Chapter 24 The Second Soviet Republic

Ukraine’s membership in the United Nations, which admitted the republic as a founding member at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, raised its international status to one comparable with the British dominions of Canada and Australia or even sovereign states like Belgium or Brazil.

Its United Nations seat and enhanced status aside, at the end of the war Ukraine presented a sorry picture. Although the map made it seem like one of the main beneficiaries of the war — Ukraine’s territory increased by more than 15 percent — the republic was in fact one of the war’s main victims. It lost up to 7 million of its citizens, who had constituted more than 15 percent of its population. Out of 36 million remaining Ukrainians, some 10 million didn’t have a roof over their heads, as approximately 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages lay in ruins. Ukraine lost 40 percent of its wealth and more than 80 percent of its industrial and agricultural equipment. In 1945, the republic produced only one-quarter of its prewar output of industrial goods and 40 percent of its previous agricultural produce.

With its industrial base devastated by Soviet scorched-earth tactics, the deindustrialization and deurbanization policies of the Germans, and the relentless fighting between the two armies, in some places Ukraine had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Western advisers suggested that it was easier to build new plants than to restore old ones, but the authorities decided to reconstruct the plants they had built with such huge sacrifices in the 1930s.

By 1948, the wartime Soviet alliance with the United States and Britain had given way to the Cold War between Moscow and the West. At stake was Soviet control over central and eastern Europe, as well as Western positions in Iran, Turkey, and Greece. With the Soviet army stationed as far west as Germany, Ukraine was no longer a border republic facing what was considered the hostile West, as it had been during the interwar period, but its importance to the union’s industrial and agricultural potential remained as great as it had been before the war. Ukraine had to produce arms, food, and soldiers to fight what many deemed an imminent conflict between the communist East and the capitalist West. For Ukrainians, that meant a lot of guns and very little butter. Ukraine had rebuilt its economic potential by 1950, but agricultural production lagged behind, with prewar levels not reached until the 1960s.

The first postwar decade in Ukraine largely entailed reconstructing the shattered economy, rehabilitating a shocked and traumatized society, and restoring the party’s ideological and political control over lands temporarily lost to Germany and its allies in the course of the war. In western Ukraine — the former Polish, Romanian, and Czech provinces of the country — the restoration of party control in fact meant its introduction, as the Soviet regime had lasted less than two years before the German invasion. Throughout Ukraine, this period saw the (re)implementation of the political, social, and economic models developed in the 1930s. In his last years, Stalin was not eager to engage in experimentation — late Stalinism was clearly running out of revolutionary zeal. The experience of the war that had just ended and preparations for war with the West, which the Kremlin believed was about to begin, informed most of the political, social, and cultural decisions made by Stalin and his aides.

Among the reconstruction projects given high priority by those at the very top of the Soviet political pyramid was one of the giants of Soviet industrialization of prewar years: the Dnieper electric power station in Zaporizhia. The retreating Soviets had blown up part of the Zaporizhia dam in 1941, but they saved the remains in 1943, when the Germans tried to finish the job — Soviet scouts cut the wire that was supposed to detonate the explosives. The reconstruction of the dam and the electric power station became a priority for the newly appointed party boss of the Zaporizhia region and future leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who came to the city in 1946 to find the power station and the industrial enterprises built around it completely destroyed. “Grass was already growing among the bricks and iron, the howling of dogs gone wild could be heard from afar, and all around there were nothing but ruins, with black crows’ nests hanging from the branches of burned trees,” wrote Brezhnev, recalling his first impressions on visiting what remained of the Zaporizhia industrial complex in the summer of 1946. “I had had occasion to see something similar after the Civil War, but then it was the dead silence of the factories that was frightening, while now they had been completely reduced to dust.”

According to the report of a government commission, the city of Zaporizhia had no electricity or running water. More than 1,000 apartment buildings, 74 schools, 5 cinema theaters, 2 universities, and 239 stores had been destroyed. But Moscow sent Brezhnev to Zaporizhia not so much to rebuild the city as to get the power station and the steelworks, called Zaporizhstal, working again. He did what he was asked to do in record time. The electric power station generated its first electricity in March 1947, with the first steel produced in September of that year. In November 1947, in recognition of Brezhnev’s accomplishments, the Kremlin recalled him from Zaporizhia and promoted him to party boss of the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region, one of the main economic powerhouses of Ukraine.

In his memoirs, first published in 1978, Brezhnev writes about difficult times in the cities but says nothing about the villages, which in 1946 and 1947 witnessed the return of famine on a scale comparable to that of 1932 and 1933. Close to a million people died as a result of the new famine that hit southern Ukraine especially hard, including the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia regions led by Brezhnev. Not surprisingly, Brezhnev remained silent about the new crime of the regime in which he held a prominent office — the starving to death of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. A prominent official who refused to stay silent was Brezhnev’s boss at the time, Nikita Khrushchev. In memoirs smuggled to the West and published in the United States in 1970 but unknown to the readers in the USSR until the late 1980s (Brezhnev’s, by contrast, appeared in print runs approaching 15 million copies in the 1970s), Khrushchev described not only the famine but also the inability of the republican leadership to do anything to save the victims — Moscow still made life-and-death decisions affecting Ukraine exclusively.

Khrushchev blamed the new Ukrainian famine on Stalin, as he did much else that happened in the 1930s and 1940s. In this case, he was clearly on target. In the summer of 1946 the worst drought in half a century hit Ukraine, but the authorities in Moscow kept demanding grain from the Ukrainian countryside, devastated by the war and a bad harvest. This time they needed grain for the reindustrialization of the cities and for Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, where Stalin shipped millions of tons of grain to keep the new communist regimes going. To prevent the impending catastrophe, Khrushchev appealed directly to Stalin, asking for the introduction of ration cards for the peasants like the ones introduced for city dwellers.

Kaganovich saw his new task in Ukraine as reinforcing Moscow’s ideological control. Maksym Rylsky, a neoclassical poet and head of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, became the main victim of Kaganovich’s ideological witch hunt. He was attacked in the press for Ukrainian nationalism and removed from his position in the fall of 1947. Although Stalin soon recalled Kaganovich to Moscow, and Khrushchev got his old party office back, attacks on Ukrainian cultural figures continued. They were part of an all-union campaign associated with Stalin’s ideological watchdog Andrei Zhdanov, who attacked Soviet writers and artists for “bourgeois individualism,” “lack of ideological clarity,” and “kowtowing to the West.” Among the victims of Zhdanov’s campaign were the satirists Mikhail Zoshchenko in Russia and Ostap Vyshnia in Ukraine. Writers could depict only one conflict in their work — that between the good and the better — which put satirists out of a job. The search for ideological deviants that began with writers spread to musicians and historians. In Ukraine, a hunt for “nationalists” reached its peak in 1951 with an attack in Pravda on Volodymyr Sosiura’s poem “Love Ukraine,” a patriotic text written by that prominent poet in 1944. The regime came to see what was good for mobilizing Ukrainian patriotism against German aggression during the war as nationalistic when it sought to consolidate control over the formerly occupied territories.

The Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet-German war of 1941–1945 became known in the Soviet Union, provided new legitimacy for the regime that had managed to survive and repel foreign invasion.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army continued to challenge Soviet rule in the Galician countryside into the 1950s — significantly longer than any other armed resistance in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe. Around 1947, the commanders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army changed tactics by splitting large formations into smaller units of no more than fifty fighters, and then even into smaller groups with a maximum of ten members. They avoided large-scale military confrontations with the much more numerous Soviet troops, saving their forces for a new war between the USSR and the West that they expected to break out at any moment. Meanwhile, even the smaller insurgent units continued to create problems for the Soviet regime, attacking representatives of the party and state apparatus and undermining efforts at collectivization of agriculture and Sovietization of the region through the educational system. The regime responded with repressive measures that included forced deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians suspected of supporting the underground.

It took the Soviet security services until the spring of 1950 to track down and kill the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych. Another commander replaced him, but in the next few years organized resistance was largely crushed, and small underground units lost contact with one another. Some of the insurgent units made their way through Polish and Czechoslovak territories to the West and joined the émigré nationalists led by Stepan Bandera in West Germany. In 1951, the British and the Americans started to airdrop members of the Bandera and other nationalist organizations back into Ukraine with the goal of collecting intelligence. The Soviets responded by stepping up their attempts to assassinate Bandera and other leaders of the Ukrainian emigration in Germany. They succeeded in the fall of 1959, when a Soviet agent killed Bandera with a KGB-made spray gun loaded with cyanide. The assassin defected to the West in 1961 and confessed to killing Bandera and another Ukrainian émigré leader back in 1957. His testimony in a West German court left no doubt that the orders to kill émigré leaders had come from the top echelon of the Soviet government.

Ukrainian nationalists, whether real or perceived, were not the only target of Soviet propaganda and the secret police in the last years of Stalin’s rule. At that time a new group, Soviet Jewry, emerged at the top of the hierarchy of enemies. Jews had been among the victims of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, but not until the late 1940s were they targeted as a group. That change came with the onset of the Cold War and the founding of the State of Israel. Now Jewish citizens of the USSR came under suspicion for double loyalty and siding with the West against their Soviet motherland.

In January 1948 a leader of Soviet Jewry, renowned actor and artistic director Solomon Mikhoels, was killed on Stalin’s orders. By the end of the year, Stalin had imprisoned the Jewish wife of his right-hand man, Viacheslav Molotov — Polina Zhemchuzhina, a native of southern Ukraine and a strong supporter of Mikhoels. The Soviet media declared war on “cosmopolitans” — a euphemism for Jews — purging many Jews from the party and security apparatus. The Jews of Ukraine found themselves among the primary targets of discrimination. In 1952, the anti-Semitic campaign reached new heights with the arrest of a number of Jewish doctors, accused, along with Slavic colleagues, of killing members of the Soviet leadership, including Andrei Zhdanov, who had died of natural causes in 1948. Only Stalin’s death put an end to the anti-Semitic campaign. The Soviet leadership stopped the campaign in its tracks and released the surviving doctors from prison, but anti-Semitism remained in the corridors of power in Moscow, Kyiv, and other Soviet centers.

Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, ending the most dreadful era in Soviet history and leaving a legacy that would haunt his successors and the country they ruled for generations to come. The anti-Semitic campaign was one of many aspects of that legacy. The struggle against Stalin’s inheritance became one of the defining features of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule as Stalin’s successor. But it took time for the former Ukrainian party boss to gain full power in the party and the state and to develop his anti-Stalinist orientation.

Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to the pinnacle of Soviet power began in December 1949, when Stalin summoned him from Lviv, where he was at war with the nationalist underground, to Moscow and handed him his old position as head of the Moscow party organization. He arrived in the Soviet capital a few days before the lavish celebrations of Stalin’s seventieth birthday. During the official ceremony, the dictator seated Khrushchev next to himself, with a visiting dignitary from China, Mao Zedong, on his other side.

Immediately after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev emerged as one of the four most powerful Soviet leaders. In June 1953 he masterminded the arrest of his most dangerous competitor, security tsar Lavrentii Beria. In February 1955 he got rid of Beria’s one-time ally, the head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov. In June 1957 he crushed the opposition of Stalin’s former aides Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, and in March 1958 he became head of both the Communist Party and the Soviet government. The help of his clients in Ukraine made Khrushchev’s success possible. The republic had the largest (in terms of membership) party organization in the union, given that the Russian communists did not have their own party, and thus the largest voting bloc in the all-union Central Committee.

Khrushchev rewarded his Ukrainian clients handsomely by bringing them to Moscow. Among the first to make the move was Oleksii Kyrychenko, the first ethnic Ukrainian in the position of party boss of Ukraine since the revolution. In 1957 he became secretary of the all-union Central Committee and the second most powerful man in the country. Khrushchev’s protégés also included former party secretary from Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk Leonid Brezhnev, who became head of the Supreme Soviet and de jure head of the Soviet state under Khrushchev. Another product of the Ukrainian party machine was Nikolai Podgorny (Mykola Pidhorny), the former first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, appointed by Khrushchev to the all-union Central Committee in 1963. These and dozens of other Khrushchev protégés from Ukraine brought clients of their own to the center. Whereas Stalin had relied on cadres from the Caucasus for a good part of his career, Khrushchev relied on people from Ukraine. By promoting Ukrainian party cadres to positions of power in Moscow, Khrushchev made the Ukrainian communist elite a junior partner of the Russian party and government bosses in running the multiethnic Soviet empire. Its members gained influence on decisions made in the center, as well as more autonomy in deciding their internal Ukrainian affairs.

The rise of Ukraine to honorary second place in the hierarchy of Soviet republics and nationalities began in January 1954 with all-union celebrations of the tercentenary of the Pereiaslav Council (1654). Official party propaganda hailed the council, which approved the passing of the Cossack Hetmanate under the protection of the Muscovite tsar, as the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia.” That formula had its roots in the nineteenth-century imperial paradigm of the “reunification of Rus’” through the efforts and under the auspices of the autocratic Russian state. A special document officially approved by the Central Committee in Moscow, the “Theses on the Tercentenary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia,” explained what that formula meant under the new circumstances. The document built on the Stalinist policy of treating the Russians as the “leading force of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country” — the formula coined by Stalin in a toast he delivered at the banquet celebrating the end of the Soviet-German war in May 1945. It also elevated the Ukrainians to the status of the second most important Soviet nationality. According to the document, Russians and Ukrainians were separate peoples, albeit closely related in history and culture.

The Soviet authorities ordered the construction of a number of monuments to mark the anniversary and gave the long, awkward name “Tercentenary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia” to a number of institutions, including a university in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. Ironically enough, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky had founded the university in 1918 at a time when Russian forces had been driven out of Ukraine and the country was under German control. But the most lavish symbolic gesture, celebrating the “eternal friendship” of the two East Slavic peoples, was the transfer of the Crimean Peninsula in February 1954 from the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation to that of Ukraine. Ten years earlier, the Crimean Tatars had been deported from the Crimea, as the entire nation was accused of collaborating with the Germans. Despite the propagandistic effort to represent the transfer of the peninsula as a manifestation of fraternal amity between the two nations, the real reasons were more prosaic. The key factor was geography. Cut off from Russia by the Kerch Strait and linked by communication lines to the Ukrainian mainland, the Crimea needed assistance from Ukraine to rebuild its economy, which not only the war and German occupation but also the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars had undermined.

In 1950, the Crimea delivered to the state five times less grain than it had in 1940, three times less tobacco, and twice fewer grapes. The settlers sent to the peninsula from the Russian Federation were unaccustomed to southern conditions and of little help in rebuilding the economy. When in the fall of 1953 Nikita Khrushchev visited the peninsula, distressed settlers besieged his car and demanded assistance. From the Crimea he went directly to Kyiv to begin negotiations on the transfer of the peninsula to Ukraine, believing that the republic was in a position to help the economically depressed region and that its agricultural experts knew how to deal with droughts and produce grain in steppe conditions. Khrushchev’s clients in Kyiv went along, as did his colleagues in Moscow. By February 1954, the Ukrainian, Russian, and all-union Supreme Soviets had signed off on the deal.

The Crimea became part of Ukraine — the first and last enlargement of the republic’s territory based not on ethnic but geographic and economic considerations. Of the 1.2 million inhabitants of the Crimea, Russians constituted 71 percent and Ukrainians 22 percent. The peninsula benefited from the new arrangement and the investments and expertise provided by the Ukrainian government. The production of Crimean wines doubled between 1953 and 1956, and production of electricity increased by almost 60 percent. But the major boost to the Crimean economy came in the following decade with the construction of the North Crimean Canal, whose first stage was completed in 1963. As construction continued in subsequent years, the canal made it possible to bring as much as 30 percent of all Dnieper water to the peninsula and irrigate more than 6,000 square kilometers of agricultural land. It also supplied water to the cities of Feodosiia, Kerch, and Sudak.

Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, held in Moscow in February 1956, opened a new era in the life of the Soviet Union and its constituent republics. The new leader attacked Joseph Stalin for violating the principles of socialist legality by instigating purges of party members. He did not mention the persecution of millions who did not belong to the party, the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933, and the deportations of entire nations. As the de-Stalinization drive launched by Khrushchev’s speech continued, many former leaders of Ukraine, including Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, and Mykola Skrypnyk, were politically rehabilitated. The Ukrainian KGB — the Committee for State Security, a new name for the secret police — and Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office reviewed close to a million cases of victims of political terror, rehabilitating under 300,000 people. Charges and sentences remained in effect for those accused of Ukrainian nationalism, taking part in the nationalist underground, or collaborating with the Germans. Still, tens of thousands of members of the Ukrainian nationalist underground were released from the Gulag, as were surviving bishops and priests of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The KGB placed most of these people under surveillance upon their release.

Khrushchev was a believer. He had faith in communism as a superior social order. In the early 1960s, he publicly declared to his own people and the world that the basis for a communist society would be established in the next twenty years. In Marxist-Leninist parlance of the time, that meant ability to produce an abundance of consumer goods, which were in short supply in the USSR. Khrushchev also adopted a new party program of communist construction. The promotion of the new secular religion, now with a firm date for the advent of the communist paradise, went hand in hand with struggle against traditional religion. In a reversal of postwar Stalinist policy, Khrushchev unleashed new repressions against religious groups, promising the extinction of religion before the arrival of communism and pledging to show the last religious believer on television in the not too distant future. Thousands of Orthodox churches, mosques, synagogues, and prayer houses were closed as part of this revival of the antireligious campaign of the 1920s and 1930s. In Ukraine, the number of Orthodox churches fell by almost half, from 8,207 to 4,565, between 1960 and 1965. Especially hard hit were the regions of eastern and central Ukraine — in Galicia, the authorities were careful not to close too many churches in order not to drive the newly converted Orthodox believers into the ranks of the clandestine Ukrainian Catholic Church.

While it was clear to many that the advertised arrival of communism was little more than a propaganda ploy, the end of the Stalinist terror, the release of some categories of political prisoners, and the publication of works exposing the crimes of Stalin’s regime (including the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner of the Gulag between 1945 and 1953) created an atmosphere of relative freedom known as the “Khrushchev thaw.” In Ukraine it was marked by a return to public life of the generation of writers and artists whose works had been proscribed under late Stalinism. Among them was Ukraine’s best-known filmmaker, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was able to leave his Moscow exile and resume work in his homeland. The poets Maksym Rylsky and Volodymyr Sosiura, who had been under attack in the 1940s and 1950s, were active again. They helped raise a new generation of Ukrainian poets — Ivan Drach, Vitalii Korotych, and Lina Kostenko, among others — who became leading figures of the “sixties generation,” which was pushing the limits of socialist-realist literature and culture.

The new party line was sold to worried cadres as a return to “Leninist norms,” which meant, among other things, the end of mass purges of the party apparatus and some decentralization of power. Both changes empowered the regional and republican elites, and the Ukrainian cadres were more than happy to embrace the new opportunities. With the creation of regional councils charged with economic development (another return to the policies of the 1920s), the Ukrainian authorities found themselves in control of more than 90 percent of enterprises located on their territory and all of their agricultural facilities. They were now much more independent of the center than their predecessors. From the early 1950s, local officials ran Ukraine with virtually no influx of party and government personnel from Russia or any other Soviet republic. The local cadres were organized in client networks, with the position of an individual party boss depending on his (there were very few women in the party apparatus) personal loyalty to his superior. The Ukrainian party networks extended all the way to the Kremlin, becoming more stable and independent than most other republican networks in the union.

Khrushchev’s reforms contributed to the spectacular expansion of Soviet industry and the increasing urbanization of Soviet society. His program of constructing cheap five-story apartment buildings that became known as khrushchevki changed the skyline of every Soviet city and allowed hundreds of thousands of citizens to move from temporary shelters and cramped communal apartments to individual apartments with heat, running water, and indoor toilets. Although most state resources went to the development of the Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan and the natural resources of Siberia in the Khrushchev years, Ukraine became one of the main beneficiaries — and victims — of the new industrial growth.

In the 1950s and 1960s, three new hydroelectric power stations went up on the Dnieper, diverting the natural flow of the river, creating gigantic artificial lakes, flooding agricultural lands and nearby mines, and forever changing the ecology of the region. The construction of chemical complexes designed to produce pesticides for agriculture and consumer goods for the masses enhanced the economic potential of the republic but also increased pressure on its ecological system. Ukraine was also deeply involved in the Soviet atomic and space projects, both products of the arms race that accompanied most of the Cold War. In the town of Zhovti Vody, close to the site of the first battle between Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Polish royal army in 1648, uranium was discovered and mined. The largest missile-producing facility in all of Europe was built in the nearby city of Dnipropetrovsk. Ukraine’s contribution to the Soviet breakthrough into outer space was enormous. In recognition of that contribution and Ukraine’s symbolic place in the hierarchy of Soviet republics, a Ukrainian became the first non-Russian launched into space by a Soviet rocket. Pavlo Popovych, a native of the Kyiv region, made his first trip into space in 1962. His second flight would take place in 1974.

As might have been expected, the growth of the Soviet space program and the military-industrial complex did little for the well-being of the population, which in the early 1960s again found itself on the verge of famine. The immediate cause of food shortages was a number of droughts that hit Soviet agriculture. This time, instead of exporting grain as in 1932 and 1933 and in 1946 and 1947, the government decided to buy grain abroad, avoiding a repetition of the disasters of those years. It was a marked departure from Stalin’s times. Khrushchev tried to improve the plight of the peasants and the productivity of collective farms by dramatically raising purchase prices for agricultural products (the price for grain increased sevenfold). He also reduced the individual plots of collective farmers by half, believing that this would free them from extra effort at home and leave more time and energy for work on the collective farms.

But Khrushchev’s well-intentioned policies did not bring the results he had hoped for. He continued to dictate what the collective farms should cultivate and how, promoting the increased production of corn, which could not and did not grow in the places designated by the party apparatchiks in Moscow. His attempt to provide the peasants with more time to relax undermined the production of agricultural products on individual lots. Between 1958 and 1962, the number of domestic animals in individual ownership decreased by more than half, from 22 million to 10 million. The reforms that were supposed to increase productivity and improve living standards in the village made products much more expensive in the cities, where prices for butter went up by 50 percent and meat by 25 percent. Many city dwellers recalled the 1950s as a paradise lost. The peasants preferred the 1960s.

In October 1964, when the members of Khrushchev’s inner circle, including his Ukrainian protégés Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny, removed him from power in a palace coup, few Soviet citizens had anything good to say about one of the Soviet Union’s greatest reformers. They took full advantage, however, of the opportunity provided by his de-Stalinization policies to complain publicly about their ousted leader and his economic initiatives, which had left store shelves empty and driven prices for agricultural products through the roof.

The new leaders, who had arranged the coup partly out of fear that Khrushchev would blame them for economic difficulties and remove them from power, decided to play it safe. They returned to the centralized model of the Soviet economy created in the 1930s by abolishing regional economic councils and reinstating all-union ministries in Moscow as the main governing bodies of the Soviet economy. But they left in place the relatively high purchase prices for agricultural products, turning agriculture from a source of revenue, as in Stalin’s times, into an economic black hole that demanded ever new subsidies. The living conditions of collective farmers, which had never been easy, improved somewhat, but their productivity did not; moreover, the new leaders never reinstated the original sizes of individual plots and continued to suppress personal initiative in the agricultural sector. Like Khrushchev, they made it an official goal to improve living standards for the population but feared the power of private ownership and private initiative.

The ouster of Khrushchev and his replacement as party leader by a less ideologically motivated Leonid Brezhnev led to the scaling down of his “communism tomorrow” propaganda campaign. It also brought about the reinstatement of Stalin-era controls on public debate and a return to political repression. The new leadership signaled the change, of course, by arresting and putting on trial Andrei Siniavsky and Yulii Daniel — two writers who published their works in the West and stood accused of anti-Soviet activities. The arrests came in the fall of 1965, a year after Khrushchev’s dismissal. In early 1966 the two intellectuals were sentenced to seven and five years of hard labor, respectively. The trial marked the end of the Khrushchev thaw.

In Ukraine, arrests began a few months earlier, in the summer of 1965. The KGB targeted young intellectuals in Kyiv and Lviv who had begun their literary and cultural activities during the thaw. An early activist of the Ukrainian dissident movement, Yevhen Sverstiuk, later characterized it as essentially cultural and driven by “youthful idealism... a search for truth and honesty... rejection, resistance, and opposition to official literature.” While concerned with the fate of the Ukrainian nation and its culture, young intellectuals presented their arguments in Marxist-Leninist terms, pushing the limits of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and “return to Leninism” campaigns. That was especially true of one of the first samvydav (Russian: samizdat, or self-published) texts of the Ukrainian dissident movement, titled Internationalism or Russification? Written soon after the first arrests of Ukrainian dissidents in 1965 by the young literary critic Ivan Dziuba, the treatise argued that under Stalin Soviet nationality policy had lost its Leninist bearings, rejected internationalism, and become hostage to Russian chauvinism.

Despite the growing political rigidity of the regime and its increased intolerance toward any form of opposition, the “Khrushchev thaw” did not end in Ukraine with the first arrests of young intellectuals and continued in some respects until the early 1970s. This was certainly true of the revival of national communism, which found a strong supporter in Petro Shelest, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and a member of the all-union Politburo. The son of peasants from the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine, he had joined the party in the 1920s. Like the national communists of that era (one of whom, Mykola Skrypnyk, was not only rehabilitated but also celebrated in Ukraine in the 1960s), Shelest believed that his main task was not to follow orders from Moscow but to promote the economic development of Ukraine and support its culture. The Ukrainian language was under ever-increasing pressure from Russian: the number of students in Ukrainian-language schools had been falling since the prewar years, with the proportion of students in Russian schools increasing from 14 percent in 1939 to 25 percent in 1955 and to more than 30 percent in 1962.

These figures disturbed Petro Shelest, who presided over the formation of a new type of Ukrainian identity that took pride in the republic’s role in defeating German aggression and in its enhanced status in the union, combining elements of loyalty to the socialist experiment with local patriotism and celebration of Ukrainian history and culture. This new identity was an amalgam of the Soviet identity formed in the 1920s and the national identity that had taken shape in interwar Poland, Romania, and, to some extent, Transcarpathia. While dominant, the Soviet component had to adjust and become more culturally Ukrainian and self-assertive than it would otherwise have been.

The political situation in Moscow, which somewhat resembled that of the 1920s, helped Shelest’s return to the ideas of national communism and his ability to pursue them long after the ouster of Khrushchev. A number of political cliques were fighting for control of the party and government, and the support of Ukrainian party cadres was as essential in Moscow in the 1960s as it had been in the 1920s. Shelest was only too happy to trade support for the Brezhnev group, which was competing with cadres led by former KGB head Aleksandr Shelepin, for limited Ukrainian political and cultural autonomy. The informal deal came to an end in 1972 when Brezhnev, having marginalized Shelepin, decided to move against Shelest. The latter was transferred to Moscow in May 1972 and, while still a member of the Moscow Politburo, accused of nationalist deviations on the basis of his book O Ukraine, Our Soviet Land, which was full of pride in Ukrainian history and the republic’s achievements under socialism.

Brezhnev replaced Shelest with his own loyalist, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who came from Brezhnev’s native Dnipropetrovsk region. The Dnipropetrovsk faction was pushing aside other Ukrainian cadres in Moscow and Kyiv and taking ever greater control of the Soviet party and state machine. Shelest’s departure from Ukraine was followed by a purge of his loyalists and an attack on Ukrainian intellectuals. Ivan Dziuba, author of the “national communist” Internationalism or Russification?, was sentenced to five years in labor camp and five years of internal exile for the work he had written back in 1965. Purged from institutions of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were Mykhailo Braichevsky and scores of other historians and literary scholars working on the pre-1917 history of Ukraine, especially the “nationalistic” Cossack era. The KGB was catching up on work it had been unable to complete in Ukraine under Petro Shelest. But repressions could do only so much and last only so long. The next time the Ukrainian party elites and Ukrainian intellectuals established a common front against Moscow, it would no longer be under the slogan of a return to Leninist ideals.