In the latest drive against Soviet dissidents more arrests have taken place in Ukraine than anywhere else in the USSR. Three names have already been mentioned in the official Soviet press; Ivan Svitliychny, a literary critic and translator; Vyacheslav Chornovil, a journalist and critic; and Yevgen Sverstyuk, a literary critic and educationist. Dissident sources in Ukraine have now disclosed the names of 13 more prisoners.
Why has the KGB singled out Ukraine as a special target? Since the charge against the defendants will no doubt be “nationalism” as well as having engaged in anti-Soviet activities,” it is important to realise that national sentiments have been rising throughout the Soviet Union.
The Chronicle of Current Events – that remarkable clandestine periodical – has within the past year reported the arrests and trials of “nationalists” in such widely scattered areas as Armenia, Tajikistan, Lithuania, Moldavia, on the movement of Jews to Israel, and on the campaign waged by the Crimean Tartars and the Meskhetians for their right to return to their original homelands, from which they were expelled at the end of the second world war for having collaborated with the Nazi invaders.
Nowhere, however, have national feelings been more strongly held than among 40 million Ukrainians – the second-largest group in the Soviet Union, and the second largest nationality next to the Russians.
Indeed, the entire history of Soviet Ukraine is one of continuous turmoil, of efforts, on Moscow’s part, either to come to terms with the powerful currents of nationalism in Ukraine, or to suppress them by methods ranging from outright terror to the banning of the Ukrainian language from institutions of higher learning and the assignment of Russians to leadership posts in traditionally Ukrainian areas.
Moscow’s difficulties were increased during the immediate postwar period with the absorption of millions of western Ukrainians who lived in areas formerly belonging to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Separatist sentiments were much stronger among the western Ukrainians than those who had already lived for nearly three decades under Soviet rule, and so were right wing ideological predilections which led many Ukrainians to wage bitter guerrilla struggles against the Red Army in some areas well into the late 1940s. With his customary disregard for distinctions, Stalin labelled all manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism as “bourgeois” and “anti-Soviet.” In the 1930s, the cream of Ukrainian intelligentsia – many of whom were unflinchingly loyal to the Soviet regime – was decimated on charges of “bourgeois nationalism.” During and after the second world war, whole populations would often be accused of collaborating with the ant-Soviet guerrillas and either massacred or deported to Central Asia and the far eastern parts of the country.
These strong-arm methods were superseded by cultural and administrative Russification – policies which continued until well after Stalin’s death, and which have been only partially ameliorated under Khrushchev and his successors. Yet the very relaxation of Soviet policies in Ukraine – above all the elimination of wholesale terror – has created a situation which the regime may well consider potentially more dangerous than sporadic military forays by starving and poorly armed guerillas.
In the mid-1960s, a new breed of Ukrainian nationalists came to the fore. Known as the shestidesiatniki (men of the sixties), these have been mainly young intellectuals, many of whom had been dedicated members of the Komsomol (the communist youth organisation) and of the Communist party.
“Card-carrying” members or not, almost all consider themselves Marxists or democratic socialists, as well as inheritors of the humanistic traditions of 19th century Ukrainian literature. Their protest against specific policies of the regime has not been voiced in anti-Soviet terms but rather in legal terms.
Much as their counterparts in Moscow and Leningrad, they have not criticised Soviet laws and institutions as such, but rather those who have consistently violated them –the police, the courts, the censors.
To the extent that they have opposed forced Russification and have urged a greater degree of cultural autonomy for their country, they have done so on strictly constitutional grounds – in other words, as freedoms granted both to individuals and to national groups by the Soviet constitution (freedom of speech, assembly, and conscience – articles 124 and 125), and as legitimate expressions of Lenin’s views on the rights of ethnic minorities in a socialist society.
True, some of them have also either alluded to, or openly come out in favour of, separate Ukrainian statehood – but again, basing themselves on the Soviet constitution, article 17 of which guarantees the right of secession to all republics of the USSR.
In 1965-66, the secret police descended on these young intellectuals, detaining about 190 of them, and finally sentencing about 20 to terms of hard labour ranging from six months to six years.
It is these men and women who again find themselves the objects of the secret police’s wrath, yet much has changed. For one thing, much as the authorities may try to smear the Ukrainian dissidents with the brush of “bourgeois nationalism” and attempt to link them with the activities of right wing Ukrainian groups abroad, they will find it impossible to lend any credence to such charges.
The Ukrainian dissidents may be described – for want of better terms – as “national communists” or “national democrats.” Their ranks have swollen over the past five years or so, and their activities have grown correspondingly.
Perhaps the most notable achievement is the samizdat journal, the Ukrainian Herald, five issues of which have appeared so far. In many respects similar to the Chronicle of Current Events, the Herald has also published literary works by Ukrainian writers and poets.
Its principal aim, however, has been to document in protest and dissent all violations of “Soviet legality” in Ukraine, all expressions of protest and dissent – by Ukrainians as well as other ethnic groups – and all manifestations of Russification and “Great Power chauvinism” by the Russian authorities.
Even more important – and most likely the key to the current crackdown in Ukraine –is the steady but unmistakable convergence between the aims and tactics of Ukrainians and the other dissidents in the USSR.
Five years ago, the eloquent pleas of the Ukrainian intellectuals for national and basic human freedoms found little echo among the intellectuals in Russia. Within the past two years, however, the Chronicle of Current Events has evinced increasing interest in, and sympathy for, the aspirations of Ukrainian dissidents. There have even been reports of actual collaboration between groups in Moscow and Leningrad on the one hand and those in Kyiv and Lviv on the other.
There can be little doubt that this growing ideological and practical collaboration causes considerable discomfiture in Moscow. For it is only by espousing popular grievances that the civil rights movement in the Soviet Union can hope to break out of its isolation, and begin to assume the character of a genuine mass movement.
While national aspirations have so far been voiced mainly by intellectuals (as they have been in every country over the past century), there is mounting evidence that they have stuck a responsive chord among many ordinary men and women who bitterly resent the manipulative and arrogant tactics of the Russian nachalstvo (bosses).
Finally, it is worth speculating to what extent national awareness in Ukraine (or for that matter in the Baltic republics) has been encouraged by the relative successes scored by the Jewish “exodus movement.” Indeed, if the history of the emergence of public opinion in the USSR is ever written, the Jews may well turn out to have been one of its catalysts.
There is no hard evidence of interaction between Jewish and Ukrainian nationalism, but it is curious that Soviet spokesmen have over the past few months taken to attacking alleged cooperation between “Zionists” and Ukrainian nationalists.
Articles under such titles as “Unholy alliance – collaboration between Zionists and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” have been appearing in the pages of the Soviet press. On 28 October last year, the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist party, Piotr Shelest, in a speech in Lviv said that “the Zionists and the nationalists have one master, one idea – a fierce hatred for everything socialist, frantic anti-communism, and anti-Soviet activities.”
Shelest repeated these charges on 22 November before a conference of Ukrainian “ideological workers,” and at a meeting of the Lviv party committee on 22 November the “unholy alliance” was again fiercely denounced. These charges are patently absurd. If anything, Jews inside the Soviet Union, as well as Zionist spokesmen abroad, have been inordinately cautious lest the “exodus” movement be identified with any other manifestations of dissent in the USSR.
This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.
