in them and confiscate them. Both your letters and those to you. The information famine is no easier for an intellectual to bear than the lack of food. And in the radio and the press—emptiness.

  Ukraine is far away—no one will hear!..

And yet, even there, there were bright hours. There was the joy of communion with people and, obviously, the secret solace of creativity, though those poems were raw pain. I am especially struck by the details of our zek life, filtered through the poet’s aching heart. Vasyl’s greatest concern was to protect them. It was here that real dramas unfolded, here that the tragedy of his life lay.

Shortly after my return from the hospital, Vasyl was accused of some triviality and put in the punishment cell for 15 days. There is no way to pass on this information to the outside world, so there is no point in showing solidarity with Vasyl or starting a protest action: if the world doesn’t know about it, the demand will not be met. But it’s also impossible not to protest. The first idea is a hunger strike. But that is too difficult and ineffective. Then Roman Semenyuk said he was starting a partial hunger strike: refusing breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The idea was well-received: without suffering too much, we would still demonstrate our solidarity. Absolutely all the dissidents in the camp took part in the action: the Jew Mikhail Kheyfets, the Romanian Valeriy Graur, the Russians Vladimir Kuzyukin and Pyotr Sartakov, the Ukrainians Viktor Lysenko and Yuriy Butenko, the Armenian Paruyr Hayrikyan, as well as Roman Semenyuk and I. Zinenko was furious:

“They eat like horses, and they say they’re on a hunger strike.”

This went on for 15 days. Of course, we didn’t get Vasyl out of the punishment cell, but we still felt like human beings. When I later, somewhat sheepishly, told Vasyl about this action, he consoled me:

“Vasyl, even if you ate two rations plus a hospital ration 5-B, and on top of that the camp store provisions—it would still be a partial hunger strike.”

Vasyl returned from the punishment cell in a terrible state. I come back from work for lunch—he is in the yard. Seeing me, he suddenly put on a stern expression. What’s wrong with him, I wonder.

“Vasyl, please accept my condolences on the death of your father.”

His heart responded to everyone’s misfortune. My father had died back on May 8, but the news only reached me on the 21st, when Stus was in the punishment cell. Later, we held a forty-day memorial for my father: we made a salad from weeds, dressed it with oil, brewed tea… By the way, those weeds helped us a lot, because our food was potatoes and groats, no vitamins.

We began to think about how to ease Vasyl's situation. And someone with more experience recalled that one could apply to be certified as disabled for a certain period. This provided the opportunity to work not 8, but 6 hours and to sew 3/4 of the glove quota, as well as to receive slightly better food. Swallowing his pride, Vasyl wrote such a request in order to snatch an extra two hours for himself. But to be certified as disabled, one had to go to the hospital in Barashevo. As he was getting ready, Vasyl took with him a volume by some philosopher—dense, compact reading, so as not to overly irritate the authorities. And that’s when the incident occurred. Zinenko would not allow him to take the book: “You are going for treatment, not for studying.” This is one form of torment. The regime in the hospital is much milder, but there is absolutely nothing to do there: books are not allowed, except rarely for a few. You walk around there, bored to death between the barracks and the morgue, looking at the ready stack of coffins, which greatly contributes to a speedy recovery…

So they don’t give Vasyl the volume. Vasyl refuses to go without the book. But the order is already issued, the convoy has arrived. They twist Vasyl’s arms, put him in handcuffs, and shove him into the “box”—a cell in the paddy wagon, approximately 120x60x60 cm. In the hospital, Vasyl wrote a statement in which he called Zinenko a fascist. I don't think it greatly offended an ox like Zinenko, but it was sufficient grounds for further retaliation. Vasyl was granted disability status, but a few days after his return to the 17th camp, Zinenko found a reason to throw Stus into the punishment cell. So much for Vasyl’s disability status…

It seems that this time we managed to report it to the outside world. And I was hoping for a visit on July 11. To my surprise, I wasn’t deprived of it. My mother and sister had already set off on their journey, gone to the bus, but they were caught up by my telegram telling them not to leave. I myself was collected for transport on July 9. On the way, I understood that it was to Kyiv, “to have my brain washed.” The “higher operational considerations” were probably this: Ovsiyenko’s prison term is ending soon, he was not firm at his trial, he pleaded guilty, now his father has died, he recently had an operation—so wouldn’t he write a recantation, wouldn’t he badmouth his Mordovian comrades in the press? They could even release him a few months early and thus finally break him and cut him off from like-minded people. True, he is trying to resist, he hasn't spoken to the KGB for almost a year, but here we’ll bring his relatives to him, send his former teachers and university professors… The plan failed. In Kyiv, on August 20, I submitted a statement that my admission of guilt at the trial was a forced consequence of psychiatric terror. So, without any special honors (not by plane, but by a regular prisoner transport), I was returned to my dear Mordovia and on September 11—the very day of Mao Zedong’s death—I arrived at the well-known to me 19th camp. It’s much easier here than in the 17th.

Immediately, another piece of news: it turns out that 17-A as a political camp no longer exists. It has been given over to criminals, and our “contingent” has been dispersed to other camps in Mordovia, some to the Urals. And Stus (though he is currently in the hospital), Kheyfets, Lysenko, Semenyuk, and Kuzyukin ended up in the 19th. Hayrikyan exposed the latter as an informer, so he wasn't even allowed into the camp—he was pardoned.

Before I continue the story, I must tell about Mikhail Kheyfets, a Russian-speaking Jewish writer from Leningrad. He is already over 40. A Russian language teacher who found it difficult to be disingenuous with his students, so he took up literary work for hire, in particular, ghostwriting a book for some general, who then removed the note “Literary transcription by M. Kheyfets.” He knew the poet Joseph Brodsky well and wrote a long article about his work, defining him as a poet of genius. Brodsky served 5 years of exile and went abroad. With a 9th-grade Soviet education, he became a university professor there… Kheyfets read in Brodsky’s poems what was only hinted at: the Czechoslovak events of 1968, and he clarified the perspective on them. (See: Mikhail Kheyfets. Selected Works. In three volumes. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. – Kharkiv: Folio, 2000. Essay “Joseph Brodsky and Our Generation” in vol. 2, pp. 198–217). A few conversations, a few notes—and there you have it, a sentence: 4 years in the camps and 2 in exile. He viewed this turn of fate during the investigation as fortunate: priceless material was falling into his hands. Being a man of encyclopedic knowledge and phenomenal memory, he used them to the best effect: while he was still serving the last months of his imprisonment, his book “Place and Time” was published in Paris, where many kind words were said about us, Ukrainians: I heard a passage about myself on Radio Liberty sometime in 1978. In 1983, “Suchasnist” published his book “Ukrainian Silhouettes,” which begins with a long essay on Vasyl Stus and ends with a short one—about me. We, Ukrainians, knew how to suffer much in the concentration camps, but there was no one to write about it. Thanks to the Jew Mikhail Kheyfets: nothing better has been written about Stus to this day than his essay. (This book has also been published here: it was included in the almanac “The Field of Despair and Hope.” Compiled by Roman Korohodskyi. Kyiv, 1994. Also: M. Kheyfets. Selected Works. In three volumes. The essay on V. Stus “There is no one greater in Ukrainian poetry now…” is in vol. 3, pp. 137–225). “Ukrainian Silhouettes” came into my hands at the end of 1990, when the main part of my memoirs had already been written and published in part 3 of the journal “Donbas” in 1990, partly in the 6th issue of “Silski Obriyi,” and first of all—in samvydav.

So Mr. Mikhail would walk along the fence, his hands tucked into his sleeves, his pea coat hanging on him like on a scarecrow, his hat like on a stake, shuffling in his boots, even the gloves that came out from under his sewing machine looked like squashed frogs… “Mr. Mikhail,” I used to say to him, “you must be that legendary Wandering Jew.” There, along the fence, he would conceive whole chunks of books, and then, sitting down somewhere, quickly write them down.

Here, in the 19th camp, there were several Jewish “hijackers”: Mikhail Korenblit, Boris Penson; Mikhail Goldfeld, Lassal Kaminsky, and Anatoly Azernikov had already been released. We had very good relations with them: not for nothing did anti-Ukrainian periodicals at the time write about the “alliance of the trident and the Star of David.” That alliance was strengthened both in the West and in the East—in the Mordovian and Perm concentration camps. But I have a special affection for Kheyfets. He was one of the first to greet me with a kind word in the 17th, where I was brought into solitude, he took a lively interest in Ukrainian affairs, tried to read in our language, and asked me to speak Ukrainian with him. I think not only to learn it, but also to give me the opportunity to speak my mind in my own language. The action in defense of Stus brought us very close. And then this incident happened.

Back in the 17th camp, in Ozerne, Vasyl's cell was searched and a notebook of his poems was taken. In the hospital, he was told that the notebook had been confiscated and destroyed as having no value. A rough draft remained with Kheyfets in the camp. What to do? We had to save what we had. Divide it up and memorize it—Kheyfets suggests to me and Roman Semenyuk. He takes a part for himself as well. But it's not easy. Those poems are heavy, like stones. I hadn't managed to copy more than a few when they took me to Kyiv on July 9. And so, on one of my first days in the 19th camp, in September, Kheyfets brings me a notebook of poems, written in his chicken scratch, and asks me to copy the poems neatly. And then he dictates another two dozen poems to me from memory. This—without knowing our language.

Soon Vasyl returned from the hospital with his notebook. It turned out they had “mistakenly” announced its destruction. Similar “mistakes” were made at the time in the women's camp regarding the drawings, embroideries, and poems of Stefania Shabatura, Nadiia Svitlychna, and Iryna Kalynets. Some were destroyed, but mostly they were just tormented. I remember how Stus, Kheyfets, and Sergei Soldatov went to the KGB colonel Drotenko to argue about this, and all the dissidents in the camp filed protests.

Vasyl managed to send almost all his poems from Mordovia, writing them in a continuous line and replacing certain words with similar-sounding ones: tyurma (prison) – yurma (crowd), Ukrayina (Ukraine) – Batkivshchyna (Fatherland), kolyuchyi drit (barbed wire) – bolyuchyi svit (painful world). So as not to offend the censor’s eyes with “cacophonous,” undesirable words in letters. That same autumn, I copied his entire white-gridded notebook, about 60 pages, and kept those poems until my release, bringing them home safely on March 5, 1977. There were many textual variants in that white notebook. As a pedantic philologist, I diligently reproduced everything, although I did not always agree with Vasyl’s punctuation. At home, I typed them up. My fellow villager, Ivan Rozputenko, saved one copy and brought it to me only after my final release in 1988. Even earlier, I had handwritten them for Kyiv friends and gave the notebooks to Olha Heiko-Matusevych. Sometime in September 1977, the KGB confiscated it during a search of her father's apartment. My own manuscript was lost forever—among others that I entrusted to mother earth. These texts, I believe, are of particular value to textual scholars, as the poems were repeatedly revised and completely rewritten when the author believed they were lost.

When did he write his poems? Although I lived for a time in the same barrack as Stus and worked almost next to him, I rarely saw it happen. Because writing in the camp is not entirely safe: any guard can take an interest in what you are writing, and might even take it away “for inspection.” So Stus only wrote down the poems; they came to him always and everywhere. This was a man whose mind worked without rest. And this work of the brain was noticeable in that individual words of his inner monologue would break through to the outside. This was especially noticeable after his time in the punishment cells, where a man is free to mumble to himself, where self-control weakens. His tense, pained, focused face rarely brightened, except in good company, or when he was asleep. Then you could see a completely different Vasyl, almost childlike. It seemed to me that this man kept himself in iron shackles his whole life, encasing his refined poet’s soul in the armor of a warrior.

Once he sang a song that came to him in the summer of 1971 on St. Volodymyr's Hill in Kyiv, in anticipation of his fate, which became intertwined with the fate of the “Sixtiers” and of all Ukraine. I remembered the melody—impetuous, courageous—and sang it to Vasyl many years later in the Urals, when we were on a walk in neighboring “yards.” “A little off,” Vasyl said, but did not correct me on how it should be. It seems to me that Olha Bohomolets sings it “a little off” now. And the Telnyuk sisters—Halia and Lesia.

  The proud cliffs of the Slavuta still green,

  the river’s churned surface still gleams blue,

  your time has already passed you by, a flying bird,

  your last, ahead—the fall.

  The sky is still deep, the sun is still high,

  but the heart, too small for the chest, will not burst:

  the beautiful torments have broken off, gone away,

  and something calls you, and something beckons you!

  Your unfurled heights have flown by,

  ahead—the abyss! And do not close your eyes.

  You see the crossroads? Pray.

  For you are not yet a warrior, and you are not yet a man.

  The proud cliffs of the Slavuta still hunch over,

  but the world plunges headlong down.

  Cling to the cliffs, like a thorny bramble,

  grasp for the sky, like an apple blossom.

  Horizon beyond horizon, distance beyond distance,

  until the tense day burns out.

  The poplars have raked away in high sorrow

  your viburnum-red, primordial, longing songs.

  For a boundless foreign land has already appeared,

  and the green expanse withers in grief.

  Farewell, Ukraine, my Ukraine,

  a foreign Ukraine, farewell forever!

In the 19th camp, in the village of Lisove, Vasyl served out his “five-year plan” to the last day, until January 11, 1977. They put him to work grinding clock cases—wooden bodies for the clock mechanism—on an emery wheel. This new “profession” did not come easily to him. He was angry that he had to expend effort on it, to concentrate, instead of working mechanically and thinking his own thoughts. Our colleague, also a philologist, but an Armenian one, Razmik Markosyan, and I tried to help Vasyl after finishing our own work, but it was not easy for Vasyl to accept help. However, the conditions here were easier, the work more varied, the camp large, the barbed wire not always pricking your eyes. And most importantly—a much wider circle of people to communicate with. There were about 300 men here in total, about half of us were Ukrainians. Approximately a third were convicted on charges of collaborating with the Germans during the war. Far from all of them were guilty of that: those whose guilt the authorities had no doubt about had long been shot. But here there were many who had become victims of militaristic policy: if there is international tension, then society must be “heated up” from within. So they catch “enemies”: “traitors” from the past and modern potential “traitors to the motherland”—dissidents. To make others afraid: every such trial was written about in regional and district newspapers, talked about on the radio, but for the most part, it was all KGB fantasy. The largest number of such prisoners were Belarusians and Ukrainians, many of whom were nationally conscious.

The second part of the “contingent” consisted of men who had fought with weapons in hand in the 40s and 50s against the Soviet occupiers: Ukrainian insurgents, Lithuanian “Forest Brothers,” Estonians, and Latvians. Among them were several Ukrainian 25-year-term prisoners: Mykhailo Zhurakivsky from Yasenia, Ivan Myron from near Hoverla, Mykola Konchakivsky from the village of Rudnyky in the Mykolaiv district of the Lviv region, and Roman Semenyuk from Sokal.

The last third consisted of “dissidents” of various shades: young Lithuanians Vidmantas Povilionis and Romas Smailys, the young Latvian Maigonis Rāviņš, the Armenians Razmik Markosyan and Azat Arshakyan, the Moldovan Gicu Ghimpu, the Jews Mikhail Kheyfets, Boris Penson, and Mikhail Korenblit, the Uzbek Babur Shakirov, Russians from the Estonian Democratic Movement Sergei Soldatov, and a Ukrainian who had lived in Great Britain for 29 years, Mykola Budulak-Sharyhin. Towards the end of the year, they transferred Vladimir Osipov, the editor of the Russian Christian journal “Veche,” to us from Barashevo.

Among the Ukrainian “dissidents” at that time were the Kharkiv engineer Ihor Kravtsiv, who began to take an interest in Ukrainian culture in his thirties, which aroused the authorities' suspicion. For reprinting a few pages of Ivan Dziuba's work “Internationalism or Russification?” and for a few telephone conversations, he got 5 years of imprisonment. Ihor was one of Vasyl's most interesting interlocutors, although they disagreed on some things. I remember being present during one of their principled conversations: Ihor was trying to convince Vasyl that he needed to take care of himself, not to be in a state of constant confrontation with the administration; after all, he had to realize that he did not belong only to himself: our nation may have struggled for who knows how long to give birth to Vasyl Stus, and he would just go and perish in another hunger strike that he could have avoided. Mr. Ihor himself had to be very careful, as he suffered from constant headaches. Vasyl, however, was uncompromising.

Mykola Budulak had just returned from Vladimir Prison. He was from the Vinnytsia region. At 15, he was taken to Germany for labor. He ended up in the British occupation zone and went to Britain, where he graduated from the University of Cambridge. He lived without citizenship, as it was difficult to obtain there, but that didn't stop him from traveling around Europe on business for his firm. But in 1969, he came to Moscow—and there they suddenly discovered that he was a Soviet citizen who had evaded military service (at 15, during the German occupation!) and was also spying for Scotland Yard. This became necessary because a large group of Soviet officials had just been expelled from London for gathering unauthorized information. The court went to deliberate—and did not return. Three years later, Budulak was informed that he would serve 10 years. “Never mind, the Queen of England won't declare war on the USSR over you.” Mr. Mykola was fluent in English, French, German, Polish, and Russian, so Vasyl had someone to consult with about the nuances of languages while translating Kipling and Rilke.

There were older Ukrainian dissidents here, such as Kuzma Dasiv from Boryslav. In his youth, he had also been a laborer in Germany, about which he told many stories; Mykola Hamula and Mykola Hutsul from Horodenka in the Ivano-Frankivsk region—typical distributors of Ukrainian samvydav. In general, at that time, the Ukrainian ranks in the 19th camp had thinned out: Mykola Slobodian, Petro Vynnychuk, and Yaromyr Mykytko were transferred to the Urals; Kuzma Matviyuk, Lyubomyr Starosolsky, and Hryhoriy Makoviichuk were released.

Vasyl treated the participants of the national liberation war in Western Ukraine with particular respect, sparing no time to ask them questions. And when old Hutsul Mykhailo Zhurakivsky, from Yasenia near Hoverla, would take out his Jew's harp from his bag on Sundays and alternately play and sing melodies that smelled of such ancient antiquity that one's heart would ache: “But wander, little wanderer, but wander, wander…,” Vasyl would become deeply moved and ask the old man to play more. (“He plays the Jew's harp so plaintively, you could call on the Lord for help.”)

His younger countryman, Ivan, with the surname Myron (a type of Ukrainian surname), was also serving 25 years. He was captured at the age of 22. He lived with his preserved youthful respectful attitude towards elders, almost worshiping his recently deceased mother, and avoiding conversations about women. Still young in appearance, he had already gone through such hardships that it made your hair stand on end. Without a shadow of pride, he would talk about the uprisings in the camps in the early 50s:

“We were going to our deaths, women lay down under tanks, they were crushed by the tracks, but we still broke the Stalinist concentration camp regime. That's why we can't let them take away from us, one by one, the rights we won so hard.”

For him, a man of deep faith and broad education, who knew several languages, politeness and intelligence were natural, so do not doubt that this story, which happened to him, is entirely true, though it may seem incredible to some.

He was sitting in the section on his bunk one day, surrounded by dictionaries. The deputy chief of the colony for regime, Lieutenant Colonel Velmakin, comes in (hissing the ‘s’ sound):

“Citizen-convict, why are you not standing up and greeting the chief?”

“Where I come from, the one who enters greets first.”

Velmakin gave Myron 5 days in the punishment cell. The prisoner served them without taking a single crumb of food or a drop of water.

Some time later, the situation repeated itself—10 days. Myron spent them in the same way, surviving only on prayers. He barely made it out of the punishment cell and collapsed. Mykhailo Zhurakivsky picked him up and nursed him back to health. He gave him tea, pressing down his tongue with a spoon, because his tongue filled his whole mouth. After that, Myron seemed to age somehow and stopped playing volleyball with the boys.

We asked him how he dared to go on a “dry” hunger strike. After all, it is known that one can die from it even on the third day from dehydration, a blood clot can form from the thickening of the blood, one can be poisoned by one's own gastric juices. As for a regular hunger strike, irreversible processes—the body's “self-consumption” of less important organs—begin around the fortieth day. Even if you stop the hunger strike, you are already a dead man walking. It is no wonder that Jesus Christ fasted in the desert for 40 days. There is nothing accidental in the Holy Scripture. Later, in 1980, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) boys, led by Bobby Sands, went on a hunger strike. They demanded political prisoner status. But the “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher was adamant. Bobby Sands was elected a Member of Parliament during the hunger strike. Ten of them died, the rest stopped the strike. The shortest one lived was 39 days, the longest—69. Surely the conditions in British prisons were somewhat better than in Russian punishment cells.

Here is Mykola Konchakivsky—a hefty fellow from Rudnyky near Mykolaiv in the Lviv region. He “rolls logs” at the sawmill. I remember when I was first brought here on April 12, 1974, he was one of the first to approach me, greet me, ask how many years I had brought with me (it's not customary to ask about the case), and pat me on the shoulder like a father, saying:

“Never mind, Mr. Vasyl, you'll serve your time no worse than others. I've been fighting for thirty-five years now. Ever since I joined the Polish army in '39, I've been at it. My twenty-nine years are almost up.”

When I heard that, my 4 years, which had seemed like a very long term, suddenly shrank and became so pitiful… Later, Mr. Mykola told me he had three graves: one in Poland on an obelisk to the defenders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and twice his family had received news that he had fallen, and they held memorial services for him. Mr. Mykola served his 29 years, returned home in the autumn of 1977, and died a month later…

I must also mention the Lithuanian partisan Liudas Simutis, who also communicated with the younger generation without fear of persecution.

This, I believe, was our closest circle, which would gather on Sundays and holidays for “tea,” though the tea was only a pretext, a diversion for the guards, who sometimes broke up such gatherings, especially before protest actions and Soviet holidays. It was here that all the news was discussed, here that fascinating conversations took place, which I could now only reconstruct, as I am unable to retell them verbatim.

I arrived from the transport very weakened, but fortunately, the autumn of 1976 was surprisingly rich in mushrooms. Honey mushrooms grew everywhere in the industrial zone, and champignons under logs and boards. I became more skilled at mushroom picking than anyone. Ihor Kravtsiv would clean them, and Roman Semenyuk would cook them, hiding in some nook, of which there were many in this camp. We often got “burned” doing this, but still managed to get some extra nourishment for free. Because the food in the dining hall was something I don't even want to remember. And the bread was good only when the bakery in the camp burned down and for two months they brought us human bread, not the special zek-baked kind. Usually, we would invite Stus, Budulak, and Konchakivsky for these mushrooms.

“Khayma,” Vasyl would say. “They must have sewn a zek’s stomach into me somewhere in that ‘Gaazy.’ It only accepts thin soup, but not human food.”

“Khayma” was Vasyl's little word, which, as he jokingly explained to me, was supposed to be short for “khay katuyut chorty yoho mamu” (let the devils torture his mother).

There, over tea, our assessment of the events and the reasons that brought us, the next generation, which came to be called the “Sixtiers,” to the Soviet concentration camps was formed. Since I was one of the youngest in our circle, it was natural that I always sat at the edge of the table, for which Vasyl nicknamed me “skrayechkusyd” (edge-sitter). That's roughly how I felt in the Sixtiers movement: as if I had jumped up and grabbed a higher rung than I deserved, and was just hanging there, dangling my legs and thinking about how to pull myself up when I didn't have the strength. After all, the leading figures of the Sixtiers were people 10–20 years older than me; there were only a few of my peers in the camps. It seemed to me that among the students of philology at Kyiv University who gathered in the SICH (the Vasyl Chumak Literary Studio, once founded by Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Drach, Tamara Kolomiyets), many had a good chance of being arrested in 1972–1973, but for some reason, I was the one who “fell into the chosen number.” Maybe because I was lucky to have older friends who, for all five of my student years, gave me Ukrainian samvydav literature to read, and I, conspiring and hiding behind my Komsomol pin (I was even a group Komsomol organizer), gave it to literally dozens of my friends to read. And no one turned me in, which later greatly surprised investigator Mykola Tsimokh:

“Why did no one ever give me anything when I was studying at the law faculty of the university ten years earlier?”

“Because I chose decent people…”

So, without appearing in public, say, at the Shevchenko festivities on May 22, without frequenting the Ivan Honchar Museum, without flaunting an embroidered shirt (because I didn't even have one), without making personal acquaintances with the “leadership,” I was nevertheless aware of almost all the affairs of the resistance movement. I had in my hands almost all the samvydav of that time: Vasyl Symonenko’s “Diary” and poems, Mykhailo Braichevsky’s “Reunification or Annexation?,” Ivan Dziuba’s “Internationalism or Russification?,” Yevhen Sverstiuk’s “A Cathedral in Scaffolding,” “Ivan Kotlyarevsky Laughs,” “The Last Tear,” “On Mother’s Holiday,” Mykhailo Osadchy’s “Cataract,” Valentyn Moroz’s brilliant essays “Report from the Beria Reserve” and “Among the Snows,” Viacheslav Chornovil’s “What and How B. Stenchuk Defends,” “Woe from Wit,” all five issues of the “Ukrainian Herald,” and much more.

The arrests of January 12, 1972, were a profound drama for me: people who had been my guiding stars suddenly found themselves beyond a dark horizon. To remain silent was unbearable, but I was not yet capable of acting at their level, especially since, having graduated from university that year, I had to go to a village to teach. No one anywhere. Well, I had to slowly prepare a new generation, especially since before me were still pure, untouched souls, capable of taking things on faith. But I only taught for half a year: on the 20th anniversary of the Great Despot's death, March 5, 1973, I was arrested in the village of Tashan in the Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi district of the Kyiv region and soon joined the case of Vasyl Lisovyi and Yevhen Proniuk. Not without reason, for in the spring of 1972, I had helped them publish the next, sixth issue of the “Ukrainian Herald,” the idea of which was to divert accusations from those arrested, and I also helped Lisovyi produce several dozen copies of his open letter to the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in defense of those arrested. (It was published in issue 8 of the journal “Zona” in 1994).

Lest the reader think I have written a memoir about myself and not about Stus, I will skip my own case here and outline only the most interesting, socially important moments.

At our trial in November–December 1973, prosecutor Makarenko proclaimed, with what he thought was irony:

“These were the great leaders of a small movement.”

But he was right. A small circle of people obsessed with the national idea, who “grew from small, thin mothers” (M. Vinhranovsky) after the Holodomor, the war, the repressions, awakened by the spring wind that blew after the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, warmed by the fatherly hand of Maksym Rylsky—they had not yet unfolded a great national liberation movement. They were still stewing in their own juices, pulling threads from the 1920s through a thirty-year desert into their plundered present. They did not go too far. Although they rallied around the “Ukrainian Herald,” they completely rejected the idea of creating an organization. Many underground groups sprouted in Ukraine, but none managed to expand beyond a dozen or two members before they were arrested. The Sixtiers, it seems to me, held together on personal friendships. Yevhen Sverstiuk once remarked: “When so many glorious, talented, good people gather together, something will come of it.” But they thought their time had not yet come to go out into the public, although hiding from people was even worse. Where there is an underground, there is distrust. The core of this circle in Kyiv was Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Sverstiuk, and Viacheslav Chornovil.

In 1970, the “Ukrainian Herald” began to be published, edited, as is now known, by V. Chornovil. In typescript, in a very small circulation. Illustrated with photographs. But our enemies duly appreciated it, because they understood where it was leading. There were rumors that the head of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, V. Nikitchenko, himself had a conversation with Ivan Svitlychny, in which he said: “We tolerated you as long as you were not organized. Now that you have a journal, which is a sign of an organization, we must take measures against you.” It was said that Nikitchenko had once studied with Svitlychny's wife, Leonida Pavlivna, and treated Ivan with respect. Rumors of possible arrests, of a list of 600 people, began to spread. In the summer of 1970, Nikitchenko, as too loyal, was replaced by V. Fedorchuk, brought from Moscow. It was said that P. Yu. Shelest was against him, but Shelest’s own days were already numbered: it was no trouble to gather compromising material against him, and he agreed to the arrests. They were looking for a pretext. Although the 5th issue of the “Ukrainian Herald” announced that its publication was being discontinued, this did not save the Sixtiers. The pretext for the arrests was, as always, a political provocation.

At the end of 1971, a Belgian citizen, a member of the Ukrainian Youth Association, Yaroslav Dobosh, came to Kyiv via Prague and Lviv. As I later learned from my classmates, Lemkos from Prešov, Mariya Hostova and Anna Kotsur, he had met with Anna in Prague, and she had given him the phone numbers of several people in Kyiv and Lviv. Later, in the materials attached to our case from Svitlychny's case, I read that Dobosh had had telephone conversations and meetings with Svitlychny and someone else right in the hotel and on the street. Nothing special was said, so no one paid any particular attention to Dobosh. In Kyiv, Anna gave Dobosh a microfilm of the “Dictionary of Ukrainian Rhymes,” which Sviatoslav Karavansky had compiled during his long years of captivity. This dictionary had been passed from hand to hand; several university departments had recommended it for publication. But the author was once again in captivity—so the dictionary automatically became “seditious.” Later in the press, it was referred to as “one anti-Soviet document” (see the newspaper “Literaturna Ukrayina” of June 6, 1972). Dobosh was returning home for the New Year when he was arrested and accused of espionage. He got scared and told them who he had seen and what he had talked about in Kyiv and Lviv. A photocopy of his statement was in our case with Lisovyi and Proniuk. If it had been published in full (the Soviet press only gave snippets with appropriate interpretation), everyone would have been convinced of the clumsy case the KGB had concocted under Fedorchuk's command. But no matter: the pretext was there. A rumor swept through Kyiv: on January 12, Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Viacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus, Zinovia Franko, Mykola Kholodnyi, Oles Serhiyenko, Leonid Plyushch, Vasyl Zakharchenko, Leonid Seleznenko, and Mykola Plakhotniuk were arrested... In Lviv, Iryna Kalynets, Ihor Kalynets, Stefania Shabatura, Ivan Hel... Dozens of names were mentioned. The newspapers “Radianska Ukrayina” and “Pravda Ukrainy” on January 15 published a few lines about Dobosh’s arrest, and on February 11, a few more lines ending with something like: “For conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR and in connection with the case of Ya. Dobosh, I. Svitlychny, E. Sverstiuk, V. Chernovol, and others have been arrested.” Exactly so: “Chernovol.” And behind “and others” stood dozens of people, hundreds of searches, thousands of summonses for interrogation, dismissals from work, expulsions from universities, blocking the children of the arrested or anyone even remotely connected from higher education… Borys Kovhar was arrested. Anna Kotsur was detained for a while, then she stayed for some time in the Czechoslovak consulate, as if it were some kind of refuge after the occupation of the entire country… Ivan Dziuba was detained and released, but on April 18, he was finally arrested. On May 18, Nadiia Svitlychna was arrested… No one was charged with “espionage,” only with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” but the aforementioned newspapers have yet to see fit to publicly apologize for this.

Kyiv is paralyzed. I, then a fifth-year student of Ukrainian philology at Kyiv University, experienced those events as a personal tragedy. Vasyl Lisovyi, a philosopher with whom I had become close when I was a freshman and he was a graduate student teaching us logic, and who for all these years had given me Ukrainian samvydav to read, was walking around looking black as night. One day he asked me for help: there was an idea to publish another issue of the “Ukrainian Herald” to divert the accusations from those arrested. I bought paper, transported something somewhere. But when I got the entire “print run” (some ten typescript copies on thin paper) into my hands and went to my sister’s apartment to proofread and collate it—I felt that what I held in my hands was the most important thing in Ukraine at that moment. There was a report on the arrests, brief information about the arrested. Then followed a letter from Borys Kovhar to KGB investigator Colonel Danylenko about how he, Kovhar, was “sent” into the environment of the Sixtiers to inform. He did this for a while, but then, convinced that he was dealing with the best people in Ukraine, he tried to refuse the shameful craft. But the KGB punishes its “renegades” with particular mercilessness: Borys Kovhar spent ten years in a special-regime psychiatric hospital.

In the spring of 1972, Vasyl Lisovyi told me that he was preparing an open letter to the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR to protest the arrests. It cannot be, he said, that everyone remains silent; someone must speak out in defense. I read it and—without the author’s permission, together with Petro Romko—rewrote its unfinished version. (The final version of the “Open Letter to the Members of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine” was published in the journal “Zona,” No. 8, 1994, pp. 125-148). The letter ended thus: “Dobosh has been released, but the ‘Dobosh affair’ is now simply a case turned against the living Ukrainian people and the living Ukrainian culture. Such a ‘case’ truly unites all those arrested. But I consider myself also involved in such a case—which is why I ask to be arrested and tried as well.” Which is what happened on July 6, 1972.

I again performed technical operations, met with Yevhen Proniuk and the typist regarding this matter. But the letter did not become public knowledge then, because instead of me, it was E. Proniuk who went to pick up the copies from the typist. He was detained on the way on that same July 6, and I, with a heavy heart, went to the Pereiaslav region to teach. I waited for my turn for eight difficult months, about which I should one day write separately.

It cannot be said that I did not understand that I was a “criminal” against the existing system, because I always and everywhere spread the truth about its anti-Ukrainian essence, thereby truly undermining it. And yet I was never free of astonishment: could it be that Lisovyi, Svitlychny, Dziuba, Sverstiuk, Moroz, Stus, about whom I had heard so much and whose good works I had read, and I along with them—that we were “especially dangerous state criminals”? How could their tongues form such words? No, it wasn't about us, it was like a dream, it was as if behind glass…

Our sincerity and naivety harmed us during the investigation and in court: we did not know how to lie! Even not to tell the truth—that was hard for us. I was captivated by Yevhen Proniuk (I had only seen him twice before) when I was familiarizing myself with the materials of our case: lengthy questions, and all the answers were the same: “The question is understood, I refuse to answer on ethical grounds.” Because it concerned normal behavior, a normal act, and good thoughts—and they were being judged as crimes! I complained a little to my elders, why hadn't they taught me how to behave in case of arrest. But then it turned out that they, for the most part, were just as inexperienced themselves. But the gang had gone to school on how to break us!

We went to our fate with open souls, not feeling like criminals and not knowing how to lie. And the truth did not seem terrible to us. They deceived us and blackmailed us with the psychiatric hospital. I was terrified at the prospect of becoming a human-like beast at 24 and began to tell some things. Some friends hold it against me. No one knows the measure of their own sin; perhaps I still have a million years of purgatory to endure—but let them mercifully consider that for more than thirteen years I atoned for these very sins, and in an hour of joy, forgive me. It was a horrific violation of our untainted souls.

When in December 1973, prosecutor V. Makarenko proclaimed in a booming voice: “The defendants Proniuk, Lisovyi, Ovsiyenko, having entered into a criminal conspiracy…,” I involuntarily glanced at the courtroom to see if anyone was laughing. Was this about us? No, no one smiled. In the courtroom—only the wooden physiognomies of the “special public.” Only on my poor father’s head fall the stones of words he does not understand. He sits stunned.

Proniuk’s defender, Kzhepytskyi, began his speech thus:

“All of us, lawyers, fully and completely share the anger and indignation with which comrade prosecutor…”

My lawyer, Hertruda Denysenko, before the trial, tried to persuade me to repent:

“Of course, you understand that your activity for the Soviet government is like a mosquito bite to an elephant.”

“Of course. For that, the mosquito is killed.”

Even earlier, I had reproached my investigator, Tsimokh:

“Don’t you understand what you are doing?”

“Never mind,” was the reply, “our cause will outlive us.”

It did not outlive you, Mykola Pavlovych. Your elephant is dead, Hertruda Ivanivna. And from our “mosquito bites” as well. These godless people did not fear God’s punishment, and did not think of the shame they brought upon their kin. Now they are probably on a “well-deserved retirement,” receiving good pensions from the state against whose emergence they fought so fiercely. Or they are building a “law-based Ukrainian state” together with Judge P. H. Tsuprenko, who, after sentencing us, became the First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR and remained so even in the first years of independence. (Died around 1993). Of course, they are valuable specialists… But I would not say they are good specialists. After all, the fortress they were defending has fallen. So they will bring down Ukraine as well! I do not call down curses upon them and do not wish for them to now sit where they sent us, but let them in their old age earn their daily bread not by the legal craft, but with sickles or hammers. Not paper ones, but real ones. And let people nod their heads at them and point their fingers at their children. For one must answer for sin unto the seventh generation.

This was the atmosphere of 1972–1973, when the case of Vasyl Stus was being fabricated.

Vasyl Stus rarely mentioned individual episodes of his case. But once he showed a photograph taken in Lviv during the Christmas caroling of 1972, on January 9. He stands, his head leaning against a doorframe. People at a festive table. There is Mykhailo Horyn, Stefa Shabatura, Iryna Kalynets, Lyubomyra Popadiuk, Olena Antoniv, and someone else. Three days later, Vasyl, Stefa, and Iryna would be arrested. “I felt so dreary in my soul then,” said Vasyl. That mood is conveyed in “A Sketch of a Memory,” written, probably, in Mordovia:

  Already then, when, having dived into the forest,

  you drank greedily the Carpathian sorrow,

  partaking for the last time of its

  age-old otherness, that glazes over

  and does not let you closer, already then,

  having slipped on the clayey clods,

  a thorny tremor took hold of your leg

  and your heart grew numb… Already then, as the evening

  nurtured your phantasmagorical solitude

  among the figures of phantasmagorical passersby

  (darkness stuffed into yellow flasks of memory

  the hunched, lingering lanterns) --

  a premonition of disaster stepped in your tracks

  and a foreboding ran ahead.

  Defiled by the masks of drunkards,

  lechers, whores, grasping vagabonds

  and feebleminded countrymen,

  this sinless, yet sinful, deaf little town

  trembled, swayed, like a quagmire,

  under the whispers of indifferent storytellers,

  wishing to please one and all—

  what a chill blew upon me

  in this estranged fatherland, right here,

  where the land seemed to me the heart of hearts,

  and a groan of blood marked the horizon!

I do not know which town Stus visited, besides Lviv, perhaps Truskavets, but this “otherness that glazes over,” “a land that seemed the heart of hearts,” because here one could still hear the “groan of blood” of the insurgents, which for us, from the Dnipro region, testified to the continuity of our liberation struggles (“marked the horizon”), indicates that it was a Galician town, which, like all of Ukraine, was emasculated, repressed, and occupied by foreigners.

We, from the Dnipro region and Galicia, who were imprisoned in Mordovia, Siberia, the Urals, had the opportunity to overcome that alienation that the “grasping vagabonds” had imposed on us, dividing us with borders. But our entire nation will not overcome it soon. Even Levko Lukianenko once told me about this: having come to work in Galicia in 1959, he for some time felt that this land was for him “as if behind glass.”

Already then, when your own people—

  these dear, sinful, glorious, honest faces—

  began to rustle, to hiss all at once

  over your head, already then,

  when in the sun of dear surroundings

  you felt an anxious stillness, and the water

  ran through hardened arteries,—

  horses galloped towards you (it’s him, it’s him!—

  the utterly bewildered crowds said

  and yellow fingers pointed in your direction)—

  the future was writing at random

  your stolen today.

Bad premonitions are not in vain, because the surveillance of everyone was total, and who knows where it is easier: to be under convoy or under secret surveillance, when you can be seized at any moment.

  Already then,

  when the last Christmastide was forming

  (it was Christmas Eve, and carols, and the clamor

  of children’s clear caroling),

  you felt it. When through an unknown Lviv

  you walked by guesswork, nearing your hour

  (here it is, here you are, moment of parting,

  that outran the meeting), already then,

  when, hoping for happy wishes,

  hosts of sick people from the clinic looked out for us,

  and a solemn, memorable song

  was a dam for the noisy trams

  and late passersby, I realized:

  this is all—one immense farewell

  to the earth, to the world, to eternity, to being.

The fruit of long reflections on the fate of a generation and of all Ukraine was a poem, marked in the manuscript as number 63:

  The path sinks into the darkness of a dream.

  Higher and higher reach the waters

  Of tart oblivion. The edge is ever nearer.

  I look into the emptiness of days and years

  and think: where is that boundary, by which

  a lost soul returns

  to its primordial state. To the vale of those luxuries,

  Which trumpeted the young years.

  Quo vadis? The disobedient step

  recognized itself in this joyless gait,

  and you only follow in its track!

  And the paltry strip of years narrows,

  as your own shadow comes towards you

  and foretells, foretells: here it is, broken,

  your road. Darkness. Abyss. The end.

  In one conversation, Vasyl even depicted the situation that had developed by 1972. It was like this, he said, we lifted our leg to take a step, but hesitated, wondering, is it time to step? Are we capable of taking on a higher responsibility? It was at that very moment that they cut off our other leg. So the KGB's calculation was correct and precise: to cut us down right now, to get by with “little bloodshed,” because tomorrow would be too late: the “great leaders” would launch a great movement that could only be stopped with mass repressions.

  Go beyond the edge. It is too hard for us to live

  with the uncertainty of purpose. A half-step,

  as if a step taken above oneself,

  paused and froze. A half-desire

  cut short by half-hesitation. The horizons of limits

  hide behind the hills of patience

  and are invisible to the audacious goals

  of expanse.

Rethinking the past, you want to correct something in it, because you see that it shouldn't have been that way, that you didn't live up to expectations:

    Oh, what if that land

  had known our smallness? What would have happened—

  for a mountain to be a mountain? What would it take for us

  to move—these stretches of time,

  these wispy stretches of life,

  when the emaciated figures of strength,

  these storms of ashen passions,

  suddenly descended upon us.

  And one wants to reach beyond the edge of time,

  beyond the primordial. Oh, what would it take for us to straighten up

  by returning into death. Oh, what would it take to walk

  up the slope of fate to the summit of a scream,

  with which the firmament of the first creation burst forth

  and stirred the certainty of silence and decay!

  Oh, those unbearable exits beyond the edge

  of omnipresence! Oh, those prayers of fear,

  oh, that audacious thirst for self-escape,

  the desire for combustion, for burning, for auto-

  da-fé. That frost of suffering

  and the eternal untouchability of daring,

  the movement of movement of movement. That boundlessness of forces,

  stirred by a young pain.

  That haze of efforts, that evidence

  of self-revelation, that deafened abyss

  of collapse and stepping beyond

  visible death, so that the hummocks of torment

  would mold the wombs for flowers… This is you,

  uncertainty. This is you, road,

  which headlong turns us back

  to the heart of hearts, into the aortas of fury,

  where a dovelike hum is boundless.

Somewhere in another poem, Vasyl felt the pain:

  For we are few. A tiny handful—

  only for prayers and endless waiting.

  Fate warns us in advance,

  That viburnum blood is so steep,

  so tart, like the blood in our veins…

And he repented before the image of Alla Horska:

We did not endure. Forgive us.

Forgive us. We did not endure,

Too small for our own crucifixion.

The collapse of hopes, the premonition of an early death—this is the seal that marks many of Stus’s poems from his Mordovian period. He knew his fate:

  We will sink into eternity young…

And he only asked:

  Grant me, O Father, a high fall…

He remembered Kyiv, which was dear to him above all for its dearest people. This poem, he said, took him seven years to nurture:

  Like a swarm of birds

  Blessed St. Sophia’s shone forth,

  and galactic Kyiv turns to bronze

  in the flicker of the dearest faces…

He remembered Ivan Svitlychny, in whose presence, according to Vasyl, the biggest fool would say intelligent and kind things, even if Ivan said not a word, but was only present and smiling into his mustache. And the brilliant, in Stus's words, Ivan Dziuba. And I recalled how the chief of the Kyiv KGB prison, Lieutenant Colonel Sapozhnikov, personally brought us to our cells the issue of “Literaturna Ukrayina” from November 9, 1973, with I. Dziuba's “recantation,” in which he regretted having inadvertently harmed his native state. The statement, however, was quite restrained, not implicating anyone, unlike Mykola Kholodnyi's statement of July 4, 1972. Or the recantations of Zinovia Franko and Leonid Seleznenko. So many broken, mutilated souls! But Vasyl's assessment of Ivan Dziuba deserves a separate mention.

His was the most famous name among the Sixtiers, although a smaller circle knew well that all of Ukrainian Kyiv actually revolved around Ivan Svitlychny. But to many, it seemed that the mace of ultimate responsibility for Ukraine had fallen precisely on Dziuba—thanks to his work “Internationalism or Russification?,” which had circulated in Ukraine in typescript since the end of 1965 and had been published abroad in several languages. It was truly the “Bible” of a whole generation in the era of bidding farewell to communist illusions. Dziuba’s work became a landmine under the “Leninist national policy of the CPSU.” It was written as if from Leninist positions, but it revealed to the reader such a “practice of national construction” that he could not help but doubt the theory as well. I told Stus that at my trial with Lisovyi and Proniuk, prosecutor Makarenko said that Dziuba was already tired of politics, he wanted to return to his own work, to literary criticism (this was early December 1973, just after his “recantation” was published). That Dziuba had supposedly said: one Ukrainian-language pioneer song is worth more than all our samvydav; maybe a play by Korneichuk, whom we all so vehemently dislike, does more for Ukraine now than… I don't remember what. One would have to peek into the KGB archives. But even Ivan the Terrible's archives are not declassified yet… I asked Vasyl about that “meeting at the top” that prosecutor Makarenko had mentioned. Because it turned out that it was a conversation in Stus's apartment at 62 Lvivska Street, which the KGB had fully recorded and quoted almost openly during the investigation. “But I don't remember such a tirade from Dziuba,” Vasyl said.

In 1973, Ivan Dziuba was sentenced to 5 years in a strict-regime camp, but he was not sent to the c he was released from the pre-trial detention center—and he disappeared from Ukraine for 10 years. Just like those who were convicted and sent to psychiatric hospitals.

I was taken to Kyiv in the summer of 1976 and brought back fresh news about Ivan Dziuba. Our Kyiv KGB guard, Honchar, gave me a collection of Ivan Drach’s poetry, “Kyiv Sky,” which had been awarded the Shevchenko Prize because it contained several poems about Lenin. “And he could have been in prison,” Honchar said deliberately. He also gave me a new little book by Ivan Dziuba to read, “Facets of a Crystal,” which contained a single “recantation” paragraph, while the rest of the text consisted of articles about writers from the peoples of the USSR. And not a single one about Ukrainian writers. So, he was forbidden to write about Ukrainian literature. (Later, a thick book with the same title was published in hardcover. To jump ahead, I will say that his first article on Ukrainian topics—exactly 10 years later—was about Mykola Vinhranovsky in “Literaturna Ukrayina.”)

I can see it as if it were now: Vasyl standing by the barrack with a fresh issue of the journal “Vitchyzna,” his eyes scanning Dziuba's article about some Yuvan Shestalov or Yuri Rytkheu, and saying: “A cruiser in a puddle… Poor Ivan, what have they done to you…”

When someone spoke too critically of Ivan’s “recantation,” Vasyl would stop them as politely as possible: “You don’t know what he endured during the investigation. After all, as the most significant figure, the pressure on him was the greatest.” “But he was already a banner, he should have died rather than surrender; someone else could have repented, but not him, the author of such an epochal work.” “And still, my tongue cannot bring itself to condemn him. And whoever hasn't been here—let them not dare to even squeak about it.”

Jumping ahead once more, I will say that later, in the Urals, in 1984, Vasyl consoled himself with the thought that the letter he did in fact write to Dziuba in 1975 had been lost and was never published anywhere. Vasyl was mistaken. I recently saw his “Open Letter to Ivan Dziuba” published in the book: Vasyl Stus in Life, Work, Memoirs, and Assessments of His Contemporaries. Baltimore-Toronto: Smoloskyp, 1987, pp. 69–71. (See also: V. Stus. Works in 6 vols., 9 books. Lviv: Prosvita, 1994–99. Vol. 4, pp. 441–443).

He used to say in Mordovia: “If here, in this hell, one of us were to write a ‘recantation’ to save himself (I would never allow myself to do so), I wouldn’t say a word.” But how wittily he mocked Oles Berdnyk when the latter bought his freedom with a “recantation”! (“LU” of May 17, 1984). Later in the Urals, Vasyl also recalled his kinsman Vasyl Zakharchenko, to whom he had sent a telegram from Kolyma with just two words in response to a recanting statement in that same “LU”: “Shame, Vasyl!” Yet another case. Kuchyno, the Urals. Vasyl Fedorenko, exhausted after some 30 years of imprisonment, “cooperated” with the “kum,” turning over some piece of writing by Levko Lukianenko that had been prepared for smuggling out to freedom. For this, Levko was thrown from the open-barracks regime, where he had spent only two months, into a punishment cell and then returned to a cell for the remainder of his term. Fedorenko was afraid that Levko, through a visit with his wife, would report this to the outside. Vasyl happened to overhear their conversation through the door’s wicket, and later, from the work cell’s wicket, he teased Fedorenko, who was out for his walk in the yard just a few feet away: “Levko, Levko, don’t tell Nadia that I’m a rat…”

And here are a few episodes from Mordovia.

We are sitting on a bench one day. A snitch walks by with a cat in his arms.

“Who do you think has it best in the camp, Vasyl?” Vasyl asks, deliberately loud. And answers his own question:

“Cats and sons of bitches.”

The snitch quickly makes himself scarce.

Sometime in December 1976, Vasyl and I are called to have our pictures taken: he would soon be off to exile, and I was going home. They offer us a false jacket-and-shirt front with a tie—to look like a civilian in the photo.

“If the state is not ashamed to keep me in these clothes I have on, then I, on the contrary, would be proud to wear them even in my Soviet passport photo.”

And so we were photographed just as we were.

What struck me about Vasyl’s character was his absolute refusal to compromise with his own conscience. Here is a situation. A young Latvian, Maigonis Rāviņš, was put in a punishment cell for failing to meet his work quota. The boy was terribly ill, with fluid draining from his nose and ears, his eyes watering, and there, too, on starvation rations, he was forced to meet the work quota. There was no way to inform the outside world, so starting any kind of protest was pointless, but Vasyl says:

“Do as you wish, but I will do what I think is right.”

And he begins a hunger strike. You involuntarily follow his lead.

One day I was asking Vasyl about a work I had heard about back when I was a student, the title of which the KGB agents in the verdict had translated as “Phenomenon of the Day.” They meant “of the Epoch.” For some reason, Vasyl was reluctant to talk about it, but he eventually said it was a work from his graduate school days about Pavlo Tychyna, about the poet’s brilliant talent and his vile downfall when the repressions began. I remember one episode from Vasyl’s story. After the arrest of Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska (January 1930), two writers ran into Pavlo Tychyna on the street and said:

“How times change. Just the other day we were with you at her evening soirée, and now she’s an enemy of the people.”

“Me? I wasn’t there!”

“But of course you were, you must have forgotten.”

“No, I really wasn’t there, you must be mistaken.”

The writers realized what was going on and agreed that he had not been there. They said their goodbyes and parted ways. But Tychyna catches up to them, grabbing them by the sleeves:

“I have a feeling you think I was there. So I’m telling you again, I was not there!”

“But of course, Pavlo Hryhorovych, we were mistaken; you really were not there.”

Few people know that Tychyna had already been arrested by then, that as the most talented one, the pressure on him was the greatest. Being a sensitive soul, he felt a breaking point within himself as early as 1922:

Ah, perhaps I too should kiss the Pope’s slipper?

Vasyl was deeply distressed that all five typewritten copies of his work “Phenomenon of the Epoch” had fallen into the hands of the KGB and were possibly destroyed. Fortunately, the work has since been printed, first in the journal “Vitchyzna” in 1990, and it came out as a separate brochure in 1993. (See also: V. Stus. Works. 1994. Vol. 4, pp. 259–346).

I told Vasyl how, as a teacher, I had to study Tychyna’s poem “The Party Leads” with my students in class, a poem written right after the famine of 1933 and immediately published in the newspaper “Pravda” in Ukrainian:

All the masters to a single pit,

Bourgeois after bourgeois,

We shall, we shall beat them!

We shall, we shall beat them!

And the refrain:

The Party leads!

The Party leads!

What masters, what bourgeois! I, of course—not in class, but in the hallway to a few boys—shortened this poem a bit:

The Party leads

Everyone to a single pit.

Vasyl spoke reluctantly about his own verdict: it was empty, and the charges were trumped-up. In any case, the reader can now familiarize themselves with the “Protest by Way of Supervision” by the Prosecutor of the UkrSSR, M.O. Potebenko, regarding Stus’s sentence, which was published in “Literaturna Ukrayina” on April 28, 1990. He once mentioned a witness who testified to literally this:

“Stus spoke Ukrainian even when there was no need to.”

(At this point, I must say that in the publication of my memoirs in the journal “Donbas” No. 3, 1990, on page 100, I mentioned the poet Oles Lupiy. This was a false memory. But Stanislav Telniuk, may he rest in peace, pointed out to me in “Literaturna Ukrayina” in 1990 that Oles Lupiy was not involved in Stus’s case at all. It was about someone else. I take this opportunity to apologize to the esteemed Oles Lupiy).

Vasyl also said that they had incriminated him for a quatrain he himself had forgotten. Where on earth did the KGB agents dig it up? I’ve seen another version published somewhere, but from Vasyl’s lips in Mordovia, it sounded like this:

A gang of bandits and terrorists

robbers, and rapists

has taken up residence in the capital city

as the Bolshevik party.

The KGB agents were thrilled: they had something to build a “case” on.

ENDS OF THE EARTH

Stus was taken away on a prison transport on the last day of his prison term—January 11, 1977. The journey took almost two months. Already at home, I received a letter from him. It turned out we were released from convoy on the same day, March 5. I was released in Zhytomyr and placed under administrative surveillance in Radomyshl that very day, while Stus was released into exile in the Magadan Oblast, in the village of Matrosova in the Tenkinsky District. Each extra day spent under guard on a transport counted as three days of exile, so he returned to Kyiv in August 1979, not in January 1980, as his sentence stipulated.

I received several letters from Vasyl from Kolyma, but unfortunately, they have not survived, just like my entire “archive.” He wrote, I remember, that the journey had been very hard on him. For a time, he was with Viktor Khaustov: “He is a great statist.” He wrote that he was working in a gold-mining shaft, where people quickly develop silicosis. (“From the mines they carry out gold, to fill the gullet of the insatiable one…” No, Vasyl did not mention these words of Shevchenko about the Decembrists in his letters). Once I wrote to him that I had heard his poems on Radio “Liberty,” from his new collection “A Candle in a Mirror.” Vasyl asked me not to write such things in letters, because they wouldn’t be let through. Incidentally, later, in the Urals, Vasyl told me that it was not he who had named this collection, but the publishers, who had found this image in one of the poems. A candle, repeating endlessly between two mirrors.

Sometime in August 1977, Vasyl broke his leg because he had to climb through the wicket of his dormitory window: his neighbor had intentionally taken the key with him. I learned about this not from Vasyl himself, but I wrote an alarmed letter to the local doctors and sent a copy across Ukraine. The doctors took offense and asked someone there to protect them from me. For this letter (and for other “sins”), my administrative surveillance was extended, and I was issued an official warning about the inadmissibility of legal violations. The prosecutor of the Radomyshl district, Leonid Sytenko, held up my package to Vasyl with dried fruits and a bunch of guelder-rose for two months. Perhaps it was this that Vasyl remembered in one of his poems: “In the Kolyma frost, the guelder-rose blooms with auburn tears.”

He left the hospital early because he was worried about the papers he had left behind in the dormitory—books and manuscripts. Of course, he found much was missing: thugs had pilfered it. He hopped on crutches, with no one to bring him water from the floor below. This is what I’m recounting from what I heard from Vasyl in the Urals. He had to live in a dormitory with criminal exiles. It was unbearably difficult in an atmosphere of constant drunkenness and profanity. “I would gladly return to Mordovia,” Vasyl wrote to me. One time, a drunken company burst into his room, and one of them started pestering him:

“So, countryman, you got sprung? I know you. You’ve got a little sin on your soul. Let’s go, we’ll settle up.”

Another, having drunk himself sick, urinated in Vasyl’s teapot… And there was also an incident where they provoked him into drinking a little vodka. He wouldn’t have drunk it, he said, but he was hoping to get rid of a cold. He went out to the outhouse, and there they grabbed him and took him to the drunk tank!

Moving to a private apartment, though not forbidden, was impossible: as soon as he would make an arrangement, the owners would be intimidated and would refuse the next day. A campaign was launched against him in the local press, and meetings of the “labor collective” were held to condemn the nationalist Stus. I remember Radio “Liberty” broadcasting his statement on this matter.

Vasyl recalled the visit of his wife, Valentina. As they walked through the settlement, it was like a nest of vipers, hissing at them, and he would say to his wife: “Hold your head high, Valyok!” That’s what he affectionately called her—Valyok.

And through all of this, a phrase from a letter has stuck in my mind: “The poems are coming, but in a turbid stream.”

Meanwhile, the resistance movement in Ukraine was reviving. On November 9, 1976, the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords announced its formation. One by one, its founding members went to prison: Oлекса Tykhy and Mykola Rudenko, Mykola Matusevych and Myroslav Marynovych, Levko Lukianenko… Through the grapevine, I heard that the exiles Viacheslav Chornovil and Vasyl Stus had agreed to cooperate with it.

(Note: This is now confirmed by published letters. Yet some Oleksandr Paskhover, in issue 41 (124) of the journal “Polityka i Kultura” in 2001, in an article with the cynical title “The Mistake of an Ex-Convict,” and an even more cynical subtitle “Democracy is the Most Popular Fool’s Game,” offers sage, retrospective advice to the members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group on how they should have behaved when the repressions began: they should have “disbanded and acted more moderately.” Instead, in their case, “human ambitions came into play, but normal logic did not.” The author reasons like that wise gypsy: “What’s this war at night? You might get poked in the eye…” And he portrays us, Ukrainians, as some sort of naive simpletons. Behind the author’s feigned sympathy and sly concern for the “glory of Ukraine,” one can glimpse a cunning attempt to downplay this outstanding phenomenon: as if those foolish Ukrainians only knew how to “perish for no good reason.”

Before writing, one should have read a bit of the Group’s materials and the letters of Vasyl Stus himself, published back in 1997, rather than relying solely on the subjective memoirs of Semen Gluzman, who was little acquainted with the Group’s activities. Because there are other assessments. The renowned American scholar of political thought, Ivan L. Rudnytsky, noted back in 1981: “…the factually confirmed significance of the Ukrainian dissidents is beyond doubt. The sacrifice of these brave men and women testifies to the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian nation. Their struggle for human and national rights is in harmony with the global trend of human progress in the spirit of freedom. The Ukrainian dissidents believe that the truth of freedom will prevail. It does not behoove those who are fortunate enough to live in free countries to believe any less.” (Ivan L. Rudnytsky. “The Political Thought of Soviet Ukrainian Dissidents.” In the book: Historical Essays. Volume 2. Kyiv, “Osnovy,” 1994, pp. 486–487).

And the most distressing thing in O. Paskhover’s publication is the claim that it was Oksana Yakivna Meshko who “dragged in,” “recruited” Vasyl Stus into the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (this is KGB vocabulary!) and sent him “to the scaffold” (as if the KGB had nothing to do with it!). He writes: “…Mrs. Meshko was a true revolutionary, and Vasyl became a victim of her revolution”; “…Oksana Yakivna was probably indifferent to the fact that tomorrow Stus would be brutally murdered in the camps”; “Vasyl was a brilliant guy, and he could have done so much more for Ukraine than what he was being dragged into the group for.” As if Stus were a naive child. But he was a powerful personality, capable of inspiring and leading others!

I have reviewed the letters of Vasyl Stus, published in his six-volume collection. As early as October 1977, from his exile in the Magadan Oblast, he writes to Petro Grigorenko in Moscow, to Svitlana Kyrychenko and others in Kyiv, to Levko Lukianenko in Chernihiv, and to his wife and son, that he is ready to “take the place” of the arrested members of the Group (he calls it the Oversight Committee), that he is ready to “place his own head under the hefty club.” And he persistently repeats this several times, writing that upon a second arrest he will not give any testimony, and he outlines a whole program of his actions in case of arrest.

To P. G. Grigorenko, 1977 (an unfinished autograph of the letter was seized during a search on 02/10/1978), vol. 4, p. 450:

“I have already written—to Moscow, and to L. Lukianenko, and to A. Bolonkin—that it is not fitting for me to sit idly by, even with limited opportunities due to my astronomical distance from the capitals. Therefore, I give my full consent, my carte blanche—to both Sasha Bolonkin and L. Lukianenko as a member of the Ukrainian Oversight Committee, and to you as an authoritative representative of the democratic movement—for my participation in all endeavors that promote the cause of progress in ensuring the human rights of peoples to the independent determination of their fate.” (p. 450).

To Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Svitlana Kyrychenko, and Yuriy Badzyo, Leonida and Nadiia Svitlychna and Pavlo Stokotelnyi, Ryta and Borys Dovhan, dated 10/29/1977, vol. 6, book 2, p. 124:

“…Levko hears that the community is utterly intimidated by the crackdown on the Oversight Committee. So, if there are members of such in Kyiv, let them know: I agree to become its member, though I can do little, being far from Ukraine.

Because when the first rank has fallen, someone must take their place. Of course, you may have your own considerations (and valid ones), but I would not want them—these considerations of refusal—to be dictated by fear of the tank that crushes everything in its path.”

To L. H. Lukianenko, dated 10/31/1977, vol. 4, p. 454:

“Mr. Levko, if no one is stepping in to replace the departed members of the oversight group committee, I am willing to take a place. I know that I will be able to do little from here, but still… If my proposal is accepted, let them let me know. I have written about this to both Kyiv and Lviv.”

To his wife, son, and friends, on New Year’s Eve, 12/31–01/01/1978, vol. 6, book 1, p. 295:

“If they are finishing off the defense committee—at such an interesting time—then one must assume that the time of our meeting with Levko, so distant, can only be brought closer by a new Mordovia.” (p. 295).

“So, I do not know if Kyiv or Moscow has reacted in any way to my proposal to also place my head under the hefty club. For I have not had a single letter on this matter.” (p. 295).

This means that Kyiv and Moscow did not want to expose Stus to danger.

When Stus returned to Kyiv in the late summer of 1979, he became an active member of the Group. In letters from exile, he writes directly about himself as a member of the Group. To V. Chornovil, December 1979, vol. 6, book 2, p. 177:

“The conditions are utterly awful. O(ksana) Y(akivna) is ill and a bit whimsical. On 7.12 they gave me surveillance for a year—to be home from 20:30 to 6 a.m., not to visit O(ksana) Y(akivna). You, Stefa (Shabatura. – V.O.), I—have been declared members of a non-existent, completely paralyzed group.”

To Y. Sverstiuk, 02/29/1980, vol. 6, book 2, p. 182:

“Consider the Group non-existent. Its presence is a formality, though I sign my appeals to the authorities as a participant.”

In 1982, in Kuchyno in the Urals, in his notes “From a Camp Notebook,” Stus wrote (vol. 4, p. 493):

“In Kyiv, I learned that people close to the Helsinki Group were being repressed in the most brutal way. That, at least, is how they tried Ovsiienko, Horbal, Lytvyn, and how they later dealt with Chornovil and Rozumnyi. I did not want such a Kyiv. Seeing that the Group was effectively left to its own devices, I joined it, because I simply could not do otherwise. When your life has been taken—I do not need the crumbs. I had to busy myself with saving my poems, contributing to the Group’s informational materials. (…)

Psychologically, I understood that the prison gate had already opened for me, that in a matter of days it would close behind me—and close for a long time. But what was I to do? Ukrainians are not let out of the country, and I had no great desire—to go abroad: for who here, in the Great Ukraine, would become the voice of indignation and protest? This is fate, and one does not choose one’s fate. So one accepts it—whatever it may be. And when one does not accept it, then it chooses us by force.”

And further (vol. 4, p. 491):

“But I was not going to bow my head, no matter what. Behind me stood Ukraine, my oppressed people, for whose honor I must stand until I perish.”

V. Stus writes about his relations with the UHG on the following pages: V. Stus. Works in 6 vols., 9 books. Lviv: Prosvita, Vol. 4, 1994, pp. 450, 454–455, 456–459, 494, 501; Vol. 6, book 1, 1997, p. 295; Vol. 6, book 2, 1997, pp. 124–125, 147, 177, 179, 181–182, 184.

Pro memoria for O. Paskhover and other people of “common sense”: “God requires the sacrifice of the best” (V. Stus). Svitlana Kyrychenko gave a worthy response to O. Paskhover, but PiK published her article “The Mistake of a Non-Convict, or A Defect of Vision” only in a truncated form in issue 3 (134), pp. 32–33).

On November 18, 1978, Oksana Yakivna Meshko came from Kyiv and Olha Orlova—sister of political prisoner Serhiy Babych—from Zhytomyr to visit me in the village of Lenine (until 1924, Stavky) in the Radomyshl district. “Vasyl, there’s no one left to work in the Helsinki Group,” Oksana Yakivna said. I looked at 74-year-old Baba Oksana, who was fighting almost single-handedly against the entire Evil Empire—and well, you’re a man wearing trousers, after all… I agreed, which meant setting a course for prison. Before we knew it—prison was already here! Two policemen and a KGB agent grabbed us on the street, took us to the village council, searched us, cursed us out, and took the women away in a Black Maria to Radomyshl, while a policeman named Slavynsky grabbed me by the collar and shoved me out the door. On December 1, I sued the hooligans, but on the 8th, a case was opened… against me.

Arriving home that evening (my anxious mother was waiting for the bus out by the garden) and understanding full well that there was no getting out of this for me, I cautiously told my mother about the new trouble and sat down to type the final pages of my memoirs about Mordovia. That writing had a grand title: “The Light of People.” I had been working on it all autumn. My heart sensed that I wouldn’t be on this short leash of administrative surveillance for long—soon they would drive me into the kennel. And God knows if I would return from there, so I had to leave some memento of the good people. For some reason, most of it was about Stus. I typed up the last of the 42 small sheets (A5 format), hid one copy in a small forest, and told my mother to give it to Dmytro Mazur, and I sealed the second in a synthetic jar—so they wouldn’t find it—and together with other papers so precious to me, I entrusted them to Mother Earth, showing the location only to my brother Mykola. I returned nine and a half years later—it was gone. And Mazur’s copy has not surfaced. Could it have been stolen? Maybe they exist somewhere? God knows, that was a more valuable document of the time than this current writing of mine, because I no longer recall the details and impressions of that time so vividly.

While the “trial and proceedings” were ongoing, I wrote two draft documents for the Ukrainian Helsinki Group—on the situation of those under surveillance in Ukraine and of exiles in Siberia. Yuriy Lytvyn later said that he edited them. I kicked myself afterward for not sending the memoirs “The Light of People” by the same route—perhaps they would have been saved.

Meanwhile, for two months they kept me under a signed pledge not to leave, and on February 7–8, 1979, they tried me in Radomyshl and sentenced me to three years in a strict-regime camp. The worst part was that I was now a “criminal”: according to the verdict, it turned out I had cursed out a policeman with obscene words (probably Russian swear words!) and even torn two buttons off his coat…

My case caused a great stir. As is now known, on February 11, Vasyl Stus sent a telegram to A.D. Sakharov: “Protesting the conviction of Vasyl Ovsiienko, demanding his release and the punishment of those guilty of this judicial fabrication, I am beginning a political hunger strike” (V. Stus. Works in 6 volumes, 9 books. Lviv: Prosvita. 1994. – Vol. 4, p. 469; UHG. Documents and Materials. Vol. 3, p. 216).

In April, I was transported from Zhytomyr to Vilniansk in the Zaporizhia Oblast, to colony No. 55. My relatives spread my new address, and in the first months of my imprisonment, I received a few letters from friends, including two postcards from Vasyl Stus from Kolyma. Here they are:

“May 21, ‘79

Dear Vasyl,

At last, I have your new address of passion. You have a new trial—so have the strength to endure it. The main thing is to forget despair, do not think that just because you are hidden away—you have been forgotten. I understand that the environment is—original, but be yourself everywhere. In the end, find solitude if there is no one to talk to from the heart.

Now I am beginning to envy you. When you write to your relatives—have them keep me informed. It would be good to correspond with your sister. It’s a pity—I don’t know your mother’s name—I would very much like to write to her—so she does not grieve too much.

Work. Fulfill your duties and watch the calendar. Everything will be all right—believe me.

I am enclosing two stereoscopic postcards. I embrace you—V.S.”

“The environment is original”—a special colony for prisoners who have an additional punishment: compulsory treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction under Art. 14 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR. When I said there that I hadn’t been a drinker on the outside, they didn’t believe me, but that I had been treated for alcoholism three times—they took that as a matter of course. Because only a few percent of the prisoners there were not undergoing compulsory treatment. In truth, I borrowed this joke back in Mordovia from Stus.

August 10, ‘79

Dear Vasyl,

I am very glad that you received my letter. I have two letters from Mykola—from Vuhledar—thank you. I have written back to him. I will soon write to Frosyna Fedorivna.

Yesterday I worked my last shift. I’ll spend two days getting my final pay—and my work contract will be finished. It’s a great pity, of course, to leave this picturesque place, but—what can you do? Even if you don’t want to—you have to. I am planning to go to Kyiv, but I assume the routes may change, be corrected by circumstances. I quite liked the letter from Vuhledar.

I hope that you will not become an alcoholic—and that comforts me. I am sure that you are working diligently and meticulously fulfilling all executive orders. That is why I am at peace about you. I am even—proud.

It’s a shame that books cannot be sent to you. But, I think, you order them—through “Book—by Mail.”

I wish you health. Take care of your clear head. I had a letter from Vasyl Semenovych from Buryatia—he is learning to be a good lathe operator. No word from Yevhen yet—perhaps he will take my warm spot?

All the best, my friend. I am adding three stereoscopic postcards. I embrace you, with greetings—Vasyl.”

Vuhledar is a small town in the Donetsk region where my brother Mykola lives.

Frosyna Fedorivna is my mother.

Vasyl Semenovych Lisovyi and Yevhen Proniuk are my co-defendants, with whom I sat in the same dock in 1973. Zorian Popadiuk took Stus’s place.

These postcards are published in the edition: V. Stus. Works in 6 vols., 9 books. Lviv: Prosvita, Vol. 6, book two, 1997, pp. 164, 174–175.

Yevhen Sverstiuk once said that fate was unmerciful to Vasyl Stus even in sentencing him in 1972 to less than others—5 years of imprisonment and 3 years of exile, instead of 7 plus 5. Had he been released in 1984, at a time when the Ukrainian Helsinki Group had effectively ceased to exist because all its members were under arrest, perhaps he would not have been arrested a second time and would have survived. But he was released in 1979, when the Group was still active, and he had joined it while still in exile. By that time, the following Group members were already imprisoned: Mykola Rudenko (Feb. 5, 1977), Oлекса Tykhy (Feb. 5, 1977), UHG sympathizer Vasyl Barladianu (Mar. 2, 1977), Myroslav Marynovych (Apr. 23, 1977), Mykola Matusevych (Apr. 23, 1977), a person close to the Group, Heliy Sniehiriev (Sep. 22, 1977, died in captivity Dec. 28, 1978), Petro Vins (Dec. 8, 1977), Levko Lukianenko (Dec. 12, 1977), Yosyf Zisels (Dec. 8, 1978), Vasyl Ovsiienko (Feb. 8, 1979), Oles Berdnyk (Mar. 6, 1979), Mykhailo Melnyk died (Mar. 9, 1979), Petro and Vasyl Sichko (June 6, 1979), Yuriy Lytvyn (Aug. 6, 1979). Before V. Stus, Petro Rozumnyi (Oct. 3, 1979), Mykola Horbal (Oct. 23, 1979), Yaroslav Lesiv (Nov. 15, 1979), Vitaliy Kalynychenko (Nov. 29, 1979), undeclared Group member Hanna Mykhailenko (Feb. 20, 1980), Zinoviy Krasivskyi (Mar. 12, 1980), Olha Heiko-Matusevych (Mar. 12, 1980), Viacheslav Chornovil (Apr. 2, 1980), Ivan Sokulskyi (Apr. 11, 1980) were imprisoned…

Almost all the work fell on the shoulders of Oksana Meshko and Vasyl Stus. Having to earn a living through hard physical labor and dedicating the rest of his time to public affairs, Vasyl, as he later told me, did not waste time on correspondence. Moreover, from September 1979, I was put on an information starvation diet: they only gave me some letters from relatives, but nothing from friends.

In early 1980, I learned that a case had been fabricated against Viacheslav Chornovil in Yakutia, and Stus had spoken out in his defense. This statement of his was used as a new charge against him.

In May, an investigator from the Zaporizhia Oblast KGB called me in, along with the prosecutor of the Vilniansk district, Bykov. The investigator, struggling to speak Ukrainian, tried to interrogate me… in the case of Vasyl Stus. So, his eight-month vacation in Ukraine was over… This was the beginning of the “Olympic roundup.” Stus was arrested on May 14, 1980.

Once upon a time, Kaganovich and Stalin had conceived of turning Ukraine into an “exemplary socialist republic,” but its population was not suitable for this. Ukrainians were not fit material for the construction of communism. It was decided to exterminate them and replace them with newly bred Homo sovieticus. In our times, Brezhnev and the first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the CPSU, Grishin, set themselves the goal of making Moscow an “exemplary communist city.” As Mykola Khvylovy put it, “the Ukrainian intellectual cannot do without a Moscow conductor. He is used to aping, to repeating the rearguard.” V. Shcherbytsky (I apologize for making it seem as if he were an intellectual) could think of nothing better than to make an “exemplary communist city” out of Kyiv. Since his predecessors had already worked gloriously in this direction, all that was left for him was to cleanse the city of prostitutes, thieves, “drifters” (the homeless), and, of course, the “pathetic renegades.” Especially since some games of the Moscow Olympics-80 were to be held in Kyiv that summer. Not only the aforementioned individuals, but also Vasyl Stus, Dmytro Mazur (June 30, 1979), and Oksana Yakivna Meshko herself (October 13, 1980) fell under this scythe.

I categorically refused to say anything about Vasyl Stus: I knew nothing, I said, about his “criminal activity,” and I could not even entertain the thought that Stus could be engaged in such things. I also refused to sign the “witness interrogation protocol,” because if I know nothing about a crime, I cannot be called a witness. I was already familiar with the KGB’s vile practice of creating the effect of “criminal activity” with many volumes of empty protocols. My explanation infuriated prosecutor Bykov, and he shouted:

“Nationalists like you and Stus should be put up against a wall!”

The next time, investigator Kraichynsky interrogated me just as unsuccessfully, and later he did so again in the case of my countryman from the Malyn district, Dmytro Mazur. Well, since such guests had taken to visiting me, my fate was already sealed, I told myself, and began to prepare for the road.

On September 5, 1980, I was taken on a transport and—what a miracle!—in the Lukianivka prison in Kyiv, I happened to meet Yuriy Lytvyn and stay in the same cell with him for a whole 10 days. It was a true gift to us from the MVD! It turned out that Lytvyn, for lack of imagination in the KGB heads, had a “case” fabricated against him similar to mine—resisting police officers, also three years of criminal charges, and they had taken him for the summer to the Kherson Oblast so that, while sitting in Bucha near Kyiv, he wouldn’t disrupt the Olympics. They were just now returning him to Bucha. It seems they hadn’t moved me because of the Olympics either. As Lytvyn assured me, they didn’t put me in the dock with Mazur—they just messed with my head in Zhytomyr and then sent me off to Korosten with a firm promise: you will serve time.

Indeed, on June 9, 1981, Major Chaikovsky, an investigator from the Zhytomyr Oblast KGB, arrived and announced that it had been decided to open a criminal case against me under Part II of Art. 62. Just like that: “it has been decided,” not because I had committed a crime. It was “decided” so because my prison term was coming to an end, and no member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, or anyone connected to it in any way, was to be at liberty. All those who were due for release were being “worked over” in confinement: Mykola Horbal, Viacheslav Chornovil, Olha Heiko, Vasyl and Petro Sichko, Vasyl Striltsiv, Yaroslav Lesiv… I learned from Yuriy Lytvyn that I had been “retroactively” accepted as a member of the Group as of November 18, 1978, and a hint of this had come even earlier in a postcard from Oksana Meshko. Investigator Chaikovsky said frankly:

“If you write a letter of repentance to the regional newspaper, you’ll be home before these three years are up.”

It went without saying that in the opposite case, I would receive the maximum term. I chose the latter. I refused to participate in the so-called investigation, giving only some explanations in court.

“That’s all right,” said the investigator. “We won’t gather everything, we’ll gather a sufficient amount of material.”

The “sufficient amount” turned out to be three of my statements that had received no distribution (two of them were handed directly to KGB agents—yet even this was assessed as acts of agitation and propaganda), a few testimonies from intimidated criminals, mostly distorted… This is what they tried people for back then, for such “slanderous fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system”: I had asserted that there was an artificially created famine in Ukraine in 1933, that Russification was taking place, that the Ukrainian intelligentsia had been destroyed, that the Soviet Union had occupied Afghanistan, and even—imagine that—I had called Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn great men of our time! The case was solidly furnished with excerpts from other people’s cases (for context!), and for some reason they even brought two volumes of Stus’s case to Zhytomyr and showed them to me from a distance. In my file, there was a certificate stating that this time he had been sentenced, like all decent people, to 10 years in special-regime camps and 5 years of exile and had been declared an especially dangerous recidivist.

KUCHYNO

According to legend, the Mordovian concentration camps were one of the first new construction projects of the Bolshevik government. In any case, at one of the stations on the railway branch that had become overgrown with camps, I saw a memorial plaque: the “iron knight of the revolution,” Felix Dzerzhinsky, had visited here in 1918. During Khrushchev’s “thaw,” when the number of political prisoners shrank from millions to tens of thousands, they were concentrated precisely in Mordovia. By the early 1970s, there were about a thousand political prisoners. I am speaking only of those with political articles, or as they prefer to call them in our country, for “especially dangerous state crimes,” from Article 56 to Article 65 of the Criminal Code, because a huge number of people had criminal charges fabricated against them for political reasons, as was done to me in 1979. Many were convicted under Art. 187-1, which differs little from 62, but those sentenced under it to three years were held in criminal camps. And how many more languished in psychiatric hospitals!

The concentration camps became a place of work for whole generations of the Mordovian population, a kind of “collective farm” from which they took everything they needed. For work done personally for a guard, a foreman, a superior, they would pay the zeks with permission to take a piece of sausage or salo from a visit, some would bring tea, which was a kind of currency in the zones, and in the end, some were sold for money: there was a certain rate: of, say, 100 rubles passed on, the one who brought it into the zone would keep 25 rubles for himself. Such corruption flourished in the criminal zones, and to a lesser extent in the political ones. More resourceful political prisoners began to use these human flaws to send information out to freedom. Some channels became permanently active for years. Of course, this greatly harmed Soviet propaganda, which tirelessly asserted that we had no political prisoners, only a few “pathetic renegades” who had committed “state crimes.” But copies of verdicts came out of the zones—let them be fabricated—but intelligent people in the world could see what people were tried for in the USSR. So, for “higher operational considerations,” it was decided to break up the illegal structures by moving the political prisoners to a new location. Starting in 1972, political prisoners began to be transported in batches to the Urals, to the Perm Oblast, where camps VS-389/35 in the village of Polovinka, VS-389/37 at the Vsekhsvyatskaya station, and VS-389/36 in the village of Kuchyno in the Chusovskoy district were opened. In this same Kuchyno, the premises of a sawmill were converted into a special-regime camp for political prisoners declared especially dangerous recidivists, as well as those who had a death sentence commuted to 15 years of imprisonment. At the old location, in the Mordovian Sosnovka, there were 33 such men in 1980. On March 1, 32 were brought to Kuchyno—one had died on the way.

And so, with a brand new “ten-spot and a five-spot” of exile, titled “especially dangerous recidivist,” I arrived on December 2, 1981, in Kuchyno, Chusovskoy district, Perm Oblast, in the special-regime colony VS-389/36, where Levko Lukianenko, Vasyl Stus, Ivan Kandyba, Vasyl Kurylo, Vitaliy Kalynychenko, Semen Skalych, Oles Berdnyk, Mykola Yevhrafov were already waiting for me… Ivan Hel, Danylo Shumuk, and Bohdan Rebryk had recently been taken from here to exile. I have named only the Ukrainians.

Although new prisoners were arriving at the zone, more were leaving—some were released, some were transferred by court order after 2/3 of their term to a strict regime, and some died. Besides the Ukrainians named above, by the end of 1981, Semen Skalych (Pokutnyk) was already there, Oleksa Tykhy was soon brought from the hospital, and Oles Berdnyk was returned from Kyiv—he was already on an open-barracks regime (there, by decision of the administration, one could be released after serving 1/3 of the term, but they tried to keep us “dissidents” in a cell for the entire term). In 1982, Yuriy Lytvyn was brought from Kyiv, then Mykhailo Horyn from Lviv, and Valeriy Marchenko from Kyiv. Here, Aleksei Murzhenko and the Russian Yuri Fyodorov were serving out 14 and 15 years respectively for the Jewish “hijackers” case (1970). A former Lithuanian partisan, a 25-year-termer, and now a “dissident,” Balys Gajauskas, was “pulling” a new “ten-spot.” The Lithuanian human rights activist Viktoras Petkus soon arrived from Chistopol Prison (Tataria), where political prisoners from Vladimir had been transferred, followed by the Armenians Ashot Navasardyan and Azat Arshakyan—Vasyl Stus and I knew Azat from Mordovia. The Estonian zoologist and human rights activist Mart Niklus is here, and his countryman Enn Tarto was brought in, as was the Russian writer Leonid Borodin, and the Latvian human rights activist Gunārs Astra. There is also Vasyl Fedorenko, Viacheslav Ostrohliad, and Borys Romashov was brought in—these three are former criminals, but “politicized.” But their old nature, unfortunately, has not changed. Also on the open-barracks regime were the “anti-Soviets” Mykola Yevhrafov from the Donbas and the Lithuanian Marxist Henrikas Jaškūnas. There are also a few men convicted on charges of collaboration with the Germans during the war, most of them Ukrainians. Their death sentences were commuted to 15 years of imprisonment. Among them, Yevhen Polishchuk stood out, who was in fact involved in the national liberation struggle in Volyn. The only one accused of espionage was former major Filatov, a Mordvin.

I have listed many people by name, because where else, if not in memoirs, should one do this? Besides, when writing about a specific person, one must define the environment in which they live. They say an average person becomes like their environment in a few years. Here, for the most part, were not accidental, not average people, so it was all the more psychologically difficult for them to live for months, for years, in an extremely confined space. Countless psychological dramas unfolded here, often ending tragically. Not with fights or murders (though such attempts were also made), but with loss of health, hunger strikes, and suicide attempts.

After two weeks of “quarantine,” I was put in cell No. 17, where there were already five people, including Kandyba and Kurylo. Next door, in No. 18, was Lukianenko, and Stus was in No. 20. I first saw him through a crack: tall and thin, unusual in his striped uniform. Yuri Fyodorov was in the cell with him at the time. Communication between cells was quite limited. The main news was passed through the wicket. One person would stand by the door and listen for a guard coming down the corridor. Another would knock three times on the wall. The neighbors would likewise post a lookout by their door and respond with the same three knocks. The interlocutors would stand on stools, stick their heads through the wickets as far as the bars allowed, and exchange short phrases—as briefly as possible, because the guards weren't asleep either. Two knocks on the wall meant “disperse, danger,” one meant “wait.” These conversations were our most common regime violation, a reason for being deprived of the right to buy food with those wretched 4 rubles, of visits, of being thrown into the punishment cell. And yet, the information hunger forced us to take risks.

It was quite difficult for me to get used to cell life. Ahead—darkness and hopelessness. The harsh reality cooled my heart, which had been inflamed during the investigation and trial, and it began to fail. And then jaundice set in. I’m lying in the medical unit under an IV drip one day, and they bring in Vasyl Stus. He recoiled when he saw me, completely yellow:

“Vasyl, I didn’t recognize you.”

“Stus, no talking,” boomed the guard Novitsky.

And that was the whole conversation. Vasyl was suffering from a heart condition at the time; they had brought him for an injection.

Once or twice a month, special-regime prisoners are shown a movie. They bring the occupants of two cells, as a rule, into a larger room. We go with our benches. One cell sits along one wall, the other along the opposite. For attempting to shake hands or greet each other, they send you back to your cell. Once or twice, I ended up at a movie with Stus. The movie was shown on a primitive projector by the prisoner Filatov, and later by Leonid Borodin, who was in a cell with Stus. One day he told us: “Oh, are they putting the screws to Stus…” Stus was in the punishment cell at the time.

Cell confinement is difficult in itself, due to the lack of air and movement. In fact, it was not a camp, but a prison with an extremely cruel regime of confinement. While in criminal camps recidivists were taken to work in the workshops of the production zone, we worked in cells across the corridor. We were given one hour of exercise a day in a tin-plated yard, 2 by 3 meters, covered from above with barbed wire, with a guard on a platform. From our cells, we could only see the fence 5 meters from the window and a little bit of sky. There were seven different types of fences, including electrified ones, and the perimeter’s forbidden zone was 21 meters wide. Our food cost 24–25 rubles a month (in Mordovia it was 19–23, but here we were in the second price belt). The water was rusty and smelly. We were shorn, as befits slaves since the times of Ancient Egypt, and all our clothing was made of striped fabric. We were entitled to one visit a year, one package of up to 5 kg a year after half the term was served, and even those they tried to deprive us of. Some of us went years without seeing anyone but our cellmates and guards. The work was not physically hard, but not all people, especially the elderly, were able to cope with screwing in tiny bolts: we used them to attach a small panel to a cord—a part for an electric iron into which a light bulb is screwed. The quota was high: 522 cords per shift (8 hours). Failure to meet the work quota, like any regime violation, was punished with the punishment cell, where it was cold and you were hungry, and with the loss of visits, packages, and the laryok (the monthly allowance to buy an additional 4–6 rubles worth of food). “Malicious regime violators” were punished with confinement in a solitary cell for a year, or with imprisonment in a prison for three years (taken from your term, but by court order). Under the Gendarme-General Andropov, on September 23, 1983, Article 183-3 was introduced into the Criminal Code, under which systematic regime violations were punished with an additional five years of imprisonment—this time in a criminal camp. So the prospect of lifelong imprisonment opened up, and especially—a swift end at the hands of criminals.

But the hardest thing to endure was the psychological pressure.

If in Stalin’s time, when entire categories of the population unfit for the construction of communism were exterminated, the authorities were no longer interested in a person thrown to be ground into camp dust, in our time the verdict handed down by a court was not final. In our time, it was rare for someone to end up in political camps “for nothing.” These were active people who, upon release, could rise up again. Therefore, the authorities closely monitored everyone, determining the significance of the individual, their potential—and treated them accordingly. It was a kind of examination: they studied the tendency of development (or decline) of this or that person and took preventive measures to ensure they did not become a greater danger to the system. From this point of view, Vasyl Stus truly posed a special danger to the existing order. He, along with other human rights defenders, was indeed undermining Soviet power. And it did fall—having exhausted its economic potential, unable to withstand the military standoff with the West, having suffered an ideological collapse. We fought on this front—the ideological one. And we won. But not without sacrifice.

Our diet consisted of bread, potatoes, barley, wheat, and oat groats, millet, fish, 20 grams of sugar, 23 grams of meat, one gram of tea, and some amount of fat. The quality—as befits a prison. What to cook from these products is determined and strictly controlled by the assistant to the colony chief on duty (an officer) and a squad of “controllers” (guards), of whom there are 3–4 on a shift.

For the punishment cell, the food is prepared separately, without fats and sugar, and if one is punished with the cell without being taken out to work, then hot food is given every other day, with only 450 g of bread and hot water on the alternate day. This is while your only bedding is your slippers under your head, and your only underwear in the summer is shorts and a T-shirt, and in the winter, a pair of long johns, but without the shorts and T-shirt. You get a jacket and trousers with “SHIZO” (punishment isolator) written on them, socks, a handkerchief, and the only furniture during the day is a stool chained to the floor, and at night for 8 hours—wooden planks that are fastened to the wall during the day.

In ordinary cells, several people are held together. The most was eight. It’s crowded. You rejoice if you get a chance to be in a cell alone. Because you become deathly sick of the constant lack of privacy, you can’t be alone with yourself, relax, let down the guards of perpetual restraint in everything—so as not to harm your neighbor, not to create tension in the cell.

The bunks (metal cots) are double-deckers, one above the other. Where there should be a mesh, there are metal strips about 10 centimeters wide. The mattress is usually thin, lumpy, and it sags between the sparsely welded strips, so it’s hard to find a comfortable spot. You can’t even put a newspaper under it. The bunks shake. One person tosses and turns, not letting the other sleep, another snores, and what a stench from sick people! One wants to open the wicket, another is cold, one wants to listen to the radio, another to concentrate on a book. To speak plainly: one of the most vexing problems in the cell is the toilet. In the corner by the door is an unscreened latrine (“parasha”), covered on top with plywood. The natural sense of embarrassment that every person feels forces you to use it as rarely as possible. Poor-quality food and constant restraint upset the stomach and intestines, the lack of privacy is inhibiting—as a result, almost all prisoners suffer from illnesses, many have bleeding from hemorrhoids. And often there is no water in the cells. For a long time, we asked the administration to put up at least some kind of partition by the “parasha,” at least on one side. Once I said to the colony chief, Major Zhuravkov, who was making the rounds of the cells with his “entourage”:

“You’re forcing us to drop our pants in front of each other here…”

“Why are you slandering me in front of honest people!”

I thought they would punish me, but no—a few days later, they installed partitions, even in the work cells. But then a pipe burst somewhere—and we lived in a stench for weeks, months. In short, such a regime aims to re-educate a man into a beast.

Later, when I happened to be in the same cell with Stus for a short time, he stands over the latrine embedded in the floor, which is clogged with filth, and in a booming voice declares:

“The latrine is authorized to announce!”

What a play on words! Even in such unattractive circumstances.

At first, it was still allowed to lie on the bunks before lights-out, but then it was forbidden. No matter how you felt, you had no right to lie down for more than 8 hours, unless a doctor permitted it.

With a standard sentence of 10 years in special-regime camps, 5 years of confinement, and the aforementioned “honorary” title of “especially dangerous recidivist,” Vasyl Stus arrived in Kuchyno in November 1980. Here, he was watched especially closely. Stus had somehow managed to send most of what he had written in the strict-regime camp in Mordovia out to freedom, including some things in letters, sometimes writing them in a continuous line and replacing words that were sensitive to the censors (prison – `yurma`, barbed wire – `bolyuchiy svit` [painful world], Ukraine – homeland). From the Urals, however, sending a poem in a letter was impossible.

One could receive letters from anyone, but in reality, they only gave us some letters from relatives. We were allowed to write one letter a month. The confiscation of letters was one of the most painful aspects of our lives. You would self-censor that letter so much, sanitize it so it would get through, but the result was the same: “contains forbidden information,” “distorts Soviet reality,” “slanderous in content,” or even simply “suspicious in content.” The censor Yarylova would submit such a report—and from her empty, bottomless bovine eyes, it was clear she hadn't even seen the letter. Its fate was decided by the KGB agents Chentsov, Vasilenkov, or even Afanasov himself, if not in Kyiv or Moscow—we were sure—they gave instructions on how to treat each of us. Or they would give orders to the operatives, lieutenants Utkin or Zhuravkov (“the Crown Prince”—as we called the colony chief’s son among ourselves). And they didn't know Ukrainian, so they would send it for translation—and two months would pass. But it was much simpler for them to fill out a confiscation form without bothering their heads with the letter. They would suggest: “Write in Russian—it will get there faster.” But how can you write to your own mother, wife, or child in a language that is not your own?

The law allows three days for the delivery or sending of a letter, but they hold it for as long as they want. Once I dared to suggest to Dolmatov: why don’t you push for a law that would allow you to hold letters for three weeks, three months, three years, or ban writing them altogether—you’ve had that before, haven't you? Have no doubt, the Supreme Soviet will unanimously vote “for it” even if Andropov wants to “legally” execute it in its entirety, and they will cheerfully line up against the Kremlin wall… Dolmatov boiled over. Stus liked such jokes, albeit somber ones.

Searches. They were conducted two or three times a month, but there were periods when you could be searched five times a day. When taking you to a visit, they make you change clothes completely, looking into all possible folds of your body and orifices. Of course, it wasn't always like that; it often depended on the guard, but most often on the operative and the KGB agent. They look in your mouth, in your ears. “Blow your nose. Cough. Squat. Raise your hands. Show your heels. Spread your buttocks. Show the head of your penis.” Stus had, I think, only one visit in Mordovia and one in the Urals. When he was being taken to the second one—he couldn't stand the humiliating search procedure and returned to the zone.

We would take slips of paper with foreign words to work to study them. Stus knew German, English, and with the help of Mart Niklus, he was studying French. They would confiscate them. When taking you out to work, they would lead you into their “guard room”—and you had to strip naked. They would feel every seam, look into every fold of your body. I can still hear his voice, full of offense and helplessness: “They paw you like a chicken…” Such a remark was enough to land you in the punishment cell.

They were especially vigilant when a visit was approaching. If the KGB decided not to grant a visit, depriving you of it was a matter of technique: the guards are given the task of finding a regime violation. You spoke through the wicket with the neighboring cell. You didn't meet the work quota. You declared an illegal hunger strike. The regime chief, Major Fyodorov, would find dust on the coat rack shelf. That same Fyodorov once punished Balys Gajauskas for “not being candid in conversation.” And if you had candidly said what you thought of him—you would have been an even bigger regime violator.

You are allowed to keep one set of underwear with you—they can force you to take the change to the “kaptyorka” (storage room). In the heating season, it was better, because our own people were the stokers and they tried their best. In the non-heating season—it was cold and damp, because the barrack stands on a swamp, and sometimes you could see the glint of mire through the cracks in the floor.

The padded jacket, which could have saved you from the cold at night, you are forced to take out on a certain date.

You are allowed to have no more than five books, journals, and brochures, all together, in the cell. The rest—take them to the storage room. But everyone subscribes to journals, newspapers, tries to work on something, even if it’s just learning a foreign language. This already requires a dictionary and a textbook. But the regime is relentless: excess books are thrown out. Since all trouble comes from books, the guards are especially vigilant about this. Here’s Warrant Officer Novitsky counting them out loud, sweeping the rest from the table to the floor and kicking them out of the cell, into the corridor.

The old camp wolves Novitsky, Sharynov, and their younger colleagues Chertanov, Inozemtsev, Vlasyuk were the most meticulous and treated us as if we had murdered their own fathers. And to keep anything handwritten in the cell was sometimes completely impossible. Sometimes, you would start a letter several times, because they wouldn't let you finish it. They’d see through the peephole that you were writing—and they’d quietly open the door, run in, and confiscate what you had written “for inspection”—and that was the last you’d see of it.

Of course, it wasn't the same for everyone, because sometimes you’re sitting next to someone in a cell, but the regime is different for each. It was easier for those who could refrain from writing in captivity. An artist, however, as Yuriy Lytvyn used to say, is like a woman: if he has a creative idea, he must give birth to a work. And just as it is hard for a mother to see her child destroyed, so it is for an artist when his work is destroyed. And even more so when that child is torn from the womb prematurely and trampled by dirty guards' boots… Creative people like Stus, Lytvyn—they could not *not* write. But to bring a work to completion was almost impossible. I once happened to hear a conversation between Vasyl Stus and the KGB agent Chentsov:

“I’ve already stopped writing my own things, I’ve taken up translations, but you don’t even let me do that, you confiscate them or take them to storage outside the zone. I am sure that if anything happens to me, you will try to destroy everything, so that not a trace of me remains in this world. At least give me the chance to finish my translations…”

In early December 1983, Stus was put in a solitary cell for a year. When he came out of there, somewhere in February–March 1984, I had the chance to be in cell No. 18 with him for about a month and a half. Also there were the penitent Semen Skalych from the Ivano-Frankivsk region and Ivan Mamchych from Myrhorod. It was a difficult time for me: my heart condition was worsened by the fact that I couldn't sleep because of Mamchych’s snoring. It had little effect on Vasyl, he said, and old Semen was hard of hearing, an invalid, and didn't go to work, so he could sleep during the day. They took me to work in the same cell as Mamchych, not with Stus, so we would communicate less. And the main conversations happen at work, where your hands are busy with their own thing, and your mind with its own—in the living cell, you try to read as much as possible, to write something down. Mamchych already had the right to move to the open-barracks regime, so we agreed that we would demand to be separated, that is, for him to be released from the cell. But the opposite happened—they took me out of cell No. 18… So Vasyl and I never really got to talk.

They never kept any of the Ukrainian dissidents with Vasyl, except for Semen Skalych, who was preoccupied with matters of faith and his own ailments, so I was probably the only one in Kuchyno to read all eleven of Rilke’s elegies in Stus’s translation. They were written down in a 24-sheet (or maybe 18-sheet) squared school notebook. The elegies have a long line, so the entire notebook was densely filled. The images of German mythology spoke Ukrainian for the first time, but—to no one… True, Mykola Bazhan soon after published one elegy in his own translation in “Vitchyzna.”

Vasyl had Pasternak’s translation of one elegy into Russian, but whether because of the language barrier, Vasyl’s translation seemed more accessible to my perception. Where is that notebook now? The KGB agent Vladimir Ivanovich Chentsov must know. To send anything in letters from here, as from Mordovia, was absolutely impossible. “And yet,” Vasyl once told me, “I had two or three ways out from here as well. That’s why they are putting so much pressure on me.” He told me about one failure. Before going out for a walk, a tightly rolled note fell out of his pocket. His cellmate Moiseienko noticed this and suddenly changed his mind about going for a walk. A few minutes later, Vasyl was searched and the letter, prepared to be sent out to freedom, was confiscated. To find a crack for transmitting information and works to the outside world in those conditions was extremely difficult: the guards were selected with special care, and we had no money to bribe anyone. And it was a very risky business: we knew of cases where they took money and papers—and turned them in. In one of the neighboring zones, Paruyr Hayrikyan was tried for such a “bribe”—he was sentenced, I think, to 5 years in criminal camps.

At that time, Vasyl also had a general squared notebook with a blue cover, made from several school notebooks, with several dozen poems written in free verse. Vasyl let me read this notebook. But due to my own poor health, I couldn't manage to memorize a single poem, which I regret to this day. And I didn't expect that they would separate us so quickly.

The blue notebook had no title, but in his last letters, Stus calls this collection “Bird of the Soul” and writes that it contained up to 300 poems and as many translations. Where is that “Bird” now, in what cage? I fear it never flew out from behind bars. And let’s not console ourselves with the sweet fairy tale that manuscripts don't burn… I shudder when I remember how, on the day Mart Niklus was taken to Chistopol prison, in the yard near the exercise pens, the guard Chertanov—a kind of unholy creature with ears sticking out—was burning his papers. He smiles with satisfaction at Balys Gajauskas and me (we were being led out for a walk in the yard), stirring the colorful illustrations that are burning with a vibrant flame:

“It burns beautifully!”

Perhaps such was the fate of Stus’s “Bird of the Soul”? After all, his son Dmytro and friends are still told that upon the liquidation of institution VS-389/36, all documentation was destroyed…

Why didn't I just drop everything and copy down the poems? Of course, I should have. But there was little hope that I would have brought Stus’s poems from the Urals: it was not Mordovia. Even the Gospel of John, which I rewrote several times to save it, was eventually confiscated and destroyed. (I wrote a separate essay about this, “God Protects His Own”). Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska says that Stus’s work is like a tree with its top cut off. From his five years in Kuchyno, only a few letters remain and a text known in publications as “From a Camp Notebook,” which I will discuss later.

From those poems, I am left only with a general impression: they were unlike the Mordovian ones, some were narrative, quite long.

“To write rhyming poems now seems indecent to me,” Vasyl would say.

I argued that only lazy people could write unrhymed poems in Ukrainian, because our language is so rich in rhymes, and the syntax is remarkably flexible: you can place words wherever you want in a sentence. While dozing at work, I tried to memorize one poem—about a willow bush that, with its many twisted shoots, strains toward the sky, but as soon as a trunk begins to grow from it, it is cut down at the stump again. The phantasmagorical idea of life with only roots, without normal flowering and fruiting, with only monstrous underground structures, was present in another poem as well. It seems I first encountered this idea in Yevhen Sverstiuk’s article “Ivan Kotlyarevsky Laughs” (1969). The theme of another was based on Borys Mozolevsky’s famous find: “He found the pectoral!” Vasyl ironized. In others, I recognized Ivan Drach, the artist Liudmyla Semykina—and Vasyl was dissatisfied with himself, saying that the character in a poem should be unrecognizable, generalized. Although in general, he was favorable towards Mozolevsky’s poems. He quoted Mykola Kholodnyi, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, Lina Kostenko. Especially Pavlo Movchan, saying that in Russian translation he reads better, and the reason is the underdevelopment, the provinciality of our language. He lamented the debased state of our language in society, which, having enormous potential, could not develop it because it was ousted from many spheres of use. Terminology is not created on its own basis, the specificity of syntax is leveled. He tried to create new words and word forms if similar ones existed in other languages and ours had such a potential. Back in Mordovia, I noticed how he listened intently to the speech of his countrymen, inquiring about individual words—and later used them in unexpected contexts. He diligently “milked” dialect dictionaries, songbooks, especially a collection of Ukrainian folk songs recorded by Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. (This book, with his underlinings and marks, is preserved by Vasyl’s widow, Valentyna. It was published in 1974, and I read this very copy). There, our language is captured as if in its initial, pure state, untouched by bookish and foreign words, and the songs we know now are as if in their embryonic form—pure clots of Ukrainian poetic vision and national ethics: “I love that little Vasyl who doesn’t drink vodka. He doesn’t drink vodka, doesn’t smoke a pipe, and when he steps out the gate—he smells of basil.” “Oh my God, oh God, what have I done! He has a wife, and I have fallen in love. He has a wife, and two little children, both with dark hair.” Or: “In the open field, the cornflowers have bloomed. I fell in love with you because you are a little dark-haired.” Or: “Give me water over your shoulder, for my heart will burst.” As for Vasyl’s own spoken language, it struck me first of all with its aphoristic precision. He did not strive for so-called literary, standardized creativity—he willingly used dialectal words, and he himself spoke with a singing Podillian melody. His endings of interrogative sentences were especially beautiful.

“My language is my mother’s,” Vasyl would say. “After all, I went to a Russian school in Donetsk, and at the university, we mostly spoke Russian.”

Vasyl was born in the village of Rakhnivka, Haisyn district, in the Vinnytsia region, but his parents moved to Stalino just before the war. His father, Semen, died in 1978. Amazingly, Vasyl was given leave from Kolyma (to get it, Stus himself and the entire Ukrainian exile community in Siberia, as well as Andrei Sakharov in Moscow, went on a hunger strike). He managed to talk with his father, and the next day he passed away (June 7). Those seven days were spent on the funeral and on comforting his mother, whose name, as is our custom, he never mentioned (Yelyna, that is, Olena Yakivna Synkivska). But sometimes he would take out her photograph, look at it for a long time, and say:

“My poor mother…”

Once I showed him a photograph of my mother. He stared at it for so long that I became anxious about what he was trying to see in it, and he said:

“How alike they are, these mothers of ours…”

Mother, beloved, Ukraine—all this merged into some triune deity to whom each of us secretly prayed, but only the Poet by the Grace of God dared to speak of it aloud:

He gets a letter from his son, is happy, but notes that he signs it “Dmytryk,” and he is already 18 years old. He says his son grew up without him. During his 8-month leave, it was not easy to find common ground with him, he even began to fear they would become completely estranged. Now his son is “getting it.” Later, from the work cell, he boasted: his son is getting married, which was a bit unexpected for him. But he is pleased with his choice: “I know that girl—from a very decent family” (Oksana, daughter of Heinrich and Helia Dworko). In the last weeks of his life, Vasyl received a telegram from his wife about the birth of his grandson, Yaroslav (May 18, 1985). Major Sniadovskyi called Stus into his office, congratulated him, and read part of the telegram, but did not give it to him: forbidden information. This greatly outraged Stus.

We were allowed to subscribe to the Soviet press, and everyone tried to get as much as possible, because you never knew where you would be, in which cell—you had to rely only on yourself. It was good that you could subscribe not only with your earned money, but also with money sent to you. Because you earn, say, a hundred rubles for meeting the quota, half is immediately deducted “for the barbed wire”—to the state, from the other half another half goes to pay for food, then they deduct court costs—and for Vasyl’s trial, they brought “witnesses” from Kolyma at his expense—so they fleeced him for two thousand rubles. It would have been enough to last his entire term. Four rubles could be spent at the “laryok,” and two for meeting the work quota—if you weren’t deprived of that right. And you also had to pay for clothes and shoes—so you were left with only a few rubles. So we had to ask our relatives for help, so as not to go mad here without a newspaper, without a book. “Book—by Mail,” by the way, was also available to prisoners, but let’s recall what was written in the press and what books were published back then… A pile of newspapers would arrive—you’d glance through them in a few minutes, because there was nothing to read there, neither in the text nor between the lines. Especially in the Ukrainian-language ones. But we subscribed to them out of a sense of duty, just to know that nothing was changing. Vasyl openly called the “Literaturna Ukrayina” of that time the “Bitch”—that's what they call the wall newspapers in the camps (in the 19th Mordovian camp, the wall newspaper was called “Friendship of Peoples”), and he jokingly proposed nominating it, together with the KGB, for the Shevchenko Prize—after all, it had begun to be awarded for anti-Ukrainian writings. If Shevchenko had known about that, he wouldn’t have wanted to be Shevchenko…

As for Shevchenko himself, Vasyl once had a conversation during his short leave with a Moscow dissident about some third person:

“He considers Shevchenko a genius. Ha!”

“And I too belong to those eccentrics who consider Shevchenko a genius.”

The Muscovite, Vasyl recalled, became flustered and changed the subject. Vasyl told me about this incident because I was then preoccupied with Lytvyn’s idea of finding the roots of our human rights defense in Shevchenko, and even deeper—in the Ukrainian Cossack freemen.

“And I, for all my respect for Shevchenko, sometimes would like to shake him out of his sheepskin coat. That’s why I don’t reread him, because I’m afraid of disappointment,” Vasyl remarked.

Provincialism, caused by the absence of statehood, the total, centuries-long destruction of our talents, as a result of which we cannot stand on a par with other civilized nations—that is what oppressed him. It is strange to hear accusations of nationalism against Stus, because he was very critical of his own people, openly speaking about our negative traits developed over centuries of slavery. Here, he would say, we have created a cult of Shevchenko and a myth of his world fame. But the world doesn't know him, doesn't understand him, we are locked within ourselves, we have not developed our own civilization with which the world would reckon—and we had such potential. But how much that unfortunate people had to strain before it could give birth to Shevchenko, through whose lips it spoke its word of truth! And how many such geniuses were strangled in their cradles! It seems to me, he said, that a genius is like the sun, only in reverse. He concentrates within himself the energy of an entire nation.

Here it would be appropriate to recall a publication that appeared in the Kharkiv journal “Prapor” when Vasyl and I had already been separated. I managed to pass that issue to Vasyl, but he did not react to that writing at all. He had gotten used to it.

In 1983, Ivan Duz, a professor of philology from Odesa, was traveling in Canada. And at Carleton University, he happened to talk about Shevchenko:

“And then the provocative questions began:

‘What do you think are the prospects for the development of Ukrainian literature? How soon will it perish?’

‘Why is the Ukrainian language forbidden in your country? Why don’t children study it in school?’

‘Why don’t you publish Vasyl Stus, he is the greatest successor to Shevchenko?’

And so on.

Calmly, with evidence, we respond to each insolent attack. We speak of the crowning achievements of our Ukrainian literature, of O. Honchar, M. Stelmakh, B. Oliynyk, Y. Hutsalo, O. Kolomiiets, the head of our republican society ‘Ukraina’ V. Brovchenko, of the interesting pleiad of young prose writers, poets, playwrights. We talk about the popularity of the Ukrainian language, about the publication of newspapers and journals, scientific works and fiction in our native tongue. We name the print runs. We argue with evidence that Vasyl Stus is a rabid anti-Soviet, a libeler, a slanderer, and not a poet, that the true heirs of T. H. Shevchenko were P. H. Tychyna, A. S. Malyshko, M. T. Rylsky, M. P. Bazhan, the talented artists of the 60s and 70s, and not the dissident-slanderers.

We explain, we clarify, we argue, but it’s all like talking to a brick wall. It is impossible to convince those who make a living from lies.

Prapor. – 1984. – No. 2. – p. 98.

(A similar opus was published about Vasyl Stus in the journal “Donbas” in 1974.)

But the successive recantations cut our hearts to the quick, like Oles Berdnyk’s in “Literaturna Ukrayina” of May 17, 1984, the report on the “creative report of a young communist” Mykola Vinhranovskyi, the “Afghan Poems” of Dmytro Pavlychko… When we would start to count which of the writers had not yet written a “recantation,” either in the form of a curse against the “pathetic renegades” or the Ukrainian émigrés, or in the form of a little poem about Lenin and his party—the number could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Well, Lina Kostenko, Pavlo Movchan, Valeriy Shevchuk, Hryhir Tiutiunnyk… Alas, it is not the time to speak of this. Look into the notes “From a Camp Notebook.”

At that time, Vasyl read and recommended to me Victor Turner’s book “The Forest of Symbols” (orig. title, but here “Symbol i ritual,” M., “Nauka,” 1983), and later C. Lévi-Strauss’s “Structural Anthropology,” calling them brilliant. It seemed to me that Vasyl used the word “brilliant” too often—it was from his excitement over new ideas, consonant with his soul, which he found here and there. He read a lot and quickly, grasping the essence and developing the thought on the fly.

At that time, there was no strength to read the Ukrainian-language press. It was deliberately made third-rate, to beat into a person’s head the conviction that what is Ukrainian is inferior. To read it was to condemn oneself to a dense provincialism. We glanced at it only out of obligation, to know that with us everything was as before, a deadness. Stus read more of the Russian-language journals: “Inostrannaya Literatura,” “Teatr,” “Voprosy Literatury,” “Voprosy Filosofii,” searching for and finding at least something alive there.

There was a small library in the zone, where the head of the department, Major Dolmatov, at our request, had allowed us to temporarily donate our own books so that other people could read them. This did not last long, because the authorities were afraid of communication between cells in this way. Soon Dolmatov ordered everyone to move their books to the storage room, then he carried out a purge: a prisoner has the right to keep no more than 50 kg of belongings. That’s when the “men of the law” really robbed us… So we basically had to ask individual guards to pass a book to another cell. This rarely succeeded. Or we tried, while taking our things from the storage room, to slip an agreed-upon book into each other’s bags—the owner would deliberately leave his bag untied. We often got “burned” for this, we were punished, the books were confiscated—but the desire to support one another was stronger.

Mykhailo Horyn permanently donated several volumes of Lesia Ukrainka, which Stus carefully read and copied many things from into his notebook. He was struck by how much Lesia wrote about her illnesses in her letters. “That’s how it is with us: two Ukrainians get together and right away: ‘It hurts here and it hurts here.’ – ‘And for me, it also hurts here and here!’” Because he didn’t talk about his own ailments, as if he were made of iron. The only thing he said was: “There, in the medical unit, they sewed some kind of zek stomach into me: it only accepts balanda.” He could eat very little. Sometimes he wanted to take a piece of bread to the work cell—“not allowed,” they wouldn't let him. Another time he said: “My heart is stopping.” That is, he had cardiac arrhythmia. About Lesia, I remember this:

“What kind of playwright are you, Lesia? You pull your characters by strings, and they proclaim your ideas for you.”

And this was despite the fact that he once forced Leonid Borodin to read one of Lesia Ukrainka’s plays and convinced him that her work was no worse, and even stood higher in its artistic qualities than works recognized as European classics. We are not known and not valued in the world because we are a stateless nation and cannot present ourselves properly. You Russians, you publish your “ideological enemies” Pasternak, Bely, Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva in Moscow, you don’t sell them at home, but you take them abroad, because you know well that it’s not with Demyan Bedny that you should go out to the world.

Once he asked me if I knew Vynnychenko.

“How would I? I’ve only read the second volume of ‘The Rebirth of a Nation’—it was incriminated against me in 1973. And our literature professor, Nina Yosypivna Zhuk, convinced us that Vynnychenko wasn’t even worth reading. If we read him, we would spit—so much filth was in it. Only his early stories were worth anything, she said.”

“You are a poor man, Vasyl. Without Vynnychenko, Ukrainian literature is like a man with one lung. Vynnychenko is half of Ukrainian prose.”

Another time he said that he really wanted to write prose. I tried to imagine what it would be like: thick as honey and sharp as the blood of the guelder-rose. Because not only his poetic but also his everyday speech, as I have already noted, was striking in its precision, imagery, and metaphorical quality, and his ability to be amazed and to discover the very essence in a fact was astonishing. Here he says to me:

“So you have three convictions? So you are an especially dangerous state criminal and a recidivist? That’s horrifying! It’s horrifying!”

And indeed, when you think about it…

A kite has killed a sparrow under our windows and is slowly gutting it, staring with a yellow eye. I call old Semen and Vasyl to look. Before the old man is off his bunk, Vasyl is already shouting through the wicket:

“You damned KGBist!”

“Heh-beh”—Vasyl pronounced this word with a special emphasis, and he called the whole criminal cabal by the tender word “bandochka” (little gang). Entirely in the Ukrainian tradition—even in our anthem we have “vorizhen’ky” (little enemies). When they particularly vexed him, he would thunder the words: “Gestapo men! Fascists!” To which Ivan Kandyba would remark that he was paying them compliments.

Thin, of a slender build, he walked unhurriedly, like all people of great stature and spirit. His face was tense, his lower lip even jutting out—that’s how the sculptor Borys Dovhan depicted him. Was he like that even before his first imprisonment? Perhaps the sculptor captured his integral image, the one that is eternal. His eyes were chestnut, almost black, steppe-like, Scythian (there was some speck on one eyeball), his gaze was piercing—the authorities couldn't stand it and hated him fiercely for the at times open contempt in that gaze. In his dealings with his cellmates, he was polite and unobtrusive. He smoked—and suffered from the fact that he was causing inconvenience to others. But he never forgot to at least go to the wicket or the door—depending on where the draft was coming from. It must be said that smoking in a cell is a frequent cause of tension and conflict, but with Vasyl, it never happened, because he agreed that it was indeed a “criminal activity”—to smoke in a cell—and he tried to bother those around him as little as possible. I remember how he rejoiced upon receiving some particularly fragrant tobacco in a package, but immediately began to pass it on to smokers in other cells. The guards would do such a service.

On Christmas Eve 1983, Vasyl was put in the punishment cell, and then in a solitary cell for a whole year. The conditions there are harsher, but you have solitude. While sitting there, he didn't waste time on chatter and had more free time. Having received a small book of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems in German there (the foreword was in Russian), he began to translate his elegies. He worked in “binges,” couldn't sleep at night—it was good that the light was on in the cell at night. And his cell was in the very corner of the barrack: some nights the guards didn’t even look in there. And you can hear them when they’re coming. Unless, of course, they’re sneaking up. So sometimes in the morning, the door opens:

“Well, Stus, hand over what you’ve composed during the night.”

Stus silently stands in the corner, there’s nowhere to hide anything in the bare cell…

He had known German for a long time, and in Kuchyno he was studying English and French, carrying slips of paper with words to work. They often confiscated them, searching him on his way out to work, and punished him for it. To master a language, Vasyl said, you need to abandon everything else and live in it for at least a few months. Mart Niklus helped him the most in learning languages; besides his native Estonian, he was fluent in Russian, English, French, and German. This is characteristic of small nations—to know foreign languages. We Ukrainians compare unfavorably with them. We think there are many of us anyway, we have someone to talk to. And especially since there’s nothing to read in those foreign languages anyway—so only those with a high level of ambition study them. Vasyl did not think so, he found application for his knowledge even in captivity. Yuri Fyodorov had a Polish “Słownik encyklopedyczny”—Stus read it completely, as he felt no difficulty with any Slavic language. This knowledge greatly helped him in his own word creation. After all, the word was his profession, his subject of fascination, his object of creativity.

It’s true: no one in Kuchyno sat in the punishment cells as often as Vasyl Stus and Mart Niklus. Mart was healthy, a resilient man, and he recovered relatively quickly after the punishment cell or a hunger strike, but for Vasyl, with his two-thirds of a stomach that couldn't tolerate many things at all, it was mortally dangerous. It seems Mart did not take that into account when he began a hunger strike on February 8, 1983, and informed Vasyl about it. Vasyl could not but support him. And this was in the conditions of a solitary cell. Two weeks later, they were taken to the hospital, but it was unbearably cold there, and after 18 days, Vasyl ended his hunger strike.

“How disgusting it is to end a hunger strike without having achieved a thing,” he once confessed to me.

When people say to me, “And what is there in your Ukrainian culture?”—I remember Shevchenko with his book hidden in his boot and Count Leo Tolstoy, who toyed with vegetarianism and rewrote certain pages 25 times. I remember Pushkin exiled to Odesa and the Caucasus—and our Pavlo Hrabovskyi, who spent half his life in captivity.

This is not a reproach to any of the writers—God forbid! It is a reproach to those who dare to compare the results without considering the efforts and potentials.

Anatoly Rybakov’s “Children of the Arbat,” Vladimir Dudintsev’s “White Robes” were written, one might say, in plain sight of the KGB; Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” was arrested not for 200 years, as A.M. Suslov predicted, but for only 30. But not the author. And with us, Ukrainians, they cleaned out everything not only from our drawers, but also from the cracks and corners of our souls, and the very souls were shaken out of the bodies of potential authors! Does Vitaliy Korotych not know this, he who dared to reproach Ukrainian writers for having nothing to pull “out of their drawers”? Of course, everything he wrote in the so-called “stagnation era,” as someone aptly put it, “clattered smoothly to the printing presses,” while he was busy teaching us on the radio that we should give up our seats to old ladies on the tram. But he never mentioned the place where Vasyl Stus was.

By the way, about Korotych. Vasyl once recalled a literary evening where Korotych presided—this was before 1972. Vasyl spoke sharply there. Korotych, as the chairman, tried to neutralize the sharpness. But during the break or after the evening was over, he grabbed Vasyl by the elbow and squeezed it. As if to say, well done, Vasyl, I’m with you, but you understand that not everyone can do as you do.

Stus spent a considerable amount of time one-on-one with the former criminal Borys Mikhailovich Romashov from Arzamas, Gorky Oblast. Romashov had first served 25 years for murder, but in the camp he started to “get political,” for which he was given several years of “anti-Sovietism,” transported to Sosnovka in Mordovia, and then returned to a criminal camp. There he wrote something like memoirs about the political zone and packed them in a box with products that were being shipped out of the zone. They were discovered all the way in Vladivostok. He was released, spent four months drinking, and in between, he defaced his passport and military ID with some slogans and threw them over the fence of the military commissariat. Here they charged him with the memoirs, made him a recidivist, despite the fact that he had a certificate of mental problems. It was difficult to be in a cell with him, even dangerous. As a rule, by the second or third month, he would have conflicts with everyone. Of course, he became embittered against Vasyl as well. In work cell No. 13, where it was cramped with no room to turn, he nailed a plank to the floor and forbade Vasyl to step over it or place his cords there. Once he brandished a mechanical screwdriver—a half-meter-long metal tool. Vasyl had to call the guards and demand they be separated immediately. But they were both put in the punishment cells, accused of a mutual conflict. I remember how Vasyl later thundered in the “guard room,” I was listening through the wall:

“What did I sit five days for?”

But even after this, they were put back in the same cell. Later, Romashov was in a cell with the remarkably imperturbable, calm Balys Gajauskas, who was engrossed in studying languages (he could read in almost all European languages, and had once conversed with Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans—with whom hadn't he been imprisoned over the previous 25 years and these 10!). In his presence, Romashov set a mattress on fire and broke the window twice. Seeing that the administration did not react to this, he struck Gajauskas from behind on the head with an iron screwdriver, then twice with the blade of the screwdriver against his heart—but the blade, fortunately, was short, and Balys fell sideways… Then he hit him again and again (they counted 12 bruises). The guards ran up, opened the wooden door, but were afraid to open the barred one until Romashov threw down the screwdriver and said, “That’s it!” You could hear Balys shouting, “Why aren’t you saving me?”

The victim was kept in the hospital for only 12 days, to record only “light bodily injuries.” A criminal case was refused; it ended with six months of solitary confinement, which for him was more of a reward than a punishment, because there no one bothered him as he brewed tea, brought from the KGB agent, on wrapping paper. This is not a guess—once I was sent to cut the weeds around the barrack, and under Romashov’s window, I saw foil from a tea package, and unburnt paper: he must have thrown it out when the guards noticed. Not all guards were informed by the KGB agent about his relations with Romashov. Of course, Romashov is a victim of circumstances, but there is reason to believe that he was guided by chauvinistic sentiments, which were fueled by the KGB. The criminal element was constantly used by the administration against prisoners of conscience for intra-cell terror, and when possible, as informers. They were paid for this with tea, and some of their violations were overlooked. Back when I was in a cell with Romashov and Fyodorov, he brewed that tea every day in the work cell on wrapping paper. As long as it was summer and a few windowpanes were removed, I tolerated it. But when it got cold, I felt my heart couldn’t take it. I pressed the call button and demanded to be let out of there. Of course, I violated the “zek ethic”—I essentially snitched on a cellmate, for which he threatened to kill me. After that, he was in a cell with Vasyl, then with Balys.

I am telling so much about Romashov, a clearly unworthy man, because he, besides the guards, is probably the only one who knows the secret of Vasyl Stus’s death, so one needs to know who he is.

From time to time, conflicts with the administration would arise in the zone, and then we had to protest with hunger strikes, which, as a rule, did not yield positive results for us. But most often, the hunger strikes were associated with certain dates when prisoners of conscience in all camps demonstrated solidarity among themselves, protesting against illegal imprisonment and inhuman conditions of detention. Since the 70s, it had become a tradition to mark January 12—the Day of the Ukrainian Political Prisoner (in memory of the arrests of 1972). On April 24, we showed solidarity with the Armenians—the day of the 1915 genocide. September 5—the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Red Terror (the Sovnarkom decree on the Red Terror, 1918). October 30—the Day of the Soviet Political Prisoner, a date deliberately not tied to anything. December 10—Human Rights Day.

Stus, Tykhy, and Niklus never missed these dates, regardless of their condition. Others also went on hunger strike, including myself. The colony administration reacted to this with outward calm, because the declarations were not written in its name. It only diligently collected data on who participated, who was the initiator, and then conscientiously carried out orders from above (from the KGB) on how to punish whom. But around 1983, the deputy chief of the colony for the regime, Major Fyodorov, went around all the cells and warned that there was a new directive: all “unfounded” hunger strikes were to be considered a violation of the detention regime, and participation in them would be punished. Which they began to do. The question arose, was it worth it for someone awaiting a visit to consciously deprive themselves of it? Was it worth exposing oneself to other punishments—we had enough of them as it was? Some began to refrain, only submitting a statement of protest without declaring a hunger strike. Vasyl, however, was consistent in this to the end.

Before these dates, there were always pogroms in the cells, all handwritten materials were confiscated, someone was put in the punishment cell for a fabricated “regime violation,” someone was moved to another cell, or transferred to other zones (as I was on October 30, 1975). In 1983, on October 29, they took me, Levko Lukianenko, Viacheslav Ostrohliad, and Yuriy Lytvyn, who had been on a hunger strike for more than two weeks, to the hospital. The Black Maria broke down, they brought us back—and took us the next day. There, a doctor (I think his name was Kharisov) announced to us that from now on, medical personnel would not help prisoners fight the administration, that is, they would not force-feed us. They would allow a hunger striker to reach a state of coma and would only save them at the last moment, and as is known, people come out of a coma as invalids, if not physically, then mentally. Lytvyn was force-fed on the 16th and 25th days, and on the 26th, he ended his hunger strike. Stus went on a hunger strike for 18 days in February. He was not fed at all. There were rumors that in the strict-regime camp, people had gone on hunger strikes for 18–20 days, and they were not saved either.

The memory of the fatal hunger strike of the boys from the Irish Republican Army, who were demanding the return of their political prisoner status, was fresh in everyone’s mind. The “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher had stripped them of this status because they had resorted to violence in their fight for the independence of Northern Ireland. No matter how one assesses their actions, the courage with which ten of them, one after another, led by their leader Robert Sands, went to their deaths, struck the whole world, especially us, who had also long been demanding political prisoner status. The longest any of them lasted was 59 days, the shortest 42. A hunger strike is not just a means of pressuring the government, but a demonstration of the readiness to die if the demand is not met. And if someone goes on a hunger strike, they must already have resolved to die. In a democratic state, a person has control over their own life. The Irish boys took a pledge from their relatives that if they were no longer in control of themselves, the relatives would not agree to let them be saved. In any case, by then, irreversible processes begin—it is practically impossible to save a person. In our country, we didn’t even have the right to die. I know people who went on hunger strikes for years, for example, Anatoliy Lupynis, and they wouldn’t let him die. I saw a prisoner in the Pavlov psychiatric hospital in 1973 who had been on a hunger strike for almost a year, being in a state of depression. But the doctors believed he was faking the depression—after each forced feeding, he would be brought back beaten to a pulp…

It is also true that some prisoners, including political ones, abused this Soviet “humanism.” Back in Mordovia, they asked one guy:

“So, how’s the hunger strike going?”

“Not bad, with an appetite.”

Such cases happened, but rarely. They were condemned by the unwritten ethic of political prisoners. This was possible in a camp, but not in a cell, where you simply had nothing to eat if you didn’t accept food through the “feeder” slot. On the third day, a hunger striker was supposed to be isolated, but sometimes this was not done, in order to accuse them of taking food from their neighbors.

In his dealings with the administration, Stus, it seems to me, sometimes became incensed and spoke too sharply, and that was all they needed: they deliberately “wound him up” to have a pretext to punish him. And they were trained provocateurs. And it’s disgusting to talk to them when you see their aims. For example, one time the regime chief Fyodorov called in Balys Gajauskas. They send this old wolf, or rather, he comes himself, when the guards can’t find or provoke a “violation.” Fyodorov doesn’t leave empty-handed. Balys doesn’t answer the questions. For that, he was punished. The next time, Balys answers the questions. Then Fyodorov asks:

“And how do you feel about the administration, in particular about me?”

Tell the truth? He gives some evasive answer. The result: “Was not candid in conversation.” Punish him.

Fyodorov punished Viktoras Petkus because his collar was not ironed. As if we have an iron in our cell.

“What is not forbidden is permitted”—this is on everyone’s lips now. On the lips of our punishers was something else: “What is not permitted is forbidden.” And they point to the Rules hanging on the wall.

“And is breathing permitted by the Rules or forbidden? Is talking, going to the latrine, forgive me, permitted or forbidden by your Rules?” Vasyl asks with a heavy heart.

We now perceive Vasyl Stus mainly as a poet, but he himself never emphasized this in his daily life. He laughed heartily at a joke brought from a transport by Gajauskas: “First, we’ll read a book. Then a journal. Then the newspapers. Well, and when there’s absolutely nothing else to do—then we’ll write poems.” That’s the last resort, so to speak…

Once, lost in thought, he said:

“If we are ever remembered at all, it will be as martyrs. As those who, in a brutal hour, dared to remain themselves. And somewhere there, in small letters, they will write that so-and-so also wrote poems.”

Who knows, reader, which of his feats is greater: his poems, his life, or his death? If his life had not been as it was, if he had not foreseen his own early death—then his poems would have been different.

And yet, the most reliable thing that remains of us is the written word. So what remains of Vasyl is first and foremost his poetry as the pain of his time materialized in words, no, the prehistoric, eternal pain of a suffering person, the pain of Ukraine: it spoke most clearly to his contemporaries and descendants through his lips. He was the exposed nerve of an era that, God willing, is now passing. He felt it so subtly and sharply and prophesied the future so accurately that we will be amazed at his gift more than once. It is this—the ability to see the future, to prophesy—that is the mark of a genius, it is by this that he joins Eternity:

A few more years—and the bond will break.

Barbed wire will enter the dreams of children,

and all the portents of prophecy

will want to come crashing down on us.

A red bark in the black waters of fate

will be lost. And a long-legged phoenix

will carry you to bright chambers

from self-will, submission, and misfortunes.

And all that which you dreamed in life,

like an inscription, will break through on your gravestone,

for you are now forever free,

like an orphan in his own all-being

(crucified on a black cross).

Alas, there are many brave men now who lay their heads on the rail when the train has already passed. Where were you then? “We thought the same way back then, we just kept silent,” they say. So it will be no surprise and it will be just that the “portents of prophecy” will be sought by posterity precisely in the poems of Stus, and not in the theoretical expositions of people who quickly “restructured” themselves as much as they were allowed. Has the bond of barbed wire truly been broken forever, or will it not become a reality, and not just dreams, for our children?

How painfully he read his poems, each time suffering through them and turning to ash. Especially “How Unbearable Is This Native Foreign Land” and “The Broken Bough of Evening Sways”—not the version that is published now, but a shorter one. I asked Vasyl to write down a few poems for me (because I only remembered some fragments from Mordovia), and he wrote down one, plus Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Homesickness.” I had to ask again, and he wrote down a few more. And I managed to learn about ten of them while Vasyl was still alive. And then I would repeat them to myself—for spiritual support, and to this day I carry them as a treasure of my soul.

I find discrepancies between the versions I brought out of Mordovia and those that are published now, and this one, written down in February 1984 from the author’s own lips and carried out in my memory, is completely different. It is not published in the collections of V. Stus’s works, so I present this version here:

The broken bough of evening sways,

Like a blind man’s staff, that pokes into the space

of autumn’s gloom. The shoots of pity’s frays

huddle in walls. The tree sleeps in its place.

The broken bough of evening sways,

Sorrow, like a plum, with auburn filled.

Oh you all-forgiving, oh you overwrought!

Your dimness washed by sadnesses is stilled.

The plowed black road is boiling in its way—

No sign is left of the ancient track!

The taut horizon, hunched in wrathful fray

of bitter reproaches. Oh, yield to the attack

of doubt. Lord, let me live, I pray.

Pretend the road is cut. That sleeps away

the soul, rocked in a deadly snare

of high approaches. On the heart’s screen, there

the broken bough of evening sways.

And your path is covered with dead leaves…

…Expand, expand in your duel with the age!

Just listen, if the Universe still sleeps.

The Universe does not sleep. It stirs, it does—

it stirs, deftly prodded in the ribs

by the glooms of memory… Footsteps echo. Thus,

This, Lord, is radiance! This is the triumph of

of hopes, of passings and of comings, and of re-

turns to one’s own, to the forgotten and the timely…

The gloom sways. And the sun does not go out.

And the pine tree plays in brassy fires.

And your perpendicular sun is boiling!

And how, O Lord, how am I to live?!

To curse and to love, to curse and to love,

to kiss the knout and the woven whip,

and your sky under the hummocks of skies...

...Of iron, of plastic, glass, and concrete,

I chance upon a song. I catch them to the tone

of a silken voice. A noble cellar!

The plowed black road is boiling—

not a trace of the ancient path remains...

...Grant me, O Father, a lofty collapse.

...The broken bough sways majestically.

This poem is key to understanding the title of the collection “Palimpsests,” which Vasyl initially thought of calling “The Broken Bough,” but decided it would be too banal. A palimpsest is a parchment on which something was written, then washed away, erased, or scraped off, and a new text written in its place. For scholars, the original text is sometimes of greater value, and it can occasionally be deciphered. Such is our history—scraped, erased from our memory, with something utterly nonsensical written in its place... “Winter Trees” is the title of his very first collection (the stress is indeed on the last syllable: dereva)—trees in a state of suspended animation, as if dead; a broken bough, a road from the past to the future plowed over, the lost ancient path, the collapsed spiritual sky under the rubble (hummocks) of other collapsed skies—all these are metaphors of the same order, piled up like stones, creating a tragic picture of our historical existence, of an almost hopeless striving for the sun, for a full-fledged existence.

The amphibrachic meter resembles the gait of a blind cripple with a staff. The words, torn between the lines, seem to turn the Universe inside out, and then it rolls and bounces like a ball:

He fusses, fu-

sses, smartly prodded in the sides

by the glooms of memories...

And, like the crack of a whip, the word “whip” (plit’) sounded with a whistle: “Plee-t’.”

Having often heard Vasyl read, I sometimes try to imitate him, but only with those poems I heard him recite and which I feel with my heart.

In the summer, the cells were hot, so it was not forbidden to remove a few window panes and cover the openings with gauze—because of the swarms of mosquitoes! They kept us from sleeping for a month and a half. But having the panes out made it much easier for us to communicate. Around that time, Vasyl received a letter from his wife with a handwritten copy of Lina Kostenko’s epic poem about the Romani poet Papusha. He stood by the window and read it aloud. It was a Sunday, and for some reason, the guards didn’t feel like shouting, or perhaps something human stirred in them as well... So Vasyl also read a few of his own poems.

But the most memorable situations for me are still the extreme ones. He was like a wound-up spring that absolutely needed to uncoil from time to time—through a poem or an emotional outburst.

In the first days of 1983, Vasyl approached the colony’s assistant chief on duty, Captain Lyapunov, to inquire about the fate of papers recently confiscated during a search, for which no receipt had been issued.

“Who took them?”

“That new officer, the Tatar, I don’t know his last name.”

Lyapunov filed a report depicting the conversation as an insult to the national dignity of Major Gatin, and on Christmas Eve, which was also his birthday, Vasyl was thrown into a punishment cell. Mart Niklus was put in at the same time.

“Vasyl, where are you? On the roof?” Niklus had recently read that in some country, prisoners had climbed onto the prison roof, and the warden didn't know how to get them down. They could have used our specialists, the likes of Novytsky...

“The devil knows! In some kind of gas chamber... In the name of Lenin-Stalin... And Gatin-the-Tatar!”

I stand by the door of my cell, number 17, listening closely, relaying what I hear to my cellmates. The guards are yelling at Niklus and Stus, but Vasyl’s stirred and insulted soul knows no restraint. Then they turn on the loudspeaker, which was installed in the corridor for this very purpose. And yet, during a pause between the announcer’s words, Vasyl managed to shout:

“Anyone who doesn’t participate in the hunger strike on January 12 is a coward!”

We had already informed each other about the intention to hold a hunger strike or submit a protest statement, but according to prisoner ethics, everyone decided for themselves how to act. So these words surprised me:

“Well, that’s not Vasyl talking anymore...” I state ruefully.

Then Yuriy Lytvyn painfully remarked to me:

“Vasyl, you cannot measure a poet by the same standard as everyone else. A poet lives in his own world, one unknown to us, so we have no right to judge him from our rationalist tower, because we risk being mistaken...”

He lay down on his bunk in the corner (it was still allowed then) and cried, the poor man... And so another truth was revealed to me.

After the punishment cell, Vasyl was formally sentenced to a year of solitary confinement, where he was put in the punishment cell many more times, and those days were then added to that year, so he only came out of there in February 1984, into cell 12, and then to us, in cell 18.

And Vasyl’s improvisation had a continuation and became a kind of folklore: you’d be sitting there, turning those hateful little screws, hammering with a screwdriver: “For Lenin! For Stalin! For Gatin-the-Tatar! For Yuri Andropov! For Vanka Davyklopov! And very gently—for Kostya, for Chernenko. How can you even fit him into a rhyme?”

So it happened that Vasyl would reproach his fellow inmates for their passivity. He lived in a state of constant, extreme tension and wanted others to be the same.

“Vasyl,” I would explain to him, “I can’t be like you. I am capable of extreme actions, but only for a short period. I can’t be in a state of constant confrontation. I wouldn’t last long. I can’t pick up a stone that I know I can’t lift. I’ll just bend over and disgrace myself. I can’t constantly burn brightly, but I am capable of smoldering for many years to come, let the smoke sting their eyes...”

Vasyl agreed with this and said that it was not right for him to always be rushing ahead either; he needed to look back at the community, at the physical and spiritual capacities of these exhausted, and at times burnt-out, people, for whom it was simply no longer proper to yield their position, so they stood their ground through sheer force of will, just so as not to retreat—let alone move forward!

“I am not a hero, Vasyl, I am a victim. And if you want to know, I quite seriously believe that besides this imprisonment, I am no longer good for anything—here, I am of the greatest use to Ukraine...”

Perhaps these thoughts will seem overly desperate to some, but God loves the truth—they were not a pose dictated by fear. Vasyl worked in a cell far from me, and it was hard to shout to him, but one time I heard through the food slot Levko Lukianenko yelling to him from a distant cell:

“If we decide to self-immolate, I am ready. But I am no longer capable of long-term efforts. I don’t have the strength.”

But even after this, Vasyl said:

“Woe is me with these bad sheep. No matter how long you’re imprisoned, you always have to look out for them.”

But about that same Lukianenko, he once said in the presence of old Semen Pokutnyk, nodding towards his cell:

“Now that is a Man!”

It sounded evangelical: “Ecce Homo!” It seems they spent a little time together in the hospital somewhere in 1980 or 1981. While already in exile in 1988, Levko Lukianenko wrote a brilliant essay-memoir about Vasyl Stus. (See Levko Lukianenko. I Will Not Let Ukraine Perish! Kyiv: “Sofiia,” 1994, pp. 327–343. But I must caution that Lukianenko could not have heard all of Vasyl’s dialogues with the authorities; he reconstructs them. In prison, you generally see very little; you only hear and guess what is happening. Lukianenko relies on his own—very rich!—experience of being in punishment cells, on his experience with hunger strikes, so his essay is psychologically truthful, but let’s not take it as an eyewitness testimony regarding Stus. Just like mine, by the way. An attentive reader will see discrepancies between my account and Lukianenko’s, even regarding dates and places of events, but that is how I remember it, and he remembers it differently).

There were also times when his release of tension manifested in physical rebellion. Once I was working in the cell next to his, opposite the guards’ room; it could have been cells 9 and 10. It seems he was in a punishment cell then, because for some reason they brought his lunch directly to his work cell. I don't know what conflict Vasyl had with the “gang” of guards, but I suddenly hear the clatter of a bowl and a rustling, a clatter and a rustling... Glass shattered. I guess that it's Vasyl throwing the bowl; the plaster is crumbling off the walls. Silently and for a long time. Into the corridor, as I determined by certain sounds, they quietly brought in several soldiers led by Senior Warrant Officer Sharynov. I even saw them through a crack. For several days after that, I did not dare to call Vasyl for a conversation through the food slot. On another occasion, a window frame was made at Vasyl's expense. Of course, such incidents were discussed among us, but no one dared to condemn Vasyl. He could not be other than he was. He filled half the prison with his presence. When he was gone, we felt it acutely. Viktoras Petkus said it best: “Half the prison is gone.” The pressure on him was the greatest, and he withstood it as long as he could. “Of iron, of plastic, glass, and concrete...” His spirit was like that, but his body was made of the same clay as other people’s—only how did he endure such pressure that would have been enough for God knows how many “mere mortals”?

Here is a vivid scene:

“I am working alone in cell 7. Novytsky opens the door and disdainfully makes some petty remark just to bite, to hurt me. He rolls saliva in his mouth as if he’s about to spit in my face. I squeezed the screwdriver, barely restraining myself. A little later I call him: ‘Novytsky, I had a screwdriver in my hand. I am a fool...’”

“I understand, Stus.”

Back when we were in the same cell, Stus told me that during his last investigation at 33 Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv, they had twisted his arm: to this day he couldn’t raise it up. When the investigator was writing something, Vasyl had nothing to do, so the next time he wanted to take a book with him. The guards wouldn’t allow it, so he refused to go there at all. The chief of the KGB investigative isolator himself (Sapozhnikov, I knew him as a lieutenant colonel) came, ordered him to be handcuffed and led away, which was done. It is worth mentioning: at that same time, Vasyl was operated on again: he had a hernia. It was all a path of losses.

I have already mentioned that for “systematic violation of the detention regime,” a prisoner was punished with up to 15 days in a punishment cell, up to a year in solitary confinement, and then through a court, the detention regime was changed to a prison regime for up to three years. Thus, Vitaliy Kalynychenko and Mart Niklus were sent from us to the Chistopol prison (Tataria). It seemed that Stus would be the next to go to prison. After solitary, he was already psychologically preparing himself for the transport. He thought, better or not better, but at least a change of conditions, and he was sick and tired of these same old prison guard faces... But then the gendarme-in-chief Andropov invented a new article of the Code, according to which a prisoner could be kept in confinement forever: 183-3, “Malicious Insubordination to the Demands of the Administration of Corrective Labor Institutions,” for up to 5 years of the same regime the prisoner is held in, or a stricter one. For us, this meant going from ten years of special-strict (cell-based) regime directly to a special or prison regime, but now as common criminals... If you survive, they can add another 5 years there. And they wouldn’t let our kind survive among criminals. Only a phenomenon like Serhiy Babych managed to endure 13 years there... And so Dolmatov began to threaten Vasyl Stus with this article as the biggest violator of the regime.

The regime in Russian prisons has never been stable or strictly defined. It has always depended on the whim of the pettiest official-guard. However, the directives, of course, were set from above. And the conductor of the authorities’ policy towards political prisoners, even towards each one individually, is the KGB officer, who, although holding no official position in the camp, is in fact the highest authority here. When I didn't want to talk to a KGB officer, I would ask him: “How did you get in here? Who, by what right, let you in? I have a warden, a duty officer, a guard, but you are not provided for by law.” And he had nothing to say. That’s how it was on the outside back then too: the KGB was a state within a state. An official of any department would unconditionally follow a “telephone recommendation” from a KGB officer, whereas one could disobey one's own minister.

Until 1981, the KGB officer in Zone 36 was Chepkasov, who became a KGB investigator for the Perm region with the rank of major. He was replaced by Vladimir Ivanovich Chentsov, born around 1951, a local, a geographer by education, who, in the words of Ivan Kandyba, couldn’t handle children, so he went to re-educate grown men. At the end of 1984, he was replaced by Vasilenkov, about thirty years old. I have the impression that he came specifically to destroy Stus. Having accomplished this, he disappeared. However, he had told Gayauskas directly: “You could be killed.” Soon after that, Romashov made an attempt on his life... The senior KGB officer for all three zones was Lieutenant Colonel Afanasov, and his assistant was Bortnikov. From Kyiv, a colonel I knew since my Mordovian days, Honchar, would visit, and from Lviv—Vasyl Ivanovych Ilkiv. Then a rumor spread that Honchar had fallen ill, supposedly even died—in any case, he stopped coming, and Ilkiv replaced him. Many (like Tykhyi and Kandyba) categorically refused to speak with them. But it was from those conversations that one could learn about new directions of pressure on us. Of course, disinformation also came from here, and information about us flowed in—from guards, operatives, and snitches, of whom there were, albeit a few, among us. So, if it ever becomes necessary to inquire about the violations against each of us, it is first and foremost from the KGB officers.

Here it is necessary to name the direct executors of our sentences as well. The head of colony VS-389/36 was Major Zhuravkov. He died approximately 10 days after Stus. He was replaced by Major Dolmatov, the zampolit. This Dolmatov, with the rank of captain, was the head of our unit from 1980 to 1983, our direct superior. In early 1984, he was replaced by Captain Kondratyev, then Captain Snyadovsky (both soon became majors). The chief of the regimen was Major Fedorov, who became famous for his despotism. Sometime in 1985, he was replaced by Major Maksin, who had previously been the head of the operational unit. Two operatives—Lieutenants Zhuravkov (son of Major Zhuravkov, we nicknamed him the “heir apparent”) and Utkin. The doctor was Pchelnikov, Yevgeniy Arkadievich, a criminally irresponsible and lazy man. After Stus’s death, he was replaced by Dr. Grushchenko, who, it seems to me, tried to alleviate our situation. I believe it was he who saved Mykhailo Horyn from certain death, as he conscientiously treated him and, probably, when it came to Horyn’s early release, his word was important. Perhaps after Stus, it was decided to stop our extermination.

The duty assistants to the colony chief (DPNK) at various times were Captain Lyapunov, Major Galedin, Senior Lieutenant Saburov, Major Gatin, and Captain Laptev. Among the guards, the most meticulous were the old prison wolves Novytsky (from the Donetsk region!) and Sharynov, their younger colleagues Chertanov, Sergey Ostanin, Rudenko (from Moldavia), Inozemtsev, Kukushkin, Vlasyuk (from Podillia), Korol (from Kuban), Navoznov, Varov, Sergey Sidorov, and others. They were not all the same, but all were complicit in the crimes committed against us there. With some, one could occasionally strike up a conversation about something, for example, during a search, to ease the situation. Once, I said to one a long-contemplated phrase, which, of course, did not soften the situation: “A decent man would not work here; he would rather take a rope and hang himself.” Because they would justify themselves: if I don’t do it, someone else will, maybe even worse. Then I would remind them: you still persecute those who worked in German concentration camps, and you hold people in cells here accused of collaborating with the fascists. Aren’t you doing the very same thing?

Guards were carefully selected for this place, but it was not easy to lure a young man to such a remote wilderness. The living conditions in their dormitory did not encourage the extension of “labor agreements,” so they changed frequently. When their term ended, the more decent ones did not renew it.

Once, Vasyl praised Korol in this way:

“Korol, you will certainly be in hell, but not in the very center, but two meters from it. And that’s for not writing a report on efendi Kerimov.”

This gentle-natured old Azerbaijani, accused of collaborating with the Germans in the Kharkiv region, was taken out for some work in the yard. Knowing that Mart Niklus was in a punishment cell, he decided to help him. He took a piece of bread and something else and wanted to pass it through the window when the guard left him alone in the yard for a moment. Korol caught him. This could have turned into a tragedy for the old man: he would not have survived the punishment cell. He begged Korol on his knees not to write a report! Vasyl accidentally saw this from the window of his 12th cell: there stands Korol, twirling a bunch of keys on his finger over Kerimov’s head. From then on, Vasyl developed a respect for Kerimov, addressing him as “efendi.” It seems that this is how Muslims respectfully address a true believer who has been to Mecca. Efendi Akper Karimov died on January 19, 1985, in the hospital (in the village of Tsentralnoye) in great agony from kidney disease.

Many more details of our existence in the Kuchyno torture chamber could be recalled, and they would be useful for future researchers not only of Vasyl Stus’s work but of our entire national liberation movement, but it is impossible to embrace the immense. So it is time to conclude.

...In September 1982, Mykhailo Kurka, an approximately 70-year-old man convicted on charges of collaborating with the Germans—in reality, he had served in the Ukrainian police—was taken to the hospital VS-389/35 in the village of Tsentralnoye. In the autumn, he was taken somewhere further, and then news came that he had died at the beginning of 1983.

On the night of May 5, 1984, Ivan Mamchych died in the zone, right in the kitchen where he worked. He died after a week of interrogations by Poltava KGB officers, from high blood pressure, which he had long suffered from.

On March 7, the gravely ill Oleksa Tykhyi was taken for transport. At the end of May, Levko Lukianenko received a coded message in a letter from his wife that on May 2 (it later turned out to be actually May 5 or 6), Tykhyi had died in Perm, in the prison hospital. On the fortieth day after his death, Levko Lukianenko proposed that the community mark it with a fast (a hunger strike), and on the 39th, 40th, and 41st days, with silence as well. At that very time, we were all learning Morse code from the Armenians Azat Arshakyan and Ashot Navasardyan, who had arrived from the Chistopol prison. Levko tapped out this sad news to Vasyl on the pipes. Vasyl understood but didn’t believe it: he rushed to ask through the food slot:

“Did I understand correctly that Oleksa Tykhyi has died?”

And he “burned” Levko: the guards either overheard or figured out who initiated the action and punished Lukianenko with three days in a punishment cell. Soon, this somber ritual of a commemorative fast became a sad tradition among us.

On August 23, in cell 20, his cellmates came for lunch and found Yuriy Lytvyn with his stomach slit open. On September 4, he died in a hospital in Chusovoy. We learned about this two weeks later.

In the summer, they take from us the mortally ill Valeriy Marchenko, 37 years old, who was suffering from kidney disease. In the autumn, the KGB officer Chentsov told us that Valeriy had died in October in “Gazy”—the all-Union hospital for prisoners in Leningrad. Since we did not know the date of death, we honored Marchenko on December 10, Human Rights Day.

On January 19, 1985, Akper Kerimov died in the hospital at Vsekhsvyatskaya station.

Who’s next? A oppressive atmosphere, an era of escalation of an already inhuman regime. Apparently, the Kremlin had decided to solve the problem of “non-existent” political prisoners by simply exterminating us.

At the end of 1984, the KGB officer Chentsov was replaced by Vasilenkov. From Ukraine, my grandfather only brought him the surname. Now he strives to present himself as “truly Russian,” especially in conversations with Leonid Borodin. And the best proof of that is to crush his own kind. Stus is his victim, if you’re looking for specific culprits. And at the same time, a second countryman “with tin buttons” appeared, Captain Snyadovsky, later a major, who became the head of the unit. He called himself a Ukrainian “from the West,” and said he got his Polish surname from his stepfather. He boasted to me that he had graduated from Lviv University, that he knew Bohdan Stelmakh, who publishes his poems in... the journal “Vsesvit” (when it's a journal of foreign literature). That he reads Oles Honchar and... Petro Zahrebelnyi, when his first name is Pavlo. That he speaks only Ukrainian with his children at home. But he accuses Stus of supposedly “forcing” him to speak Ukrainian:

“You won't hear another Ukrainian word from me, you Herod, because you are not worthy of it,” Stus cursed, returning to the cell. “I will speak to you only in your prison language.”

This was said in the presence of Borodin, who, of course, did not like it. But what’s true is not a sin: all our executioners spoke this language, regardless of their nationality. Both Peter I and Catherine II, and Stalin, and Kaganovich, and Snyadovsky. If Russia, in Lenin’s words, is a prison of nations, then the Russian language for us is the language of the prison of nations.

(Once, Sasha Romanov from Saratov, who in 5 years in the Mordovian camps made a sharp turn from neo-Marxism through democracy to monarchism, told me that there is a suspicion Stalin was a Georgian Jew.

“Sasha, ‘were he a Negro of venerable years,’” I say, quoting Mayakovsky, “he is still a Russian imperialist.”)

“I would learn Russian just because Lenin spoke it,” the “internationalists” love to quote. We have long known what kind of “internationalist” Lenin was, but as for the Russian language—for us, the slaves, it was first and foremost the language of the convoy, the KGB, the guards—the direct executors of our sentences, that is, our executioners. So it is not surprising that at times an aversion, a rejection of it, stirs. Only when we become good neighbors with Russia will the emotions be forgotten, and we will treat the Russian language as we do French or Chinese.

It is understandable that the “language of inter-ethnic communication” in Russian concentration camps is Russian, although there are relatively few Russians there. At the first opportunity, people tried to switch to another language, for example, English (this greatly complicated the work of guards and snitches), and most often they spoke Ukrainian, because Ukrainians at all times of Soviet power constituted about half of the “contingent” of any political camp. The Russian Yuri Fedorov, the Lithuanians Balys Gayauskas and Viktoras Petkus, the Latvian Gunārs Astra, the Azerbaijani Akper Kerimov understood Ukrainian well, read it, and asked to be spoken to in Ukrainian. Meanwhile, the only Latvian in the zone, Astra, could speak his language perhaps only with the cat in the kitchen. So we, Ukrainians, had perhaps this one privilege in Russian prisons—the luxury of communicating in our own language. And as for countrymen “with tin buttons,” you could throw a stick and hit one: Snyadovsky, Novytsky, Rudenko, Lyubetsky... Khrushchev, Podgorny, Chernenko, Gorbachev. Only this didn’t make it any easier for us, because in their rush to imperial heights, they try to prove their loyalty to the Russian throne by being cruel to their own kind.

Major Snyadovsky distinguished himself by inventing ever new prohibitions for the prisoners. For example, he forbade having two hats in the cell in winter—a summer one and a winter one. Sit in the cell with your head shaved, or else wear your winter hat. He forbade buying stationery in the camp store—order a pencil and a notebook through “Posyltorg.” He interpreted the rules for visits in such a way that if you didn’t use it this year, the right to it was lost altogether. And so he sought ways to make things worse for the prisoners. When he spoke, he averted his eyes—because he has a somewhat pockmarked face and clearly doesn’t want people to look at him. Perhaps this is the source of his bitterness towards the whole world? Especially towards a defenseless prisoner?

Sometime from February 1985, Snyadovsky and Vasilenkov established a rule: when taking a cell to work, they would take one prisoner to the “duty room” and strip him naked, often with humiliating procedures. When they return for lunch—they take another one. After lunch—again. And from work—they take one, and when leading them for a walk... Sometimes, you would be stripped naked several times in a day. I was stripped three times one day, Horyn—five times. And they find nothing—just to torment you. They especially tormented Stus. I can still hear his voice, full of insult and pain: “They paw you like a chicken...” And so you can’t restrain yourself, you say something—and there you have it, a “violation of the regime,” and there’s the punishment.

In the summer of 1985, Stus was in cell 12 with Leonid Borodin, which was the only residential cell with a window facing north. God’s sun never looked in there; it was cold and damp. The bunk beds take up more than half the cell. Stretch out your arms—you’ll touch the walls. A small table, two stools, a washbasin—and nowhere to turn. The confined space is heavily oppressive, you feel like you’re in a trap with no way out. The “perestroika” that began in the newspapers in 1985 had not yet reached our corridor that year. It seemed, on the contrary, that the “gang” of guards had become even more ferocious, as if before their own demise.

Later, I had to share a cell with Borodin, and he told me that in recent times Vasyl had been very sad, finding fewer and fewer reasons for jokes. He hadn't received letters for almost the whole summer, when a package of food unexpectedly arrived—half of his term had passed. But they did not get to eat all of it. One night, a very cheerful or perhaps timid soldier was posted on the watchtower nearby, who entertained himself with endless Asian songs. Borodin pressed the call button, summoned a guard, and asked him to call the watchman to be quiet—it was impossible to sleep. The next day, the guards filed a report that Stus had woken up the entire prison at night, not letting the convicts rest. Fifteen days in a punishment cell. Borodin went to the authorities, wrote an explanatory note stating that Stus hadn’t said a word. Dolmatov replied:

“Who should I believe: you or my subordinates? If you were the chief and didn’t believe your subordinates, how would they treat you?”

Dolmatov knew very well what he was doing.

A few days after the punishment cell—a new ordeal. On August 27—this is according to Borodin’s later accounts—Stus took a book, placed it on the pillow of his upper bunk, and, leaning his elbow on it, read. This displeased the guard Rudenko—a very unkind fellow from Moldavia, who, however, sometimes used Ukrainian words. He remarked through the peephole:

“Stus, you are violating the bed-making regulations.”

At that time, sitting or, God forbid, lying on the bunk before lights-out was strictly forbidden. Stus responded calmly, adjusted his pillow, and chose another, “permitted” posture. However, the next day it turned out that Rudenko, along with the duty assistant to the colony chief, Senior Lieutenant Saburov (Gunārs Astra nicknamed him “the Well-Fed Boy”), and some other guards had filed a report that Stus was lying on his bunk during work hours, and in his outer clothes at that. The lie was obvious. So Vasyl, while preparing to go to the punishment cell, told Borodin that he was declaring a hunger strike. “What kind?” Borodin asked. “To the end.”

This is all according to Borodin’s accounts. Gayauskas and I were then in cell 20, almost opposite them. By some sounds, we determined that Stus had been put in the punishment cell again, but we did not hear those words. It was quiet across the way for a day, then another. I even thought that Borodin had also been put in. That Stus was in the punishment cell again was bitter news, but, I must say, familiar: well, he would suffer through it again, there was nothing to be done. But “TO THE END”—we learned about this much later, when Vasyl was no longer alive. Borodin had no way of communicating this sacramental phrase to us from cell 12. To his left was an empty cell, to his right—a small corridor, the exit to the exercise yards. It had never happened that prisoners managed to rescue someone from a punishment cell with any protest actions.

Stus’s fate was probably already decided: if they didn’t torture him to death this time, they would the next. We had not yet heard—and it is unlikely that Vasyl had heard—that his work had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. True, we had often talked among ourselves about this prize, recalling that in 1978 there had been talk of awarding the Nobel Prize to the founders of the Moscow, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian Helsinki Groups. This brilliant idea, unfortunately, was not duly appreciated by the Nobel Committee: at that time, the prize was awarded to the President of Egypt and the Prime Minister of Israel for fighting and then making peace. What support that would have been for the human rights movement! Lytvyn was considering how the Ukrainian Helsinki Group could submit a nomination for the Nobel Prize for Lina Kostenko’s novel “Marusia Churai.” Yurko did not know that only a laureate can nominate a candidate. Later, we learned that Stus’s work had been nominated for the Nobel Prize by the German writer Heinrich Böll, the 1972 Nobel laureate and president of the International PEN Club (he died that same year, 1985). Böll knew the value of Vasyl Stus’s work, as his poems had also been published in German, and he was certain that Stus would become a Nobel laureate. But it did not turn out that way.

The Kremlin gang had enough trouble with Nobel laureates Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom they had to deport, and Andrei Sakharov, whom they deported to Gorky at the beginning of the Afghan War and kept under house arrest there. The Kremlin gang also knew that the Nobel Prize, according to its statute, is awarded only to the living; it is not awarded posthumously. They could not allow a Nobel laureate, and a Ukrainian at that (which would have raised the “Ukrainian cause” to an unprecedented height), to emerge from behind bars. Not even Adolf Hitler allowed such a thing: in 1936, he released Carl von Ossietzky from a concentration camp when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The Kremlin decided to deal with the potential laureate in the traditional Russian way: “No person, no problem.” To destroy him before the prize was awarded, before October 24 (I might be slightly mistaken on the date). Gorbachev’s defenders will say that he most likely had not even heard of Stus. But I am certain that our cases were considered and decided at the highest level. At that time, there were probably as many especially dangerous political recidivists as there were members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in the Kremlin. Gorbachev, you see, started a “revolution” without releasing from captivity his seemingly most important allies—the political prisoners, as is done everywhere among civilized people. Moreover, he kept us imprisoned even in 1988, and some in 1989, and having become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate himself, he began a new recruitment of political prisoners. He, you see, pardoned us. That is, he considered us criminals to whom he showed mercy. Rehabilitation came much, much later—in 1991…

I am certain that the administration of camp VS-389/36 received an order to destroy Vasyl Stus by any means before October 24—the day the Nobel Prize was to be awarded.

On September 2, 1985, in our cell 20, the lower window panes froze over. True, Balys Gayauskas and I had the food slot open. The heating had not yet been turned on, and the prison stands on a swamp. It was cold and damp. For the punishment cell, they might allow you to take only an undershirt and underpants (it was still considered the summer season). They issue pants, a jacket with the inscription “SHIZO” (punishment isolator), socks; you could have a handkerchief. A towel, cup, and spoon are given only at mealtime. But Stus was on a hunger strike...

During the day, the bunks are raised against the wall and secured with a pin that a guard pushes through the wall from the corridor. A board attached to the bunk at a 90-degree angle becomes a small table. Under the bunk is a stool chained to the floor. When “lights-out” is announced, the guard shouts: “Hold the bunk.” The guard removes the pin, and the prisoner must lower the bunk; it hangs on chains and rests on ledges. The stool ends up under the bunk, and it is no longer possible to sit on it.

Punishment cells 3, 4, 5, and 6 are located in a separate corridor, perpendicular to the main one. As you look from the guard post, the windows of the punishment cells are under the gable, with the window of cell 3 being closest to the guard post. They said Stus was first in the fourth, and then in the third punishment cell. Thus, no sound from the punishment cell could reach our windows. In addition, the windows of the punishment cells are covered with a “bayan” (louvers—slanted boards placed so that from the cell one can see nothing but a sliver of sky). In the main corridor, on the way to the punishment cells, two doors are installed. In short, there was no connection with the punishment cells. (Here I must note that in some of my previous publications, the punishment cells were “numbered” incorrectly; it appeared that cell 4 was on the corner, and then, accordingly, 3, 2, 1. In fact, the order from the corner closest to the guard post is: 3, 4, 5, 6).

On September 2, before lunch, we heard that Vasyl was taken to some official in the direction opposite from the punishment cells. When he was returning, he announced to us, who were working in the cells, in his thunderous voice:

“I’ll punish you, I’ll punish you... Go ahead and destroy me, you Gestapo agents!”

Who was threatening him with additional punishment? Maybe Dolmatov. Maybe Snyadovsky or Fedorov. Because Zhuravkov hadn't been in the zone for some time (he died 10 days after Stus).

That same day, around 5-7 p.m., Enn Tarto, whose duty it was to collect the finished products (cords for electric irons with panels attached) from the cells after work and bring in work for the next day, heard Vasyl asking for validol while sitting in work cell 7, opposite the punishment cells. He was put on the second shift. The guards said the doctor wasn’t there, although Pchelnikov was, in fact, present. Then Tarto told the guards he would tell the doctor himself, so Stus was supposedly given the validol.

One evening, on September 1, 2, or 3, I myself heard Stus asking for his boots: it was cold, and he was at work in slippers. The guard Inozemtsev—I could hear—gave him the boots. Of course, only for work time. He must have been working in cell 8 then, which is in the main corridor, opposite the “duty room.” Because I wouldn’t have heard a sound from cell 7, which is in the perpendicular corridor.

Levko Lukianenko—according to his accounts—was then going to work in cell 7. Supposedly, Vasyl Stus was also brought to the same cell for the second shift. It is in the same corridor as the punishment cells, but at the opposite end from cells 4 and 3 and across from them. Every day, Levko would call out to Vasyl: “Hello, Vasyl!” or “Ahi!” depending on which shift of guards was on. Vasyl would respond. But on the morning of September 4, Stus did not answer.

That day at lunchtime, as Gunārs Astra later recounted, the authorities came to the camp territory: Dolmatov, Afanasov, Fedorov, Maksin, and someone else. They entered not through the corridor, but past the windows of the residential cells (while the prisoners were opposite, in the work cells). And they went into the punishment cell corridor from the side of the yard for solitary prisoners. Clearly, to see Stus. They behaved very quietly, because even Lukianenko didn’t hear them. Maybe at that time he was being taken to the residential cell for lunch. And for lunch then, the entire guard team led Levko—four men and the duty officer Galedin himself—so that he would not dare to look into Vasyl’s punishment cell through the peephole. And yet, returning from lunch, he rushed to the door—they did not let him in.

An oppressive atmosphere. Something had happened.

“Even that pagan woman wasn’t laughing,” Lukianenko later recalled.

That was the female foreman who was always laughing with the guards in the duty room.

The cook, Gunārs Astra, was ordered to prepare a three-day bread ration—as if someone were being taken for transport. It’s not hard to guess who. Such a thing had never happened: they could only take us to Perm for three to four hours or to the hospital for two to three hours; a ration was never given. So, this was a “pont” (a pretense). But they forgot about that ration.

And another thing: they brought Oleksandr Vizir, who was distributing food at the time, to cell 12 and ordered Borodin to hand over Vasyl’s spoon—as if he had ended his hunger strike.

Oleksandr Mykolayovych Vizir, from Myrhorod, was convicted for wartime offenses. He is a kind man, but he was probably strictly forbidden to say anything about Stus. And he still had many years of imprisonment ahead of him.

Later, it was said that Vizir himself and his accomplice Volodymyr Ivanovych Ostapenko (from Zhytomyr) prepared Vasyl for his final journey. Once they were free, both of them categorically denied this in letters sent at my request.

On September 4th or 5th, Vasyl Kurylo was released from cell 19 to the general population, and Leonid Borodin was moved from cell 12 to take his place with Horyn, from whom we finally learned through the food slot how and why Stus had been imprisoned.

On the night of the 5th, around midnight, I heard a noise in the corridor, shuffling feet, and distinguished the boarish roar of Novytsky, specifically: “Give me the knife, give me the knife!” Later, I guessed that they were stealthily carrying out Vasyl’s body at night, so that no one would accidentally see it. And they were already spreading the version of a suicide in cell 7. Lukianenko completely refuted this version: that evening, Stus had not worked in cell 7. The next day, Levko noticed that the parts on the only workbench there had not been disturbed.

We began to discuss what to do. First of all, we needed to find out where Stus was. We signed up to see the authorities, but no one was called. In the corridor, when we were being led to work, none of the authorities were to be seen. Back on September 2, I had submitted a request to Snyadovsky to call me for a talk. I remind him again. I sign up for an appointment several days in a row. Dolmatov himself called me, somewhere around the 12th or 14th of September:

“I am not obliged to report to you about other convicts. He personally insulted me. I imprisoned him for the insult. Stus is not here. I am not obliged to answer where he is.”

Dr. Pchelnikov disappeared. Snyadovsky disappeared. Zhuravkov disappeared.

“I am in charge of everyone,” says Dolmatov.

On September 25, Vyacheslav Ostrohliad, Borys Ivanovych Tytarenko, and I are taken to the hospital at Vsekhsvyatskaya. Dr. Pchelnikov has reappeared and is handing over his duties to a new doctor, Grushchenko.

In the prison van, Ostrohliad tells incredible things:

“Stus drove a shiv into his heart, grabbed the bars with his hand, and froze like that. They had to pry his hand off. Inozemtsev told me this—we are on good terms.”

“Where would he have gotten that shiv, when he was searched so thoroughly?”

I don’t believe it. Stus is not the kind of person to do such a thing, and Ostrohliad is not the kind of person to be believed. Especially citing a guard. It was possibly one of the attempts to spread a false version.

I don’t want to believe that Vasyl is gone. Although Levko Lukianenko has repeatedly expressed his certainty that it is so.

“And the proof?”

“We almost never have reliable proof here, but my soul feels that Vasyl is no longer with us.”

Several months later, Enn Tarto recounted that soon after the event, he managed to speak with Romashov, who was then in solitary confinement in cell 6—in the same corridor as Vasyl, with two empty cells between them. Romashov allegedly heard the bunks being lowered in cell 3 on the evening of September 3. (Balys Gayauskas says that Romashov himself was then in the neighboring cell, number 4. See his version of Stus’s death in the essay “The Museum in Kuchyno—The Conscience of Russia”). When the guard pulled out the pin, Stus apparently couldn’t hold the bunks, and they struck him. Because Stus supposedly groaned:

“Killed me, the bastards!”

He often used that word. Even Romashov remembered it. In December 1987, I had the opportunity to speak with Romashov one-on-one. He did not want to confirm this version: “I don’t want to talk about it at all.” He had been mistakenly released from his cell at that time, and perhaps he wanted to lie low. And in general, why should he bother with our troubles, when he still had God knows how long a term, and he had no sympathies for me or for Stus. Or perhaps the guard deliberately pulled out the pin unexpectedly while Vasyl was sitting on the stool under the bunks, and they hit him on the head? And they were heavy, made of thick planks, and even reinforced with a metal corner along the edge. We will probably never know the secrets of Vasyl Stus’s death...

The world knew about the death of Vasyl Stus on September 7. We, who were sitting next to him, did not know, although we guessed and felt it.

On October 5, in the hospital, a KGB officer from Kyiv, Ilkiv Vasyl Ivanovych, called me for a conversation. A local KGB officer, Zubov or Zuev, was present. One of those whom the Russians call a “strapping fellow.” The conversation was in Ukrainian, so the “fellow” remained silent. In a fairly frank conversation, I, as the prisoners say, called Ilkiv’s bluff. I list all the deceased: Mykhailo Kurka, Oleksa Tykhyi, Ivan Mamchych, Yuriy Lytvyn, Valeriy Marchenko, Akper Kerimov, Vasyl Stus...

“Well, Stus... His heart couldn’t take it. It can happen to anyone...”

And right there, my own heart sank:

  ...a mountain’s 

slow crawl, a descent, the falling apart

of a continent...

Thus I finished my second attempt at a memoir about Vasyl Stus (the first was in the autumn of 1978) and dated it “January 5, 1989.” It was quite concise, one might say, a summary—just to record the main facts. Because we all walk under God, no one knows their time, and to leave honest testimonies about those who left us earlier is our sacred duty. For it is known: history, unfortunately, is not always what happened, but what is written down. If the participants and contemporaries of socially significant events do not leave testimonies, then new people will come and write “according to their own understanding,” based on the materials that have been preserved. Or as they are commissioned. And what remains of us, former political prisoners? Criminal case files? They contain far from the whole truth, and far from everything in them is true. Because the investigation has its own truth, and the accused has his. And each side conceals something or portrays it in a light favorable to itself. So nothing can replace living memoirs, written in conditions of freedom from the fear of persecution.

THE RETURN

And yet:

we will still return

at least—

feet first,

but: not dead,

but: not defeated,

but: immortal.

  V. Stus

We must return in thought to that place, to Kuchyno: what happened there after Vasyl Stus was gone?

His death struck us hard, shook all of Ukraine and the world, but not our prison. There were no signs of Gorbachev’s “perestroika” in our corridors at least until the end of 1986, when “guests” from Moscow began to frequent us. They started proposing that political prisoners write some kind of, even a paltry, repentant statement, well, at least “I regret what I have done,” “I was mistaken,” “I will no longer engage in political activity.” Ask for release “on health grounds.” Or let a mother or wife ask—so that there would be at least some piece of paper. Rumors reached us in the special regime that in the strict regime camps, some people had written something. Whether they wrote or not—the bulk of them were released in the first half of 1987. But we, the “especially dangerous recidivists,” held firm. So, Gorbachev says he is for perestroika, but why doesn’t he first of all release the opposition and take them as his allies? He wants to have a “human face” before the world—so why doesn’t he release political prisoners unconditionally, with rehabilitation, and not through a humiliating “pardon”? It turns out that he, too, considers us criminals, but, like a good tsar, shows us mercy.

O enemy! When will you be forgiven

The death rattle and the heavy tear

Of the shot, the tortured, the beaten to death

In Solovki, Siberia, Magadan?

O state of darkness and darkness, and darkness and darkness!

You twist yourself into a serpent, ever since

An unabsolved sin has shaken you

And pangs of conscience disfigure your spirit.

Rage over the abyss, balance yourself,

Block all paths to yourself,

For you know well, you universal sinner:

You cannot flee from yourself to the ends of the earth.

This madness of impulse, this tornness

Of all-over-flights—from hell to paradise,

This hovering over death, this thirst

Of the corrupt to corrupt the whole white world

And to keep pounding, pounding the aching victim,

To wrest forgiveness for its own

Perennial atrocities—that is too much

Marked on souls and spines.

That very tear will incinerate you

And a fierce cry will sprout in a hundred stalks

Across fields and meadows. And you will comprehend

The frenzied all-destructiveness of your kind.

O master of your own death! Fate

All-remembering, all-hearing, all-seeing—

Will forget nothing, will forgive nothing.

If a political prisoner admitted his guilt—then the Kremlin gang is no longer guilty before him! With a cunning, forced admission of his own guilt, even a plea for humanity, he rehabilitated that gang! “And to keep pounding, pounding the aching victim, to wrest forgiveness for its own perennial atrocities…” No, we would not stoop to such an atrocity. When Gorbachev’s predecessors needed to imprison us, they did not ask for our consent. When the new Russian tsar was in a tight spot and wanted to make some political deal with us, we were not going to play along. When the pressure got to be too much, he would release us anyway.

And so it happened. But the release was preceded by some relaxation of the regime. In the spring of 1987, several people, including myself, were released to the general population regime. Many of us were granted amnesty: our remaining sentences were halved, although we bore no resemblance to those who had “embarked on the path of correction.” On February 19, the nearly blind Vasyl Kurylo was released. In the summer, Leonid Borodin was taken for transport and not returned (he was released). On July 2, the gravely ill Mykhailo Horyn was released (for this, they summoned his brother Mykola to Kuchyno). On October 8, Semen Skalych-Pokutnyk was released. One could feel that this last Perm “archipelago” of three camps was disintegrating. But at the same time, Petro Ruban, Ivan Sokulsky, Mykhailo Alekseev, Ivan Kandyba, and Mart Niklus were being mercilessly tortured in punishment cells.

On the morning of December 8, 1987, Levko Lukianenko was taken from Kuchyno into exile. An hour later, the zone was swarmed by a horde of guards. They subjected us to a “general shakedown” and told us to pack all our belongings for a journey. Where to? Today happens to be the day of the Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Reykjavík. Could it be that this time we have become objects of political slave trade, a “bargaining chip,” and are about to be released? But judging by the mood of the “shakedowners,” it doesn't seem so. If they were releasing us, they would have been more polite. So, they are moving us to another place. To be able to tell Reagan: “They are no longer in Kuchyno.” Reagan would find out about Moscow’s trickery tomorrow, but for Gorbachev, a lie for one day was enough.

They took us, eighteen men, to a familiar place—the hospital at the strict-regime camp VS-389/35, in the village of Tsentralnoye, Vsekhsvyatskaya station, only they placed us on the opposite, southern side of the barrack. The regime here was much weaker. If formally it turned out that Vasyl Stus was punished with death for supposedly lying on his bunk at an improper time, here Major Osin, having startled Mykola Horbal, waves his hand:

“Lie down, lie down...”

We could have stayed there. But no—they kicked us out. Some were transferred to the strict regime. Gunārs Astra was taken to Riga and released back in February 1988. He died a month later. On April 18, Vitaliy Kalynychenko was released; on July 8—Mart Niklus, Hryhoriy Prykhodko, Borys Romashov. On August 2—Ivan Sokulsky. Mykola Horbal, Ivan Kandyba, and I were moved from that place on August 12, 1988, held for three days in the visiting room, and on the 15th, taken to Perm. After us, only two men remained in the special-strict regime—Enn Tarto and Mykhailo Alekseev. On August 21, in a miraculous way, in less than a day, I was brought back to my homeland. By plane to Kyiv (they only showed me the handcuffs), by prison van to Zhytomyr. The special convoy handed me over to the local jailers, who unsealed the accompanying packet and found the instruction: “Upon receipt of this, release.” The reason: “For conscientious work and good behavior, testifying to his correction—to be pardoned.” Well, I'll be. As if I had been imprisoned for hooliganism and idleness... But you can't just sit outside the prison and cry: take me back. That same day I made it home, to my dear mother...

A few days later, on September 3, 1988, at a meeting of the Ukrainian Cultural Club, in the well-known apartment of Dmytro Fedoriv at 10 Olehivska Street in Kyiv, for the first time in my life, I spoke freely, without self-censorship, before a considerable circle of our own people, but people gathered not by force, as in Mordovia or the Urals.

It was the eve of the anniversary of the deaths of Yuriy Lytvyn and Vasyl Stus, so I spoke about their final days and recited several of Stus’s poems from memory. The audience received the speech well, and they asked me to write about it. “But to write about great people, one must be of equal stature to them, so as not to distort their image,” I objected. But Svitlana Kyrychenko (the wife of Yuriy Badzio, an old friend of Stus) replied that every detail of these people’s lives could be valuable, and everything should be recorded. Indeed, I thought, there are not many who knew them in captivity. And not every witness will write. So, I must find my hidden memoirs from 1978 and continue them. Svitlana also noted that my reading reminded her of Vasyl’s. I must have imitated the author to some extent, because I had heard and seen how he himself read. Now many people read Stus’s poems, but it troubles me if the reader misplaces the accent. Then Petro Borsuk asked me to copy and send him these poems so that his daughters could learn them. I reprinted and distributed selections of the poems many times then. Soon my fellow villager Ivan Rozputenko brought me a typewritten copy that I had given him in 1977 or 1978. The leadership of the Ukrainian Helsinki Union provided me with a typewriter, so I retyped the entire selection I had brought out of the Mordovian camp No. 19. It came out to 50 A5-sized pages.

In the autumn of that same year, 1988, I met Stus’s widow Valentyna Popeliukh and their son Dmytro in Kyiv, along with their grandson Yaroslav, and Dmytro’s wife Oksana Dvorko. In Barakhty, in the Vasylkiv region, I visited Yuriy Lytvyn’s mother, Nadiia Antonivna Parubchenko, went to the village of Hatne near Kyiv to the grave of Valeriy Marchenko with his mother Nina Mykhailivna, his family and friends, and tracked down Oleksa Tykhyi’s son Volodymyr in Kyiv. Those were difficult meetings... As if you had returned from the other world. I also went to Vasyl’s mother in Donetsk, to 19 Chuvaska Street, in a small house not far from the station. When Yelyna Yakivna heard who I was and where I was from, she cried bitterly and went into the garden, leaving me with Vasyl’s niece Tetyana. Returning, she said that just when she begins to forget her grief a little, someone writes or comes—and stirs it up again. It was then that I keenly felt my guilt for returning from that world alive, while the best of us had perished...

“He went to school before he was six,” his mother told me. “One day, the teacher, Zoya Petrivna, comes to me and asks why Vasylko comes to school barefoot, it’s already cold.”

“What? He goes to school? Then I won’t let him. He’s still too young.”

“No,” says the teacher, “you must let him go to school. I hold him up as an example to the others, those overgrown ones: ‘Stusyk, come on, you come out.’ And he stretches up to the blackboard on his tiptoes and writes.”

So he became a schoolboy before he was six, and a student by sixteen. They didn’t even want to accept him into the institute. He was so sharp in his studies, he would sit over those books and cry, so much so that I was afraid he would go mad.

And his mother also recalled how, when he was already a student, he came home one evening in his only suit, completely filthy.

“What was I supposed to do, when that drunk woman was lying in the market. I had to take her home. Otherwise, I wouldn't have slept at night.”

And another time he says to me:

“Take me to church, mother.”

We went on a Sunday. But then some woman was carrying a sack of potatoes, so he started helping her. And so we never made it to the church service.

“It’s nothing,” he says. “You have to do good for people.”

“My language is my mother’s”—I recalled Vasyl’s words, listening to his mother from Podillia, to the sing-song melody of her questioning sentences.

That same autumn, in the journal “Kafedra,” which was then being published in Lviv-Kharkiv by Mykhailo Osadchyi and Stepan Sapeliak, I read an essay by Vitaliy Kalynychenko about the last days of Vasyl Stus. I was surprised: there were so many inaccuracies and conjectures in it. This was because Kalynychenko was not in Kuchyno at the time of Stus’s death. He was in the Chistopol prison then, and returned later; we told him the stories, and this is how he mixed them up. Although Sapeliak and Kalynychenko argued to me that it was a short story, a work of fiction, the fresh wound pained me too much. Why this myth-making on a fresh trail? First, the whole truth must be told. Perhaps someday a writer will portray the image of Stus better and more accurately than we who knew him, but we must first of all testify to the truth.

I immediately wrote three or four pages of text about the circumstances of Vasyl Stus’s death known to me, which was published in one of the subsequent issues under the title “The Disintegration of a Continent.” This prompted me to write a broader memoir, because I did not immediately start writing after my release: I wanted first to find what I had written in 1978, as many details and impressions from those times I could no longer recall so vividly. I have already mentioned that when I went into captivity in 1979, I hid one copy in my yard in Stavky, burying it in a nylon jar in the ground. When I returned in 1988, I dug and dug—it wasn’t there! I had given the second copy to Dmytro Mazur through my mother—and Dmytro couldn’t find this one either. So I wrote a second version (finished on January 5, 1989). Copies of my typescript began to circulate throughout Ukraine and beyond. First, my memoirs were published by the typewritten journal “Literaturnyi Yarmarok” (editor Bohdan Zholdak), then, with a few phrases removed, by the journal “Donbas,” number three, 1989, and partially by the journal “Silski Obrii,” number six of the same year. For some newspapers, I prepared separate fragments.

Later, I saw that my memoirs were far from complete, so I decided to expand them, even at the expense of my rule to write as concisely as possible. This should be a document about a man and a document about a time and place to which access was restricted. I testify. Before readers, literary scholars, before the court of history. This third, perhaps not the last, version, I finished on January 30, 1991, while already working in Kyiv as the secretary of the Ukrainian Republican Party. (It was published in the booklet: Vasyl Ovsienko. The Light of People. Memoirs and Essays about Vasyl Stus, Yuriy Lytvyn, Oksana Meshko. Library of the URP journal “Respublika.” Series: Political Portraits, No. 4. Kyiv, 1996. 108 pp. While preparing this booklet, I made some corrections and additions, without violating the narrative style or introducing contemporary assessments. Let it be as I remembered and perceived it then. It is a document of its time. Now, in 2004, I am again making some small—even smaller—corrections and additions, and adding notes).

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the idea arose to transport the mortal remains of the Ukrainian national heroes Vasyl Stus, Yuriy Lytvyn, and Oleksa Tykhyi to their homeland. The families held lengthy negotiations with the authorities, and the public collected money. By the end of summer 1989, specific dates were outlined: to bring them back by September 3-4. These are the anniversaries of the deaths of Vasyl Stus and Yuriy Lytvyn. Good people included me in the group that was to travel to the Urals. It was an unforgettable trip... A few days after returning, on September 9, I asked Mykhailo Horyn, who was chairing the second day of the Constituent Congress of the People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika, to let me speak at the rostrum out of turn, and I made the following announcement (of course, I spoke more briefly, but the text was written):

“Here, good people, in my hands are the keys to the prison cells from which political prisoners, including myself, were taken away less than two years ago. These are the keys to the cells of the so-called ‘institution VS-389/36’ in the village of Kuchyno, Chusovoy district, Perm region—a special-strict regime colony for ‘especially dangerous state criminals, especially dangerous recidivists,’ such as those present here, Mykhailo Horyn, Levko Lukianenko, Mykola Horbal, Ivan Sokulsky, Ivan Kandyba...

These are the keys to the cells of that very ‘institution’ where well-known human rights activists, members of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords—Oleksa Tykhyi, Yuriy Lytvyn, and Valeriy Marchenko—were driven to a fatal state, dying in prison hospitals in 1984. This key, number three, is possibly from punishment cell No. 3, in which the outstanding poet of modern Ukraine, Vasyl Stus, died as a result of a hunger strike and from the cold.

I did not steal these keys. I just picked them up on September 1 in one of the cells of the abandoned and semi-ruined, painfully familiar prison. Let us hope that these keys will never again jingle in the hands of guards. Their place is in a museum.

According to the ‘most humane in the world’ Soviet laws, the remains of a deceased prisoner are not returned to the family for burial in their homeland until the term of imprisonment ends. Thus, those prisoners who survived are already at home, and those who died are still under arrest. Oleksa Tykhyi is in the ‘Severnoye’ cemetery in Perm; Yuriy Lytvyn and Vasyl Stus are in the village of Borisovo, near Kuchyno, under posts with the numbers 7 and 9. Only the body of Valeriy Marchenko was wrested away by the great ascetic, his mother Nina Mykhailivna, and buried near Kyiv.

The families of Stus, Lytvyn, and Tykhyi, with the support of the ‘Memorial’ society, the All-Ukrainian Society of the Repressed, the UHG, and Rukh, have finally obtained permission to transport the mortal remains to Kyiv and rebury them in the Lisove cemetery. The funeral was supposed to be on September 3, the day before the anniversary of the deaths of Lytvyn and Stus.

We bought plane tickets, ordered zinc coffins, and chartered transport. But three days before our departure, a telegram arrived from Kazantsev, the head of the communal services department of the Chusovoy district, stating that the reburial was prohibited ‘due to the worsening sanitary-epidemiological situation in the district.’

Nevertheless, a film crew from the newly created ‘Halfilm’ studio, led by director Stanislav Chernylevsky, who is working on a full-length film about Vasyl Stus, went to the Urals. I went with them. Unique footage was taken at the graves of Stus and Lytvyn, in the premises of our former prison, including the punishment cell where Stus died. We arrived just in time, as the ‘prison of nations’ is soon to be converted into a cowshed.

We established that there was no worsening of the sanitary-epidemiological situation in the Chusovoy district. We asked doctors, market workers, sellers, people on the street—no one had heard of such a thing; no special state had been declared in the district. From conversations with the chief doctor of the district’s sanitary-epidemiological service, Dyvdin, and the deputy head of the communal services department of the district executive committee, Musikhin, it became clear that the decision to prohibit the reburial was made after calls from Kyiv, from Kuchyno, and from Perm. It is not difficult to guess that those calls were from interested parties, from the culprits of the deaths of Tykhyi, Lytvyn, and Stus.

In 1985, Stus was buried a few hours before the arrival of his wife and son, and they were not allowed to transport the body to Ukraine. Then, too, they cited an unfavorable sanitary-epidemiological situation. So, there is an epidemic. It is a plague. It is an anti-Ukrainian plague, the carriers of which sit in the KGB and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine!

In this connection, I propose to add the following to the congress’s resolution:

‘We demand the return to Ukrainian soil of the mortal remains of Ukrainian patriots with which the expanses of Russia are sown, including Tykhyi, Lytvyn, and Stus;

we demand the complete rehabilitation of all prisoners of conscience of the 60s-80s, which cannot be done without a public condemnation of the perpetrators of the repressions (condemnation, not conviction);

we demand that the safes of the KGB be opened and the works of our artists, particularly Yuriy Lytvyn and Vasyl Stus, be retrieved from them for the purpose of their publication.’

A storm of applause erupted in the hall. Journalists surrounded me, photographing those keys…

Also in the hall was the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine for ideology, Leonid Kravchuk. (He was sitting not far from me, a little behind, in the first seat next to the aisle. I saw a woman approach him and pin a badge to his jacket—at that time, the first batch of such simple blue-and-yellow flags, which were simply pinned to clothing with a needle, had been made for us in Lithuania. They were easily lost. The cunning fox looked down at the badge, took off his jacket, and hung it on the back of his chair).

Not everything that was filmed at the cemetery in the village of Borisovo and in Kuchyno made it into Chernylevsky’s film (final title “A Black Candle for a Radiant Road,” “Halfilm,” 1992), nor did everything even make it into the shot. Here is an example.

Shortly before our trip, I received from Mart Niklus in Estonia his essay “Excursion into the Past”—about a visit to Kuchyno in September 1988 (he had also been there with a film crew from Estonian television in May 1989). Mart writes, among other things, that the brother of our warden, Major Dolmatov, Stepan Oleksandrovych, is buried a few steps from the grave of Stus and other political prisoners, and that Dolmatov himself fell ill with cancer and went to Moscow for treatment. His predecessor, Major Zhuravkov, died shortly after Stus and is buried in Perm. In the corner of the cemetery in Borisovo, we found the burial of Yuriy Lytvyn under post No. 7, Ishkhan Mkrtchyan under No. 8, and Vasyl Stus under No. 9. I found the grave not only of the brother but of our warden Dolmatov himself. It is one over from his brother’s, the fourth from Stus’s, in the same row. I started looking for it because I saw discarded wreaths with inscriptions under the fence, comparatively fresh: “To our dear Aleksandr Grigoryevich from the staff of institution VS-389/37,” “...from the Maksin family.” Political zone 37 was in Polovynka; now criminals are probably held there, as the political prisoners were only left in zone 35, in Tsentralnoye. But Maksin was our last chief of the regimen! Maybe he was transferred there. It seems “Aleksandr Grigoryevich” is one of “ours.” I didn’t know Dolmatov’s first name and patronymic, but I guessed it was him and started looking for the grave. A photograph embedded in the monument left no doubt. And the inscription:

“Dolmatov, Aleksandr Grigoryevich 24. II 1946 – 4. IV. 1989.”

May he rest in peace. God is his judge. And Zhuravkov’s. They took many secrets with them. If only they had lived and told them. But it’s probably no coincidence that they died not at all old… (See my essay on this, “God Protects His Own”).

Under public pressure, the transfer was finally permitted. Returning from the Urals, I wrote the following note for the press on November 22:

“On the evening of November 15, 1989, an expedition flew from Kyiv to Perm to transport to their homeland the mortal remains of Ukrainian patriots Oleksa Tykhyi, Yuriy Lytvyn, and Vasyl Stus, tortured to death in the death camp VS-389/36 in the village of Kuchyno, Chusovoy district. The group included Stus’s son Dmytro, Tykhyi’s son Volodymyr, the deputy head of the All-Ukrainian Society of the Repressed and UHG member Vasyl Gurdzan, who represented the interests of Lytvyn’s mother, film director of ‘Halfilm’ studio Stanislav Chernylevsky, cameramen Bohdan Pidhirnyi and Valeriy Pavlov, sound engineer Serhiy Vachi, writer and bard Valeriy Pokalchuk, and a former prisoner of Kuchyno, the head of the Zhytomyr branch of the UHG, Vasyl Ovsienko. Tykhyi’s other son, Mykola, came from Moscow. The director of the film ‘Vasyl Stus. The Thorny Road,’ poet Volodymyr Shovkotyshnyi, had gone to the Urals back on November 7, carrying letters to the local authorities from the Writers' Union of Ukraine and the USSR, from the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine, and from its head, USSR People’s Deputy Mykhailo Bielikov.

By the time the main group arrived, the coffins and the wooden crates for their transportation had not been made, because some lieutenant colonel and captain of the militia had ‘advised’ the craftsmen not to hurry...

Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi had previously had to visit countless institutions, including the district KGB department, now headed by Vladimir Ivanovich Chentsov, who had worked as a KGB officer in the death camp from the end of 1981 to the end of 1984 and is one of the culprits in the deaths of the political prisoners. Chentsov said that his department not only did not obstruct but even facilitated our cause. In reality, only the public helped us; the authorities only hindered. Everything was done to make the group miss the return flight and not return on Saturday, as people were supposed to gather in Kyiv on Sunday. The Perm journalist and poet Yuri Belikov (he is from Chusovoy), the editor of the newspaper ‘Chusovskoy Rabochy’ Yuri Odeskikh, the director of the Chusovoy printing house Aleksandr Mikhailov, and journalists Mykola Gusev and Marina Chernykh helped us a great deal. It was the printing house that provided us with its bus, a heavy truck, and tools, because from the state (from the communal services department) we were only able to get a few shovels. The driver of the truck from the printing house, Valeriy Sidorov, spent the night of the 17th in the truck to make sure nothing happened to it, and did not sleep at all the next night. But it did not help...

The main group, after dozing in a Perm hotel on mattresses laid on the floor, traveled for four hours by electric train to Chusovoy, visited all the necessary institutions, and checked into a hotel. We had to carry all the equipment ourselves and use local transport. The cold was biting. In the evening, we discovered that we had not taken the death certificates of Tykhyi, Lytvyn, and Stus—so they would not give us the coffins. Ovsienko had to be sent back to Perm. On the morning of the 17th, the group set off by bus from the local printing house to the village of Borisovo, on the outskirts of which the cemetery was located. On the way, the group met the local policeman, Matyakubov, and stopped at the village council in Kopalno, but the head of the village council was not there, although a meeting had been arranged with him by phone. We started trying to call him and the district authorities. No one was there. Chernylevsky, Dmytro Stus, and Gurdzan with the cameramen had to, after dropping off the tools at the cemetery, return to Chusovoy, where after long delays they were allowed to exhume the coffins, but not to remove them until the zinc ones were brought. The same negotiations were held at the cemetery with the local policeman and some operative. Around 12 o’clock, we declared that we would start digging without permission, taking full responsibility for the consequences. The issue was the ‘desecration of graves’...

The snow had barely dusted the ground. The ground was frozen about 10 centimeters deep.

Stus’s coffin was found at a depth of approximately 100–140 cm in dry clay. It was reached earlier. The middle of the three lid boards was slightly broken. Lytvyn’s was at a depth of 150–180 cm, in wet clay; we had to bail water out of the pit. It was upholstered with a fabric that was once red. Still quite sturdy.

Around 2 p.m., Ovsienko returned from Perm, immediately got to work, and recounted that he had traveled from Chusovoy in the same bus as the former guard Sergey Ostanin, who did not want to get off the bus to visit the graves of his victims, not even the grave of his own boss, Dolmatov, who is buried a few graves away from Stus. He now works as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, along with the former guard Navoznov, while the rest have scattered who knows where. Kukushkin hit Lieutenant Lyubetsky on the head with a hammer—now he himself is in prison. Such was the news.

Yuri Belikov, Nikolai Gusev, and another journalist from Chusovoy were digging with us. The authorities only observed. It was getting dark. We had to run lighting from the nearest house, for which the owners took no payment. (These were the Zherebtsovs, Nina Vasilyevna, Sergey Timofeyevich, and their son Aleksandr). Before dark, we managed to get ropes under the coffins and move them from their place. But the zinc coffins were still not there. The coppersmiths were bored in the bus; we had to increase their pay, ‘warm them up.’ Chernylevsky and the cameraman had to go to Chusovoy again for negotiations, from where he brought back vague but alarming news that something had happened on the road to our truck, which was supposed to bring the zinc coffins from Perm. However, we did not stop our work.

Finally, around 7 p.m., the truck with the coffins arrives. We are relieved, while the authorities are unpleasantly surprised (the policeman, the operative, the representative of the sanitary-epidemiological station Dyvdin, and from communal services—Kazantsev).

Shovkoshytnyi explains that they barely managed to persuade the craftsmen to finish at least two coffins that had been started, and the wooden crates for them. All with extra payment, of course. And the Tykhyi brothers went to some factory where they were promised a craftsman and materials. The truck left Perm in the morning, but on the way out of the city, it was stopped by the traffic police, who began to check its serviceability. Of course, the steering wheel play turned out to be too great; it was impossible to drive. The driver and Shovkoshytnyi went to the traffic police booth to argue, but there they were told that there was a suspicion they had hit a boy. They had to go to the district police station at the other end of the city. But when the driver Sidorov and Shovkoshytnyi came out of the booth, they saw with horror that their truck was sinking on all three right wheels. (Later, two identical punctures were found in each wheel, all on the side). There was one spare wheel; they put it on the front, moved the punctured ones to the inside of the rear axle, and the intact ones to the outside.

They went to the district station. Only at 2 p.m. local time (12 p.m. Moscow time) were they released, with an apology. (It later turned out that at that very time the Kyiv city executive committee had made a decision about reburial at the Baikove, not the Lisove, cemetery. So, the order to delay them was ‘called off’). The truck couldn't go faster than 40 km per hour, and it was a journey of some 200 km...

So, there is hope we can manage. Everything now depends on us.

The first coffin to be raised, around 7 p.m., was Stus’s. We removed the lid. The body was not covered. Everything was black: the face, the prisoner’s clothes, the pillow under his head, the shavings in the coffin. The body was desiccated, the nasal cartilage had collapsed, but there was no doubt that it was Stus. (It should be noted that we did have such doubts. Dmytro looked and said: “That’s father.” He pulled his cap from his head, covered his face with it, and turned away mournfully). The effect of blackness is enhanced by the darkness and artificial lighting. The head is turned slightly to the left. How to transfer the body to the zinc coffin? We broke a side wall with the idea of sliding it. We try, but we see that the body will break apart. So we cover it with a strong cloth, press it tightly, and flip the coffin over. We place the body on boards, cover the back with a second piece of cloth, take both pieces tightly in our hands, and, as if in a sack, place it into the zinc coffin. We work with rubber gloves and gauze masks. There is no particular smell, just something like mold. (Remembering the version about the possible murder of V. Stus with the bunk boards on his head, I looked closely, but noticed no injuries on it. But, in fact, this procedure was carried out under such tension that we were not in a state for inspection. I am not inclined to mystifications, but a participant in the exhumation, the poet Yuri Belikov, showed a photograph of V. Stus to a psychic. The psychic said: “This man was killed by a blow to the head”).

We placed a pass from the church under his head, a small cross, covered the body with a shroud, placed unlit candles by his hands, prayed, said our goodbyes, and closed the coffin with the lid.

Lytvyn’s grave was deeper. When we lifted the coffin, water poured out of it (I can still hear that gurgle). We removed the lid—the body was covered with a shroud. His mother had been at the funeral, so she said they even allowed her to change her son into civilian clothes. She performed a minimal rite, so we did not remove the shroud, especially since everything was wet. We transferred it to the zinc coffin in the same way, using two pieces of cloth, placed candles, prayed, and closed the coffin.

We carried them to the road, about two hundred meters between graves, with great care, first Vasyl, then Yuriy. Having completed this, we tackled the empty coffins with a sense of relief. We stacked them and lowered them into the pits. Custom dictates that the ropes be thrown in as well. We filled them in, made mounds, and tidied the grave of Ishkhan Mkrtchyan, which was between Stus’s and Lytvyn’s. We took the numbers off the posts and chipped off splinters for ourselves. By the way, the plaque on Lytvyn’s post No. 7, which his mother had brought and which we had seen on August 31, was already gone. We placed candles on all eleven prisoners’ graves, two of which were now empty, and so we departed. (In October 2000, I learned from David Alaverdyan that the Armenians, led by his father-in-law, a former Kuchyno prisoner Ashot Navasardyan, had taken the remains of Ishkhan Mkrtchyan back in February 1989, without asking anyone! David showed a video of it: a blizzard, and they are digging…).

The truck with the coffins and wooden crates left immediately, around 9 p.m. The coppersmiths and Shovkoshytnyi went with them—to the printing house garage, where the coppersmiths soldered the coffins shut, placed them in the crates, and the printing house director, Mikhailov, bound the crates with wire at the edges during the night so they would be accepted as luggage.

We got out of the cemetery around 11 p.m. and reached the hotel by midnight. We managed to contact Kyiv and report on the course of events. We were told that the funeral would be at Baikove, not Lisove cemetery—the Kyiv City Council executive committee had made such a decision.

Chernylevsky and the cameraman went to film the soldering. There, the driver Sidorov removed the wheels, patched the inner tubes, and in the morning, together with Shovkoshytnyi, they took the coffins to the airport in Perm.

We arrived in Perm by electric train on time, but the Tykhyis were not there. We report this to Kyiv. They know nothing there.

Finally, 20 minutes before passenger check-in began, they arrived. Exhausted, they were dragging a marble slab from their father’s gravestone. Thank God...

Volodymyr and Mykola recount that with great difficulty they managed to obtain permission on the afternoon of the 17th to exhume their father’s body, who was buried in the “Severnoye” cemetery in Perm, and to have a coffin and crate made. But the craftsman who was supposed to make them did not show up. Someone told them he had been beaten. On the morning of the 18th, the brothers came to the workshop where the materials and tools were, told someone there that they had a craftsman. But there was no key to the workshop. So they pried the door open, entered the workshop, and got to work themselves, although custom forbids relatives from doing this. It was a good thing Mykola had some elementary knowledge of the matter. Only towards the end of the work did a coffin-maker’s assistant, Igor, come and help them. They hurried to the cemetery. They had to disregard custom once again—together with the gravedigger, they broke the headstone, dug up and transferred their father’s remains to the zinc coffin, rushed back to the workshop where Igor soldered it shut, and then came here. We informed Kyiv that all was well, we were flying out.

We flew out of Perm at 8 p.m. (6 p.m. Moscow time) and arrived in Boryspil at 8:30 p.m. The precious cargo was handed over to us an hour later—about a thousand souls were waiting for it...

...A truck with its sides down drove out, with the coffins on it. Valentyna rushed forward and fell upon her husband’s coffin. Mykhailo Horyn said a word about the martyrs, thanked us by name for our hard work. Banners, candles, a prayer service, high voices desperately beating against the night sky, planes roaring. A high, sorrowful solemnity. And we, forgotten, as if no longer needed by anyone, look for a car to take our things to Kyiv, load them—and meanwhile, the escort has driven off.

I arrived at the Holy Protection Church in Podil the next day, November 19, in the morning. A huge crowd. This is the same church where Valeriy Marchenko’s funeral service was held on the Feast of the Intercession in 1984. How our paths intertwine... When the coffins were carried out, they bowed three times to the Temple of God, circled it—I squeezed my way into Lytvyn’s hearse-bus to comfort his mother and son. I no longer had the strength to take a turn carrying the coffin.

The funeral has been described in the press without me. I will only say that I, too, made my way to the microphone and briefly—one cannot delay a funeral until sunset—reminded everyone that we were burying three “especially dangerous state criminals—especially dangerous recidivists” today. Oleksa Tykhyi was sentenced to a total of 22 years—he served 14. Yuriy Lytvyn lived only 49 years, but was sentenced to 43 and served 22. Vasyl Stus, out of his forty-seven and a half years, was a prisoner for 12, and was sentenced to 23. For what? For the Word of truth...

Farewell, dear cellmates—Oleksa, Yuriy, Vasyl...

Yes, we depart like shadows, and like ears of grain from under a scythe,

in one lament we unite our solitary voices.

It was not dawning, nor was it day, but only at the time of harvest’s fullness

it seethed and rumbled, like the thunder of cries and commands.

But lying down in the swathes under the clear sky, face up,

we awaken the polyphony of the world’s colorful dawns.

A throng of births rises, a throng of age-old passions,

and God does not take His eyes off the Ukrainian mirror.

It is not just one dawn, not just one millennium,

that in an oasis of misfortune we are choked, crushed, and bent...

Like brands the centuries are to us, like a wound, so forgive, my dear God, forgive,

when this luckless zeal cannot be borne, cannot be carried to the end.

But soothsayers mark our fate—the dry land will yet crack open,

and whether into the abyss or to freedom—smash your fists against the horizon.

You will yet see Ukraine in a heavy crown of crimson.

Upon the still waters and the bright stars

a swan will fall with her white breast.

Strike, lightning, and, thunder, resound,

so as not to spread wings again—in sorrow.

Green villages, white towns, and a blue river, and a light-blue valley,

and a golden Ukraine, like a dream, has gone somewhere, leaving traces behind.

Here I will stop in my solitude—there, where the hooves of a black horse

scatter the bright sparks of furious days.

...Suddenly the road was veiled, which broke off right at its goal.

January 5, 1989, village of Stavky. January 30, 1991, city of Kyiv. Corrections and notes from 1996 and 2004.

The Light of People: Memoirs and Essays about Vasyl Stus, Yuriy Lytvyn, Oksana Meshko. – Kyiv, 1996. – 108 p. : ill. – (Library of the URP journal “Respublika.” Series: Political Portraits, No. 4. – Photos, illustrations, and other publications.

MEMORY

“O MY MOST HOLY CUCKOO-MOTHER”

On May 6, 1994, in Donetsk, Yelyna (Olena) Yakivna Stus (née Synkivska) passed into eternity.

Her son Vasyl lived barely half of his mother’s lifespan, inducting her into the Temple of Holy Mothers of Ukraine. And who inducted Vasyl Stus into the Holy Temple called Ukraine? His Mother, of course.

His heavy cross was the Word. The Ukrainian Word. And his Mother gave it to him. “My language is my mother’s,” Vasyl told me in a cell of the Kuchyno special-regime camp in the Urals. And I recognized the melodic Podillian intonations when I listened to his Mother after her son’s death. In 1988, upon my release, I had to perform a difficult duty: to visit the relatives of those who had died in captivity—Oleksa Tykhyi, Valeriy Marchenko, Yuriy Lytvyn, and Vasyl Stus. I walked as if on hot coals. As if guilty for being alive, while THEY had not returned.

I also stepped onto the quiet Chuvaska Street, No. 19, in Donetsk, with a trembling heart. His mother was in the yard. When she learned that I was FROM THE OTHER WORLD, she cried bitterly and went into the garden. Returning, she joined the conversation between me and Vasyl’s niece Tetyana:

“Just when I start to forget my grief a little, someone comes and reminds me...”

And as if catching herself, she told me a little about Vasyl’s childhood, and about herself.

For what do we know about our mothers? In Kuchyno, I had shown Vasyl a photograph of my mother, who was not much younger than Yelyna Yakivna. He looked at her features for an unnaturally long time and said:

“How similar they are, these mothers of ours...”

Sometimes he would gaze at his mother’s image for a long time and sigh: “My mother, my mother...”

My whole expanse is four by four.

Wherever I look—a wall, a corner, and an angle.

This lilac-gray slag has eaten my whole soul,

This tangle of broken roads.

And farther than death is my native Ukraine.

A well, a fence, and two sad windows,

That smolder in the evening fire.

And in each pane—as if two embers,

Sorrowful eyes are set. It is you,

O my most holy cuckoo-mother.

The paths to you can no longer be found

And I cannot enter your sleepless night.

So wait for me. Wait for me. Wait.

Even if in vain—still wait, blessed one.

And pray to the Lord for me.

And if I die—then look for me from the other world.

Yelyna Yakivna was born on June 5, 1902, in Rakhnivka, Vinnytsia region. With her husband, Semen Demyanovych, she had two daughters and two sons. The eldest, Yaryna, died in 1940 of meningitis; 14-year-old Ivan was torn apart by a German mine; Vasyl was devoured by the insatiable Russian empire in 1985, and only Mariya, thank God, still teaches in Donetsk to this day. The mother endured what all Ukrainian peasants did in this most tragic of centuries in our history: hard labor, famine, repression. In 1940, the family was about to be “dekulakized,” so the father had to hide in a mine in the Donbas, and then he brought the family there. This is what Vasyl wrote about his mother:

“When I was 9 years old, we were building a house. And my father was dying—swollen from hunger. And we pushed a wheelbarrow, mixed clay, made adobe bricks, raised the walls. I was hungry as a dog... It was hard—our veins were about to burst. But you had to push the wheelbarrow. I remember how my mother cried because she had only one torn, patched-up-and-re-patched shirt, and Mariya and I wore who knows what.”

“I remember how in 1946-47 I herded someone else’s cow—for which they fed me. I knew that my mother was hungry—and I couldn’t eat alone, I would ask to take the bowl home, to eat with my mother. Once I brought the bowl, and my mother began to scold me very harshly, she cried, telling me not to do it again. Because she was very hungry—and it was hard for her to look at food. And the spoon wouldn't go to my mouth.”

“The first lessons in poetry were my mother’s. She knew many songs and could sing them very intimately. There were as many songs as Baba Zuyikha, our fellow countrywoman, had. And of the same kind. The greatest mark on my soul was left by my mother’s lullaby ‘Oh, lully-lully, my child.’ Shevchenko over the cradle—that is something you don't forget.”

“Oh, lully-lully, my child,

day and night.

Go, my son, to Ukraine,

cursing us.

And—so sadly: am I not in Ukraine? Where else should I go to it?”

Vasyl’s path to Ukraine lay through Mordovia, Kolyma, the Urals, and ended in thorny glory at the Baikove cemetery. And his mother’s path to her son has just now ended. They did not let her see her son in 1975, when she beat against the walls of the gloomy stone building at 33 Volodymyrska Street, having heard that her gravely ill son had been brought to Kyiv. They saw each other only in 1978, when all of Ukrainian exilic Siberia, through a hunger strike, won Vasyl leave to say goodbye to his father and bury him. The mother did not close her son’s eyes in the distant Ural captivity in 1985; she was too frail to come for the reburial in November 1989... The director Stanislav Chernylevsky filmed the mother in her last years—and we saw her in the film “A Black Candle for a Radiant Road.” But there is not a single foot of film where the son was captured. Only his voice:

Who will offer her water?

Who will close her eyes—tell me?

Indeed, others, better than I, have written about the tragedy of a mother who “gave her son as a sacrifice”; I cannot say it better. So let us bow our heads today before the memory of this Mother, henceforth immortal in her son’s word.

If it were not for you—this winter

would be for me like an endless

dreary street. For me

without you there is no life.

If I did not know that in the quiet of quietness

And in the dark of darkness there is no

your candle, that dawns

beneath the abyss of heights, —

I would have gone mad long ago.

Day after day, year after year,

I gaze into the sad window

and see an almond-shaped eye.

O Ukraine! O Mother! O Wife!

This misfortune, if it were not for you,

would have cut me down with a scythe.

But you gave wings to the whole horizon

And saw out all the worlds

And with a rainbow illuminated

my hours of solitude.

Independent Ukraine. – 1994. – No. 18 (119). – May 15.

TO A GREAT CITIZEN OF UKRAINE

“The high-throated pines of Sviatoshyn, that hum like pipes, wrapping their majestic crowns in the sky,” after a long separation, once again greet the familiar sharp profile of Vasyl Stus—now in bronze... On May 25, 1995, on the wall of the Academy of Sciences postgraduate dormitory at 61 Vernadsky Avenue, in Sviatoshyn, where the poet lived from 1963 to 1965, a memorial plaque was unveiled. Its author is a man who has the right to touch the memory of Vasyl—Borys Dovhan. He had already made a bust of him in the 60s, when it required not only talent but also civic courage. Such memorial plaques, said literary scholar and friend of Stus, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, at the unveiling, are notches in our memory of the best among us. He lived in Sviatoshyn during his years of self-affirmation, here he found friends and like-minded people, here he met his beloved wife... These pines are a living image of his spiritual height, his upright stance.

And his widow, Valentyna, stood in the crowd of people... The family did not want a large gathering for the ceremony, but the honor for the poet and citizen will be measured not by the number of people who came to the unveiling of the plaque today, but by the number of seconds that passersby will stop here, said Vadym Proshko, the head of the Leningrad district council. This is the first and truly popular monument to Stus. The plaque was cast at the Institute of Casting Problems of the Academy of Sciences (headed by Borys Kyriyevskyi), the area was tidied up by workers of the Housing Maintenance Office of the Academy of Sciences (head Oleksandr Mykytenko) and the state communal enterprise of green economy (director Serhiy Mykytiuk). No one refused to participate in this work; they only asked if it was possible to pay for the materials.

Piketers from the Verkhovna Rada came to greet Vasyl—Ukrainians from Crimea and a choir of UPA soldiers from Kolomyia. When Ukraine is beset by May’s communist frosts, they come to the capital, but there are only a few Kyivans there under the walls...

Poet Oleh Orach, on behalf of the Commission for the Creative Heritage of Vasyl Stus, bestowed the honor of unveiling the memorial plaque on Mykhailo Horyn, Head of the URP, who had once been imprisoned in the Urals along with Stus.

“The empire has perished,” said M. Horyn. “But it left many stereotypes in people’s consciousness, a certain way of thinking that will long manifest itself in actions. Vasyl Stus was one of the few who rose from the imperial mire and became a model of a citizen of Ukraine. With his every act, he asserted his own and the national dignity: he called an enemy an enemy, an executioner an executioner. And in the conditions of a cell, that was a daily display of courage. Not everyone managed it. And the prison divided people into those who adapted and those who constantly resisted the regime, defending their dignity and the honor of their people. Stus was a great citizen of Ukraine in prison. He was a truly free man behind bars—an example for all of us,” said M. Horyn.

I continued his thought, that Vasyl appeared in Kyiv at a time when the first frosts were setting in for the Sixtiers. He returned to Kyiv in the fierce frost of 1979, and had no one to turn to here—as practically the entire Helsinki Group had already been arrested. “I did not want such a Kyiv. Seeing that the Group was effectively left to its fate, I joined it, because I simply could not do otherwise,” he wrote in his “Camp Notebook.” He did not strive to go abroad—“for who here, in Greater Ukraine, will become the throat of indignation and protest? This is fate, and one does not choose one’s fate. So one accepts it—whatever it may be. And when they do not accept it, then it chooses us by force.”

Indeed, when a nation is in captivity, the struggle for freedom claims its best forces. Many, it seemed, could have gathered information about human rights violations in Ukraine, many could have sat in prison, but only the noblest went. Stus went, whom we miss so much now. He went where the noblest were supposed to be…

Independent Ukraine. – 1996. – No. … – June.

A SPIRITUAL FEAT DOES NOT GO IN VAIN

The publishing union “Prosvita” (Lviv) has released Vasyl Stus’s “Palimpsests”—a collection of poems by the outstanding poet, who died at the age of 47 in the punishment cell of a political concentration camp in the Urals on September 4, 1985, reconstructed by his son Dmytro.

This third volume, in two books, completes the publication of his Works in six volumes, nine books, which was carried out over 5 years.

On June 1, 1999, at the Kyiv Teacher’s House, with the assistance of the “Prosvita” Society and the “Ridnyi Krai” charitable foundation operating under it, a presentation of the entire publication was held under the title “People and Text.” It was hosted by one of the edition’s compilers, Candidate of Philology Dmytro Stus, and Halyna Stefanova. Unfortunately, due to illness, the head of the editorial board of the publication, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, could not participate, but she sent a touching letter, which said, in part:

“It is terribly sad that I could not be here with you on one of the happiest days of my life, as it is not often one has the good fortune to witness the realization of one’s most cherished plan, especially when this plan is so large-scale and significant for Ukrainian culture—accomplished in, to put it mildly, far from favorable conditions, but rather in spite of these conditions, on a saving enthusiasm. Well, this is in line with our traditions: has not all the best of Ukrainian cultural achievements, like Stus’s creative feat, been realized, taken flesh and weight in defiance of conditions, in some higher spheres of supra-reality... From these ascetically modest volumes emerges the existential self-affirmation of a man who built himself in conditions of unfreedom, who won his upright stance, who showed high examples of intellect and poetic insights with which one can worthily enter the expanses of modern world culture... In terms of the amount of new and unknown material, miraculously preserved and happily found, this publication is unique. Stus believed that his works would reach the reader, and for this, he made many manuscripts. Although some of them perished (perhaps his last collection ‘Bird of the Soul’—the fruit of the last five years of his captive life—is irretrievably lost), the compilers showed miracles of ingenuity in deciphering the texts of the manuscripts, primarily Dmytro Stus, his wife Oksana Dvorko, and Halyna Burlaka.”

M. Kotsiubynska further noted that this work by a small group of enthusiasts, people mostly close to Stus (the driving force of the project was the poet’s son), has not yet been properly appreciated. But great things are seen from a distance.

Speaking at the presentation, a professor at Kyiv University, Vasyl Yaremenko, assured that the editorial board of the publication will be nominated for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. Perhaps this will be their substitute for a salary, which they received (or rather, did not receive), like everyone else.

Dmytro Stus presented all the volumes of the publication. The first volume includes early poems written before his imprisonment in 1972. These are the unpublished collections “Winter Trees” (compiled by Mykola Honcharuk), “The Merry Cemetery” (Valentyna Makarchuk), and “The Whirlwind” (D. Stus). The second book contains poems that were left out of the collections.

The second volume, with the somewhat ironic (Goethean) title “Time of Creation (Dichtenszeit),” consists of approximately 200 poems and 200 translations written in the 9 months from his first arrest to his trial (compiled by H. Burlaka and O. Dvorko).

The third volume contains poems that circulated in samizdat under the title “Selected Works.” It was these that Heinrich Böll nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1985. But it is only awarded to the living...

The fourth volume contains literary articles, dramatic attempts, and journalism. It was prepared by Serhiy Halchenko and Mykola Honcharuk.

The fifth volume includes translations (M. Honcharuk, O. Dvorko, Albina Shatska).

Finally, the sixth volume, in two books, “Correspondence,” was compiled by M. Kotsiubynska, who added a unique “Dictionary of Names Found in the Letters.”

“We live in a time of paradoxes,” said Yevhen Sverstiuk. “Never before have we had a situation where openly criminal elements are in power. On the other hand, never before have we seen churches appear like visions, not only in Kyiv but also in villages. And this is happening in times we call difficult. Books are appearing that we could not have dreamed of—that we would hold in our hands the works of the banned Stus, the diaries of Yefremov, about which only legends circulated. And from whom was Hrushevsky not confiscated? Now we have all this. But this needs to be comprehended when we talk about the current terrible, difficult times. Times are always different for different people. We have come to bow to Vasyl Stus for what he made impossible in his time and under his circumstances—for the people of today. We are not most in need of funds. They will be found. A work needs to be written—and it will be published one way or another. ‘Unwritten letters do not arrive,’ says Nadiia Svitlychna. None of these nine books had the right to appear in the world, except perhaps for the censored letters. But they were published. A spiritual feat never goes in vain. There is some mysterious energy of a life cut short and there is an immense power of concentrated moral will that orients other people. If not for the ‘family enterprise’ of Dmytro and his wife Oksana, it would have been impossible to move this great cause. Just as if not for the energy of Leonida and Nadiia Svitlychna, the books of Ivan Svitlychny would hardly have been published. It's all about people. Our time needs people of scale who are able to fill the gaps, who are able under current conditions not to bend, not to adapt, not to groan and not to whine.”

“Seeing these books being published,” Yevhen Sverstiuk continued, “I thought (you’ll find this funny): where did Stus get a pencil? Paper? They only gave us a pencil to write a petition—and then they’d take it back! Stus fought for this privilege with hunger strikes. And for his wife to be allowed to send him two volumes of Goethe. It was incredibly difficult. He was a man who stood tall. He demanded to be reckoned with as long as he was alive. In every line, he is as he is. He never bent, never took the easier path. And this is the main lesson from Vasyl Stus for all of us. This is a Shevchenko-like lesson. Take his correspondence, written under censorship. It’s so meaningful, as if the censor didn’t exist! Or ‘Phenomenon of the Epoch’—he cites banned authors! This was at a time when 99% of writers pretended they had never even heard of those banned authors... But he had to pay for all of this!”

Also speaking were Oleksandra Koval, director of the “Prosvita” publishing union, who took on this publication without hesitation; Pavlo Movchan, head of the “Prosvita” Society; Ivan Dziuba, academician and director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature; Member of Parliament Anatoliy Matviyenko, whose assistance helped publish one of the volumes; and Leonid Finberg, a representative of the International Renaissance Foundation, which financed the publication of 6 of the 9 books. Incidentally, one volume was published with funds from the “Kalmius” Private Charitable Foundation, and another was funded by the public, primarily through a collection by Nadiya Svitlychna and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in Edmonton. Semen Gluzman provided computers for the publication. The state, however, did not contribute a single kopek, despite the assurances of Vice Prime Minister Valeriy Smoliy when he presented the Order of Yaroslav the Wise to the poet’s widow, Valentyna Popeliukh, on January 25, 1998...

Vasyl’s fellow countrymen from Rakhnivka, Haisyn Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast, brought the poet’s son and wife a korovai and a jug of water from the well from which he drank. And the wonderful artists Serhiy Moroz and the sisters Halia and Lesia Telniuk sang songs set to the lyrics of Vasyl Stus.

Prava liudyny. Informbiuleten KhPH [Human Rights. KHPG Newsletter]. – 1999. – No. 12 (161). – June 1–15. – pp. 11–12; Slovo i chas [Word and Time]. – 1999. – No. 7 (463). – July. – pp. 16-18. – Photo.

VASYL STUS STREET IN KYIV

In 2002, the 14 districts of Kyiv were consolidated into 10. In the process, the districts were given historical names. Among them was Sviatoshynskyi (previously the territory of the Leningradskyi Raion). With the return of such a luminous name, the district’s leadership changed, and positive developments began. In particular, the district administration and council successfully implemented a long-standing decision to rename Radhospna Street to Vasyl Stus Street.

On this street, there are several dozen large new buildings, home to thousands of people. Nearby, at 61 Vernadsky Avenue, where the dormitory for graduate students once stood, there is a memorial plaque by Borys Dovhan which states: “In this building, the poet Vasyl Stus lived from 1963 to 1965.” Incidentally, it was installed twice, in 1995 and 2000, because the first one was stolen by some miscreants.

After marrying Valentyna Popeliukh in December 1965, Vasyl Stus lived nearby, on Lvivska Street, until his arrest on January 12, 1972. That little house is no longer there, as the Ring Road was built through the area. But the poet’s soul often returned there in his dreams:

Here is our porch. You are already at the door.

You pressed the bell—and so easily

Opened the heavy gate of paradise.

Our son called out. I wanted to shout! But

I had not the strength to make a sound…

Now his widow lives nearby, on Chornobylska Street. The poet and human rights activist, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, lived there for only 8 months, until his arrest on May 14, 1980. During his reburial on November 19, 1989, his coffin was brought here for a final farewell. The poet’s work is full of “purest Sviatoshyn recollections.” Stus is remembered here by the living and by the “tall-throated Sviatoshyn pines.”

The ceremony celebrating the street’s renaming took place on May 21, 2003, near building number 25, and then moved to School No. 200 on Dobrokhotova Street. This school is also to be named after Vasyl Stus. The ceremony was attended by the poet’s widow, his son Dmytro, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Mykhailo Horyn, the creator of the gravestone crosses Mykola Malyshko, and Mykola Horbal, who also lives nearby.

The lively interest of Sviatoshyn residents, especially schoolchildren, in this great name heralds significant shifts in their souls.

Prava liudyny [Human Rights]. – 2003. – No. 14 (306). – May 15-31. – p. 11; Visti tyzhnia [News of the Week]. – 2003. – May 26.

Published:

Ovsienko, V.V. Svitlo liudei: Memuary ta publitsystyka. U 2 kn. Kn. I [The Light of People: Memoirs and Publicistic Writings. In 2 vols. Vol. I] / Compiled by the author; Artistic design by B.Ye. Zakharov. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – pp. 129–237.

Photo:

Stus Vasyl STUS.