Ukrainian dissident Vasyl Ovsiienko passed away

Vasyl Ovsiienko, Ukrainian dissident, civic activist and political prisoner of Soviet labor camps, passed away on the 75^th year of his life, following a long illness.

Ovsiienko was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda for the first time in March 1973, at the age of 23. In total, the civic activist spent over 13 years confined for his convictions.

In the late 1960s, Vasyl Ovsiienko distributed Ivan Dziuba’s samvydav work Internationalism or Russification among students. He became a member of the All-Ukrainian Coordination Board of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, heading the Zhytomyr branch of the organization, in 1988, and the program coordinator of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group in 1998. After the Soviet collapse, together with his associates, Ovsiienko managed to export some items that belonged to Ukrainian political prisoners’ cells, including particularly the keys to the prison cell of Vasyl Stus, from the Perm oblast of Russia. He also organized expeditions to the Solovetsky Islands and Sandarmokh.

Vasyl Ovsiienko is the laureate of the Vasyl Stus Prize for his publicist work and the Ivan Ohiienko Prize in the Public Activity nomination. He is also the recipient of the third grade Order of Merit, first grade Order for Courage, and the fifth grade Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise.

"Vasyl Ovsiienko, a man of countless virtues, Christian, Ukrainian philologist, editor, chronicler of the resistance movement, popularizer of the life and work of Vasyl Stus and other dissidents, political prisoner from the times of Brezhnev and Gorbachev, passed away […]. He was a great and a very humble person; he was, in fact, a one in a million devotee," Vakhtang Kipiani, editor of the Istorychna Pravda, remembers of him.

PEN Ukraine expresses sincere condolences to the family and friends of Vasyl Ovsiienko.