Age: 29
Education: Master of Philology at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Profession: Writer
Did you know? Her first “publication” was conversations with her grandfather, which he transcribed and published in a local Boryspil newspaper when she was a child.
In Ukraine, history is never far away.
For Olena Herasymyuk, that past seems particularly close. The poet and former military medic spent five years documenting the stories of Ukrainians who perished in Soviet gulags, casting light on a chapter of Ukrainian history that many forget or choose to ignore.
Millions of Ukrainians died or suffered from political repressions under the Soviet Union. But the subject of death and suffering is “taboo in Ukrainian traditional culture,” Herasymyuk writes in the introduction to “Rozstrilny Kalendar” (“Execution Calendar”), her 2017 book. “And this problem is not restricted to history.”
Still, “Rozstrilny Kalendar” focuses on history, telling the story of these executed Ukrainians in the form of a calendar to show that “the Soviet repressive system never took a day off,” Herasymyuk says.
Coming from a long line of writers — her father and grandfather are poets — Herasymyuk always knew she wanted to do something related. She published her first book of poems, “Deafness,” in 2014.
But Herasymyuk was not content to stick purely to literature. She was also an activist. In this regard, she took after her grandfather, Mykhailo Datsiuk, a poet and Soviet-era dissident.
In 2014, Herasymyuk took part in a demonstration on Kyiv’s Independence Square in which she and others read the names of Ukrainians writers and intellectuals killed in Sandarmokh, a forest in northwest Russia in 1937–38, at the height of the Stalinist Terror. “A lot of people came,” Herasymyuk says.
It was also personal. Herasymyuk’s father was born in exile in Karaganda on the bleak northern steppes of Kazakhstan. Her great grandfather had been a commander in the Sich Riflemen, an Austro-Hungarian unit that briefly fought against Bolshevik forces in 1919.
“Rozstrilny Kalendar” began as a project on Facebook that published one or more stories of victims daily. In one year, Herasymyuk and her collaborators published 1,000 articles. A third of them made it into the book.
She also succeeded in helping to persuade a court to posthumously rehabilitate 13 people arrested and executed in 1923 for their opposition to Soviet authority.
Herasymyuk was touched to receive a message from a descendant of one of the rehabilitated men. “We never believed it would happen,” Herasymyuk says, quoting the woman’s words.
“Rozstrilny Kalendar” wasn’t the end for Herasymyuk. In 2017, she joined the Hospitaliers military medical battalion in the Donbas. There, in June 2019, she took part in a special operation to capture Volodymyr Tsemakh, a man who allegedly played a central role in the Russia-backed militants’ downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17. Several months later, Tsemakh was released to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange.
This year, Ukraine awarded her the medal “For Saving Lives.” She also published “Prison Song,” a book of lyrical poetry drawing from her experiences in the war, to great acclaim.
