THE SIXTIERS (Sh., the Sixtiers movement). The cessation of mass repressions in the mid-1950s and the rehabilitation of a significant portion of those repressed, the brief and superficial criticism “from above” of Stalin’s personality cult, and the partial liberalization of some spheres of society, especially the spiritual sphere—this was enough for the emergence of a whole pleiad of young artists and writers who advocated for greater creative freedom, the defense of national culture, and opposition to total Russification, and thus for the renewal and democratization of socialist society within its ideological limits. After decades of satanic selection—the physical and moral extermination of the very best of the Ukrainian people—the appearance of this generation seems almost miraculous. As early as the beginning of the 1960s, they were called the Sixtiers—by analogy with the shestidesyatniki in 19th-century Russia, who sowed “the good, the rational, the eternal” among the people. The Sixtiers movement was also characteristic of other peoples of the Soviet Union.
The first manifestations of the 20th-century Ukrainian Sixtiers movement were cultural and educational. This includes the poetry of Lina KOSTENKO, Vasyl SYMONENKO, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Ivan DRACH, and Ihor KALYNETS; the publicistic and literary criticism of Ivan SVITLYCHNY, Yevhen SVERSTIUK, and Ivan DZIUBA; and the works of artists such as Alla HORSKA, Panas ZALYVAKHA, and Stefania SHABATURA. Operating within the existing system, the Sixtiers restored a set of socio-psychological qualities characteristic of the intelligentsia: natural self-respect, individualism, an orientation toward universal human values, the overcoming of provincialism, a rejection of injustice, and respect for ethical norms, law, and legality. Using official structures, and sometimes ignoring them, the Sixtiers spontaneously gathered at literary evenings, on trips to historical sites, in informal clubs like the Clubs of Creative Youth in Kyiv and Lviv, at the Ivan Honchar ethnographic museum, in folklore ensembles (the “Zhaivoronok” choir of Borys Riabokliach and the “Homin” choir of Leopold Yashchenko), and near monuments to T. Shevchenko —and not only in Kyiv.
This was a moral and ethical resistance to the totalitarian regime by a brilliant cohort of talented individuals. A high cultural and moral atmosphere, sensitive to new ideas, prevailed in the Sixtiers’ milieu. It opposed both the official totalitarian ideology and primitivism. It united people of different views and nationalities who, however, never declared each other enemies, because at that time everyone equally needed freedom, and a future democratic Ukrainian state was imagined as a likely guarantor of such freedom.
The era of the carefully cultivated faceless mass and total fear slowly receded—the Individual was being reborn. “Do you know that you are a human being?” asked Vasyl SYMONENKO at the very beginning of the 1960s.
There were practically no outright opponents of socialism among the Sixtiers: almost all of them sought to improve it in their own way (the idea of “socialism with a human face”). But all sorts of prohibitions on what seemed to be completely legal and innocent educational activities, and especially repression by the authorities for expressing one’s thoughts, led to the gradual evolution of a part of the Sixtiers toward becoming its opponents. The poetry of V. SYMONENKO was perhaps the first clear evidence of this maturation toward political demands: “My people exist. My people will always be. No one will erase my people.” There was a growing understanding that the main reason for the destruction of Ukrainian cultural identity was the de facto colonial status of Ukraine within the USSR. The first political demands were limited to expanding the powers of the republican state bodies. The neighboring countries of the “socialist camp,” where there were more freedoms than in the USSR, served as a model. The suppression of those freedoms in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 also sharpened the worldview of the Sixtiers.
To avoid being accused of clandestine activities, the Sixtiers did not create formally documented organizations. In the samvydav literature, which the Sixtiers intensively produced and distributed, the question of changing the system and achieving national independence was generally not raised, although this was often what was implied. This, however, did not save the Sixtiers from repression. The authorities understood that the Sixtiers movement was an environment in which a political opposition was forming. And they resorted to a tried and tested method—a preemptive strike.
But the first wave of arrests in August–September 1965 instead of intimidating the Sixtiers, sparked a whole wave of bold protests. Flowers were thrown to the defendants, and crowds outside the courthouses chanted “Slava!” (“Glory!”). Signatures were collected in defense of those arrested, giving rise to the term “podpysantsi” (signatories). The first open act of protest against the arrests of the Sixtiers was the speech by Ivan DZIUBA on September 4, 1965, at the premiere of the film “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” by S. Parajanov. Those who most actively defended the arrested were themselves subjected to repression: expulsion from universities and postgraduate studies (V. STUS), dismissal from work (M. KOTSIUBYNSKA, Y. BADZIO, S. KYRYCHENKO), cancellation of dissertation defenses (Y. PRONIUK), and publishing bans for dozens of creative individuals. In 1967, V. CHORNOVIL compiled a book of materials about the arrested Sixtiers, “Woe from Wit (Portraits of Twenty ‘Criminals’)”, which brought the Ukrainian movement to the world stage: the world learned about a struggling Ukraine and began to help it through broadcasts on Radio “Liberty”, protests by the democratic public in the West, and official inquiries by politicians, which the USSR authorities called “interference in internal affairs.”
The Sixtiers appealed to domestic legislation, citing the generally democratic constitutions of the USSR and the UkrSSR, and increasingly, international legal documents, primarily the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For example, H. Altunian, A. Levin, V. Nedobora, and V. Ponomaryov were convicted in Kharkiv for appealing as USSR citizens to a UN Committee. A paradoxical situation arose: the Sixtiers were defending the law from the authorities, while the authorities, with ever new repressions, tried to prove that there were no human rights violations in the USSR!
The prisoners of 1965 brought a new spirit to the Mordovian and later the Perm political camps. They continued their struggle for human rights even there. They were warmly welcomed as successors by the surviving fighters for Ukraine’s freedom from the previous generation—the insurgents of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), who were honorably serving out their 25-year sentences and were the most authoritative figures in the camps. The concept of a “prisoner of conscience” acquired real meaning: rarely did anyone trample on their own conscience to buy freedom.
Distinct tendencies within the Sixtiers movement included national-communism, which was manifested in the highly intellectual work by I. DZIUBA, “Internationalism or Russification?”, and the integral nationalism of the brilliant publicist V. MOROZ. But these totalitarian trends, characteristic of past decades that had already led the Ukrainian people into a historical dead end, proved to be unpromising in the 1960s. Standing somewhat apart was the popular socialism of the underground organization “Ukrainian National Front” (led by Dmytro KVETSKO, with its journal “Volia i Batkivshchyna” (Freedom and Fatherland)).
The main current of the Sixtiers movement was most vividly expressed in the uncensored typewritten journal “Ukrainsky Visnyk” (Ukrainian Herald) (1970–1972, edited by V. CHORNOVIL). It was characterized by a combination of the struggle against national oppression with the struggle for human rights. This journal, along with the intensively produced samvydav, effectively became the organizational infrastructure of the resistance movement. The circle of people involved in disseminating uncensored literature grew ever wider. Ukrainian samvydav crossed borders. It was broadcast on Radio “Liberty” and published in other languages. It destabilized the totalitarian state and damaged its international reputation; the state could not withstand the ideological, economic, and military competition with the democratic West and was forced to engage in a process of “détente.” And so it delivered a second, harsher blow, which manifested in the new arrests of the intelligentsia on January 12, 1972, and in the following months (the so-called second wave of arrests ).
On June 28, 1971, the Central Committee of the CPSU adopted a secret resolution “On Measures to Counter the Illegal Distribution of Anti-Soviet and Other Politically Harmful Materials.” On December 30, 1971, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU decided to launch an all-Union campaign against samvydav with the aim of destroying the infrastructure for its production and distribution. For the Ukrainian resistance movement, a separate “spy thriller” was staged. On January 4, 1972, a Belgian citizen and tourist, Yaroslav Dobosh (see: The “Dobosh Affair” ), a member of the “Union of Ukrainian Youth,” was detained at the border in Chop. After appropriate “handling,” he testified that he had met in Lviv and Kyiv and “exchanged information” with several Sixtiers. This primitive adventure with “spy passions” ended with a press conference by Dobosh on June 2, after which he was expelled from the USSR. None of those arrested were charged with “treason against the homeland,” only with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” (Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR). But this time, almost all the leading figures of the Sixtiers movement received the maximum sentence—7 years of imprisonment in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile—and were transported outside their homeland to camps in Mordovia and the Perm region, and then into exile in Siberia and Kazakhstan. The most stubborn were committed to psychiatric hospitals. The list of arrested reached a hundred people. Behind this were thousands of searches; tens of thousands of people were terrorized by interrogations.
The social atmosphere after 1972, unlike in 1965, was oppressive. Isolated attempts to protest the arrests were suppressed in the most brutal manner (V. LISOVY, M. LUKASH, H. SNIEHIROV). Anyone who did not testify against the arrested and showed the slightest sign of sympathy for them was fired from their jobs, removed from housing queues, and they or their children were denied access to higher education or expelled from institutes. All opportunities for career advancement and creative publication (printing, exhibitions, etc.) were closed to them. Those Sixtiers who wanted to survive had to repent humiliatingly (Zinovia Franko, Mykola KHOLODNY, Leonid Seleznenko, Vasyl Zakharchenko), while others hypocritically wrote pasquinades about their recent friends or the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists—mercenaries of foreign intelligence services” abroad, and squeezed out false odes in honor of the stranglers of their homeland (Ivan DRACH, Dmytro Pavlychko). Some could not withstand the suffocating atmosphere and lost heart (Hryhoriy Chubai), or committed suicide (Hryhir Tiutiunnyk). The most steadfast went into “internal emigration” for a long time (Lina KOSTENKO, Mykhailyna KOTSIUBYNSKA, Valeriy Shevchuk), or actually emigrated to Russia (Les TANIUK, Pavlo Movchan). Just as the renaissance of the 1920s is called the Executed Renaissance, the renaissance of the 1960s is rightly called the Suffocated Renaissance. Thus, the authorities finally dispelled the illusions of the Sixtiers about the possibility of reaching an understanding with them: they remained hostile to the individual, and especially to a nationally conscious Ukrainian.
Having physically crushed the Sixtiers, the authorities sought to completely eliminate Ukraine’s linguistic, cultural, and historical national identity. This was done by destroying the Ukrainian-language education system, newspapers, and magazines, and through political purges. As a result, huge masses of the Ukrainian population sank below zero in their national and human self-awareness: they became ashamed of and renounced their Ukrainianness. It became obvious: it was impossible in principle to enter communism as a Ukrainian. One more generation like this—and there would be no one to save Ukraine, and no one for whom to save it...
However, the arrests of the Sixtiers in 1972–73 did not put an end to this vibrant phenomenon: they continued their struggle even in captivity, writing samvydav there, fighting for the status of a political prisoner, and defending their honor—and thus the dignity of an entire nation. In particular, on the initiative of the “zek general” V. CHORNOVIL, they marked January 12—the Day of the Ukrainian Political Prisoner—with hunger strikes and protests. They were gladly supported as successors by the surviving UPA insurgents, who were honorably serving out their 25-year sentences and had the reputation in the camps of being the most steadfast fighters. The Sixtiers befriended representatives of other peoples of the USSR and conducted joint protest actions with them. Later, in the late 1980s, they continued to develop common tactics of struggle at the Conferences of Representatives of Initiative Groups of National-Democratic Movements of the Peoples of the USSR.
The Sixtiers earned the moral support of the democratic world. After all, the world respects countries that have distinguished themselves through spiritual manifestations. It was the Sixtiers, and 5 years after their arrest, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, who placed the Ukrainian question in the context of the confrontation between the totalitarian USSR and the democratic West—and together with the West, they defeated the Evil Empire and won freedom and independence. As early as 1981, the renowned researcher of political thought Ivan Lisyak-Rudnytsky noted:
“...the fact-based significance of Ukrainian dissidents is beyond doubt. The sacrifice of these brave men and women testifies to the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian nation. Their struggle for human and national rights is consistent with the global trend of universal human progress in the spirit of freedom. Ukrainian dissidents believe that the truth of freedom will prevail. It is unbecoming for those fortunate enough to live in free countries to believe any less.”
Those Sixtiers who returned from captivity, or even while still in captivity, rejoined the struggle as members of the UHG (Ukrainian Helsinki Group), receiving new prison sentences as “especially dangerous recidivists.”
To this day, the Sixtiers are active public and political figures with a high moral reputation. Their works are the supreme examples of the manifestation of the national spirit in the second half of the 20th century. The Sixtiers movement testified to the continuity of the Ukrainian people’s aspirations for freedom: in new forms, they continued the noblest traditions of the Ukrainian national liberation and human rights movement.
Since 1992, on the initiative of N. SVITLYCHNA, a Museum of the Sixtiers Movement has been established in Kyiv, with its council chaired by M. PLAKHOTNIUK. The museum, though lacking its own premises, is already conducting extensive educational work.
Vasyl Ovsiienko. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group