The Contemporary Scene in Soviet Ukraine

The outstanding recent event in the intellectual life of Ukraine is the emergence of a group of vocal dissidents in the 1960s. The writings of Ivan Dziuba, Sviatoslav Karavansky, Viacheslav Chornovil, Valentyn Moroz, Mykhailo Osadchy, Ievhen Sverstiuk, and others, circulated in Soviet Ukraine clandestinely, have been published abroad both in the original Ukrainian and in translations, and have attracted world attention.

Certain points should be noted concerning the background of the Ukrainian dissidents. Most are young, usually in their thirties, born and educated under the Soviet system. This fact makes nonsense of the label of “bourgeois nationalism,” which official propaganda tries to pin on them. Socially, all can be classified as typical intellectuals: writers, liter­ary critics, artists, historians, educators, journalists. Geographically, they represent all sections of Ukraine, not excluding such strongly Russi­fied regions as the Donbas. Numerically, they are a tiny group. The total number of persons identified in one way or another as participants in the movement does not exceed 1,000 out of the republic’s population of 47,000,000 (according to the 1970 census). But there are indications that the avowed dissidents—men and women of truly exceptional civic courage—ought to be considered as the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. In “legal” literary and scholarly publications from Soviet Ukraine one often finds ideas analogous to those of the dissidents ex­pressed in veiled, allusive form. We are even entitled to surmise that the dissidents have enjoyed the sympathy and tacit protection of some ele­ments in the republic’s governing circles. It is, finally, to be observed that the Ukrainian dissidents have carefully eschewed any formal organi­zation. The movement seems to have taken the shape of a ramified net­work of informal, personal contacts.

The ideas formulated by the spokesmen of Ukrainian dissent can be subsumed under two headings. To the first group belong issues of a gen­eral libertarian nature: protests against infringements of human and civil rights and particularly against the denial of intellectual freedom. The sec­ond group includes points of a specifically national character: protests against the curtailment of constitutional state rights of the Ukrainian SSR, the diluting and perversion of the nation’s cultural heritage, the dis­crimination against the Ukrainian language in education and public life, and demands for cultural rights for Ukrainian minorities residing in other parts of the USSR.

It is well known that dissent has become vocal in recent years not only in Ukraine, but also in Russia. A comparison of the ideas of Ukrainian and Russian dissidents is most instructive. In the area of general libertar­ian postulates the goals of the two movements largely coincide, but there is a notable divergence between them concerning the national problem. While Russian dissidents have condemned ethnic discrimination in the USSR (i.e., the regime’s anti-Semitic tendencies or the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland), they have been wary of taking a stand on the issue of the non-Russians’ right to national self-determina­tion. It would seem that even those Russians who are dissatisfied with many aspects of the existing system are reluctant to oppose it to a point which might endanger the coherence of the Russian imperial state and weaken its international position. This apprehension that liberalization might be detrimental to Russia’s great-power interests is also the chief cause of the impotence and isolation of the Russian dissidents within their own national community. The communist government can claim the credit for having elevated Russia to a pinnacle of unprecedented power and prestige. A dissociation of Russian patriotism from the Soviet regime is likely to occur only in the event of serious setbacks suffered by the USSR in foreign policy.

One can see now that Ukrainian dissent is, in this respect, placed dif­ferently from its Russian counterpart: it is not checked, but fed, by na­tional instincts. The national issue provides an ideological complex of great emotional appeal, to which all the other frustrations and griev­ances, diffused in the society, tend to gravitate and around which, cir­cumstances permitting, they could easily coalesce. The ideas of the Ukrainian dissidents, therefore, possess a potentially high mass appeal, irrespective of the limited number of currently active participants. Within many Ukrainian families there have been members who, within the mem­ory of the living generation, have at one time or another made sacrifices for the national cause or suffered persecution for its sake. Experiences of this kind leave indelible marks on the collective mind of a society in which family ties are still very strong. This is the deep well-spring from which the present intellectual ferment in Ukraine draws its strength. The reassertion of independent Ukrainian thought, after decades of indoctri­nation and repeated purges of the nation’s “brain,” its intellectual elite, is a portent of great historical significance.

If we try to apply to recent Soviet Ukrainian dissent the model of the four trends proposed earlier in this paper, the most plausible location for this dissent is within the tradition of national communism. Ukrainian dis­sidents have not, as a rule, attacked the premises of Marxist-Leninist phi­losophy, neither have they rejected socialist economics, nor the Soviet political system, nor even the membership of the Ukrainian republic in the USSR. They have only criticized the distortions of the system and called for bringing Soviet practice into line with true Leninist principles, especially in the field of nationality policy.

Students of Soviet affairs have already pointed to the continuity of thought between early Ukrainian communist national deviationists, such as Shakhrai, and contemporary dissidents, such as Dziuba. There is, however, between the generations of the “twenties” and the “sixties,” separated as they are by a quarter-century of Stalinist rule, a perceptible distinction which needs to be carefully defined. Communist ideology of the revolutionary and early post-revolutionary epoch was an ardent faith in an imminent radical transformation of man and society. This millena- rian myth has been beautifully expressed by the communist writer Khvy- Iovy in his vision of the “commune beyond the hills” (zahirna êîòèïà). In contrast to this strong ideological motivation of the early Bolsheviks, both orthodox and deviationist, the present dissidents’ approach to Marx­ism-Leninism seems to be mostly pragmatic. They ransack the “classics” for arguments to promote certain desired reforms. They try to prove that Lenin was more broad-minded on the nationalities problem than the present leadership of the CPSU, and that respect for Ukrainian national rights is compatible with the principles of socialist economics and the Soviet political system. This pragmatic use of Marxism­Leninism is, of course, also characteristic of the men of the Soviet estab­lishment, only the latter apply it in a sense opposite to that of the dissi­dents—to provide ideological legitimacy to the status quo and to rational­ize current policies of the government.

While the national-communist strand is the most pronounced in con­temporary Soviet Ukrainian dissent, a study of the relevant literature also shows the presence of other strands of thought. The writings of Valentyn Moroz, for instance, display features reminiscent of integral nationalism of the inter-war era: the postulate of personal moral integrity to be main­tained against all odds; a resolute rejection OiRealpolitik, if the latter im­plies an accommodation to conditions incompatible with individual or national honour; and a definitely voluntaristic turn of mind.

Communism and integral nationalism represent the two younger, post­revolutionary trends in Ukrainian political thought. Can one also as­certain the presence of vestiges of the two older trends, democratic populism and conservatism? This can be answered in the affirmative. We have already noted the libertarian colouring of the ideas of the Ukrainian dissenters, and their defence of human rights and intellectual freedom. They have also advanced proposals for an improvement of living stan­dards and the welfare of the people, as well as the removal of the existing discriminatory measures against the peasantry. Going beyond the litera­ture of dissent, we find evidence in Soviet Ukrainian academic and intel­lectual circles of an increased interest in the legacy of prerevolutionary democratic-populist thought. For instance, the selected works of Kostomarov and Drahomanov have appeared in recent years in new (though heavily censored) editions, and the number of scholarly studies dealing with such topics is growing.

A noteworthy phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary Ukraine is a marked return to the national tradition.

The preceding statement leads to a discussion of the conservative ele­ment in contemporary Ukrainian intellectual life. The term “conserv­atism” is in bad odour in the Soviet Union, but the absence of the label does not preclude the presence of the phenomenon. A conservative orien­tation is characterized by two traits: a strong sense of tradition and conti­nuity (as opposed to an eschatological and futuristic view of society) and a high regard for legal and orderly modes of procedure (in contrast to rev­olutionary rejection of precedent and established form). In applying these criteria to the contemporary Ukrainian scene, we have already taken note of the heightened cultural traditionalism. As to the second point, the Soviet establishment itself has lately become more conservative, inas­much as it is trying to divest itself of arbitrariness and to approximate the model of ⅛Rechtsstaat. (In the course of doing so, it has become increas­ingly enmeshed in intrinsic contradictions, as the nature of a totalitarian dictatorship is incompatible with the requirements of the authentic rule of law.) Concerning Ukrainian dissent, its legal and constitutional character has already been stressed. It has tried to operate in the manner of a loyal opposition within the framework of the existing system. The purpose of the Ukrainian dissidents is not to destroy existing institutions, but to adapt them in order to promote civil rights, general prosperity, and Ukrainian national interests. In this sense, Ukrainian dissidents may be called “conservative reformers.’’ Such an interpretation also helps us to understand the attitude of Dziuba and his colleagues toward the statehood of the Ukrainian SSR. In their view, the Soviet Ukrainian body politic, despite all its obvious deficiencies, represents a valuable form which must not be destroyed, but rather strengthened and gradually filled with a new, living content. This concept strongly recalls the way of thinking of the patriotic Cossack nobles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centu­ries (as reflected, for instance, in the Istoriia Rusov), who based their re­sistance to the encroachments of St. Petersburg centralism on the Treaty of Pereiaslav as a constitutional act guaranteeing their nation’s auto­nomous status. By the workings of historical dialectics, Soviet constitu­tional arrangements, resulting from a great revolutionary explosion and imposed on the Ukrainian people by superior outside force, have as­sumed the character of “historical’’ rights. The future will tell whether the attempt of contemporary Ukrainian dissidents to formulate a national policy on the platform of a Soviet version of historical legitimism will be more successful than the endeavours of their predecessors two centuries ago. Such a policy could have a chance only if the defence of Ukrainian state and national rights were to be taken up by the leading cadres of the CPU and the Republic’s administrative and economic elite. This would mean a return to the policy of Skrypnyk, the loyal Bolshevik, who did not hesitate to stand up for the interests of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. The conditions for this are today, in a way, more favourable than in the past, inasmuch as the membership of the CPU has become predominantly Ukrainian in its ethnic composition. On the other hand, the present CPU leadership is the product of the conformist Stalinist era and wartime ex­perience. The cardinal points in the private philosophy of these men seem to be to take full advantage of the good things life has offered them, and otherwise to exercise extreme caution. A change may take place with the rise of the next generation of leaders, who will no longer have a per­sonal memory of Stalinism and World War II and who perhaps will be less fearful of asserting the rights of their nation.