Post-Stalinist Soviet Ukraine

On 5 March 1953, Iosif Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and self-proclaimed generalissimo of the Red Army during World War II, died.

No sooner had his funeral ended than the top Soviet leaders began to criti­cize Stalin and struggle among themselves for control of the party and govern­ing apparatus. In an effort to avoid the excesses of Stalin’s one-man dictatorship, the Politburo decided to try to govern with a collective leadership. Four figures came to the forefront - Georgii Malenkov, Viacheslav Molotov, Lavrentii Beria, and Nikita S. Khrushchev. But despite the lip service paid to collective leadership, it became increasingly clear that Khrushchev, Stalin’s former trusted lieutenant who from 1938 to 1949 had headed the Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, was consolidating his own power base. In September 1953, Khrushchev became first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU; by 1958, he had succeeded in removing all his rivals to become the undisputed leader of the country.

Beginning with Khrushchev and continuing for three more decades, Stalin’s successors were concerned primarily with the further consolidation of the CPSU’s control of the country, so that it would be able to achieve the ultimate goal - the transformation of the Soviet Union from the stage of socialism to that of full com­munism.

Change came as early as 1953, when party spokespersons were allowed to criti­cize openly the policy of russification that had been imposed on the Soviet Union’s nationalities beginning in the 1930s under Stalin. Such criticism was part of a process of de-Stalinization and a general attack on Stalinist rule, which culminated in February 1956 with Khrushchev’s “secret” speech before the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Discontent with the nationality question had already been expressed at the June 1953 meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine, or CPU (the name Bolshevik had been dropped the year before), and concern with this issue was to remain on the agenda of Ukrainian party leaders for the next several decades. The year 1953 also witnessed the designation, as head of the CPU, of Oleksii Kyrychenko.

The appointment of Kyrychenko marked a new development in Soviet Ukrain­ian political life. Not only was he an ethnic Ukrainian (the first to hold the post since the early 1920s), but so were all subsequent CPU party chairmen: Myko­la Pidhirnyi/Nikolai Podgornyi (in office 1957-1963), Petro Shelest (in office 1963-1972), and Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi (in office 1972-1989). Furthermore, Ukrainian leaders were invariably to play prominent roles at the highest levels of the Soviet regime during the post-Stalinist era. Khrushchev himself had previously been chairman of the Communist party of Ukraine; Kyrychenko, and especial­ly Pidhirnyi/Podgornyi became influential all-Soviet policy makers; and Leonid Brezhnev (an ethnic Russian from Ukraine) rose from being a regional party boss in Dnipropetrovs’k to becoming the dominant leader in Soviet politics during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Ukraine under Khrushchev

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet Ukraine, like the rest of the Soviet Union, exhibited seemingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there were efforts to integrate Ukraine more fully into the Soviet system, and, on the other, there was some loosening of control by the Communist party, which under Stalin had tried increasingly to direct all aspects of society. De-Stalinization, or the “thaw,” was especially pronounced after 1958, when Khrushchev became the dom­inant figure in both the Soviet government and the All-Union Communist party (CPSU). The dual approach of integration and a relative loosening of political control from the center was epitomized in Ukraine by two events that took place ^{in 1}954.

In February, the Crimea was ceded to Soviet Ukraine as “yet another affirma­tion of the great fraternal love and trust of the Russian people for Ukraine.”¹ This newest territorial acquisition added close to 17,160 square miles (44,000 square kilometers) and 268,000 inhabitants to Soviet Ukraine (1959). Since the entire Crimean Tatar population was forcibly deported in May 1944, the vast majority of the inhabitants who remained were Russians (71 percent) and ethnic Ukrainians (22 percent). Therefore, when the Soviet authorities, in the name of the Russian people, decided in 1954 to present the Crimea as a gift, it was turning over to Ukraine a “Slavic” land.

The year 1954 also witnessed massive state-organized celebrations through­out Soviet Ukraine commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Agreement of Pereiaslav.

The political thaw under Khrushchev was characterized by at least four develop­ments: (1) amnesties for prioners accused of “anti-state crimes” connected with the war and immediate postwar years, whether they were political, cultural, or reli­gious in nature; (2) the rehabilitation of nearly one-third of the 961,000 residents of Ukraine arrested on political charges during the Stalinist era (1929-1953); (3) the establishment in 1958 of the first permanent Soviet Ukrainian mission to the United Nations in New York City; and (4) a steady increase in the percentage of ethnic Ukrainians in the ranks of the Communist party of Ukraine (CPU). With regard to the last development, not only were most CPU Central Committee and Politburo members ethnic Ukrainians, but also three-quarters of the highest rank­ing party and state posts throughout the republic were held by ethnic Ukrainians. Finally, the Soviet central government in Moscow began to relax its strict regimen­tation of culture. The result was a wave of scholarly and literary production that no longer had to conform rigidly to the accepted interpretations of the Stalinist era or to socialist-realist artistic dogma. The new opportunities to publish brought promi­nence both within and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to writers like Boris Pasternak, Evgenii Evtushenko, and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.

The sixties phenomenon

The stepped-up campaign of de-Stalinization, marked by Khrushchev’s “secret” speech in 1956 and the subsequent removal of Stalin’s body in 1961 from the revered place next to Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square, also signaled a relaxation of cultural restraints on the non-Russian nationalities. The result was the appearance in Soviet Ukraine of works by several younger writers. Among the more important were the poets Vasyl’ Symonenko, Lina Kostenko, Mykola Vinhranovs’kyi, Vitalii Korotych, and Ivan Drach; the prose writers Hryhorii Tiu- tiunnyk, levhen Hutsalo, Volodymyr Drozd, and Valerii Shevchuk; and the literary and social critics Ivan Dziuba, Ivan Svitlychnyi, and Ievhen Sverstiuk.

Although not part of a deliberately organized movement, these writers, togeth­er with a few theatrical directors, film directors, composers, and artists, came to be known as the Sixties Group (Shestydesiatnyky). They were joined by a few older writ­ers like Borys Antonenko-Davydovych and Andrii Malyshko, and they were initially encouraged and supported by establishment literary figures like Maksym Ryl’s’kyi and Oles’ Honchar. Writers associated with the Sixties Group were unified in their rejection of socialist realism as the guiding ideology of literary production. Instead, they reaffirmed the principle that literature, especially poetry, was essentially an expression of the individual. Their writings both implicitly and explicitly sought to renew traditional Ukrainian cultural values and to restore the Ukrainian language, which had suffered increasing sovietization and russification during the Stalin­ist era. Aside from publishing their own writings, several members of the Sixties Group were active in the movement to rehabilitate Ukrainian authors whose works had been banned in the 1930s (among them Hryhorii Kosynka, Ievhen Pluzhnyk, Oleksa Slisarenko, and Mykola Zerov), and as a group they drew renewed inspira­tion from the writings of Taras Shevchenko.

In a cultural atmosphere that stressed the reclamation of the Ukrainian past for the spiritual regeneration of the present, it is not surprising that historians played an active role. They began to complain openly about the manner in which Ukrain­ian history was being treated in official accounts, and by 1957 they were able to obtain their own historical journal (Ukra'ms'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal), published in Ukrainian by the Historical Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev under the editorship of the specialist on the Cossack period Fedir P. Shevchenko. Several other historical journals and monographs soon followed. Many presented revisionist views of Ukrainian history that questioned the Soviet theory of the com­mon origin of the East Slavs, stressed the positive achievements of the Zaporozhian Cossacks during the seventeenth century, and reassessed the role of Ukraine dur­ing the revolutionary period and civil war (1917-1920). In these reappraisals, the problem of Russian-Ukrainian relations received special attention, and there was open speculation as to whether the “unification” (specifically not “reunification”) brought about by the Agreement of Pereiaslav in 1654 had represented a realiza­tion of Ukraine’s highest ideals.

Other areas of Ukrainian scholarship were also affected by the new environ­ment. The need for a general encyclopedia that classified all knowledge in the Ukrainian language had long been felt. Such a project had been under way dur­ing the early 1930s, but its editorial board fell victim to the purges in 1934, and nothing ever appeared. When emigre scholars in the West began in 1949 to publish thematic and alphabetic Ukrainian encyclopedias, it seemed that a con­certed effort needed to be undertaken in order to counteract the “distortions of the bourgeois nationalists.” Consequently, between 1959 and 1965, a Ukrainian encyclopedia under Soviet auspices (Ukra'ins’ka radianska entsyklopediia) was pub­lished in seventeen volumes. It was followed soon afterward by a smaller, three- volume general encyclopedia (1966-68), a four-volume historical encyclopedia of Ukraine (1969-72), and a twenty-six-volume detailed description of each oblast in Soviet Ukraine (1967-74). Other important synthetic compilations included a deluxe six-volume history of Ukrainian art (1966-70) and an eight-volume history of Ukrainian literature (1967-71).

The preparation of general reference and synthetic works in the Ukrainian lan­guage on all aspects of Ukrainian culture also emphasized the pressing need for a standard multivolume dictionary of the Ukrainian language. Such a project had begun already during the era of Ukrainianization, but it too had come to an abrupt halt as a result of the purges of the 1930s. By the late 1950s, the dictionary project was revived, and this time it resulted in the eventual appearance of an eleven-vol­ume, 136,000-word dictionary of the Ukrainian language (1970-80). The Soviet Ukrainian scholarly establishment also embraced the newer disciplines, with the creation of the Computer Center in 1957 and the Institute of Cybernetics in 1962. Through their research and publications, including a Ukrainian-language two-vol­ume encyclopedia of cybernetics (1973), these institutes made Ukraine one of the leading centers for the computer sciences in the Soviet Union.

The cultural thaw of the early 1960s also had an impact on painting, decora­tive design, music, and the cinema. Among the best-known artistic achievements was the internationally acclaimed film produced by the Dovzhenko Studio in Kiev, Serhii Paradzhanov’s Tiny zabutykhpredkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1964; based on Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi’s 1913 novel of the same name). The film ideal­ized traditional Ukrainian culture and language in a form whose artistic and tech­nical quality were remarkably comparable to those of contemporary films in the West.

Economic developments

After an impressive postwar economic recovery, which by 1955 had witnessed a doubling of industrial productivity over the prewar level (1940), the Ukrainian economy began to level off. Actually, during the next six Five-Year Plans, between 1956 and 1985, there was a steady decline in the growth rate of Ukrainian indus­try, from a high of 13.5 percent during the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1951-1955) to a low of only 3.5 percent during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981-1985). Signifi­cant decline, however, did not set in until the 1970s. Until that time, Ukrainian industrial development followed a pattern already well in place during the post­war decade of reconstruction. This pattern included (1) a continual imbalance in favor of heavy industry and an eventual decline of output in all branches of industry, (2) further expansion of the industrial base in western Ukraine, and (3) an initial rise but then leveling off in the growth of the work force.

Some statistical data will illustrate these trends. Whereas between 1950 and

1965 many branches of Ukrainian industry recorded double-digit growth, between

1966 and 1985 all branches recorded half or less the rate of growth of the previ­ous period. With regard to geographic location, the lower Dnieper region and Donbas continued to remain the heartland of Soviet Ukraine’s industry. Between 1965 and 1978, however, that region’s level of industrial development in compari­son to the country as a whole declined from 142 to 129 percent, whereas during the same period the Right Bank and western Ukraine (especially Ivano-Frankivs’k, Transcarpathia, L’viv, and Ternopil’ oblasts) increased their relative industrial out­put from 62 to 78 percent. The work force stood at 14.1 million in 1980, three times its size in 1940. But whereas Ukraine’s annual rate of growth in employment was 4.8 percent throughout most of the postwar war period (1950-1985), the rate was only 1.9 percent during the period’s last two decades (1965-1985).

The slower but steady growth of Soviet Ukrainian industry coupled with a dra­matic increase in the country’s urban population required newer sources of ener­gy. Between 1956 and 1972, a series of five reservoirs (Kiev, Kaniv, Kremenchuk, Dniprodzerzhyns’k, and Kakhovka) were built along the Dnieper River, transform­ing that waterway into an almost uninterrupted series of lakes stretching from Ukraine’s border with the Belorussian S.S.R. virtually to the mouth of the river as it empties into the Black Sea (see map 46). Aside from improving water transport and regulating spring floods, the dams that created the Dnieper reservoirs also became sites for new power stations which brought about a dramatic increase in hydroelectric energy. At the same time, greater growth was occurring in the natu­ral gas industry. The first postwar commercial production of natural gas was in western Ukraine, at fields centered around Dashava, south of L’viv. More impor­tant, however, was the development of the Shebelynka field southeast of Kharkiv in the Donbas region. By the late 1960s, this field was producing 68 percent of Soviet Ukraine’s and 30 percent of the Soviet Union’s natural gas.

But such advances in the hydroelectric and natural gas industries were not enough to fulfill Soviet Ukraine’s ever-increasing energy needs. Chronic drought limited hydroelectric output, and rising costs caused a decrease in natural gas pro­duction. Consequently, by 1985, hydroelectricity accounted for only 17 percent of the country’s energy output, and natural gas for only 18 percent. The lion’s share of 70 percent remained energy produced by coal- and oil-based thermal power stations; however, the output of the Donets’k coalfield in the Donbas, which had been exploited steadily since the late nineteenth century, was declining.

In an attempt to counteract these trends and to stabilize future energy resourc­es, the Soviet Union launched an intensive nuclear power program in the 1970s. This resulted in the construction in Soviet Ukraine of four nuclear power plants - near Chornobyl’ (1979), at Kuznetsovs’k north of Rivne (1979), at Konstan- tynivka north of Mykolaiv (1982), and at Enerhodar on the Kakhovka Reservoir (1984) - and in plans for four more plants by the end of the decade. As a result of these efforts, Soviet Ukraine had clearly developed diverse sources of energy for its expanded industrial infrastructure during the six Five-Year Plans that were carried out between 1955 and 1985.

While Soviet Ukrainian industrial production continued to increase, if uneven­ly, during these three decades, the country’s agricultural sector initially remained problematic. It is true that there was a phenomenal increase in the production of industrial and fodder crops (sugar beets and silage corn) between 1950 and i960, but at the same time there was only a slight increase or even a decrease in crops for human consumption. The result was a continuation of the food crisis in Soviet Ukraine as well as in the Soviet Union as a whole.

The causes of the agricultural crisis were many: planning decisions to invest in industrial and fodder crops, erratic weather conditions, and the basic inefficiency of a command economy with a market system based on one purchaser - the state - from a large body of decreasingly motivated producers on collectives and state farms. Finally, the lack of an efficient transportational infrastructure made it diffi­cult for agricultural products to reach their destinations. It was not uncommon for harvests to remain piled up and unprotected in open fields, rotting before they were picked up for delivery. No Soviet leader ever questioned the inherent short­comings in the system; instead, they all tried to institute reforms to improve agricul­tural productivity within the framework of collectivized agriculture.

Khrushchev was among the more aggressive reformers. His attention first turned to industry and the problem of management. Under his leadership, in 1957 the central economic ministries responsible for specific branches of the economy throughout the entire Soviet Union were abolished. Instead, the coun­try was divided into economic regions, each with its own council (Ukrainian: rad- narhosp; Russian: sovnarkhoz). Soviet Ukraine initially was subdivided into fourteen, and later into seven economic regions. The object was to allow local bodies to implement plans developed by the all-Union and Ukrainian state planning com­mittees. The councils of each economic region were responsible for all branches of economic development within their geographic area. In order to coordinate plan­ning between the local enterprises in the individual regions and the all-Union and republican Ukrainian planning ministries, a Ukrainian Council for the National Economy was established in i960. As a result of the reform, 97 percent of Soviet Ukraine’s gross industrial production was now under the control of republican authorities, a situation in marked contrast to that in 1953, when Kiev controlled only 36 percent of the country’s enterprises.

The introduction of the economic regions with their councils also had political implications. On the one hand, the decentralization of authority from Moscow to the republics before long allowed regional party secretaries to become virtual economic dictators able to create through patronage their own local power bases. On the other hand, the dismantling of the central ministries in Moscow created an influx of ministerial officials to Soviet Ukraine and other republics which was resented by the local authorities. In effect, the Soviet Ukrainian party hierarchy and managerial elite grew more protective of what became its own vested interests, whether those were understood to be at the regional or republican level vis-à-vis Moscow. A good example of this phenomenon in Soviet Ukraine was the military­industrial complex centered at Dnipropetrovs’k in the Dnieper industrial region, which served as a launchpad for the careers of the long-time Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the CPU first secretary Voldymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, and the future presi­dent of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma.

Khrushchev the reformer also turned his attention to agriculture. In 1958, as part of an attempt to increase efficiency, the Machine Tractor Stations were abol­ished, and their equipment sold to the collective farms. The expectation was that the collectives would somehow show more responsibility in maintaining the farm machinery. An even more grandiose experiment was to increase the amount of land planted with corn. After returning from a visit to the United States (the first by a Soviet leader), Khrushchev was convinced that corn was the crop that would save Soviet agriculture. During the late 1950s, in Soviet Ukraine alone the amount of land planted with corn grew by 600 percent. At the height of the “corn fever,” between i960 and 1963, nearly one-third of all Soviet Ukraine’s arable land was planted with this crop.

The increase in corn cultivation was coupled, however, with a decrease by more than half in the amount of land planted with wheat and rye. These undertakings were part of an all-Union agricultural plan of Khrushchev’s whereby the “virgin lands” farther east, beyond the Ural Mountains in Siberia and Central Asia, were opened up to grain production. Overall, the experiment failed. The so-called vir­gin lands at best yielded only low-quality and low per-capita harvests. In Soviet Ukraine, the corn sown was mostly used for fodder, so the already-severe food shortages only got worse. The situation became so critical that in 1963 the Soviet Union was forced to take an unprecedented step. The government violated its long-standing policy of peacetime self-sufficiency by importing grain from abroad, especially from Canada. It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that Soviet Ukrainian productivity in food grains as well as livestock increased (in some cases it had more than doubled by 1980), but this was after Khrushchev was gone from the political scene.

The Brezhnev era - stability and stagnation

The failure of Khrushchev’s agricultural experiments, combined with his contri­bution to the Soviet-Chinese rift in the area of foreign affairs, resulted in his sud­den removal in October 1964 as head of the CPSU and the government of the Soviet Union. In keeping with the principle of collective leadership that had ush­ered in the post-Stalin era, Khrushchev was replaced by two of his former proteges, Leonid Brezhnev as first (later, general) secretary of the CPSU, and Aleksei Kosy­gin as premier of the Soviet government.

Although the facade of collective leadership was maintained, by 1971 Brezhnev had become the most important political figure in the Soviet Union. He removed or isolated his leading rivals in the CPSU hierarchy, and to his position as gen­eral secretary of the party he added the title of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in 1977. Although ceremonial in nature, the office of chairman of the Presidium made him head of state, a position necessary to the Soviet leader for reasons of international protocol. Born in far eastern Ukraine (of Russian parent­age), Brezhnev built a political machine consisting of former engineers, factory directors, and officials from his home region within the lower Dnieper industrial complex. It was from there that the “Dnipropetrovs’k clan,” or Mafia as it was popularly known, had helped Brezhnev rise through the party’s ranks and to reach the highest positions in the Soviet government and the CPSU.

The Brezhnev era, which lasted until his death in 1982, was marked by an insist­ence on order and stability in sharp contrast to the spirit of social experimentation and the almost frenetic administrative changes that had characterized Khrush­chev’s rule. For example, the regional economic councils in Soviet Ukraine and elsewhere were abolished in 1965 and authority for economic development was returned to central ministries in Moscow. The only innovations were in foreign affairs, where Brezhnev was a strong advocate of accommodation with the Soviet Union’s superpower rival, the United States. In essence, the Brezhnev era coin­cided with what came to be known as the period of detente with the West. At the same time, the desire for - and achievement of - domestic stability was to bring a return to Stalinist-like bureaucratic rule (albeit without the excesses) that by the end of the 1970s had resulted in widespread economic and social stagnation throughout Soviet society.

A reimposition of stricter party control over all aspects of Soviet life also had a direct impact on the titular nationalities and national minorities within each republic. Greater limitations on national and cultural activity that was not in strict accord with general Soviet policy were imposed. This policy, as it pertained to the multinational composition of Soviet society, was based on three concepts: rastsvet (flowering), sblizhenie (drawing together), and sliianie (merging or fusing).

These concepts, formulated earlier by Lenin and Stalin, expressed the three stages through which multinational Soviet society was expected to progress. Ras- tsvet referred to the flowering of national cultures, each of which was encouraged to develop fully in a Soviet system that recognized the equality of all nationalities. Having “flowered,” the individual national components would naturally experi­ence sblizhenie - that is, each culture would be influenced by the others during a process of “drawing together.” The best having been taken from all cultures dur­ing their drawing together, the final result would be sliianie, or the merging of all national cultures into one new, revolutionary Soviet culture. While in theory sliianie meant the extraction and then fusion of the best elements from all cultures in a new Soviet amalgam, in practice the process meant assimilation to or at least acceptance of Russian linguistic and cultural forms. Such russification was threat­ening to the closely related Slavic cultures, the Belarusan and Ukrainian, which were vulnerable to russification particularly on the linguistic front.

Aside from theory was practice, or the question of the time frame. Just when would sliianie, or merging, take place? According to Lenin, merging could not occur until the stage of communism had been attained in the socioeconomic sphere. Since Khrushchev had assured the public (at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961) that the stage of communism would be achieved in Soviet society by 1980, it seemed reasonable to prepare for the alleged inevitable merging of the Soviet Union’s nationalities. Accordingly, from the late 1960s there were intense debates about the merging of nationalities among Soviet theoreticians and policy makers. During the course of the debates, some Communists even called for the abolition of what seemed the superfluous and “pseudosovereign” Soviet republics, which by the 1970s, it was argued, had outlived their “historical usefulness.”

In the end, the idea of a merging which would eliminate national distinctions and give birth to one Soviet nation (sovetskaia natsiia) was replaced by the seem­ingly more pluralistic but utterly ambiguous notion of “a new historical commu­nity of people - the Soviet people” (sovetskii narod). When this revised concept was put forth by Brezhnev at the 24th Congress of the CPSU (1971) and then incorpo-

rated into the new constitution of the Soviet Union (1977), it was suggested that as part of the dialectical process of history the “flowering” (rastsvet) and “drawing together” (sblizhenie) of the nationalities would continue. The resultant ambigu­ity made it possible for proponents of both assimilation and cultural pluralism to justify their actions. Hence, while the 1977 Soviet constitution preserved the existence of the national republics, two years later a second all-Union conference was held in Tashkent on the Russian language - “the language of friendship and cooperation of the peoples of the Soviet Union.” The Tashkent conference called for the mandatory teaching of Russian in every non-Russian pre-kindergarten and kindergarten.

National repression and accommodation in Soviet Ukraine

During the last years of Khrushchev’s and the early years of Brezhnev’s rule, when a “merging” was still the ideal, the increasing activity of the nationalities in the direction of greater cultural distinctiveness was perceived as a danger. Thus, the same Khrushchev - whose policies introduced a period of “thaw” or “liberaliza­tion” and the beginning of the sixties-era cultural renaissance in Soviet Ukraine - also revived the merging (sliianie) theory with respect to the nationality question. The result was new restrictions on national cultures.

Beginning already in 1963, the Sixties Group of writers were being accused by party ideologists of flirting with “decadent Western artistic notions” and, even worse, with Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism.” Although some members of the group changed their writing in response to warnings from the party, others contin­ued to publish in the so-called samvydav, or publishing underground, in which self­published works were illegally produced and distributed. Particularly active were the literary critics and publicists Ivan Svitlychnyi, Ievhen Sverstiuk, Ivan Dziuba, and Valentyn Moroz, and, after 1975, intellectuals associated with the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords on Human Rights, the so-called Helsinki group - Mykola Rudenko, Leonid Pliushch, General Petro Hryhorenko/Petr Grigorenko, and lurii Badz’o. Unlike the essentially liter­ary innovators of the Sixties Group, the dissidents spoke out boldly and in politi­cal terms. By the 1970s, they were issuing petitions to the Soviet government and the United Nations for the restructuring of society so that Ukrainian cultural and political aspirations could be realized. They proposed solutions that ranged from federation to independence, and they reflected a spectrum of political ideologies from national communism (Dziuba) and integral nationalism (Moroz) to pluralist democracy (the Helsinki Group). Regardless of their approach, most activists start­ed from the premise that political change in Ukraine should and could be brought about within the framework of rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution.

The increasing activity of the Ukrainian dissidents and the publication of their writings in neighboring Czechoslovakia (until the Soviet intervention of 1968) and in the West caused embarrassment for Brezhnev, who at the very same time was trying to lessen international tensions and present the Soviet Union as a responsi­ble member of the world community. Any concern about negative opinion in the West or among the world Communist movement was outweighed, however, by what Soviet authorities felt was the need to combat the dangers of Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalism” within their own borders. The result was a series of arrests and the spectre once again - a little more than a decade after Stalin’s death - of political trials.

The first wave of arrests and trials in Soviet Ukraine took place in 1965-1966. The accused were dissident intellectuals whose only crime was their outspoken criticism of the Soviet system. Since their guilt was in effect established before their trials, it was a foregone conclusion that figures like the literary critics Ivan Dziuba, levhen Sverstiuk, Ivan Svitlychnyi, and Valentyn Moroz, the writer Mykhailo Osad- chyi, and the journalist Viacheslav Chornovil (who had been sent to report on the earliest trials, which he then proceeded to describe as being conducted in viola­tion of the Soviet legal code) would be sentenced to terms in prison.

In 1971-1972, more arrests and trials took place. These affected not only dissi­dents active in the samvydav movement, but also scholars and cultural activists who during the 1960s had been in the forefront of the Ukrainian cultural revival. This last major governmental crackdown in Soviet Ukraine coincided with the remov­al, in May 1972, of Petro Shelest as first secretary of the CPU. Shelest had risen through the CPU hierarchy during the Khrushchev era, a time when Kiev’s party bosses were able to increase Soviet Ukraine’s influence and their own personal power base through the regional economic councils. As head of the CPU’s Bureau for Industry and Construction, Shelest had contributed to Soviet Ukraine’s being granted greater economic self-management, a policy he had continued to pro­mote after becoming first secretary of the CPU in 1963. He had also encouraged Ukrainian cultural development, in particular the use of the Ukrainian language (dropped in 1954 as a compulsory entrance requirement) in higher education. But the trend toward decentralization which allowed Shelest to further Soviet Ukraine’s interests was reversed under Brezhnev and Kosygin, who in 1965 abol­ished the regional economic councils. Shelest’s opposition to Moscow’s return to economic centralization, his support of Ukrainian cultural interests, and his seem­ing tolerance of Ukrainian dissidents brought him into increasing conflict with Brezhnev and his supporters.

Moscow argued that the crackdown on Ukrainian dissidents in 1971-1972 was a necessary reaction to the instability in Soviet Ukraine. Shelest, therefore, had to go. The public excuse for his demotion was the fact that in 1970 he had allowed the publication under his name of a popular book entitled Ukraine, nasha Radians’ka (Oh Ukraine, Our Soviet Country). Within a year after his removal as first secretary in May 1972, Shelest was accused of “local nationalism,” since the book carrying his name supposedly idealized the Zaporozhian Cossacks, minimal- ized the “epochal importance” of the “reunification” with Russia in 1654, failed to criticize the “nationalist deviations” in the CPU during the 1920s, and in general promoted the idea of “economic autarchism.”

The belated public attack against Shelest, almost a year after his demotion, was part of a campaign against the remnants of “bourgeois nationalism” direct­ed by his successor as first secretary of the CPU, the Brezhnev protege from the Dnipropetrovs’k clan, Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi. Since the correct party line on Ukraine’s historical and cultural past and its place in Soviet society had to be main­tained, Shelest’s demise was a convenient excuse at the same time to remove many revisionist academicians from their posts and to end publication of most of the recently founded historical journals. There was even a crackdown on traditional folk music groups (Homin in 1971) and singers of Christmas carols (koliadnyky), whose activity was banned. Thus, Shelest’s removal sent a clear signal. Under Brezhnev and Shcherbyts’kyi, the authorities were determined to eliminate any suggestion of Ukraine’s cultural and administrative distinctness from the rest of Soviet society, regardless of whether the suggestion came from the pens of belle- trists, dissidents, scholars, or the first secretary of the republic’s Communist party.

The arrests and trials of Ukrainian dissidents and the police surveillance of oth­er cultural activists revealed the continuing dilemma that the nationality question posed for the Soviet leadership. During the Brezhnev era, Ukrainian dissidents were imprisoned on more than one occasion, and some (V. Moroz, L. Pliushch, P. Grigorenko) were forcibly exiled to the West. Unlike in the Stalin years, however, they were not silenced. Moreover, the arrests and other forms of harassment only encouraged further dissident activity. In a sense, the dissidents seemed to welcome their role as martyrs in the struggle to do what they considered their patriotic duty on behalf of Ukraine’s cultural and national heritage. Among the “patriot martyrs” were activists in the Greek Catholic Church, which despite its abolition in the late 1940s continued to function underground, conducting secret services and ordain­ing clergy, in western Ukraine. Those believers who were discovered were arrested and, usually, sentenced to labor camps as punishment for anti-state activity.

Although the persecution of Greek Catholic religious and secular activists (losyp Terelia, Vasyl’ Kobryn) continued during the 1980s, at the same time there developed a kind of “cultural detente” between the Soviet authorities and those writers and intellectuals (Volodymyr Brovchenko, Borys Oliinyk, Dmytro Pav- lychko) who were willing to work on behalf of Ukrainian culture within Soviet guidelines. Some of the directors of academic and cultural institutes who carried out the post-Shelest cultural purges of the 1970s were replaced, and several writers who had been harassed for their unorthodox work (among them Lina Kostenko and Ivan Drach of the Sixties Group) were allowed to publish once again and even be recipients of state awards.

In a sense, the last decade of the Brezhnev era, which began with the remov­al of Shelest in 1972, resembled the era of tsarist Dnieper Ukraine. Like their nineteenth-century counterparts who accepted Shevchenko’s belief in exclusive national identities, the dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s were only a tiny minority of Soviet Ukraine’s population. One estimate identified at most only 975 dissi­dents (between i960 and 1972) in a country with a population of over forty-eight million. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Soviet Ukraine’s inhabitants, better off economically than ever before and spared from foreign invasion for more than a third of a century because of the protective shield of Soviet military might, seemed resigned to or even satisfied with functioning within a system that reflected the principle of a hierarchy of multiple loyalties. In effect, it seemed possible to be simultaneously an ethnic Ukrainian and a Soviet citizen. Of course, such comple­mentary loyalties could realistically be maintained only on the understanding that while a Ukrainian identity and cultural framework was possible in many circum­stances, higher forms of cultural and educational endeavor were to be carried out in the “universal Soviet” medium, Russian.

Notwithstanding this analogy, there was at least one crucial difference between the nineteenth century and the last decades of Soviet rule. Whereas in tsarist times being a “Little Russian” Russian often led one to complete national assimilation, Soviet Ukrainianism was a form of political accommodation without assimilation. Despite the increasing dominance of Russian forms in Soviet Ukrainian political, social, and cultural life (including an increase in the number of Russian-language schools and publications and the encouragement of bilingualism in elementary schools), the Soviet system at the same time produced a highly educated and nationally conscious Ukrainian stratum of the population. Also, because of socio­demographic changes, it was cities and not rural villages, especially in central Ukraine, that became the carriers of the Ukrainian ethos.

Urbanization and the new Ukraine

Urbanization was increasing by leaps and bounds. Whereas in 1959 there were 25 cities in Soviet Ukraine with over 100,000 inhabitants, by 1979 there were 46. Dur­ing the same period, the number of cities with over a million inhabitants increased from one to five. Kiev alone nearly doubled its population (from 1.1 to 2.1 mil­lion inhabitants); it was followed in size by Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Odessa, and Donets’k, which by 1979 had topped the million mark.

The phenomenal extent of the migration to cities made the 1970s an epochal turning point for Ukrainian society. For the first time in history, the majority of ethnic Ukrainians lived in urban areas (53 percent in 1979), and only a minority were employed in agricultural pursuits (37 percent in 1970, as opposed to 63 per­cent industrial workers and white-collar staff) (see table 51.1).

Urbanization, moreover, did not lead, as many Soviet and western social scien­tists predicted, to national assimilation. It turned out that the multicultural urban environment was more likely to produce a sharpening than a lessening of ethno-

TABLE 51.1

Selected characteristics of ethnic Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine, 1959-1989²

cultural awareness. Thus, in the same period when Soviet Ukraine’s population grew more urban, the number of persons claiming Ukrainian as their mother tongue continued to increase, from 30 million in 1959 to 37.4 million in 1989. It is also true that there was a slight decrease in the percentage who claimed Ukrain­ian as their mother tongue (from 94 to 88 percent between 1959 and 1989). But such trends did not necessarily mean that either the Ukrainian language or the Ukrainian identity was seriously threatened, as the dire predictions of dissident writers and Ukrainian commentators in the West were suggesting. A closer look at the 1970 census, for instance, reveals that 96 percent of all Ukrainians knew their native language.

Finally, Ukrainian national identity - like many national identities - does not depend exclusively on an active or even a passive knowledge of the Ukrainian language. This was revealed in studies during the 1970s and 1980s of the suppos­edly “russified” inhabitants of eastern Ukraine. It turned out that association with a geographic territory (Ukraine) and its material culture, not necessarily its lan­guage, was what determined a Ukrainian identity for many otherwise unilingual Russian speakers.

Thus, the Soviet Union, whose Marxist-Leninist ideological imperative called for the “withering away” of nationalities, adopted policies which in the course of the twentieth century created in Soviet Ukraine a highly educated, bilingual, nationally conscious, and largely urban population whose very existence ensured the survival of Ukrainians and their evolution into a distinct and viable national­ity. Such a reality was what the Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist Bohdan Krawchenko had in mind when, describing Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1980s, he concluded, “Ukrainian national identity is stronger today than ever in the past.”³