The 1960s are remembered in the West for its poets, musicians, hippies, dissidents and protestors who challenged the old ways, seeking greater creative opportunities and charting new directions. Ukraine had its Sixtiers too, and they also left their mark.
The poet Vasyl Stus was an outstanding and heroic representative of this defiant generation.
Because of his Ukrainian patriotism and political defiance of the Soviet system, Stus spent 13 years in labor camps and remote places of exile. Stus died while imprisoned at the age of 47 on Sept. 4, 1985, six months after Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet leader.
Sadly, this was just before Gorbachev started freeing political prisoners as part of his more liberal policy of glasnost (openness). Stus and several of his colleagues did not make it. They died in the inhuman conditions which still characterized the post-Stalin mini-Gulag for political prisoners, the majority of whom were Ukrainians.
In November 1989, the remains of Stus and two other Ukrainian political prisoners were brought back from Russia’s Perm region, where some of the labor camps for imprisoned dissenters were located, and reburied in the presence of an estimated 30,000 patriotic activists in Kyiv.
Stus had grown up in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, now occupied by the Russians. It was then called Stalino. In 1963 he became a student in Kyiv and there met a small but vibrant, innovative and courageous group of young writers, poets and literary critics, who would become known as the Sixtiers.
They included the poets Lina Kostenko, Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Drach, the literary critics Ivan Svitlychny, Ivan Dziuba and Yevhen Sverstiuk, artist Alla Horska and theatre director Les Taniuk, to name but a few.
Like their counterparts in the West, the Ukrainian Sixtiers had liberal, anti-totalitarian views. But they were keen not only to broaden the limits of individual self-expression and political freedom, but also to affirm Ukrainian cultural values and national identity in the stifling conditions of the Soviet empire.
The artistic and political nonconformism of the Sixtiers got them into trouble.
For this purpose, Taniuk and his colleagues founded the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv. They took the lead in pressing the Soviet authorities for information about the countless victims of the Stalin era, the remains of which were being found at that time in unmarked mass burial sites outside of the capital, and to protect cultural and religious monuments.
The artistic and political nonconformism of the Sixtiers got them into trouble. The most outspoken of them, Symonenko, already unwell, was brutally beaten up by “unknown assailants” and died soon afterwards at the age of 28 in December 1963. His poetry and that of his colleagues began circulating in the underground as samvydav, self-published typescripts.
The following year, the Club of Creative Youth was shut down. By now the Sixtiers in Kyiv had forged links with their counterparts in Lviv and other Ukrainian cities. Their cultural assertiveness in resisting Soviet regimentation began to take on the form of political dissent.
In 1965 the KGB cracked down. While Western attention was focused on the arrest and trial in Moscow of two nonconformist literary figures, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the simultaneous arrest of 26 member of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in Ukraine, passed largely unnoticed in the West. At that time Ukraine was off limits to foreign correspondents based in Moscow and it remained difficult to get news out of the Soviet republic.
The new post-Stalin generation refused to be intimidated by repressive measures; on the contrary, it was galvanized by them. Sinyavsky and Daniel in Moscow refused to plead guilty at what was supposed to be a show trail. There were protests about their arrest and imprisonment, and this laid the foundation for what became known as the Soviet dissident movement. In Ukraine, the same occurred.
Stus was one of the first to protest publicly. On Sept. 4, 1965, during the premiere of Sergei Parajanov’s classic film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” at the Ukraina cinema in central Kyiv on Arkhitektora Horodestkoho Street, Dziuba called on the audience to protest against the arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Stus was one of those who supported him.
During the following months, the protests and petitions multiplied. The fiery poet Lina Kostenko even threw flowers to the accused at their trial. Nevertheless, 19 people were eventually imprisoned.
Forty years after his death, Stus has become a source of inspiration for the latest generation of Ukrainians ready to defend the freedom and culture of their resilient nation.
At the end of 1965, Dziuba addressed a major essay to the Communist Party authorities asking boldly whether what Moscow was doing in Ukraine was “Internationalism or Russification?” A young Sixtier journalist, Vyacheslav Chornovil, compiled the case histories of those imprisoned and they were published in the West in 1967 as “The Chornovil Papers.” Inevitably, he was imprisoned for letting the world know what was going on.
More arrests followed and only radicalized the protestors, turning them into dissidents and oppositionists. So, what started off as an informal patriotic association of Sixtiers, by the end of the 1960s was transformed by Soviet repressive methods and political intransigence into a movement for human and national rights.
One leading activist, historian Valentyn Moroz, was given a draconian 14-year sentence in 1970. That same year, another, Alla Horska, was murdered.
A much larger KGB crackdown in 1972, resulting in scores of new arrests and targeting many of the Sixtiers, also failed to stem the tide and crush the resistance.
Stus was among those imprisoned. His poems nevertheless were circulated in samvydav and enhanced his reputation as a leading voice of modern unvanquished Ukraine – forced to languish under Russian imperialist rule, albeit now Soviet – seeking its recognition as a European nation.
In 1976, inspired by the new opportunities offered by the conclusion of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 – a multilateral East-West agreement which contained human rights provisions and was signed by Moscow – Ukrainian dissenters and political prisoners, including Stus and Chornovil, coalesced into the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group. But this only led to more repression and new terms of imprisonment.
Sadly, Stus did not live to see the release of Soviet political prisoners, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the achievement of Ukrainian independence. He died as Moscow’s captive exactly 20 years after the public protest in Kyiv that had heralded the birth of a patriotic Ukrainian dissident movement.
Just before the Berlin Wall was torn down on Nov. 9, 1989, and the German Rock band the Scorpions had begun to sing their famous song “Wind of Change,” some of the key Ukrainian Sixtiers, including former political prisoners, ended up leading a new movement seeking Ukraine’s sovereignty and democracy.
The Ukrainian People’s Movement for Restructuring, known as Rukh, held it inaugural congress in Kyiv in September of that year. It united former political prisoners, dissidents, and liberal, patriotic communists in one formidable alliance. The Sixtier Ivan Drach was elected its head, and other leaders included Chornovil and Mykhailo Horyn, a Sixtier from Lviv.
It was fitting that the remains of Stus were brought home at that historic moment and that he has since been properly appreciated as a poet and fighter for freedom. Today, 40 years after his death, as a poet and symbol, he has become a source of inspiration for the latest generation of Ukrainians ready to defend the freedom and culture of their resilient nation.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.