page_title: Vasyl Stus
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Vasyl Stus / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Русский: юбилейная монета «Василь Стус». На реверсе этой монеты портрет Стуса расположен на фоне стилизованной мозаики «Женщина-птица» работы Аллы Горской.
context_page_description: Vasyl Semenovych Stus was a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and an active member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. For his political convictions, his works were banned by the Soviet regime and he spent 13 years in detention, until his death in Perm-36—then a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners, subsequently The Museum of the History of Political Repression—after having declared a hunger strike on September 4, 1985. On November 26, 2005, the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded him the highest national title: Hero of Ukraine. Stus is widely regarded as one of Ukraine's foremost poets.
context_section_description: In 1985, an international committee of scholars, writers, and poets nominated Stus for the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, but he died before the nomination materialized.
  On 19 November 1989 the remains of Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhy and Yury Lytvyn were brought back to Kyiv and reburied at the Baikove Cemetery in a ceremony attended by more than 30,000 people.
  In January 1989, the first non-governmental Vasyl Stus Prizes were awarded for “talent and courage". This Prize was set up by the Ukrainian Association of the Independent Creative Intelligentsia, and is awarded every year on the poet's date of birth in Lviv. In 1993 Stus was posthumously awarded the Taras Shevchenko State Prize for Literature.
  On 8 January 2008, the National bank of Ukraine issued a commemorative coin dedicated to Vasyl Stus and on 25 January 2008 Ukrposhta issued a stamp in his memory.
  In December 2008, a group of current and former students of the Donetsk National University sent an appeal to the Minister of Education, Ivan Vakarchuk, asking that the university be named after one of its alumni, Vasyl Stus. The Minister supported the initiative and approached the Rector of the university with a request to discuss the issue among staff and at the academic council. On 17 February 2009 62 out of 63 members of the university's academic council voted against renaming the university to Vasyl Stus or Volodomyr Degtyaryov (61 voted against this), 63 voted for not changing the name of the institute. On 13 February 2009, representatives of the university's students voted in the same fashion. The Donetsk National University, relocated to Vinnytsia due to the War in Donbass, was eventually renamed named after Stus on 10 June 2016. The new name was approved by 75 votes out of 105 of the university's academic council.
  After it was taken over by the pro-Russian rebels during the War in Donbass, the university building in Donetsk removed its commemorative plaque of Stus in 2015.
  Stus is highly regarded among intellectuals in Ukraine.
  Dozens of streets all over Ukraine are named in Vasyl Stus's honour.
  Vasyl Stus's second trial was discussed on The Rachel Maddow Show in May 2017.
caption: Commemorative coin issued by the National Bank of Ukraine in the honor of Stus.[8]
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