“THE LETTER FROM THE CREATIVE YOUTH OF DNIPROPETROVSK” was prompted by the slanderous campaign initiated by the regional press and subsequently picked up by the all-Ukrainian press against Oles Honchar’s novel “The Cathedral”, which was published in the first issue of the journal “Vitchyzna” in 1968 and released in two more editions at the beginning of the year. The novel was aimed at protecting national spiritual values, and it spoke out against the Russification of Ukrainians and the barbaric destruction of the Ukrainian people's natural environment. The novel, mostly without having been read, “was discussed and unanimously condemned by labor collectives”—from milkmaids to academicians.
The letter’s author was the poet Ivan SOKULSKY. Volodymyr Zaremba and Mykhailo Skoryk contributed comments to the letter. In late summer 1968, the letter was addressed to V. Shcherbytsky, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR; O. Vatchenko, a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (the first secretary of the regional committee, portrayed in the novel as a negative character—the “protégé” Volodka Loboda); and D. Pavlychko, Secretary of the Writers’ Union. The letter noted that for supporting the novel, a number of people were accused of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and were expelled from the Party and the Komsomol, and fired from their jobs; it also cited examples of the destruction of Ukrainian cultural monuments and of Ukrainophobia. The letter was reprinted in the “Ukrainian Herald” and was broadcast on Radio “Liberty”.
I. SOKULSKY was arrested on June 14, 1969, and, as the author of the “Letter” and for other activities, he was sentenced on January 27, 1970, by the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court under Article 62, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR (“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”) to 4.5 years in labor camps. In the same case, Mykola KULCHYNSKY was sentenced to 2.5 years under Article 187-I for reproducing and distributing the “Letter.” Viktor Savchenko received a two-year suspended sentence with a three-year probation period.
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. V. Ovsiienko