During the period of 1922–1924, Epik worked within the regional board of the Ukrainian branch of Komsomol and from 1924 to 1925, as an editor of Chervonyi Shliakh (Red Road) in Kharkiv.

[2] Epik participated in the activities of cultural and educational societies, was a member of the Union of Peasant Writers "Plough", and later joined the VAPLITE group led by Mykola Khvyliovyi.

He was a member of several Ukrainian literary organizations such as the Plough, Prolitfront and VAPLITE (Free Academy of Proletarian Literature).

[3] In Epik's prose from the 1920s, he sharply criticized different aspects of the Soviet regime, particularly in Bez gruntu (1928), in which he harshly branded the conformists, whom he called "paperoids", who have developed a system of their existence: complete submission to the strong and merciless bullying of the weak.

[4] Even though Epik had continued to support the Communist Party, after the abrupt reversal of the Soviet Ukrainization policy in the early 1930s, he suffered from the purges.

It is now known that he was shot on 3 November 1937 at the killing field and burial ground called Sandarmokh near Medvezhyegorsk, in Karelia (then the Karelian ASSR), a site discovered in 1997 by the Memorial Society and its local head Yury Dmitriev.