"Kurds'komu bratovi" (Ukrainian: Курдському братові,[1] transl. To a Kurdish Brother)[2] is an Aesopian[3] poem written by the Ukrainian Vasyl Symonenko in March 1963 and disseminated clandestinely in samizdat until 1965 when it appeared posthumously in the German journal Suchasnist.[3][4][5] It has been described as one of Symonenko's greatest works[6] and made Symonenko a national hero and one of the most important figures in Ukrainian literature.[4] The poem appeared during the height of the First Iraqi-Kurdish War in which the Soviet Union was involved.[7]
In 1968, an agricultural college lecturer named Mykola Kots was sentenced to seven years in camp and five years in exile after disseminating copies of the poem in which the word "Kurd" was replaced with "Ukrainian".[3]
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)