Vasilii Pavlovich Kozachenko

Born Mar. 12 (25), 1913, in the settlement of Novoarkhangel’skoe in present-day Kirovograd Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Became a member of the CPSU in 1952. Of peasant origin. Participant in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, in the partisan movement.

Kozachenko graduated from the department of philology at the University of Kiev in 1938. His works were first published in 1936. His first collection of stories, The Golden Charter, appeared in print in 1939. The novellas The Diploma (1945; Russian translation, 1962) and A Mother’s Heart (1946) depict the heroism of Soviet people in the struggle against the fascist German invaders. The postwar Ukrainian village is the central theme in the novellas New Currents (1948) and Meeting the Dawn (1954). The novella Salvia (1956) deals with moral and ethical problems. Kozachenko was awarded the T. G. Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR in 1971 for his series of novellas about the partisan underground, Letters From the Hold. He has been the executive secretary of the Board of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union since 1959 and a member of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party since 1966. A deputy to the seventh and eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, Kozachenko has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.