Yevhen Zakharov, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group
THE DISSIDENT MOVEMENT IN UKRAINE[1]
(1954–1987)
The history of Ukraine in the 20th century can be viewed entirely as the history of a national liberation movement. Each time it seemed to have been mercilessly destroyed, it would rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, and gather new strength.
The Ukrainian peasantry fiercely resisted collectivization, which resulted in the mass deportation of Ukrainians to the eastern regions of the USSR in 1931 and the artificial famine of 1932–1933, which claimed several million lives. While formally developing Ukrainian statehood in the form of a union republic and a national culture, the communist regime mercilessly destroyed the national intelligentsia and eradicated the national self-awareness of Ukrainians[2].
The 1939 annexation into the Ukrainian SSR of western Ukrainian lands, which before the First World War had been part of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires and between the wars had been incorporated into Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, gave new impetus to the Ukrainian liberation movement. The Ukrainian population of these territories was driven by the national idea, and the dream of an independent Ukrainian state had not died for several generations. That is why in the western lands, the armed resistance to both the brownshirts and the reds proved to be so prolonged. The main political force of this resistance was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Created in the late 1920s in the part of Western Ukraine that belonged to Poland, this organization fought mainly against Polish domination, using terrorist methods in the process. The Soviet administration clearly understood that the Ukrainian nationalists were in no way inclined to become an obedient tool in its hands, and in any case, the new government had no intention of tolerating the existence of any non-puppet organization on the annexed territories. In 1940–1941, most of the OUN leaders located in Western Ukraine were arrested.
A similar story, but at an accelerated pace, was repeated in the summer of 1941, when Ukraine was occupied by Hitler’s Germany. The government of the Third Reich refused to recognize the independence of Ukraine proclaimed in Lviv and arrested several OUN leaders. From 1942, a large part of the OUN members, led by S. Bandera, embarked on a path of partisan warfare against the Germans[3]. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) they created continued this struggle even after Ukraine returned to USSR control. The partisan war in Western Ukraine continued until the early 1950s.
Soviet historiography portrayed the fighters of the UPA as bandits who robbed and killed women, the elderly, and children, and who organized Jewish and Polish pogroms. Obviously, this was, at the very least, a one-sided view[4]. But the terror against the insurgents was brutal: hundreds of thousands were sent to the camps with the standard 25-year sentence. Entire villages in Western Ukraine were deported “for assisting the UPA.”
In the early 1950s, the partisan war in rural areas had almost died out, but underground organizations in the cities continued to operate. According to the KGB, during 1954–1959, 183 “nationalist and anti-Soviet groups” were liquidated in Ukraine, and 1,879 people were convicted, including 46 groups (245 people) from among the intelligentsia and youth[5]. The most large-scale political repressions after Stalin’s death occurred precisely in these years.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the national movement was, as before, localized in western Ukraine. Most of the underground organizations uncovered in 1958–1969 operated there; the national idea prevailed in them, and ideologically they aligned themselves with the OUN.
However, among the underground organizations, there also appeared those that rejected armed struggle and preferred non-violent methods, for example, the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union (1961). In fact, with the emergence of ideas of non-violent resistance in the 1950s, Ukrainian dissent was born as a combination of national (the most widespread and prominent), religious, and civic movements[6]. As elsewhere, dissident activity was less and less expressed in the creation of underground organizations and increasingly took on the features of open public activism.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the national-cultural social movement predominated in Ukrainian dissent. In modern Ukrainian literature, the activists of this movement are often called the Sixtiers (Shistdesiatnyky). However, this term is given a completely different, significantly narrower and more specific meaning than that associated with the concept of “the Sixties generation” in relation to Soviet culture as a whole in world cultural studies and which was the subject of lively public discussion in Russia. The Ukrainian Sixtiers movement was a movement of the creative (primarily humanitarian) intelligentsia, aimed mainly at combating Russification and reviving the national culture. Its center was Kyiv, although the movement spread throughout Ukraine. The Sixtiers did not raise the issue of Ukraine’s secession from the USSR; they hoped for the liberalization of the regime and for a solution to the national problem within the Union[7]. They also evoked sympathy from a part of the Ukrainian party-state nomenclature, which is perhaps why until 1965 they were not subjected to criminal prosecution, and many of them made successful careers. The Sixtiers movement was not monolithic. In it, one can find the origins of all trends of political thought in modern Ukraine. The Sixtiers can be divided into “culturalists”—those who came to the movement through literature and art and could not reconcile with the regime, morally resisting it—and “politicos”—those who from the very beginning set political goals and tasks for themselves.
After the “Thaw,” a part of the Sixtiers entered into open confrontation with the authorities. When in 1963–1965 the publication of the Sixtiers in magazines and newspapers was banned and their books ceased to be published, their works were printed in Ukrainian-language publications in Poland (the newspaper Nashe Slovo [Our Word], Ukrayinskyi Kalendar [Ukrainian Calendar]), Czechoslovakia (the magazines Duklya, Druzhno Vpered [Forward Together], and Narodnyi Kalendar [People’s Calendar]), and in the West (the “Suchasnist” [Contemporaneity] publishing house), and they began to be circulated in samvydav. Initially, it was purely literary, mostly poetic; however, in 1963–1965, Ukrainian samvydav rapidly became politicized. Political journalism appeared. At first, these were anonymous or pseudonymous articles; from the second half of the 1960s, open statements, articles, and letters of protest against repressions began to prevail. Samvydav effectively became the infrastructure of the Sixtiers movement, a means of consolidating the nonconformist intelligentsia.
Ukrainian samvydav was focused mainly on the national problem (in this sense, it was significantly narrower than its Russian counterpart), which was analyzed in political, historical, and cultural aspects. For this reason, a large part of Ukrainian samvydav remained the domain of only the Ukrainian-speaking reader. Socio-economic journalism and philosophical works were sometimes found in Ukrainian samvydav. However, it was the books and articles by Ivan Dziuba, Yevhen Sverstyuk, Ivan Svitlychny, Leonid Plyushch, Valentyn Moroz, Vyacheslav Chornovil, circulated in samvydav, that belong to the best examples of Ukrainian journalism.
One of the most popular samvydav texts of the mid-1960s was the pamphlet “On the Occasion of the Trial of Pohruzhalsky,” written by Yevhen Sverstyuk and Ivan Svitlychny (it was circulated anonymously). It was dedicated to a terrible event: the fire at the Kyiv Central Scientific Library on May 24, 1964, which destroyed a huge number of precious books[8]. The article questioned the official version of the fire’s origin (arson committed by a mentally unstable library employee) and asserted that it was another act of humiliation against the Ukrainian people. “Having starved millions of Ukrainians to death in 1933,” the authors wrote, “having tortured the best representatives of our intelligentsia, and stifling the slightest attempt to think, they have made us obedient slaves... Let us not console ourselves with the eternal truth about the immortality of the people—their life depends on our readiness to stand up for ourselves.”
The most famous samvydav work of the second half of the 1960s was Ivan Dziuba’s book Internationalism or Russification?, which became a manifesto of the Sixtiers and gained wide popularity, circulating in thousands of copies throughout Ukraine. It was translated into several European languages and highly praised by various political forces outside the USSR. Using the official ideological tools of Marxism-Leninism, Dziuba offered a convincing critique of the official concepts on the national question, in particular, the theses about the immutability of the Party’s policy on the national question and the equal status of Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine, as well as the idea of the future merging of nations under communism. The most striking parts of the book are devoted to Russification and its destructive socio-psychological consequences for the Ukrainian people. It is widely believed that the book was also popular among the nationally oriented part of the party nomenclature; the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Shelest, personally read Dziuba’s manuscript and ordered that senior party officials be familiarized with it[9].
Russian samizdat was also circulated on the territory of Ukraine. This, as well as the introduction of the Russian reader to the best works of Ukrainian samvydav, was largely thanks to Leonid Plyushch. In Kyiv, he reproduced manuscripts he brought from Moscow and simultaneously organized the translation of Ukrainian samvydav into Russian for transmission to Moscow and abroad. It was thanks to him that Dziuba’s book, Vyacheslav Chornovil’s The Chornovil Papers (Lykho z rozumu), and others became known outside of Ukraine.
Geographically, the national movement was spread throughout all of Ukraine (for example, in 1972, approximately the same number of people were arrested in the West and East of Ukraine), but it was much more numerous in Western Ukraine and in Kyiv. It can be argued that in Western Ukraine, the dissident movement predominantly took the form of a national liberation movement, while in Eastern Ukraine, the national and religious movements combined with the human rights movement.
Human rights activity that did not prioritize the national problem was more noticeable in the large cities of eastern and southern Ukraine—Kharkiv, Chernivtsi, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk. It was very similar to analogous activity in Russia; perhaps it should even be considered part of the all-Union human rights movement. At the same time, in the second half of the 1970s, a tendency for human rights defenders to align with the national movement on its platform began to emerge. This was especially evident in the camps.
There was much in common between the Ukrainian Sixtiers-“culturalists” and Russian human rights defenders. Both movements were driven by the intelligentsia and were very close in spirit, the social composition of their participants, the argumentation of their demands, and their means of self-expression. Connections between the future activists of these movements were established even before the movements themselves were formed. These acquaintances continued in the Mordovian political camps, where Ukrainians arrested in 1965 were imprisoned alongside Sinyavsky and Daniel, and later Ginzburg and Galanskov. “The path from Ukraine to Mordovia lies through Moscow. Relatives of the arrested who traveled to visit them, and those released from the camps, inevitably ended up in Moscow. They would stay with the relatives and friends of the Moscow political prisoners” (Lyudmila Alexeyeva), passing information through them to the Chronicle of Current Events and abroad. The Ukrainian Sixtiers became involved in the campaign surrounding the Moscow “Trial of the Four” (1968). In the first Soviet human rights association—the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR (IG)—two members were residents of Ukraine ( Henrich Altunyan and Leonid Plyushch)[10]. In Odesa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of the largest samizdat libraries in the USSR operated; its organizers, Vyacheslav Igrunov and Gleb Pavlovsky, played a notable role in Russian dissent. Ukrainian political prisoners participated in international actions of camp resistance, marking with hunger strikes and work strikes memorable days common to Soviet political prisoners—December 10 (Human Rights Day), September 5 (Day of Red Terror), and October 30 (Political Prisoner’s Day).
As for religious movements, a peculiarity of Ukraine was the presence of two mass confessions unrecognized by the state: the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—predominantly in the west of the republic, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAPC)—in the East. Believers, and especially clergy, belonging to these confessions were brutally persecuted. The Greek Catholic Church, officially banned in 1946, existed as a catacomb church, enjoying mass support from a significant part of the population of Western Ukraine, primarily the rural population. The persecution of believers of other confessions was the same as in other regions of the USSR.
Ideological and administrative pressure on the radical part of the Sixtiers yielded no results, and the authorities resorted to repressions. The first wave of arrests took place in August–September 1965. Twenty-five people were arrested[11], to one degree or another involved in the movement, including seven from Kyiv. The central theme connecting most of the initiated criminal cases was the pamphlet “On the Occasion of the Trial of Pohruzhalsky,” the possession and distribution of which was incriminated to almost all of the arrested. One of the pamphlet's authors, the critic Ivan Svitlychny, was also arrested (he had to be released 8 months later “for lack of evidence”[12]).
There is a view that the repressions against the “Sixtiers” were carried out on orders from Moscow[13]. A number of signs indicate that the Ukrainian leadership, until the end of the 1960s, carried out such orders without particular diligence. In particular, the authorities tolerated the laying of flowers at monuments to Shevchenko, which had become traditional. These gatherings, held on May 22 in various cities of Ukraine, became annual demonstrations of national dissent. In Kyiv, several hundred people usually gathered on this day, singing songs and reading poetry. The authorities limited themselves to administrative measures and threats to the active participants. In 1967, they tried to disrupt the gathering but were met with staunch resistance from those assembled and retreated. For comparison, similar gatherings in memory of the Jews shot by the Nazis at Babyn Yar in 1941 (in which many famous “Sixtiers”, including Ivan Dziuba, also participated) provoked a much sharper reaction from the Kyiv party authorities.
After the first wave of arrests and until the end of 1971, only individual “Sixtiers”, whose activities had international resonance ( Vyacheslav Chornovil —his book The Chornovil Papers about the 1965 repressions was published in the West), and those who radically opposed the Soviet regime (members of the Ukrainian National Front and other underground nationalist organizations, and a little later—Valentyn Moroz), were subjected to direct repression. It should be noted that this relative leniency of the measures at that time towards the national movement did not extend to participants in the human rights movement of a general democratic orientation. For example, in 1969, four Kharkiv residents were arrested and convicted for supporting a letter to the UN from the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, even though a recommendation came from Moscow to refrain from arrests[14].
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, the Sixtiers movement began to take on organizational forms. In January 1970, the first Ukrainian periodical appeared in samvydav—the anonymous informational bulletin Ukrayinskyi Visnyk (The Ukrainian Herald) (UV). The prototype for The Ukrainian Herald was the Chronicle of Current Events. In addition to ordered and systematized information about movements, repressions, and the situation of political prisoners (judging by the “Chronicle” section, the bulletin had correspondents in more than ten regional centers of Ukraine), UV contained works circulated in samvydav—historical research, data on the genocide of Ukrainians, literary studies, poetry, and prose[15].
Under the conditions of a general hardening of the regime, which occurred after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the publication of UV could not but lead to a new wave of arrests. It coincided with a general offensive against samizdat, which began at the end of 1971[16]—in the first half of 1972 (in Moscow, a large-scale investigation began in the case of Yakir and Krasin, which resulted in the temporary suspension of the Chronicle of Current Events). In Ukraine, the second wave of arrests was accompanied by mass searches and dismissals from work. In January 1972, in Kyiv, Lviv, and other cities of Ukraine, about 20 of the most prominent figures of Ukrainian dissent were arrested (the arrests continued throughout the year, with 100 people arrested and 89 convicted)[17]. Hundreds of people were subjected to extrajudicial persecution. The purge affected not only scientific and cultural institutions, but also the rural intelligentsia, and party and Soviet workers[18]. Secret and open surveillance, interception of letters, and telephone tapping became widespread. Simultaneously, a new wave of Russification began.
Subsequently, Ukraine was turned into a testing ground for the KGB to try out new methods of combating dissidents. Strange murders were committed here that remain a mystery to this day (Alla Horska – although this murder occurred back in 1970, Volodymyr Ivasyuk, Mykola Zvarych), and for the first time, drugs were planted during searches. The fabrication of criminal cases against dissidents—for rape, hooliganism, resisting authorities, possession of narcotics, etc.—was initiated here. It was in Ukraine that the repressions were particularly brutal. It holds the sad palm of primacy in many respects. The first long camp sentence for a woman (Nina Strokata), the first application of Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR to a woman of retirement age—75-year-old Oksana Meshko, the first conviction of a woman for seeking the release of her political prisoner husband (Raisa Rudenko)[19]. Re-arrests of former political prisoners who had served their sentences for some minor, by “Moscow” standards, public activity—for example, for a manuscript of camp memoirs (Danylo Shumuk, Yuriy Shukhevych)—became a common phenomenon.
However, despite the repressions, the opposition national movement continued. A new stage was the creation at the end of 1976 of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG).
The UHG was founded on the initiative of a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, an ethnic Ukrainian, Petro Grigorenko. Of all the Helsinki Groups, membership in the UHG had the highest correlation with arrest. According to the calculations of Vasyl Ovsiyenko, of the 41 members of the UHG, 39 served a total of 550 years in prisons, camps, exile, and psychiatric hospitals; four—Oleksa Tykhy, Yuriy Lytvyn, Valeriy Marchenko and Vasyl Stus —died in captivity; Mykhailo Melnyk committed suicide on the eve of his arrest. Moreover, many members of the UHG declared themselves as such while they were in a camp or in exile on one political charge or another.
The Helsinki stage of dissidence in Ukraine signified the national movement’s adoption of human rights methods and forms. The idea of human rights proved to be close to the Ukrainian nonconformist intelligentsia: for the “culturalists,” it was organic; the “politicos” used the language and form of human rights ideology, which was understandable to the West, to attract greater attention and sympathy to Ukrainian national problems. The UHG focused its main attention on documenting violations of national rights. Unlike other Helsinki groups, it rarely responded to religious persecution or to the movement for socio-economic rights. Both the UHG’s program document and the vast majority of its other 30 documents are devoted to various aspects of the national problem. However, the group did speak out in defense of Evangelical Christian Baptists and also supported individual documents and appeals of the MHG.
In the early 1980s, the activities of the UHG were completely paralyzed: almost all of its members were imprisoned.
In the first half of the 1980s, open manifestations of Ukrainian dissent were suppressed, and with rare exceptions, it existed mainly in the form of underground organizations (as in the 1950s). The number of anonymous anti-Soviet leaflets increased. Psychiatric repressions intensified.
It should be noted that while the dissident movement was barely noticeable at liberty after the “general pogrom” of 1972, in the camps Ukrainian political prisoners were very active, becoming central figures of camp resistance in all its forms (hunger strikes, work strikes, declarations of renunciation of Soviet citizenship, etc.). V. Chornovil (together with Eduard Kuznetsov) initiated the movement for the Status of Political Prisoner and organized collective actions by political prisoners demanding recognition of this status. Joint and individual petitions became constant. Chronicles of camp resistance were kept. Documents created in captivity were secretly taken out of the camps by relatives of the convicts and circulated in samvydav.
“After 1972, a paradoxical situation arose in which Ukrainian samvydav was replenished mainly not by those at liberty, but by political prisoners” (Lyudmila Alexeyeva). These protests, which reached the West, received wide publicity and sparked international solidarity campaigns. One of the most powerful means of struggle was hunger strikes, which often became collective. In particular, from 1974, Ukrainian political prisoners and their camp comrades marked the anniversary of the beginning of mass arrests in Ukraine in 1972—January 12—with a hunger strike.
The activities of Ukrainian dissident political prisoners were based on traditions established by Ukrainian fraternities back in the post-war Stalinist camps. “It was they who bore the main burden of the struggle against the lawlessness of the Stalin-Beria period and are now a model that inspires and unites those who refused to renounce their convictions—people of honor and duty… They, the old-timers—the 25-year-termers—V. Pidhorodetsky, V. Pirus, S. Mamchur (deceased), P. Strotsen, V. Solodky, A. Kyselyk—provide an attractive example for the newcomers” (from MHG document No. 87 “On the Situation of Convicts in the Camps of the USSR,” the section written by Valeriy Marchenko).
In 1987–1988, Ukrainian dissidents who had returned from camps and exile became actively involved in political activities. In practically all political parties of a national-democratic orientation and national parties of a radical direction, former dissidents set the tone and were the leaders of these parties.
In these years, a new, post-dissident stage of the national liberation movement began. It was characterized by the participation of much broader segments of the population, the openness of political confrontation, and ended in 1991 with the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
[1] Introductory article to the Ukrainian section of the International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former USSR. The names of other articles in this section and other sections of the Dictionary are highlighted in bold.
[2] “Ukrainization” in the 1920s, although carried out within the rigid framework of communist ideology, to some extent stimulated the rise of national culture, primarily literature and the humanities. This process was abruptly cut short in the first half of the 1930s: in the political sphere, by the purge within the CP(b)U, during which the “national-deviationists” were crushed; in the cultural sphere, by the “case of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU)” and the subsequent mass repressions. The “cultural revival” of the 1960s was largely fueled by the memory of this upsurge.
[3] The other part, headed by A. Melnyk, collaborated with the Nazis.
[4] In any case, during the mass review of the criminal cases of former UPA fighters by the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine in the 1990s, the accusations of mass terror against the civilian population were, in most cases, dropped. It should also be borne in mind that sometimes rumors about the “atrocities of the Banderites” were created artificially: today, the facts of murders of civilians by NKVD officers disguised as UPA fighters are documented.
[5] Rusnachenko A. Natsionalno-vyzvolnyi rukh v Ukrayini [National Liberation Movement in Ukraine]. – K.: Vydavnytstvo im. O. Telihy, 1998. – P. 325, 326
[6] Beyond the scope of this essay are a number of particular national and religious movements that developed throughout the USSR and also encompassed Ukraine:
– the movement of the Crimean Tatars, whose main goal was the return of the people to Crimea (a separate section of this Dictionary is devoted to it);
– the Jewish emigration movement, a significant number of whose participants lived in Ukraine;
– persecuted religious confessions (Evangelical Christian Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christians of the Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals), and others).
[7] In modern Ukrainian historiography, there is no consensus on this matter. For example, A. Rusnachenko, arguing with H. Kasyanov, confirms that there were at least three trends among the Ukrainian Sixtiers. In his opinion, some genuinely believed in the possibility of the triumph of true Leninist ideas, others wrote in Aesopian language to avoid directly opposing the regime, and only a third, very small group, from the very beginning, viewed cultural activity as a tactical method of political struggle to achieve Ukraine’s independence. (Rusnachenko A., op. cit. – P. 157)
[8] Bilokin S. Pozhezhi Kyivskoyi publichnoyi biblioteky AN URSR u 1964 ta 1968 rr. [Fires of the Kyiv Public Library of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR in 1964 and 1968] // Pamyatky Ukrayiny [Monuments of Ukraine]. – 1998.- No. 3. – P. 145-148.
[9] Kasyanov H. Nezhodni: ukrayinska intelihentsiya v rusi oporu 1960-1980-kh rokiv [The Dissenters: The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Resistance Movement of the 1960s–1980s]. – K.: Lybid, 1995. – P. 96.
[10] Among those who supported the first letter of the IG were eight Kharkiv residents and Lviv resident V. Chornovil; some of them supported other letters of the IG as well.
[11] Nineteen trials were held (Rusnachenko A., op. cit. – P. 165)
[12] In the author’s opinion, the charm and scale of Svitlychny’s personality were so great, and the protests over his arrest so numerous, that the authorities did not dare to put him on trial at that time.
[13] This point of view is held, for example, by A. Rusnachenko, although the note he provides in the appendix, a report from Shelest to the Central Committee of the CPSU with information about the arrests of “a number of inveterate bourgeois nationalists, as well as some young people who have embarked on the path of hostile activity,” contains no direct indication of an order handed down from Moscow (Rusnachenko A., op. cit. – P. 164, 474-476).
[14] This is the conclusion of one of the four convicted, Henrich Altunyan , after he familiarized himself with the documents related to this case.
[15] Interestingly, Ivan Svitlychny and some other Sixtiers protested against the release of a periodical, rightly believing that it would hasten the repressions.
[16] On December 15, 1971, KGB Chairman Y. Andropov reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU that “nationalist elements” in Ukraine (I. Svitlychny, V. Chornovil, N. Strokata, I. Dziuba, Y. Sverstyuk, Z. Franko, and others) had begun publishing the UV “to show that an underground is operating in Ukraine.” The KGB chairman emphasized their “close contact with the so-called ‘democrats’… in Moscow,” A. Sakharov and P. Yakir. (Archive of the “Memorial” Research and Information Center, f. 172).
[17] Rusnachenko A., op. cit. – P. 190, 192.
[18] It was a common opinion that one of the reasons for P. Yu. Shelest’s removal from office in 1972 was the insufficient zeal he had shown in the fight against “bourgeois nationalism.”
[19] Of course, all the assertions about Ukrainian “priority” refer only to the circle of relatively well-known dissidents; among the victims of political repression who did not have a “public name,” corresponding precedents occurred regularly and not necessarily in Ukraine.