Who were the dissidents, and how did they contribute to the collapse of communism?
Ukrainian history textbooks today lionize the dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s who picked up the torch of resistance to communist rule and helped bring down the Soviet system. However, the seemingly obvious historical continuities could be deceiving.
The last nationalist insurgents fought in the forests of western Ukraine until the early 1950s, and the first dissident intellectuals appeared in the republic's cities by the decade's end, but there was little connecting them to the UPA's radical nationalist ideology and violent methods.Soviet Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s were products of the Soviet system. Usually first-generation college students of workingclass background, they viewed the Soviet regime as corrupting “true Leninism," in particular by promoting the assimilation of Ukrainians into Russian culture. The dissidents also insisted on operating legally and forcing the state to fulfill its constitutional obligations. They signed petitions, organized non-violent protests, and distributed self-published (samvydav) underground literature. The Ukrainian dissidents also saw themselves as part of a wider movement for democracy and human rights in the Soviet Union. They cooperated closely with Russian dissidents, especially with their leader, the famous physicist and peace advocate, Andrei Sakharov.
In 1966 the Ukrainian literary critic born and educated in the Donbas, Ivan Dziuba, wrote a book-length dissident manifesto entitled Internationalism or Russification? Quoting from Lenin extensively, if selectively, he argued for the return to the Ukrainization policies of the 1920s. In a revealing move, he even sent the manuscript to the Ukrainian party bosses, as if hoping that they would come to their senses. The state responded with firings and arrests of dissident intellectuals. Some, like Dziuba, were forced to repent and recant; others ended up in the Gulag.
After the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, promising to observe human rights, the dissidents established the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976 to monitor the Soviet government's compliance. The group included Jewish and other minority activists and worked closely with its counterpart in Moscow. The group's protest actions and petitions had largely symbolic significance, but its samvydav publications reached a much wider Ukrainian audience when they were read on Western shortwave radio stations broadcasting in Ukrainian, like the Voice of America and Radio Liberty.
Still, by the early 1980s the KGB managed to crush the organized dissident movement in Ukraine, as elsewhere. Its leaders were exiled abroad or imprisoned in the Gulag. The authorities incarcerated 24 of the group's 39 members, who eventually served a total of 170 years.11 Four died in the Gulag.
The Ukrainian dissidents did not cause Soviet communism to collapse; rather, it disintegrated during the attempt to implement radical reforms of a political and economic model that appears "unreformable" in hindsight. However, they kept alive the notion of national rights during the bleakest days of the late Soviet period, affirming the intrinsic value of civil resistance. Many former dissidents returned to politics when this became possible in the heady days of the Soviet collapse, but neither they nor the political organizations they created played a significant role in Ukraine's post-communist transformation.