Firing and dismissal
Writers and representatives of the creative intelligentsia who conflicted with the authorities often lost their jobs or were expelled from educational institutions for being “unreliable” employees and students. This became a common method for the system to abridge dissidents from social benefits, marginalizing their social functioning. A careless public statement or a poem without an ideological “backing” was sometimes enough to lose all future prospects within the Soviet state. Ukrainian poet and activist Vasyl Stus, for instance, was expelled from graduate school and forced to work as a construction worker and a stoker. Vasyl Holoborodko, Mykola Vorobiov, Vasyl Symonenko, Ivan Drach, and many other Ukrainian authors were also expelled from universities. Taras Melnychuk, after his exile in camps, was placed under the supervision of the punitive authorities, and then, with the assistance of the KGB, was relegated to a psychiatric hospital.