Ill CULTURE AND SYMBOLISM: THE MYTH OF NATIONAL MORAL PATRIMONY

In the preceding chapter, we have discussed the manipulation of symbols of the national myth and of proletarian inter­nationalism, as they have been exploited by cultural plur- alists and assimilationists in the effort to shape ideology.

We are concerned in this chapter with culture, not in the anthropological sense, but in the sense of creative pursuits that are valued over and above their everyday utility. Specifically, the concern is with the expression of symbols of national authenticity as opposed to all-Union (or, as frequently is the case, explicitly Russian) themes in Ukrainian literature, graphic arts, music, drama and cinema.

SOCIALIST REALISM AND NATIONAL

CULTURAL REVIVAL

One of the most obvious and explicit vehicles for symbolism and the expression of politically relevant myths in a so­ciety is the arts. It is for this reason that totalitarian societies have placed rigid controls over literature, graphic arts, and the performing arts.^

^For a brief but informed discussion of state control of the arts in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, see Igor Golomshtok, "The Language of Art under Totalitarianism," Radio Liberty Special Report 404/76, September 8, 1976.

Because our concern is with the "national" as opposed to the strictly artistic in Ukrainian culture, much of the liberation from the restrictions of Zhdanovism that followed the 20th Party Congress is not of central relevance. Two considerations, however, force us to consider the rebellion of writers and artists against the confines of "socialist realism" as relevant to the problem of the assertion of ethnic identity under conditions of official pressure to assimilate.

Socialist realism, as it was interpreted during the Stalin era, is a heroic romanticism, portraying an idealized future, and picturing an idealized present-day reality.

Mood and naturalistic detail are discouraged, as is conflict stemming from human weakness or the dimmer recesses of the psyche. The result is art that is monumental, sometimes even bombastic, celebrating strength, youth, work, energy and optimism. It is calculated to uplift, edify, and teach by example.

Art which must be accessible to and understandable by "the masses," and which must serve didactic and propagan­distic aims, is bound to be leveled to a very low standard, and this has frustrated Soviet artists of talent. Creative, experimental and progressive artists, even when their work is not expressly hostile to the state, have been subject to extreme censure.

The reason is that works of art and literature, even when they are manifestly non-political, are concrete manifesta­tions of some myth, and thus they are symbols. A state concerned with restricting symbolic expression to a single mythic structure which it believes bolsters its legitimacy or otherwise serves its ends will therefore seek to control artistic expression. The task of socialist realism, then, is to depict reality as already conforming to the myth of proletarian internationalism. There follows logically from this the other characteristics of socialist realism: the independence of its aesthetic ideals from all other artistic standards, and the heightened relevance of non-aesthetic categories such as social didacticism.

Ukrainian art and literature at the end of the Stalin era suffered not only from gray, lifeless, repetitive

2

themes, but also from the near-complete removal of all national elements other than those elements of Slavic cul­ture that it shared with Russia. The re-emergence of art and literature during the thaw was characterized not only by creative and stylistic experimentation, but also by a felt need to search for and find some basis of national authenticity, based on a variously felt and vaguely defined national myth: cultural and folkloristic themes that are valued above all because they are uniquely Ukrainian. Ukrainians, too, felt that the internationalist demands of socialist realism were an insufficient framework for the

/

expression of human spirituality. The most explicit state­ment of this is that of levhen Sverstiuk:

Today, everyone... understands that the point is not poetization of a Cathedral of all mankind, but above all its quite concrete embodiment in onesself, the elaboration of one's own individuality as a part of one 's own nation, as a reliable foothold for cultural and spiritual life.

2

See, for example, Ivan Svitlychnyi's criticisms, in Vitchyzna, No. 4 (April, 1961), pp. 162-77.

³Ievhen Sverstiuk, Sobor u ryshtovanni (Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1970), p. 20.

The Ukrainian cultural revival in the "thaw" period fol­lowed developments in the RSFSR, in that there was a revival of honest literary criticism, a number of significant re­habilitations, and a concern with experimentation and in­fluences from the West. There was, however, an added con­cern with national elements of art and literature that was absent from the cultural scene in Moscow.

The revival of distinctly Ukrainian literature can be said to have begun with the rehabilitation of Volodymyr Sosiura's patriotic poem "Love the Ukraine." The poem, a lyrical elegy with predominately landscape imagery, had been written in 1944 and was tolerated for some years, until it came under scathing criticism in 1951.

4 the Soviet Ukraine.

The poem was reappraised in Kommunist in 1956, and found to be innocent of the charges brought against it. Writings began to appear that expressed or inspired Ukrainian pride. Criticisms of the Stalinist style in art and literature appeared both in the RSFSR and in the Ukraine.⁶ Ivan Dzyuba and Ivan Svitlychnyi, later to figure heavily in the Young Writers Movement and later still as dissidents, were fre­quent contributors of this style of straightforward criti­cism, their writings and reviews appearing in the "liberal"

^Pravda, July 2, 1951, p. 2. The attack in. Pravda was triggered by the poem’s appearance in Zvezda (Leningrad), XXVIII, No. 5(1951), pp. 128-29. John Kolasky reports having been informed that the author of the attack in Pravda was Kaganovich; Two dears in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, Ltd., 1970), p. 260n.

^Kommunist, No. 12(1956). See commentary by Ivan Burlai, Vitchyzna, No. 1(1958), pp. 176-89, and B. Kyryluk, Radians ^fka Ukraina, January 5, 1958, p. 2.

For a review of early Soviet criticisms of the Stalinist style, see A. de Vincenz, ’’Recent Ukrainian Writing,” Survey, No. 46(January, 1963), pp. 143-50.

journals Vitchy zna and Dnipro, as well as in Literatuxma

7 hazeta. Maksym Ryls'kyi, an establishment writer of con­siderable esteem, who was later to defend the Young Writers and their views, also had an early voice in the advocacy of g art for art's sake.

Accompanying and no doubt in part accounting for the sudden surge of conscientious literature and literary crit- 9 icism in this period was the influence of Eastern Europe. Several eminent Ukrainian cultural figures travelled exten­sively in Eastern and Western Europe, and were undoubtedly influenced by the more open and experimental atmosphere that prevailed there, and brought these influences back with them.

A final development that was both a symptom of and a contributor to the Ukrainian cultural revival was the re­habilitation of Ukrainian writers and artists of the 1920s and 1930s who had been purged by Stalin for "nationalist deviations." The movement began among the younger Ukrain­ian intelligentsia, who called for rehabilitations under the slogan "fight the impoverishment of our Ukrainian heritage’"10 There was considerable support for this

7

Vitehyzna, No. 4(April, 1961), pp. 162-77; Dnipro, No. 4(April, 1962), pp. 144-52; Literaturna Ukraina, December 4, 1962, p. 3, and others.

g

Radians ^fka kultura, No. 6(June, 1956), pp. 12-13.

9

Viktor Nekrasov believes that contacts with Poland, France and Italy were among the most important stimuli of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance in the 1950s. Personal interview, Paris, June 27, 1976. ^Literaturna hazeta, December 20, 1956, p. 2, and January 15, 1957, p. 3. sentiment, even among establishment intellectuals who later became indifferent or even hostile to it.

These rehabilitations are important because they were often used by advocates of greater cultural expression to justify engaging in many of the activities for which the rehabilitated individuals had originally been purged. The issues raised in debates over rehabilitations set the agenda for controversy over cultural expression in the years to come: more latitude to seek greater national auth­enticity in art and literature, demands for more extensive use of national personnel in the performing arts, more lat­itude for the use of national folk themes, and recognition of the independent roots of Ukrainian culture.

Open calls for rehabilitations began at the 4th Plenum of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union in January, 1957. Maksym Ryls’kyi, writing in Literaturna hazeta in November, 1957, announced the most interesting of the early rehabilitations, that of Oleksandr Oles’-Kandyba (1878-1944), who had died in the emigration.

The effort to rehabilitate Mykola Khvylovyi (1893-1933) who, in the 1930s under the slogan "away from Moscow" had openly urged that Ukrainian culture model itself on that of Western Europe, was unsuccessful. Khvylovyi was too ex­plicitly nationalistic in the eyes of many establishment intellectuals, and remained, along with other national communists of the early 1920s and 1930s, a symbol of unac­ceptable nationalism in culture. The debate over Khvylovyi

■^This was the father of the OUN-Melnyk leader, known as "Ol’zhych," who perished at the hands of the Germans in the same year at Sachsen­hausen. The rehabilitation plan adopted in this case was one suggested by Babushkin: that the author’s works be edited, and those of a non­nationalist nature be printed; see Radians ’ke titeraturnoznavstvo, No. 1(1958), p. 9. D. Kopytsia opposed the rehabilitation of an undoubted "nationalist" on the grounds that it would be at variance with the principle that the Party alone must guide literary evaluation; see Literaturna hazeta, October 10, 1958, p. 2. Similar attempts by West Ukrainian literary students to rehabilitate Bohdan Lepkyi and Andrii Chykovs’kyi, both branded nationalists by Stalin, failed; Viktor Nekrasov, personal interview, Paris, June 27, 1976. also colored the rehabilitation of the dramatist Mykola Kulish (1892-1942), and that of Les' Kurbas (1887-1942), the producer and director of the famed "Berezil" theater 12

group in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

’ One of the most important rehabilitations for its effect on setting the tone of demands for national authenticity was that of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894-1956), a Ukrainian film director and prose writer with an international

13

reputation. Dovzhenko's early and later films and memoirs emphasized landscape imagery and themes of love, endurance, and death. His concern, by his own admission, was with the "eternal verity" of the Ukrainian land and culture, and he was anxious to portray the Ukrainian language on the screen in the vernacular, rather than in stilted, textbook Ukrain-. 14

ran.

More than any other rehabilitated cultural figure, Dov­zhenko became a symbol of the revitalization and re-authen­tication of Ukrainian culture. Typically, he was exploited both by the regime and by advocates of national expression. The potency of Dovzhenko as a symbol was also constantly fed by reference to his international stature.

12.

On the controversy over rehabilitation of Kurbas, see: Radians'ka

Ukraina, No. 42(May 23, 1957); Radians 'ka kultura, No. 37(May 5, 1957); Vitchyzna, No. 2(February, 1958), pp. 180-83; Literaturna hazeta, April 25, 1958; Vitchyzna, No. 5(May, 1959), pp. 163-78; Sovetskaia Bkraina^ No. 7(July, 1961), pp. 159-70; Mystetstvo, No. 2(March-April, 1965).

13

Dovzhenko had been censured by the Party for his silent films of Ukrainian life. In 1958, his early silent film The Earth was rated at the Brussels Film Festival as one of the twelve best films of world cinematography. Because of his world reputation, he was pardoned by Stalin and allowed to work on Party-commissioned films. He returned to the Ukraine in 1952 and began work on his last film, The Poem of the Sea. After Stalin’s death, he was permitted to publish his memoirs, ’’The Enchanted Desna," in Ukrainian in Dnipro, No. 4(1956).

14

0. Dovzhenko, "Notes and Materials on 'The Poem of the Sea'," Dnipro, No. 6(June 1957), and No. 7(July, 1957).

^vitchyzna, for example, reprinted a favorable review of Dovzhenko by the French historian of cinema Georges Sadoul, which had appeared in Nasha kuttura, a supplement to the Polish Ukrainian language newspaper

Several Ukrainian composers were rehabilitated during this period, facilitated by a resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of May 28, 1958, condemning "Zhdanovism" in music.16 Music in particular is a rich field for folk and national themes. Russian composers since Glinka and Tchai­kovsky have traditionally turned to Russian folksongs for themes for their compositions, and they still do. Ukrain­ian composers who turn to Ukrainian folk music for themes, however, are frequently accused of "bourgeois nationalism," and socialist realism in music means, as much as optimism and emphasis on the upbeat, the avoidance of non-Russian folk themes.

The period was marked as well by increasing calls for the right to existence of an independent, authentically unique Ukrainian culture; these demands are related to the ideological emphasis discussed in Chapter 2 on the "flower­ing" of national cultures. These demands were of three general types, apart from the question of language:

1. for recognition of the mutual (and not merely one-sided) influence of Russian and Ukrainian culture on each other;

2. for greater exploitation of Ukrainian historical and cultural themes in the arts; and 3. demands for the training and utilization of native Ukrainian personnel in the per­forming arts. These demands remained essentially unchanged throughout the period under study, and they came from the same sectors of society: those engaged professionally in history, literature, philology, art, drama, and cinema.

The common element underlying all of these is the theme of authenticity, which derives from the myth of the nation as the repository of moral values. Culture is the exam­ination and depiction - whether for the purpose of criti­cism or edification - of that which is considered of en­during value in the human experience. These demands arise

Nashe stovo; see Vitchyzna, No. 11(November, 1958), pp. 183-85. ^Pravda Ukraina and Radians’ka Ukrazna, May 29, 1958.

out of desire for the recognition of the value of the Ukrainian national patrimony, in part for its intrinsic worth, and in part in protest against what is perceived as a claim for the universal validity of the Russian patrimony.

The thesis that Ukrainian culture, and literature in particular, as well as that of all the other minority nationalities, developed under the influence of Russian literature, became increasingly a leading tenet in Soviet criticism after World War II, and is directly related to the "friendship of peoples" myth.

The most widely quoted example of this thesis of the Russian formative influence is the debt that Shevchenko is said to have owed to the Russian writers Chernyshevsky,

17 Belinsky, and Dobroliubov, despite the fact that, as John Kolasky has pointed out, these writers were still children 18 when Shevchenko published his Kobzar in 1847.

An early challenge to the thesis of primary Russian for­mative influence came in a book by G. Lomidze in 1957. Lomidze urged literary critics and philologists to pay more attention to national peculiarities derived from folklore and national character, rather than to continue seeking 19 superficial commonalities in language and themes. Lomidzefe ideas were picked up at once in the Ukraine. Borys Buriak, for example, openly argued that researchers on the "brother­ly ties" between Ukrainian and Russian literature are usually bent upon establishing such ties, and seek out com­mon ideas, subjects and themes from various works that

See, for example, I.K. Bilodid, Roszys'ka mova - mova mnohonatsio- nal’noho spilkuvann'ia narodiv SRSR (Kiev: "Radians'kyi pys’mennyk," 1962), p. 11.

18

Kolasky, op, eit. > p. 69.

19

G. Lomidze, Edinstvo v rmogoobrazovanie (Moscow: ’’Sovietskii pisatel,” 1957). Although we have no verification of his ethnic background, Lomidze’s name indicates that he is probably Georgian.

20 support the theory of Russian primary influence.

Similar demands reflecting the theme of cultural authen­ticity were expressed in all branches of the arts. We need examine only one branch, cinema, to illustrate the patterns.

Early post-Stalin demands for authenticity in Ukrainian cinema were made as a protest against numerous films in which the leading motif was the "friendship" of the Ukrain­ian and Russian peoples. Exemplary of this genre was the motion picture "Live, Ukraine!", a documentary produced by the Kiev Studio of Motion Picture Chronicle in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Soviet rule in the Ukraine. The camera pans repeatedly to the monument of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Kiev, then to his right hand holding a mace pointed east to Russia, "from whence," the narrator assures the audience, "help always came to our

21 people in difficult times." The Biblical symbolism of this scene - "I look to the hills, from whence cometh my help" (Psalms 121:1) - cannot be overlooked.

Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, there were calls for films dealing with Ukrainian historical themes, particularly the Zaporozhian Cossacks, as well as movies

22 that would accurately reflect the vernacular. One per­sistent problem has been that native Ukrainian scenario writers familiar with authentic Ukrainian culture have been at a premium; most scenario writers have been either Rus-

23 sians, or Russified Ukrainians trained in Moscow.

20

Literatiima hazeta, November 22, 1957; Vitchyzna, No. 5(May, 1958), pp. 206-10, and No. 5(May, 1959), pp. 163-78.

21

From a description to the author of the film by a recent Ukrainian emigre in Paris.

22

See letters to the editor in Radians^rka Ukraina, October 17, 1956, and Radians’ka kuttura, No. 6(June, 1956); also see Novyny kinoekranu, No. 6(June, 1956), p. 6.

23

On these problems, see discussions in Radians ^rka kultura, July 24, 1960; Iskusstvo kino, No. 12(1958), pp. 7-9; and Literatuma hazeta, January 13, 1961.

The most outspoken demand for authenticity in cinema was that of the Ukrainian film director Mykola Makarenko. En­titled "Looking at the Roots," his article covers all the demands listed above as characteristic of the movement for national authenticity, and in addition, accuses film directors and scenario writers of being unaware of the 24 culture and daily life of the people they portray.

Makarenko's article was debated and criticized in the Presidium of the Association of Cinematographic Workers of the Ukraine. Makarenko's critics, particularly Oleksandr Levada, self-appointed ideological guardian of Ukrainian cinema and then Deputy Chairman of the Association's orgburo, urged that the blame be put where it belonged: on the poor qualifications of directors, and excessive emphasis on national peculiarities, and failure to be 25 guided by "the compass of Leninist nationalities policy." In another article, Levada criticized Makarenko's demands for authenticity in terms of nationalities policy, arguing in effect that the pursuit of authenticity as an end in itself is not a legitimate concern of Soviet art. He then denied that Ukrainian art and literature had been de-nationr- alized in any event:

...Makarenko stretches the idea that the native language is the most impor­tant element in the national form of art to the point of absurdity. As regards Ukrainian writers and artists, the whole world knows that it was during Soviet times that they were given the unlimited opportunity to create in their own lan­guage, develop the language, and generously draw on its wealth and treasure. ⁵

^Sovetskaia Ukraina, No. l(January, 1961), pp. 109-35.

25

Radians 'ka kultura, April 20, 1961, p. 2.

Z^Komunzst Ukrainy, No. 6(June, 1961), pp. 61-67.

Levada has drawn here on one of the most potent themes of of the myth of proletarian internationalism, namely that the Soviet regime enabled minority cultures to develop their own languages and cultures. This, too, corresponds to the "flowering" thesis of the dialectic discussed in the prev­ious chapter. This theme is potent because, first, of course, there is a substantial element of truth to it, but secondly, because the existence of the "flowering" thesis as part and parcel of the proletarian internationalism myth permits assimilationists to disarm their critics, as Levada has done here, by refuting their arguments as groundless. The fallacy is that while it is true that the Ukrainian language is freer today than it was under the notorious ukases of Valuev (1863) and Ems (1876), this hardly implies that there is no Russification.

The issue of national authenticity in cinema remained a controversial one, and periodically attracted the close at-

27 tention of the Party. Controversy in the field of drama

28 was similar, as it was in music and the graphic arts, although in these fields interest in folk themes and dis­putes over the extent of independent development of Ukrain­ian art as opposed to the influence of Russia were prom-

29

inent.

See criticisms and counter-criticisms in Mystetstvo, No. 5(September, 1965), p. 3; Radians'ka Ukraina, May 17, 1968, p. 1; Literaturna Ukraina, January 22, 1971, p. 2; August 15, 1972, p. 4; and September 29, 1972, p. 3.

28

Calls were made, for example, for revisions in repertoire to include Ukrainian classics rather than translations from Russian and foreign plays. See Literaturna hazeta, October 20, 1959, p. 4; translation in Digest of the Soviet Ukrainian Press, 3:12:22-23; Literaturna hazeta^ May 10, 1957, p. 2; Radians'ka kultura, October 31, 1963, p. 2.

29

Radians'ka kultura, August 9, 1959, p. 4, and October 24, 1963, p. 3; Molod Ukrainy, March 15, 1963, p. 3. The authors of such articles are almost always ethnic Ukrainians, to make it appear that the move to emulate Russia and hold the native culture in contempt is a Ukrainian initiative, rather than a Russian-imposed imperative.

CULTURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHIC NATIONALISM

All myths are backward looking. The employment of folklore motifs, the artistic representation of parochial national "ways," the search for national "roots" in antiquity, and the striving for cultural "authenticity," all represent efforts to give expression to the myth of national moral patrimony. It is, therefore, the interpretation of the past that forms the crucial nexus between national cultural expression and nationalities policy in the Soviet Union, and this is probably true in general of "mobilization so­cieties" Which stake their legitimacy on a single, mono­lithic political myth.

Criticisms of the glorification of national peculiarities are most often phrased in terms of "opposing one nation­ality to another," that is, not mere glorification of Soviet Ukraine - this appears to be not only accepted but encour­aged - but rather, drawing deliberate or implicit contrasts between Ukrainians and other nationalities, particularly Russians, or over-indulgence in the elements of Ukrainian culture that set it apart from other cultures, are pro­

. 30

scribed. This generally means folk and historical themes.

The sins of ommission and commission that constitute historiographic nationalism, whether in the actual writing of history, or in belles lettres and other arts, have been explicitly set forth. These, it will be seen, are in effect proscriptions of revisions of the myth of proletarian inter­nationalism, and more especially of the myth of Russian primacy.

30

The burden of this prohibition falls disproportionately on ethno­graphers, whose subject matter forces them to deal with such themes. Ukrainian sanwydav sources report that the editors of Narodna tvorchis t' ta etnohrafiia are repeatedly censured because their journal ’’idealizes the past,” specifically through the publication of poetry, folk songs, folk tales, proverbs and sayings. Academician P. Babyi is reported to have criticized the journal simply because it publishes in Ukrainian. See Ukrains'kyi visnyk 7-8 (Smoloskyp, 1975), pp. 135ff.

Unacceptable historiographic nationalism consists of the following:

1. Idealization of the patriarchal feudal past, and of the past in general.

2. Underevaluation of the progressive significance of the joining of various peoples to Russia.

3. Attempts to whitewash nationalist and separatist move­ments.

4. Underevaluation of the friendly assistance and progres­sive role of the Great Russian people and the Russian pro­letarian "vanguard."31

Historiography, then, is a field in which the Party per­ceives that it has a great stake in defending the myths on which its legitimacy rests. Historical journals and his­torical writings have not only the force of science behind them, but, under censorship conditions as well, the im­plicit authority of the Party. Because of the trauma of rewriting history in the artificial propagation of the "friendship of peoples" myth, it can be assumed that writers take their cues from historiographers when they wish to be above reproach ideologically.

The politics of Ukrainian historiography has been treated

32

in depth elsewhere, therefore we shall not analyze it in detail, beyond noting the principal areas of contention.

Among the more contentious issues have been debates over the origins of the East Slavs, and over the patrimony of the city of Kiev. The Ukrainian historian Mykhaylo

31..

Voprosy vstoruL, No. 2(1961), pp. 223-24.

32

See, for example, Stephan M. Horak, ’’Soviet Historiography and the New Nationalities Policy: Belorussia and Ukraine,” in Jane P. Shapiro and Peter J. Potichnyj, eds., Change and Adaptation in Soviet and East Eur­opean Politics (New York: Praeger, 1976); Stephan M. Horak, ’’Problems of Periodization and Terminology in Ukrainian Historiography,” Nation­alities Papers, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 5-24; Lubomyr R. Wynar, "The Present State of Ukrainian Historiography: A Brief Overview," Nationalities Papers, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-23; Jaros law Pelenski, "Soviet Ukrainian Historiography after World War II," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 375-418.

Hrushevsky (1866-1934) - who, more than any other figure, perhaps, can be regarded the father of Ukrainian national­ism - is associated with the theory that Kievan Rus' of the 9th to 13th centuries was a uniquely Ukrainian state, dis­tinct from the later Russian state. This question is cru­cial to the myth of Russian primacy, because it is indis­putable that Kievan Rus¹ antedated the Muscovite state, so that the myth of Russian primacy demands that Kievan Rus’ and the East Slavs be regarded as having derived from a

33 proto-Russian people, rather than from independent origins. In recent ’years, the Soviet Ukrainian archaeologist Mykhailo Braichevs'kyi (b. 1934) has produced monographs, some of the officially published, which, while he dissociates him­self from Hrushevsky, in fact support the thesis of the

34

Ukrainian patrimony of Kievan Rus'.

Equally contentious, and of indubitable symbolic signif­icance, has been the question of the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654)_¥ at which time, in the official Soviet version, the Ukraine was reunified with Russia through an official treaty between Het 'man Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Contention over the Treaty involves the question of whether it is to be interpreted as a temporary military alliance against Poland, or as permanent accords of incorporation.35

Regardless of the questions of Realpolitik that may have been involved, and despite scholarly disputation both in Soviet and Western academic circles, the official interpre­tation was enshrined in the Central Committee Theses

33

See, for example, Kost' Huslystyi, "On Bourgeois Nationalist Dis­tortions in the Study of the Ethnogeny of the Ukrainian People," in Narodna tvorchist' ta etnohrafiia, No. 1(January-February, 1971), pp. 41-51; excerpts translated in Digest of the Soviet Ukrainian Press, 15:10:12-17.

S^See his Pokhodzhennia Rusi (Kiev: "Radians'kyi Pys'mennyk," 1963).

35

Various early Soviet treatments can be found in P.P. Gudzenko, ed., Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei (Moscow, 1953). advanced during the 1954 tercentenary celebration of the Treaty, and provided guidelines for all subsequent inter­pretation of Ukrainian history.

It was again Braichevs'kyi in the late 1960s who dis­puted the official interpretation, in an article entitled "Annexation or Reunion?" ("Pryiednannia chy vozziednannia?"). Braichevs’kyi examined a number of scholarly treatments of the Treaty and, adding his own analysis, concluded that the Treaty was regarded as merely a military union by the Cos­sack leadership at the time, but as an act of annexation by the Tsarist leadership. Braichevs'kyi's article, written in 1966, was refused publication, but received exceptionally wide circulation in samvydav, where it came to the attention of Ukrainian Party Central Committee ideological secretary A.D. Skaba, who is reported to have personally rebuked

37 Braichevs¹kyi.

A third problem in Ukrainian historiography has been the nature of the Zaporozhian Sich. The extreme sensitivity of the Soviet regime to the Cossacks undoubtedly stems from the latter's popular reputation for having been rebellious, untamable, and probably unwilling subjects of the Tsar, valuing above all else their independence. This popular image conflicts with the myth that the Ukrainians were his­torically eager for "reunification" with Russia. The correct ^"Theses on the 300th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia (1654-1954), Approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” Pravda and Izvestiia, January 12, 1954, pp. 2-3; translation is in Current Digest of the Soviet Press₃ 5:51:3ff.

37

See Suchasnist^r, No. 7(1968), p. 123. Braichevs'kyi's article appears in Roman Kupchinsky, ed., Natsional'nyi vopros v SSSR: sbornik doku- mentov (Munich: Suchasnist', 1975), pp. 66-124. For a translation, see Annexation or Russification: Critical Notes on One Conception, trans­lated and edited by George P. Kulchycky (Munich: Ukrainisches Institut fur Bildungspolitik, 1974). A Ukrainian edition was published in Toronto by "Novy dni" in 1972. According to Khronika tekushchikh sobytiij Braichevs'kyi was dismissed in 1972 from the Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR: No. 28 (New York: Khronika Press, 1974), p. 20. Braichevs'kyi probably never re­garded himself as a "dissident," and had written his scholarly article with publication in mind. ideological interpretation of the Zaporozhian Sich was set forth in a book that appeared in Russian in 1957 by the Ukrainian historian V.A. Holobuts’kyi. Although primarily concerned with criticism of "bourgeois nationalist" inter­pretations of the Sich, the message is modern: the Cossacks were not latter-day samurai nor fighters for independence, but rather vigilant and stalwart fighters on behalf of the

3 8 Ukrainians for reunification with Russia.

The final concern of Ukrainian historiography that is relevant to the modern quest for authenticity in culture is the revolution in the Ukraine, 1918-1922. The question is important because of the symbolic significance of the Ukraine's early "national communists": Mykola Khvylovyi,

S.V. Kosior, Vlas Chubar', Mykola Skrypnyk, and others.

The concept of national communism was a particularly sensitive one for the Soviet regime in the aftermath of Tito's defection in 1948, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the defections of Albania and Rumania. That it remains a sensitive question is evident from the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet reaction to the polycen­trism espoused by European communist parties at the Berlin conference of 1976. If, as has been suggested, the Union Republics look jealously upon the sovereignty of East Euro­39

pean socialist states, the Soviet leadership cannot be uncognizant of the danger of polycentrism arising within the Soviet Union and the breakdown there as well of the myth of Russian primacy. Great effort is therefore expended

40 to discredit the Ukrainian national communists.

38

V.A. Holubyts’kyi, Zaporozhskoe kozachestvo (Kiev, 1957), pp. 71-78.

39.

See Vernon V. Aspaturian, "Nationality Inputs in Soviet Foreign Policy: The USSR as an Arrested Universal State," in Aspaturian, ed., Process and Power in Soviet Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), pp. 449-50.

40

See H. Ovcharov, "On the Occasion of Light Shed on the Problem of Borot'bism," Komunist Ukrainy, No. 2(1958), pp. 36-47; translation in Digest of the Soviet Ukrainian Press, 1:7:1-5; Radians'ka Ukraina₃

THE AMBIGUITY OF NATIONAL SYMBOLS: ESTABLISHMENT INTELLECTUALS AND THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF THE DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

It is the ambiguity of national symbols themselves and the differential degree to which Ukrainian intellectuals pub­licly articulate their attachment to such symbols that makes it impossible to draw an analytical distinction between an "establishment" and an "opposition" in the Ukrainian context before about 1965. Mass arrests began under the Brezhnev regime, however, and it became important for Ukrainian in­tellectuals to take an unambivalent stand on one side or the other. After 1965, we can speak of the "opposition" as those individuals who either: a) were arrested, imprisoned, or otherwise harassed by the state (this is a definition by the regime of the individual as in opposition); or b) circulated their writings in illegal channels of communi­cation, or samvydav (thereby, the individual defines himself as in opposition). These categories are not, of course, mutually exclusive.

This artificial distinction, we must keep in mind, cam­ouflages the extent of shared values and symbols between opposition and establishment intellectuals, and de facto community of interest between political elites interested in decisional autonomy and cultural elites interested in expanded cultural expression. It also glosses over the developmental character of the crystallization of nation­alist dissent. Virtually all of the individuals identi­fiable as nationalist dissenters, non-conformist as they

April 17, 1958, pp. 3-4; Komunist Ukrainy, No. 7(July, 1968), pp. 26-38; F. lu. Sherstiuk, ’’Exposure and Rout of the Nationalist Deviation by the CPU in 1926-1928,” Ukraine ^fkyi istoryehnyi zhurnal, No. 3(1958), pp. 73-83; translation of excerpts in Digest of the Soviet Ukrainian Press, 2:12:1-3; also see criticisms of Roman Andriiashyk’s contro­versial novel of the KPZU, Poltava (published in Prapor, August-Septem­ber, 1969), in Radians'ka Ukraina, December 8, 1970, p. 2, and Literatuma Ukraina^ January 26, 1971, p. 3. These are typical examples of this genre of criticism; the list could, of course, be extended indefinitely. may have been, were certainly, in their own and in their fellows' eyes, members of the cultural establishment up to 1965, and few failed to try to publicize their views through legitimate channels before resorting to samvydav.

Although most establishment intellectuals seem to be unambiguous in their outward hostility to ideas that hint of ideological unorthodoxy, there have been a few whose views have been liberal enough to place them on the border­line. Foremost among these have been Maksym Ryls'kyi (1895-1964), outspoken in his early defense of the "Young

41

Writers;" Viktor Nekrasov (b. 1911), a Russian writer

42 native to Kiev and now living in Paris; and Oles' Honchar (b. 1918), whose novel Sobor we discuss below. Two writers, Ivan Drach (b. 1936) and Mykola Kholodnyi (b. ca. 1936), appear to have been on both sides, later recanting their

. 43

views.

The so-called "Young Writers" divided the Ukrainian Writers' Union, less by age than ideologically and aesthetically. That older establishment writers such as Ryls'kyi and Nekrasov frequently came to their defense is evidence of at least some shared viewpoints, and many of the values of the Young Writers, particularly as they per­tained to the preservation of the Ukrainian language, were reflected in oblique protests on the part of establishment intellectuals at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s at

41

Lzteraturnaia gazeta, August 23, 1962, p. 5; Literaturna Ukraina, January 29, 1963, p. 1.

42

See, for example, Nekrasov’s appreciation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel of the revolution in the Ukraine, The White Guard (published in the West by Fontana Modern Novels, 1971), in Novyi mir, No. 8(1967), pp. 132-42, and appended to the Fontana edition in translation.

43

On Drach, see Znannia ta pratsia, No. 1(1965), p. 2; Molod Ukrainy₃ December 29, 1965; and Radians’ka Ukraina, January 22, 1971. Kholodnyi’s recantation is in Literaturna Ukraina, July 7, 1972. For discussions of Kholodnyi, see Ukrains'kyi visnyk 3 (Smoloskyp, 1971), pp. 44-63, and Ukraine 'kyi visnyk 6 (Smoloskyp, 1972), pp. 123-25.

.. 44

Writers' Union congresses.

The most important and controversial characteristic of the Young Writers at first was innovation. Their concerns were less with politics than with art, and less with nation­alism than with universal human concerns, although national sentiment and a concern with authenticity in art and lit­erature were evident in some early works. The style of the Young Writers reflected romanticism, idealism, candor, and self-conscious honesty. It was in the latter that the Young Writers at first had the blessing of the Party through de-Stalinization: many of the early works of the Young Writers were criticisms of the "cult of personality" and of the Stalinist bureaucracy, clearly influenced by young

45 Russian writers of the "thaw," most especially Evtushenko.

The most outstanding of the Young Writers were the poetess Lina Kostenko (b. 1930), the poet Mykola Vinhra- novs’kyi (b. 1930), the physician-poet Vitalyi Korotych (b. 1936), levhen Hutsalo (b. 1937), the novelist Volodymyr 46

Drozd (b. 1939), and the poet Ivan Drach (b. 1936). Equally outstanding and somewhat more controversial were the literary critics Ivan Svitlychnyi (b. 1929), levhen Sverstiuk (b. 1928), and Ivan Dzyuba (b. 1931). Older

44

On the Writers’ Union as a forum of protest, see Ivan Koshelivets, "Khronika ukrainskogo soprotivleniia,” Konttnent, No. 5(1975), pp. 173-99; Ivan Koshelivets, Ukraina 1956-1968 (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1969); "Ukrainian Writers Protest," Radio Free Europe Research Paper F-100, February 19, 1975; and "Writers’ Congress in the Ukraine," Radio Free Europe Research Paper 1043, June 16, 1971.

45

Examples are Ivan Urach’s "Ode to an Honest Coward," Prapor, No. 1 (1963), and Andrii Malyshko’s "Ballad of the Anonymous Informer," Lzteratuma hazeta, July 28, 1961. Drach was attacked for his poem: see Literaturna Ukraine March 28, 1963, pp. 6-7. Also see Ivan Svitlychnyi’s justification of the Young Writers in Dnzpro, No. 4(1962), pp. 144-52.

46

For surveys of the works of these and other Young Writers, see "The Birth of Ukrainian Opposition Prose," Radio Liberty Daily Information Bulletin, August 24, 1962, and Jaroslaw Pelenski, "Recent Ukrainian Writing," Survey, No. 59(April, 1966), pp. 102-112. writers who in style, orientation and outspokenness were close enough to the Young Writers to be considered a part of them in spite of the generation difference included Borys Antonenko-Davydovych (b. 1899), and Andrii Malyshko

(b. 1912).

The Party’s response to the Young Writers was one of guarded enthusiasm from the beginning. In 1962, the Ukrain­ian Writers’ Union began to waive its membership require­ments, and many of the Young Writers were also taken into the Party, in the apparent hope of co-opting their energy and innovativeness. An all-Union Congress of Young Writers was held in Moscow in December, 1962, for the purpose of feeling out the demands of the Young Writers, and posing

47 constructive dialogue with the literary establishment.

Although severe and concerted criticism of the Young Writers as a group did not begin until 1963, some criticism began as early as 1960, and came not from ideological organs, but from older establishment intellectuals who felt 48 threatened by the popularity of the Young Writers. This is especially apparent, for example, in criticisms by the extreme pro-Russian establishment poet Pavlo Tychyna (1891­1967), appointed in 1962 by the Writers' Union Presidium to. 49

act as ideological watchdog over the Young Writers.

Tychyna upbraided the Young Writers for their precocious disrespect, likening them to "cubs," and to "birds just learning to fly."50 Early attacks on the Young Writers were accompanied by attacks on the "liberal journals" that

^Molod Ukrainy, December 5, 1962, p. 2. For a criticism of the Ukrain­ian delegation to the conference, see Komunist Ukrainy, No. 12(1963), pp. 42-49.

48

Viktor Nekrasov, personal interview, Paris, June 27, 1976.

49

Nekrasov interview. Nekrasov also alleges that Drach's ”0de to an Honest Coward” was written about Tychyna.

Radians 'ka Ukraina, December 27, 1963, p. 3.

published their works - Vitchy zna, Zhovten, Dnipro and n ⁵¹

Prapor.

The problem of the defiance of the Young Writers was deemed of sufficient importance to merit a CPUk Central Committee Plenum on August 9-11, 1962. Central Committee Secretary for Ideological Affairs A.D. Skaba launched a scathing criticism of the Ukrainian intelligentsia for their "tendencies to idealize the past" and for fostering hos­tility to Russians. He accused the Young Writers of openly flirting with Ukrainian "bourgeois nationalism," as well as with "decadent Western artistic notions," and reproached older writers for failing to counter sufficiently the rebel­liousness of the young and, in some cases, for openly de-

52 fending them. The Plenum marked the end of the regime's patience with the Young Writers and the beginning of harsh criticism led by ideological officials.

The "Shestydesiatnyki" and the Myth of National Moral Patrimony

Those representatives of the Young Writers who did not capitulate to the criticism of the Party in 1962-1963 came later to style themselves as the "shestydesiatnyki" (lit­erally, the "people of the sixties"). The label is sym­bolic in itself, for in Soviet historiography, the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s - the intellectual precursors of the revolution - are so styled. The name, therefore, evokes the historical role of the intelligentsia as in active opposition to the government. In this case, the dissenters have co-opted a pregnant symbol from the regime.

^^See, for example, Komunist Ukrainy, No. 12(1958), pp. 81-87; Radiant ka Ukraina, April 28, 1960, p. 1, and April 30, 1960, p. 1; Literatuma hazeta, June 23, 1961, p. 4; Vitchyzna, No. 9(1961), pp. 205-10; and Literatuma Ukraina, February 16, 1962, pp. 1-2.

52

Radians^rka Ukraina, August 15, 1962, p. 2.

The importance of the shesty desiatnyki is that they rep­resent the first kernel of a deliberate, committed, and self-identified nucleus of opposition among the mobilized and Soviet-educated generation. They form the core, and the origin, of the overt opposition that emerged when they were driven "underground" by the mass arrests under the Brezhnev regime; their orientations, values, and the sym­bols to which they were attached formed, therefore, the issues and orientations of the Ukrainian nationalist oppo­sition later. If the intellectual bases of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during and after World War II were to be found in a version of "integral nationalism" acquired by diffusion from Central Europe in the interwar period, the ideology of modern Ukrainian nationalism is a "humanist," demotic nationalism, almost an idealized inter­nationalism, that grew out of the intellectual concerns of the Young Writers and the shestydesiatnyki,

The most important of the shestydesiatnyki was the poet Vasyl Symonenko (1935-1963), for three reasons: a) he was the first to have specifically tied the humanistic and aesthetic concerns of the Young Writers to nationalist as­pirations; b) the events following his death were the im­mediate catalyst of the 1965-1966 wave of arrests which force the shestydesiatnyki into opposition; and c) he became a symbolic rallying point to unite the opposition. Like Shevchenko, he became the focus of symbolic struggle by January, 1965 as the regime vainly attempted to foster an official Symonenko cult in order to co-opt his popu­larity and neutralize the nationalist content of the sym­bol. Because of Symonenko's importance as a symbol, we shall examine him and the events that followed his death in some detail.

Born to peasant parents in Poltava oblast, Symonenko worked after graduation from the Journalism Faculty of Kiev University as a newspaperman in Cherkasy, writing poetry in his spare time. Having published only one volume of poetry, Tysha i Hrim (Silence and Thunder) in 1962, he

53 died of cancer on December 13, 1963, at the age of 29. Symonenko’s prohibited works, including poems and his Diavy_ë 54

have been published in toto in samvydav.

Symonenko’s poetry is not Aesopic in its open nation­alism:

My nation exists, my nation will always exist!/No one will scratch out my nation’/All renegades and strays will disappear,/and so will the hordes of conquerer-invaders.../ My nation exists 1 In its hot veins/ Cossack blood pulses and hums.55

Subsequent eulogies by Sverstiuk and Svitlychnyi attest to the degree that the Young Writers were impressed by Symonenko’s outspokenness, and both emphasized that he had laid down an example of "moral courage," and that everyone had an obligation to follow that example in the struggle for'national dignity.The f_act that Symonenko died of a disease, not from persecution, and in fact had not been persecuted at all, except by the censor, did not prevent his followers from making him into the symbol of a martyr to the cause of Ukrainian national liberation. Such a sym­bol appears in retrospect to have been necessary to lend unity and coherence to what was in fact an ad hoc movement. The shestydesiatnyki never identified with the OUN, attest­ing to the regime’s success in making that particular symbol

53

His second collection, Beveh chekan' (The Shore of Expectations), was published in the West by Suchasnist’ (Munich, 1965), and again in 1966 by Prolog (New York). Another collection, Zerme tiazhinnia (The Grav­itation of the Earth) was published post-humously in the Soviet Union in 1964.

⁵⁴See Ukrains 'kyi visnyk 4 (Smoloskyp, 1971), pp. 79-107. This issue also includes tributes to Symonenko by Dzyuba (pp. 119-31), Sverstiuk (pp. 113-19), and Svitlychnyi (pp. 108-121). It also includes an anonymous biography of Symonenko (pp. 73-78).

^SSIbid., p. 128. ⁵⁶ZfrzzZ., pp. 108-119.

very unattractive, and they were too young as well to iden­tify with the Ukrainian national communists of the pre-war years. Symonenko's appeal as a rallying symbol faded with time of course, and he was replaced in that role toward the end of the decade by Moroz.

On January 16, 1965, Ivan Dzyuba delivered an oration at a post-humous celebration of Symonenko’s birthday in the Republican Building of Literature in Kiev, which alerted the literary and ideological establishment to the potency of Symonenko as an anti-regime symbol:

It is no secret that Vasyl Symonenko was first and foremost a poet of the national idea.... It is true that Leonid Mykolaevych Novychenko, who is sitting at this moment at the table, assures us that the concepts 'national idea,' 'national consciousness,' are now unlawful and illegal, antiquated, and anti-Marxist.... Of course the national idea exists and will exist. It is real for us today and it means a concept of a fully sovereign state and cultural existence for the Ukrainian socialist nation, of a fullness and sovereignty of her national contribution toward the cause of peace, democracy, and socialism.5'

Dzyuba then went on to explain that there were periods in history when poets and writers became stale because they were forced by history to dwell on the national idea. The present epoch, however, is one of the kind that "does not

co squeeze out but catalyzes all other universal human ideas."

Finally, in what, given the context, could only have been interpreted as a call for resistance, Dzyuba summarized the "moral lesson" of Symonenko;

C7

Ibid., pp. 123-24.

^5&Ibid., p. 124.

People are not waiting for anything as much as they are waiting for the example of heroic public conduct. People need this example because they need the assurance that even today such heroic action is possible, and that today it is not fruitless..·.. Therefore today, perhaps more than ever, it is possible and necessary to fight. ⁹

Spirituality as the National Moral Patrimony

A fundamental assumption of the myth of national moral patrimony is that the nation is the ultimate repository and embodiment of all human spiritual values. Judging from samvydav writings and the consensus of our informants, the underlying thrust of the Ukrainian cultural revival is the feeling on the part of many intellectuals that de-national- ization deprives a people not only of cultural forms and language, but by doing so, and in the manner in which it is done, it deprives a people of the vehicle for the expression spirituality - of the medium through which ideas, traditions and interpretations which are valued over and above their everyday utility, give meaning to life, and provide comfor­table zones of stability, are preserved and transmitted. This medium for the expression of spirituality is the national culture.

Thus, in an eloquent «description of the effects of what we have called the "maximization of redundancy," Valentyn Moroz maintains that "devaluation of the word" is the main moral problem left over from the Stalin era; stereotyped phraseology, epithets, superlatives and the like reached such a pitch that any criteria for judging reality or spiritual reality disappeared. No one, he writes, believed in any reality, and emotions disappeared, too; the only

Ibid., p. 126.

emotions expressed were those "tickled out" by official' propaganda. "Devaluation of the word," he continues, led to the devaluation of all values; aim, ideal, heroism, etc., were replaced by nihilism. For the Ukraine, as well as for the other nations of the Soviet Union, the concepts "nation," "patriotism," "native language," "motherland," and the like were similarly devalued.

It is a mistake to equate the myth of national moral patrimony, as it has been articulated inside the Soviet Ukraine, with the assumption peculiar to "integral nation­alism" that a given nation, i.e., one's own, is superior to all others, and is mystically destined to "fulfill history" through the subjugation or destruction of "inferior" species or peoples. Perhaps because the OUN and UPA are so closely identified with this view - rightly or wrongly - it is sin­gularly lacking in the ideology of modern Ukrainian nation­alism. Because we are basing our conclusions solely on written material - and material written by educated and articulated people at that - we have no means of judging what concept of the nation exists in the popular mind, and we do not discount the possibility that, were Ukrainian nationalism a popular ideology, the premise of the nation as the repository of moral value might be translated into the simpler ideology of the nation as the only value.

Modern Ukrainian nationalism as it has been articulated is distinguished from wartime integral nationalism in the following ways:

1. The absence of the glorification of youth, vitality, violence, and armed struggle as the expression or culmi­nation of national vigor. Civil disobedience, not terrorism or militarism, is the form of action that is espoused.

2. The absence of any appeal to the irrational as a prin­ciple, which was a characteristic of integral nationalism.

^%alentyn Moroz, ’’Sredi snegov,” (in Russian), AS 596, SDS Vol. VIII. This and all subsequent references to samvydav documents follows Radio Liberty’s "Arkhiv Samizdata" and "Sobranie Dokumentov Samizdata” classification system, now in wide use.

The intellectuals that comprise the Ukrainian nationalist dissent movement are certainly romantics, but nonetheless, intellectualism and rationalism remain prominent character­istics of their value system.

3. The absence of an exclusivist orientation to civil life. Although the approach to Ukrainian identity is an ethnic one, it is not a racialist one. It is in this sense that the nationalist dissidents, whether Marxist-Leninist as Dzyuba, or not, as Moroz, have been profoundly affected by their socialization under the Soviet regime; that the Soviet concept of citizenship is a demotic, rather than a "root” one, has influenced the Ukrainian dissenters' concept of ethnic identity.

Modern Ukrainian nationalism arose out of dissatisfac­tion on the part of cultural elites with official prole­tarian internationalism, and out of the perceived failure of the officially sponsored culture to satisfy felt cul­tural needs. It is less the affirmation of parochial ethnicity for its own sake, than rejection of the official rejection of ethnicity. More directly stated, it is the rejection of the Russification of culture under the guise of proletarian internationalism. To the degree that Rus­sification has come increasingly to be interpreted as "oppression," modern Ukrainian national self-assertion has the same sources as nationalism in the Third World: the call for communal solidarity of a group with perceived im­mediate commonalities (language, culture, myth of common descent and fate) as against a group that is perceived as alien along the same dimensions, and can be construed to be an "exploiter." This "reactive" feature of Ukrainian nationalism is the linkage between the distinctive features of minority nationalism in the Soviet Union, and the more familiar nationalisms of other parts of the world.

The earliest statement in the post-Stalin period that the nation is the repository of spiritual values was the line in Sosiura's previously discussed poem, "Love Ukraine:"

Your lover will not love you, If you do not love Ukraine!

Statements of this type, as we have discussed above, were tolerated by the regime until the mid-1960s, so long as they did not glorify the Ukraine more than the Soviet Union itself, or set the Ukraine up as an object of adora­tion against the Union itself or against other nations. Many of Symonenko's poems - those which did not allude to Russian "conquerer-invaders" - in spite of their Ukrainian patriotism, were published after his death, with only the most offensive lines expunged.

The premise also underlay the early calls for authen­ticity in Ukrainian culture, and became increasingly ex­plicit as an element of symbols relating to authenticity. The most sensational public exposition of the thesis, how­ever, came in a novel written not by a dissident but by Oles' Honchar, then and (after a short hiatus) now Chairman of the Presidium of the Ukrainian Writers' Union.

All of our informants agree that Honchar's allegorical 1968 novel Sobor (The Cathedral)^¹ was the most significant event in the Ukraine in the post-Stalin period, because it was written by an establishment intellectual and at first accepted by the establishment, for its content and literary quality, and for the reaction it produced.

The novel abandons all canons of socialist realism; it is anti-modernization in tone, and unambiguously opposed to Russification. It concerns a young Ukrainian, Ivan Bahlai, who is killed in the struggle to save an ancient Cossack cathedral, which is being torn down by the state, in the fictional town of Zachiplianka on the Dnipro river. The town is clearly modelled on Dnipropetrovs'k - one of the most Russified cities in the Ukraine - and the cathedral is

^¹01es’ Honchar, Sobor (Kiev: "Radians’kyi pys’mennyk," 1968). The novel was first published in Vitchyzna, No. 1(1968). An offset was published in the United States by the Museum of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (New York and S. Bound Brook, N.J., 1968). a symbol of Ukrainian culture being dismantled by the Rus­sification policies of the Soviet regime.

Of exceptional literary quality, the novel was initially highly praised, first in the Dnipropetrovsk papers Zoria

6 2

and Prapor iunosti, and later by the establishment critic Leonid Novychenko in the all-Union Literaturnaia gazeta It also received a favorable review in Warsaw's Ukrainian

64 language newspaper Nasha kultura.

Later, however, the novel came under severe attack as ideologically faulty: it glorified the Cossack past, it wrongly opposed workers to bureaucrats, it was not "Party- minded’¹ and, as evidence that the novel's symbolism had not escaped the critics, it had a "very dubious subtext."

The turnabout came as the result of a conference of sec­retaries of local Party organizations in Dnipropetrovs'k. The Faculty of History and Philology at Dnipropetrovs'k University - of which Honchar is a graduate - was forbidden to celebrate Honchar's 50th birthday, and a public campaign against the novel was begun with a series of letters, allegedly from Dnipropetrovs'k workers, protesting Honchar's "negative treatment" of the working class.There are reports that at least a dozen Dnipropetrovs'k journalists

^Reported in Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, 7:23-24 and 10:30,39. ^^Literaturnaia gazeta, March 20, 1968, p. 2.

64

Nasha kultura (Warsaw), No. 5(1968), p. 2.

6⁵See criticism by M. lurchuk and F. Lebedenko, Radians’ka kultura, April 26, 1968, p. 2, and M. Shamota, Radians'ka Ukraina, May 16, 1968, p. 3. The critics and journals which had earlier praised the novel were also criticized. who came to the public defense of Sobor received sanctions ranging from reprimand to dismissal from the Party. It is also reported that the campaign against the novel touched of student riots in Dnipropetrovs’k and Kharkiv.

The aftermath of the campaign produced a remarkable doc­ument in the summer of 1968. An anonymous letter, signed only "The Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovs’k" was sent to Shelest, Shcherbitsky, Ovcharenko and Writers' Union Sec­retary D. Pavlychko. The lengthy letter protested not only the campaign against Sobor and its defenders, but also Rus­sification of culture and education in Dnipropetrovs’k and other large cities of the East Ukraine, and also detailed a number of scandals and petty larcenies among members of the Dnipropetrovs’k Party organization, suggesting that local Party members must have at least talked to the writers of

6 9 the letter about these matters.

In 1970, levhen Sverstiuk wrote and circulated in sam- vydav channels an essay, Sobor u ryshtovanni (The Cathedral in Scaffolding), loosely centered around the symbolic theme of Honchar's novel.The essay is a defense of the view that spiritual values must be centered in national culture. The type of civic personality created by the conditions of Stalinism, Sverstiuk writes, is an irresponsible and oppor­tunistic one, and this has facilitated the erosion of the nation as a repository of values. When neither the ideology nor proletarian internationalism is capable of providing enduring values, the only source of such values is the

67posev (Frankfurt), No. 9(September, 1969), p. 10.

^^"Russification and Socialist Legality..."

^"List tvorehoi molodi Dnipropetrovs 'koho^ " (1968), AS 974, SDS Vol. XVIII. Also see Ukrains'kyi visnyk 1 (Smoloskyp, 1970), pp. 26-27. For a report on the trial of one of the signers and a lengthy commen­tary on the case, see Ukrains'kyi visnyk 2 (Smoloskyp, 1970), pp. 7-21.

70 ·

levhen Sverstiuk, Sobor u ryshtovanni (Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1971). For a translation, see levhen Sverstiuk, Clandestine Essays (Littleton, Colo: Ukrainian Academic Press, Libraries Unlimited, 1976).

71 national tradition as it is embodied m the past. Not only the vehicle, but the content of human spirituality is the national tradition. For Sverstiuk, the intent and the effect of government sponsored denationalization is to "root in dogma the provincial and imitative character of

72

Ukrainian culture," that is to say, to reinforce what we have called the myth of Russian primacy.

Finally, as far as "idealization of the past" is con­cerned, Sverstiuk argues that it is the artificial "friend­ship of peoples" myth that in the strictest sense "idealizes" the past. Addressing his words to the literary critic Mazurkevych, who had criticized the intelligentsia for

73

idealization of the Cossack republic, he writes that the real question is not one of "idealization," but "was there or was there not in fact a Christian Cossack republic?"

SYMBOLS OF THE NATIONAL PATRIMONY

IN POPULAR CULTURE

There are a number of elemental symbols of national iden­tity, and generically many of these are common to ethnic communities throughout the world: architectural forms, lan­guage, folk music, art, legendary men - to name only a few. Such symbols serve to differentiate the group from others, lend the group a sense of pride in its own genius and, transmitted through primary socialization, to perpetuate the national identity. In the Soviet Union, where such symbols are entrenched in the national cultures, the regime has not tried to obliterate them, but rather to co-opt them and lend them a new, Soviet content. When this is success-

71

Ibid., p. 33.

¹²Ibid., p. 41.

73

Radians 'ka osvita, May 18, 1968, p. 8.

u ryshtovanni, p. 46.

ful, the reverence and emotion attached to the symbol will, presumably, be transferred to the regime. We have no way of judging the success of these efforts in the popular mind so long as survey research on such questions is prohibited in the Soviet Union. We can only examine the public dia­logue that has taken place between spokesmen for the regime and the nationalist intellectuals over the content of national symbols.

We shall briefly examine the manipulation of three such entrenched symbols: the legendary Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, the issue of the preservation of monuments of antiquity, and Ukrainian folk choral societies.

Taras Shevchenko

Shevchenko (1814-1861) is without question the foremost literary symbol of the pride and dignity of Ukrainians. Only Ivan Franko (1856-1916), Lesia Ukrainka (Larysa Kosach- Kvitka, 1871-1913), and the historian Hrushevsky even approach his stature in this regard. Born a serf, Shev­chenko’s freedom was purchased in 1838, and he enrolled in the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. He published his first book of realist poetry, Kobzar (The Bard) in 1847, and later, for his poetic protests against serfdom and against Russification, was exiled to Siberia. Freed in 1858, he was prohibited to live in the Ukraine, and died in St. Petersburg in March, 1861.

The Soviet regime has interpreted Shevchenko as a "revo­lutionary democrat," emphasizing that his protests against Russification of the Ukraine were aimed at Tsarist policies, not against the Russian people, for whom it is alleged he had a great love. He is often said to have been influenced by Russian revolutionary writers, and is said to have been opposed to Ukrainian nationalism. This interpretation be­gan in the late 1930s, at the same time that Russian history was being re-evaluated in the light of Russian patriotism; prior to that time, Shevchenko had been officially consid­ered to be a "bourgeois democrat, and ideologist of the petty bourgeois peasantry, with religious and nationalist

75 remnants."

The latest round of controversy over the interpretation of Shevchenko began in the preparations for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1964. An incident involving the creation of a stained-glass window for the vestibule of the Shevchenko Kiev State University illus-* trates the subtlety of the Shevchenko symbol.

Four young artists, Liudmyla Semykina, Panas Zalyvakha,

7 6

Halyna Sevruk and Alla Hors’ka, were commissioned to create the window. When completed, it depicted not a saccharine poet, but an angry, gaunt Shevchenko holding in one arm a battered woman symbolizing the Ukraine, and in the other hand a book, held high. The window bore the following inscription:

I shall glorify these small dumb slaves,

I shall put the word on guard beside them.

(Vozve Zychu maZzkh otykh rabzv nzmykh₃ la na storozhz koZo zkh postavZzu sZovo.)

75

"Theses of the Division of Culture and Propaganda of the Central Committee, Communist Party of Ukraine," quoted by Yaroslav Bilinsky, The Second Soviet jRepubZzc, p. 191. Bilinsky discusses in detail the controversy surrounding the interpretation of Shevchenko up to 1957, which we are not summarizing here. For representative versions of the modern version of Shevchenko as a revolutionary democrat, see Kornunzst Ukrazny, No. 2(1961), pp. 51-56, and No. 5(1961), pp. 75-84. Also see^ "Bard of Freedom and Brotherhood" (in English and Ukrainian for foreign readers. Kiev: Ukraina Society, 1976).

^Alla Hors’ka and Panas Zalyvakha subsequently became involved in dis­sident activities. Zalyvakha was sentenced to a labor camp. Hors’ka was brutally murdered (decapitated) under still mysterious circum­stances on November 28, 1970; samoydav sources make a credible argument that her death was the work of the KGB; see Ukraine ’kyi visnyk 4 (Smoloskyp, 1971), pp. 14-20.

There were immediate objections to the window, and the Decorative-Monumental Art Section of the Artists’ Union met in Kiev in April, 1964 to determine the disposition of the project. A piecemeal transcript of the meeting was circu- 77

lated in samvydav, Criticism of the window proceeded almost tentatively, various individuals criticizing it at first on aesthetic grounds: too abstract, too harsh. The most direct criticism, however, was that the window was "ideologically harmful" because of the ambiguous symbolism. The window was later destroyed at night, in what was of-

7 8 ficially described as an act of vandalism. It is clear that the depiction of Shevchenko as a defender of the Ukrainians, implicitly against the Russians, was unac­ceptable.

As with everything written abroad about the Ukraine, the Soviet regime is markedly sensitive to the overtly nation­alistic interpretation placed on Shevchenko by Ukrainians living in the West. The establishment of a monument to Shevchenko in Washington, D.C. in 1964, for example, prompted an angry letter to the emigration signed by 34 Soviet Ukrainian cultural figures protesting such "malicious attempts to use the works of this poet against our coun-

79 try...." These and other hostile reviews of the treat­ment of Shevchenko in the West are evidence that these interpretations are available to Soviet readers, or that the regime believes they may be. It is quite likely that they are, the Soviet borders being, as we have noted, rather

⁷⁷Ukrains 'kyi visnyk 4 (Smoloskyp, 1971), pp. 12-14.

78

John Kolasky maintains that the window was smashed on the orders of V.A. Boychenko, a secretary of the Kiev obkom, in order to prevent the commission from examining it, and that this happened on March 9, before the commission met. This is not consistent with the samvydav account, which clearly implies that the commission examined the window in April. See Kolasky, Two Years in Soviet Ukraine, p. 92.

79

Lzteraturna hazeta, November 29, 1963. permeable; this of course complicates the regime's efforts to neutralize the nationalist content of the symbol.

Ukrainian samvy dav sources allege that beginning in 1964 the regime began deliberately expunging symbols of Shev­chenko from popular culture:

A special directive has been issued calling for strict supervision of con­certs and other ceremonies honoring Shevchenko, in order to maintain them at a very basic level, lest...the sincere message of the Bard surface and awaken thoughts of the Ukraine, 'our own, but vassal land.' Many articles and poems about Shevchenko are being excised from newspapers and magazines because censors see in them implied criticism of the colonial status of the Ukraine.⁸⁰

The Jubilee Celebration of Shevchenko's birthday in March, 1964 was a festive but co-opted occasion, attended by the entire Ukrainian Party Politburo and numerous emi- 81

nent guests, including Khrushchev. The celebration was marked by the presence of large numbers of policemen in anticipation of agitation by the shestydeszatnyki. This turned out to be unnecessary, as the shesty deszatnyki, largely boycotted the event. They gathered instead at the Shevchenko monument in Kiev two months later, on May 22, to celebrate the anniversary of the return of Shevchenko's body from St. Petersburg to the Ukraine. The import of this act of defiance was that it was meant to symbolize the demand for the "return" of Shevchenko's heritage as well as

”Z pryvodu protsesu nad Pohruzhal’s’kym,” AS 911, SDS Vol. XVIII. This document is primarily concerned with the May 24, 1964 fire in the Ukrainian Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian RSR, in which 600,000 volumes of Ukrainian archival materials and books were destroyed. ^[81] his corpse. May 22 became an annual event, marked sometimes by the reading of Symonenko's poems and inflammatory speeches against Russification of. Ukrainian culture and lan­guage. At first the regime attempted to co-opt the event, organizing official festivals marked by the presence of police, komsomo1 officials and druzhynnyky, but there was always an unofficial celebration afterwards, which usually

8 2

led to arrests. Employers were ordered not to permit their employees to leave the premises on May 22, and a num­ber of individuals were dismissed after 1968 for disobeying

8 3

this injunction.

Shevchenko continues to be a potent symbol of the Ukrain­ian nation, and ironically the Party is partly responsible for this. In efforts to co-opt the symbol, they keep it potent. This potency, when exploited by the opposition, adds to the symbol's intrinsic appeal.

Monuments and Antiquity

Monuments are symbols of national authenticity insofar as they represent the continuity between a people's contem­porary perception of itself and myths of past association and differentiation from other groups. To the extent that they symbolize the myth of common ethnic descent and shared historical experiences, they "authenticate" the national myth.

Beginning in the early 1960s, there was a revival of interest in antiquity in all the Slavic areas of the USSR.

82

Ukrains 'kyi visnyk 2 (Smoloskyp, 1970), pp. 40-41.

83

Nadezhda Svitlychna and R. Motruk, for example, were dismissed from their jobs; Ukrains’kyi visnyk 1 (Smoloskyp, 1970), p. 77. Three employees of the Kiev Hydroelectric Station received prison terms for distributing leaflets asking citizens to ignore the proscription on observing May 22; Ibid., pp. 14-17. For other accounts relating to the May 22 observances, see Khronika tekushehikh sobytii₃ 5:19, 6:5, 8:35, 27:17, and 28:21.

In the RSFSR, this took the form of voluntary societies for the preservation and restoration of old cathedrals, churches and monasteries which, owing to official hostility to re­ligion, are at best in a state of neglect, and often vanda­lized or else used, for example, as storage depots by state enterprises.

In the RSFSR, these voluntary groups were often closely associated with groups that espoused neo-Slavophile or Rus­sian nationalist ideologies.^ j_n the Ukraine, there have been calls for preservation of monuments and relics, but there is no report of actual voluntary groupings on the scale that Medvedev reports for Russia. We advance two ex­planations for this. First, Soviet officials have tolerated Russian nationalist groups to a great extent, hoping that they would neutralize more anti-regime movements, and be­cause, despite the fact that Russian nationalism rests on the same type of myth that Ukrainian nationalism does, the former is more reinforcing of the proletarian internation­alist myth of Russian patrimony of the Union.

A second and more immediate explanation is that the Party acted more decisively in the Ukraine than in the RSFSR to co-opt the interest in antiquity, precisely because of its potentially nationalist overtones. The Voluntary Society for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture of the Ukrainian SSR, organized under the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers, has 12,000 primary organizations in enter­prises, collective farms and universities, and a Republic-

8 6 wide membership of over two million. Ukrainian samvydav

84

Literaturna Ukraina, April 23, 1968, p. 4; translation in Digest of the Soviet Ukrainian Press, 11:6:17-19.

85

On such groups, see Roy Medvedev, Kniga o sotsialisticheskoi demo- kratii (Amsterdam and Paris: Herzen Foundation and Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1972), pp. 104-110 and passim, 8^0n the Society, see Kultura i zhyttia, August 22, 1965; Literaturna Ukraina, June 17, 1966; and March 8, 1968; Pamiatnyky kultury, No. 1-2 (1969), pp. 13-14; and Molod Ukrainy, April 28, 1971, p. 2. The Society also receives extensive publicity in Soviet publications in­tended for Ukrainian readers abroad. sources report that the Society has been given directives to concentrate on the preservation of ’'historical-revo­lutionary” monuments, particularly those relating to Lenin, rather than on churches and monasteries, and that in 1973, 100 monuments recommended by the Society for state pro­tection, nearly all of them churches, were taken off the list. Those that receive state protection, it is reported, are not in fact restored, but merely have an explanatory plaque attached to them. These sources also list recent incidents of the removal of monuments dedicated to Shev­chenko, Franko and even Khmelnytsky, and their replace- 87 ment with memorials to revolutionary figures.

The most notable samvydav document on the nexus between antiquity and national identity is Valentyn Moroz’s account of the efforts of the Hutsuls, a small mountain people living in the foothills of the Carpathians, to regain 99 relics borrowed in 1963 for use as props in the film 88

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and never returned.

Moroz’s essay is significant less for the plight of the· Hutsuls per se than for the argument he makes for the necessity of the preservation of traditional culture in a period of modernization. For Moroz, modernity can only be dealt with on the basis of the nation as the modernizing agency, for in the nation alone reside the values that pre­vent modernization from leading to a spiritually empty "mass culture."

Moroz argues that Soviet nationalities policy must fail, because culture can only be built slowly and incrementally;

8 9 "it cannot be built on the five-year plan, like a canal." Secondly, for Moroz, there can be no such thing as a

87

Ukraine 'kyi visnyk 7-8 (Smoloskyp, 1975), pp. 151-54.

88

Valentyn Moroz, "Khronika soprotivleniia," (in Russian, 1970). AS 411, SDS, Vol. VI. This was one of three articles for which Moroz, now in the U.S., was sentenced to a fourteen year term.

⁸⁹Ibid., p. 10.

"cultural revolution:" revolutions do not create traditions, but rather destroy them. Finally, any attempt to deprive a people - whatever the size of the entity - of their nation­al identity through depriving them of their culture also deprives them of their only source of dignity and spirit- 90

uality. For Moroz, then, as for Sverstiuk and the other nationalist dissidents, the nation must be preserved, not for its own sake, but because it is the only moral patri­mony, and the national culture is the only vehicle of the higher human values.

Choral Societies

Folk music, and folk culture in general, is also a sym­bol of national authenticity. It has been believed for over a century in Russia and other Slavic countries that the simple narod - the folk - particularly the peasantry, is the repository of eternal human values. The Ukrainian nation that is romanticized and revered by individuals interested in national authenticity as a value is the rural Ukraine.

Ukrainian folk culture, like the Russian, is rich in songs and dances. The revival of interest in antiquity mentioned above was accompanied by an increased urban in- 91 terest in folk music. The regime has acted to co-opt this as well, through the establishment of national choral societies associated with enterprises, factories and uni­versities. These societies are funded by the Council of Ministers, and directed by reliable Party members; over­sight is through the Ministry of Culture. The emphasis is on works by Soviet composers written in the lyrical folk on

Ibid., pp. 14-15.

91

See also John A. Armstrong’s discussion of the utilization of choral societies and other cultural activities by nationalists in the occu­pied Ukraine; Ukrainian Nationalism 1959-1945, pp. 223-27.

style, but not upon traditional folk songs from the oral

92

tradition.

The state has discouraged active ethnological research in folk music, particularly when it has been undertaken independently of Party auspices. The journalist Ivan Prokopov, for example, in the period 1959 to 1966 collected over 4,000 ballads and ditties sung by the Hutsuls, and recorded a number of wedding ceremonies in villages in the 93

Carpathians, but was unable to publish them. Similarly, collections by Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhaylo Pavlyk and Marko Vovchok have not been published. Moroz was harassed by militia and KGB officials when trying to record Easter 94 songs in the Hutsul village of Kosmach in April, 1970.

Periodically, establishment intellectuals have urged greater state interest in authentic folk music. The of­ficial reason given for refusal to publish folk music and sponsor research in the area is that it is too tiresome, too esoteric for general interest, and economically un- 95

feasible. The following case study of the Homin Ethno­graphic Choral Ensemble, however, strongly suggests that authentic folk music is strongly evocative of the myth of national moral patrimony, and, as an elemental symbol of national identity, must be co-opted, neutralized, or sup­pressed.

The Homin ("sound of voices") group began in Kiev in 1968, an offshoot of the older Zhaivoronok ("Lark") Itinerant Student Choir, directed by Valentyna Petrienko (d. 1972) until finally denied premises for rehearsal by

92

Literaturna Ukraina, September 29, 1972, pp. 3-4.

93

Literaturna Ukraina, April 11, 1967, p. 2.

94

"Zaiava hromadian s. Kosmach prokuroru Ivano-Frankiv’skoi oblasti pro vypadok na tserkovnyi terytorii," (1970), AS 990, SDS Vol XVIII, p. 3.

95

Lzteraturna Ukraina, April 11, 1967, p. 3. Research or programs in folk arts and crafts are discouraged for similar ostensible reasons.

96 the state in 1965. A number of separate groups of young people, many of them former members of Zhazvoronok, had been gathering in private homes to sing folk songs and to re­hearse for Christmas carolling (kotzaduvannza}. These groups consolidated under the directorship of the folk­lorist Leopol'd lashchenko, and began conducting outdoor singouts; soon, they were invited to give performances in various villages outside Kiev. Members of the group in­cluded students, factory workers, teachers and scientists.

At the beginning of 1970, the group was being regularly harassed by the KGB, and accusations that it was a "nation­alist" group began; the accusation was first publicly made by a certain Ruban, partorg of the Kiev University Faculty of Journalism. He characterized it as an "underground" organization, and demanded the dismissal of lashchenko from the Composers’ Union.

In September, 1971 Homzn was officially prohibited from holding rehearsals or concerts at their regular meeting place, the kharchovyk culture palace, and the kharchovyk' s director, Kraseva, invited the group to join the culture palace's own folk ensemble, where they "sing the songs of Soviet composers." For failing to heed Kraseva's advice, and because a member of the choir had read a poem by Symo- nenko at the Shevchenko monument on May 22, lashchenko was dismissed from the Composers' Union.

Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Shevel' is reported to have urged at a meeting of the Agitprop Department that Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism is the "number one ideo­logical problem," and that Homzn is an agent of it because it "conducts propaganda among the youth by singing folk songs." All of lashchenko's compositions were removed from radio broadcasts and record stores, and his arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs were expunged from the 1972 edition of Spzvaze narodny khor (Kiev: "Muzychna Ukraina"). The ambiguity of national symbols is ironically reflected,

^Ukrazns ’kyz vzsnyk 6 (Smoloskyp, 1972), pp. 116-119.

however, in the fact, reported in eamvydav, that lashchenko submitted Homin’s repertoire to a Republican competition on folk music compositions, not under his own name but under a number, as contest rules required, and was awarded four prizes in the first judging.

Pressure was put upon individual members to leave the choir under threat of sanctions ranging from ostracism to dismissal from employment. Ukraine ^rkyi vienyk reports that 38 individuals were so threatened, and five actually dis­missed for participation in the choral group. The same source reports that a kindergarten teacher, Raisa Mordan’, was fired for taking her pupils to a performance of the group in a park. "This is a nationalist chorus," she was told at the partkom, "it sings hostile songs; it is rid-

97 died with nationalists. And you took children there!'¹

Reprisals are also taken against other groups that dis­play a public interest in folk music outside the sponsor­ship of the Party. It is reported that an old traditional custom was revived in Kiev, for example, whereby groups of young people go from home to home on New Years singing traditional folk carols (ehchedrivky). Twenty such groups were counted in Kiev in 1971, some of whom appeared in traditional dress, including the costume of the Cossack mamai. These groups are arrested on the street on charges of "hooliganism" and reprisals are taken against them at their jobs and schools. Similarly, a group of bandura players led by Vasyl Lytvyj was disbanded after an unof­ficial concert, and its members deprived of the right to

98 reside in Kiev.

97

Ukraine^rkyi vienyk 6 (Smoloskyp, 1972), pp. 133-41.

98

Ukraine 'kyi vienyk 4 (Smoloskyp, 1971), pp. 148-49.

CONCLUSIONS

We have attempted in this chapter to trace the evolution of the Ukrainian cultural revival by examining its manifes­tation in elemental symbols of distinct Ukrainian identity, public debate over the significance of these symbols, the manner in which they have been exploited by cultural plur- alists and the nationalist opposition, and the efforts of the Party to co-opt such symbols where possible in order to neutralize them or transfer their entrenched emotional connotations to the regime's internationalist myth. We have also attempted to show the precise way in which sym­bols of national identity are related to the myth of nation­al moral patrimony.

Historically, cultural revival has preceded or accom­panied mass national movements. This does not imply, of course, that there is a revolutionary situation in the Ukraine today; in all likelihood, passionate attachment to national symbols and the willingness to resist are limited to a small proportion of the intelligentsia. Although we have almost no information about the attitudes of the unmobilized peasantry, it is true that in terms of social and occupational mobility, the incentives are in the direc­tion of further denationalization rather than the reverse. An assessment of the degree of attachment of the Ukrainian population as a whole to national symbols other than lan­guage would require the study of socialization in primary groups - especially the family - and the use of survey research techniques which are at present impossible in the Soviet Union.

IV