Introductory article for the Ukrainian section of the International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. The titles of other articles in this section and other sections of the Dictionary are highlighted with hyperlinks.
The history of Ukraine in the 20th century can well be seen as the history of a national liberation movement. Each time it seemed to have been mercilessly destroyed, it would rise from the ashes like a Phoenix, gathering 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[1].
The 1939 annexation of Western Ukrainian lands to the Ukrainian SSR—lands that before World War I had been part of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and between the wars were 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 persisted for several generations. This is why the armed resistance in the western lands against both the “browns” and the “reds” proved 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 rule, at times employing terrorist methods. 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 authorities had no intention of tolerating the existence of any non-puppet organization in the annexed territories. In 1940–1941, most of the OUN leaders who were in Western Ukraine were arrested.
A similar scenario, but at an accelerated pace, was repeated in the summer of 1941 when Ukraine was occupied by Nazi 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 faction of the OUN, led by S. Bandera, embarked on a path of partisan warfare against the Germans[2]. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) they created continued this fight even after Ukraine returned to USSR control. The partisan war in Western Ukraine continued until the early 1950s.
Soviet historiography portrayed UPA fighters as bandits who robbed and murdered women, the elderly, and children, and who organized Jewish and Polish pogroms. Obviously, this was, to say the least, a one-sided view[3]. On the other hand, the terror against the insurgents was brutal: hundreds of thousands were sent to the camps with a standard 25-year sentence. Entire villages in Western Ukraine were deported for “aiding the UPA.”
By the early 1950s, the partisan war in rural areas had almost died out, but underground organizations in the cities continued to operate. According to KGB data, between 1954 and 1959, 183 “nationalist and anti-Soviet groups” were eliminated in Ukraine, and 1,879 people were convicted, including 46 groups (245 people) from among the intelligentsia and youth[4]. The most large-scale political repressions in the post-Stalin era occurred precisely in these years.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the national movement remained localized in western Ukraine, as before. Most of the underground organizations uncovered between 1958 and 1969 operated there; the national idea prevailed in them, and ideologically they aligned with the OUN.
However, among the underground organizations, there also appeared those that rejected armed struggle and preferred nonviolent methods, for example, the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union (1961). In fact, it was with the emergence of ideas of nonviolent resistance in the 1950s that Ukrainian dissent was born as a collection of national (the most massive and visible), religious, and civic movements[5]. As elsewhere, dissident activity manifested itself less and less 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 within Ukrainian dissent. In modern Ukrainian literature, the activists of this movement are often called the Sixtiers. However, this term is invested with a completely different, significantly narrower and more defined meaning than that associated with the concept of the “Sixtiers movement” in relation to Soviet culture as a whole in world cultural studies, a concept which was the subject of lively public discussion in Russia. The Ukrainian Sixtiers movement—this was a movement of the creative (primarily humanitarian) intelligentsia, aimed mainly at combating Russification and reviving national culture. Kyiv was its center, 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[6]. They elicited sympathy even 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 had successful careers. The Sixtiers movement was not monolithic. In it, one can find the origins of all currents 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 themselves 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 journals 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,” “Ukrainskyi Kalendar”), Czechoslovakia (the journals “Duklya,” “Druzhno vpered,” and “Narodnyi Kalendar”), and in the West (at the Suchasnist publishing house), and began to circulate in samvydav. Initially it was purely literary, mostly poetry, but 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 focused mainly on the national problem (in this sense, it was much narrower than its Russian counterpart), which was analyzed in its 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 Sverstiuk, Ivan Svitlychnyi, Leonid Plyushch, Valentyn Moroz, and Viacheslav Chornovil, which circulated in samvydav, that belong to the best examples of Ukrainian political writing.
One of the most popular samvydav texts of the mid-1960s was the pamphlet “On the Occasion of the Trial of Pogruzhalsky,” written by Yevhen Sverstiuk and Ivan Svitlychnyi (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 priceless books[7]. 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 to humiliate 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—its life depends on our readiness to stand up for ourselves.”
The most famous samvydav work of the second half of the 1960s was the book by Ivan Dziuba, “Internationalism or Russification?”, which became a manifesto for the Sixtiers, gained wide popularity, circulated throughout Ukraine in thousands of copies, was translated into several European languages, and was highly praised by various political forces outside the USSR. Using the official ideological toolkit of Marxism-Leninism, Dziuba convincingly criticized the official conceptions of the national question, particularly the theses on the immutability of the party's policy on the national question and on the equal status of Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine, as well as the idea of the future fusion 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[8].
Russian samvydav also circulated on the territory of Ukraine. This, as well as introducing the Russian reader to the best works of Ukrainian samvydav, was largely thanks to Leonid Plyushch. He reproduced manuscripts in Kyiv that he had 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 the book by Dziuba, “Woe from Wit” by Viacheslav Chornovil, and others became known outside Ukraine.
Geographically, the national movement was spread throughout Ukraine (for example, in 1972 approximately the same number of people were arrested in the West and East of Ukraine), but in Western Ukraine and in Kyiv it was much more numerous. It can be argued that in Western Ukraine the dissident movement primarily 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 activism that did not set the national problem as its main goal was more noticeable in the large cities of eastern and southern Ukraine—Kharkiv, Chernivtsi, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, 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 trend of convergence between human rights activists and the national movement began to emerge on the latter’s platform. This was especially evident in the camps.
There is much in common between the Ukrainian Sixtiers-“culturalists” and the Russian human rights activists. Both movements were driven by the intelligentsia and were very close in spirit, in the social composition of their participants, in the argumentation of their demands, and in their means of self-expression. Connections between the future activists of these movements were established even before the movements themselves had formed. The acquaintance 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 camp, would inevitably end up in Moscow. They stayed with the relatives and friends of Moscow’s political prisoners” (Lyudmila Alexeyeva), passing information through them to “A Chronicle of Current Events” and abroad. The Ukrainian Sixtiers joined the campaign around 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)[9]. In Odesa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of the largest samvydav libraries in the USSR operated; its organizers, Viacheslav Igrunov and Gleb Pavlovsky, played a prominent role in Russian dissent. Ukrainian political prisoners were participants in international acts of camp resistance, observing with hunger strikes and work strikes the commemorative days common to all Soviet political prisoners—December 10 (Human Rights Day), September 5 (Day of Red Terror), and October 30 (Day of the Political Prisoner).
As for religious movements, a special feature of Ukraine was the presence of two large denominations unrecognized by the state: the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church—predominantly in the west of the republic, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC)—in the East. Believers and especially clergy belonging to these denominations 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 denominations 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 turned to repression. The first wave of arrests took place in August-September 1965. Twenty-five people[10] were arrested who were to some degree involved in the movement, seven of them from Kyiv. The central theme connecting most of the criminal cases initiated was the pamphlet “On the Occasion of the Trial of Pogruzhalsky,” the possession and distribution of which was incriminated to almost all of those arrested. One of the authors of the pamphlet, the critic Ivan Svitlychnyi, was also arrested (he had to be released 8 months later “for lack of evidence”[11]).
There is a view that the repressions against the “Sixtiers” were carried out on orders from Moscow[12]. A number of signs indicate that, until the end of the 1960s, the Ukrainian leadership carried out such orders without particular diligence. In particular, the authorities tolerated the now-traditional placing of flowers at Shevchenko monuments. These gatherings, which took place on May 22 in various cities across Ukraine, became annual manifestations of national dissidence. In Kyiv, several hundred people usually gathered on this day, singing songs and reading poetry. The authorities limited themselves to administrative measures and threats against the active participants. In 1967, they tried to disrupt the gathering but encountered stubborn resistance from those assembled and retreated. For comparison, similar gatherings in memory of the Jews shot by the Nazis at Babyn Yar in 1941 (many well-known “Sixtiers” also took part in these gatherings, notably Ivan Dziuba) provoked a much harsher reaction from the Kyiv party authorities.
After the first wave of arrests and until the end of 1971, only certain “Sixtiers” whose activities had an international resonance (Viacheslav Chornovil—his book “Woe from Wit” 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, 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 of the human rights movement of a generally 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, although a recommendation had come from Moscow to refrain from arrests[13].
On the cusp of the 1970s, the Sixtiers movement began to take on organizational forms. In January 1970, the first Ukrainian periodical appeared in samvydav—an anonymous information bulletin, “The Ukrainian Herald” (UV). The prototype for “The Ukrainian Herald” was “A 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 that circulated in samvydav—studies on history, data on the genocide of Ukrainians, literary criticism, poetry, and prose[14].
In the context of the general tightening of the regime that occurred after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the appearance of the UV could not but provoke a new wave of arrests. It coincided with a general offensive against samvydav that began at the end of 1971[15]—in the first half of 1972 (in Moscow, a large-scale investigation began into the *case of Yakir and Krasin*, which resulted in the temporary suspension of the publication of “A 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)[16]. Hundreds of people were subjected to extrajudicial persecution. The purge affected not only academic and cultural institutions but also the rural intelligentsia, party officials, and Soviet employees[17]. Clandestine and overt surveillance, interception of letters, and wiretapping of telephone conversations acquired huge proportions. At the same time, a new wave of Russification began.
Subsequently, Ukraine became a testing ground for the KGB's new methods of combating dissidents. Strange murders were committed here, which remain a mystery to this day (Alla Horska—though this murder occurred back in 1970, Volodymyr Ivasiuk, Mykola Zvarych), and for the first time, drugs were planted during searches. It was here that the fabrication of criminal cases against dissidents began—for rape, for hooliganism, for resisting the authorities, for possession of drugs, and so on. It was in Ukraine that the repressions were particularly harsh. It holds the sad distinction of primacy in many respects. The first long-term camp sentence for a woman (Nina Strokata), the first application of Article 62 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR to a woman of pension age—75-year-old Oksana Meshko, the first conviction of a woman for demanding the release of her political prisoner husband (Raisa Rudenko)[18]. Repeat arrests of former political prisoners who had served their term became a common phenomenon for any minor public activity by “Moscow” standards—for example, for a manuscript of camp memoirs (Danylo Shumuk, Yuriy Shukhevych).
Nevertheless, despite the repressions, the oppositional national movement continued. A new stage began at the end of 1976 with the creation 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 Ovsienko, of the 41 members of the UHG, 39 served a total of 550 years in prisons, camps, exile, and psychiatric hospitals; four—Oleksa Tykhyi, Yuriy Lytvyn, Valeriy Marchenko, and Vasyl Stus—died in captivity, and Mykhailo Melnyk committed suicide on the eve of his arrest. Moreover, many members of the UHG constituted themselves as such while in a camp or in exile on one political charge or another.
The Helsinki stage of dissent in Ukraine signified the adoption by the national movement 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. Nevertheless, the group spoke out in defense of Evangelical Christian Baptists and also supported individual documents and appeals of the MHG.
By the early 1980s, the activities of the UHG were completely paralyzed: almost all of its members were deprived of their liberty.
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 at large was barely visible 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 Political Prisoner Status 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 smuggled out of the camps by the convicts’ relatives and circulated in samvydav.
“After 1972, a paradoxical situation arose in which Ukrainian samvydav was primarily replenished not by those at liberty, but by political prisoners” (Lyudmila Alexeyeva). These protests, which reached the West, gained wide publicity and sparked international solidarity campaigns. One of the most powerful means of struggle was the hunger strike, which often became collective. In particular, from 1974, Ukrainian political prisoners and their camp comrades marked the anniversary of the start 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 communities in the post-war Stalinist camps. “It was they who bore the main brunt 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 ones—the 25-yearers—V. Pidhorodetskyi, V. Pirus, S. Mamchur (deceased), P. Strotsen, V. Solodkyi, 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,” section written by Valeriy Marchenko).
In 1987–1988, Ukrainian dissidents who had returned from the camps and exile actively engaged in political activity. In practically all political parties of a national-democratic orientation and in radical nationalist parties, 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, by open political confrontation, and it ended in 1991 with the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
[1] The “Ukrainization” of the 1920s, although carried out within the rigid framework of communist ideology, stimulated to a certain extent 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 mass repressions that followed. The “cultural revival” of the 1960s was largely nourished by the memory of this upsurge.
[2] The other faction, led by A. Melnyk, collaborated with the Nazis.
[3] 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, for the most part, dropped. It should also be borne in mind that sometimes rumors about the “atrocities of the Banderites” were artificially created: today there is documented evidence of the killings of civilians by NKVD officers disguised as UPA fighters.
[4] Rusnachenko, A. *Natsionalno-vyzvolnyi rukh v Ukraini* [The National Liberation Movement in Ukraine]. Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo im. O. Telihy, 1998, pp. 325, 326.
[5] A number of particular national and religious movements that developed throughout the USSR and also encompassed Ukraine remain outside the scope of this essay:
– the movement of 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 denominations (Evangelical Christian Baptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christians of Evangelical Faith (Pentecostals), and others).
[6] In modern Ukrainian historiography, there is no single opinion on this matter. For example, A. Rusnachenko, debating with G. Kasyanov, confirms that there were at least three currents among the Ukrainian Sixtiers. In his opinion, some genuinely believed in the possibility of the triumph of truly 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 the independence of Ukraine. (Rusnachenko, A., op. cit., p. 157)
[7] Bilokin, S. “Pozhezhi Kyivskoi publichnoi biblioteky AN URSR u 1964 ta 1968 rr.” [The Fires at the Kyiv Public Library of the Academy of Sciences of the UkrSSR in 1964 and 1968]. // *Pamiatky Ukrainy*. – 1998.– No. 3. – pp. 145–148.
[8] Kasyanov, H. *Nezhodni: ukrainska intelihentsiia v rusi oporu 1960-1980-kh rokiv* [The Dissenters: The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Resistance Movement of the 1960s-1980s]. Kyiv: Lybid, 1995, p. 96.
[9] Among those who supported the first letter of the IG were eight Kharkiv residents and the Lviv resident V. Chornovil; some of them also supported other letters from the IG.
[10] Nineteen trials were held (Rusnachenko, A., op. cit., p. 165).
[11] In the author's opinion, the charm and scale of Svitlychnyi's personality were so great, and the protests regarding his arrest so numerous, that the authorities did not dare to stage a trial against him at that time.
[12] This point of view is held, for example, by A. Rusnachenko, although the memorandum 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 a path of hostile activity,” which he quotes in the appendix, contains no direct instructions indicating an order sent down from Moscow (Rusnachenko, A., op. cit., pp. 164, 474-476).
[13] This is the conclusion of one of the four convicted men, Henrich Altunyan, after he became familiar with the documents related to this case.
[14] It is interesting that Ivan Svitlychnyi and some other Sixtiers protested against the publication of a periodical, rightly believing that it would accelerate the repressions.
[15] On December 15, 1971, KGB Chairman Y. Andropov reported to the Central Committee of the CPSU that “nationalist elements” in Ukraine (I. Svitlychnyi, V. Chornovil, N. Strokata, I. Dziuba, Y. Sverstiuk, Z. Franko, et al.) had begun publishing the UV “to show that an underground is active 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).
[16] Rusnachenko, A., op. cit., pp. 190, 192.
[17] The opinion was widespread that one of the reasons for P. Yu. Shelest's removal from office in 1972 was the insufficient zeal he displayed in the fight against “bourgeois nationalism.”
[18] It is understood that all assertions made about Ukrainian “primacy” relate 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.