7
Li Bennich-Björkman
Ukraine shares the fate of belonging to what historian Timothy Snyder (2010) calls Europe’s Bloodlands. It was here, where the totalitarian dictatorships, the Communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, brutally fought each other for years with several occupations, and as a result Ukraine’s people suffered the most. Millions were murdered through executions, ethnic cleansing, starvation, or perdition. Genocide took place here. Almost no one in the Jewish population of what in 1944 became Western Ukraine survived the Holocaust, where large Jewish populations had lived for centuries before the outbreak of World War II. The most violent part of 20th century European history played out on Ukrainian territory, and this fate Ukraine shares with Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It was not long ago, and both during and after the Soviet era, it has greatly shaped life in Ukraine.
Ukraine offers an interesting complexity, with its western territories being Soviet latecomers, whereas its Eastern, South, and Central parts – the Ukrainian SSR before 1944 – was one of three founding republics that formed the Soviet Union in 1922. In the last years of World War II, Soviet Ukraine’s borders shifted further westwards, which had profound implications for Ukrainian identity and relations between the Party-state of Ukraine, the intelligentsia, and Moscow. The annexation of Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia from Poland and Romania in one instant turned Ukraine into a Soviet republic that within its borders harboured intense feelings of hatred and bitterness towards the occupiers, along with a cultural diversity that at times contributed to the challenge of Ukrainian national cohesion and continues to do so. The brutal and bloody beginnings of the Soviet occupation encountered an equally brutal, armed, and violent resistance in Galicia and Volhynia, led by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its paramilitary branch, the Ukrainian Provisional Army (UPA). Controversies continue around how to commemorate the OUN-UPA, its ideological and nationalist visions, and the violence in their methods. Mykola Riabchuk, one of Ukraine’s most prominent and nuanced intellectuals with roots in Lviv, underlines the importance of subtlety when considering the image of the OUN and in assessing its struggle against Soviet supremacy in Ukraine as honourable, while a lot of the ideas, goals, and violence that the organization (especially perpetrated by the UPA) stood for were dangerous and extreme. Riabchuk’s (2013) point is that these nuances are central to understanding that the tributes to the OUN, which often occur in both Western Ukraine and in exile groups in Canada and the United States, are not tributes to a violent ideology per se but honour the organization and its leaders’ struggle for Ukraine’s distinctiveness and right to exist. Keeping these aspects separate, however, is not easy, especially when the historiography becomes politicized; thus, the OUN and its legacy belong to one of the most inflamed in Ukraine (Yurchuk, 2014, pp. 40–54).
Post-war insurgency and counterinsurgency losses on both sides after some years of struggle reached the hundreds of thousands (Burds, 1997). Hence, in this part of Europe the war did not end in May of 1945, but continued, at least until the end of the 1940s, and in some places even longer (Burds, 2001). The armed struggle and the violence were successively replaced by everything from defeated frustration to slow acceptance of the situation, but there is no doubt that Western Ukraine continued to be marked by deep wounds that have not healed to this day and that shape memory politics and the identities of the diaspora. Many, maybe most, families had personal experiences of the violence of the post-war years and of the war itself; family members had been lost, relatives, and friends killed under brutal circumstances.
During the first years of occupation, Moscow Centre, with the help of the local Ukrainian Party-state, tried in various ways to destroy the nationalist, cultural, and intellectual heritage of Galician Lviv. The Party-state suppressed as much as possible the influence of the Ukrainian ‘old intelligentsia’, many of whom were long since dead. A prominent example was how the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, perhaps Ukraine’s foremost, who taught at the University of Lemberg (Lemberg was the Austrian name for Lviv) and died in 1934, was posthumously attacked for his ideas about Ukraine as a nation, along with other academics, historians, linguists, and the well-known author Iryna Vilde. Their ‘crimes’ were their studies of the history of Ukraine and of Western European texts and languages. Those who led the campaign against the ‘Hrushevsky School’ were themselves Ukrainian academics, but loyal to the Party (Amar, 2015, pp. 227–228). The Polish intelligentsia from the interwar period and before, the few who survived the War, were expelled, some to what had become Polish Wrocław (before the war Breslau in Germany), or murdered. The Party-state aimed to raise and socialize a new, Ukrainian-Soviet intelligentsia embedded in the new composition of Lviv. ‘The composition of the population, the substance and the atmosphere of the city changed by more than 90%. But at least when I went to school, no one talked about it’, says Iryna Storyvoyt, who grew up after the war in Lviv.1
To remedy Galicia and Lviv’s Ukrainian nationalism and lack of loyalty towards the Centre, several eastern Ukrainians were transferred to occupy the Communist Party’s top positions within the nomenklatura, much like how Russian-Estonians and Russian-Latvians populated the Communist Party positions in those republics. As time went by Soviet rule became part of everyday life. The Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) became more tolerated, and even accepted by many, including in Western Ukraine. Nevertheless, over the decades, Moscow continued to pay close attention to its annexed western territory, as Galicia allegedly bore a highly challenging strain of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ in the eyes of the Centre, having been under the Polish flag between the wars, and before that since the late 18th Century a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, the values and lifestyles predominating represented ‘backwardness’, even though most of the Polish population from before World War II had been murdered or deported, leaving the Ukrainians (Ruthenians as they were called earlier) in an absolute majority in the countryside as well as in the cities and towns. Moreover, these territories had been occupied by Germany for three years, 1941–1944, and thereby influenced to become opponents of Communism; at least that was what was feared from the Soviet side (Snyder, 2010). The prevailing belief among the leading Communists was that Western Ukrainians definitely were not to be trusted. This was especially true of its capital – the city of ‘Lwow’ during the Polish era and before that, in the Austrian days, Lemberg, now renamed Lviv (Kudelia, 2013; Burds, 2001).
1953: a second wave of nativization
Stalin’s death in 1953 marked the beginning of a new era for the CPU. It was said the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who had served as Ukrainian First Secretary for almost ten years before his rise to power in Moscow, had a special place in his heart for the republic. He personally knew many in the Ukrainian leadership, who supported him in the constant power struggles that took place in the Kremlin, not least in the wake of the dictator’s death. On his many travels in Ukraine, he often wore a typical Ukrainian embroidered shirt and straw hat to indicate his heritage (Vasiliev, 2011, p. 114). Khrushchev and Interior Minister Lavrentii Beria now abandoned the Russification line that had predominated in Moscow since the 1930s in favour of increased Ukrainian dominance within the Party and in more symbolically important areas (Tromly, 2014, p. 224). This was part of a general wave of nativization that swept across the Soviet Union during the first years after Stalin’s death, but it became particularly noticeable in Ukraine, where top positions during the next decades were increasingly occupied by ethnic Ukrainians.
The CPU went through a wave of centrally-ordered nativization once before. Under the Lenin-inspired Soviet indigenization policy of the 1920s, the proportion of Ukrainians in top positions in the Party increased significantly, from only 25% in 1920, to 53% seven years later (Krawchenko, 1984, pp. 38–40). Whereas the 1930s meant a return to an increased Russification with an emphasis on ‘friendship between nationalities’, which was the coded expression the Soviet leadership used to indicate that ‘fusion’, not distinctiveness of nationalities, was what was sought, after 1953 a new wave of indigenization thus began.
Moscow declared it was time that together, Russians and Ukrainians, the two great Slavic peoples, would build the Soviet Union. The new policy was as much a part of the power struggle than driven by any genuine conviction that the titular nationalities should be treated with more respect, but nevertheless, the result was growing influence for Ukrainian-born Communists and alertness to perceived Russian privilege. In 1953, symptomatic of the new period of more Ukrainian affirmation was, for example, Beria’s move, before his fall from power and execution, to openly raise the issue with the local authorities that Ukrainians in Western Ukraine suffered from discrimination. Ievhen Lazarenko, Rector of Lviv State University, went along with the new signals from Moscow, accusing the Party of ‘colonialism’ against its Western regions, a particularly serious accusation for a Party that sought to label colonialism as one of the main expressions of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ (Risch, 2006). The nativisation campaign led to the resignation of CPU First Secretary Leonid Melnikov, who was replaced by another ethnic Ukrainian, Aleksii Kirichenko (Krawchenko, 1985, p. 244, Yekelchyk, 2007, p. 154). By 1966, nine out of eleven members of the Ukrainian Politburo were ethnic Ukrainians (Krawchenko, 1985, p. 247). For the remaining post-Stalin decades, the CPU continued to be dominated by Ukrainians in leading positions.
The CPU’s relations with the CPSU changed as a consequence, and the local Party-state’s relations with the Ukrainian intelligentsia, based predominantly in Kyiv and Lviv, also transformed substantially. The Party was constantly balancing between these poles in order to try to satisfy both sides (Krawchenko, 1985, p. 245). When the local communist parties in many other republics were cleansed of national communists in a coordinated and extensive purge by Moscow between 1958 and 1961 (see Chapter 1), the CPU was saved.
The humanistic-nationalist intelligentsia
During the Khrushchev years in Ukraine, it was ‘undoubtedly so that national thinking - not least nationalism in the sense of striving for an independent nation-state – spread among many educated Soviet citizens’ (Tromly, 2014, p. 218). The important university environments where the young, the future intelligentsia, and the nomenklatura formed culturally and intellectually, developed until at least the mid-1960s into environments where such Ukraine-inclined currents flourished. Communication between the students during this period interestingly shifted from being primarily in Russian to increasingly in Ukrainian. Kyiv State University began teaching in Ukrainian in 1956, a particularly strong sign of the improvement in the status of the Ukrainian language. No longer disparagingly described as a mainly ‘peasant’, unwritten language, Ukrainian gained the status of a means of communication for the republic’s future elite. In Ukraine, pride grew in the country and its history, culture, and language. The ambition of the Soviet leadership to increase social mobility meant that many students came from peasant and working-class homes, where Ukrainian identity and language were more obvious and widespread, but a sign of low status in the context where Russian had long been ‘higher’. For these students, the national turnaround at Ukrainian universities also became a way to strengthen their position hierarchically. Among others, this applied to future journalist and dissident Viacheslav Chornovil (who eventually became one of the initiators of the Popular Front movement in the late 1980s, Narodny Rukh) and the well-known dissident author Valentin Moroz (Tromly, 2014, pp. 218–225). In the indigenization process, the recently annexed Galicia and Western Ukraine served as instigators and inspirers, where both literature and the spoken language were and remained Ukrainian. When the official climate hardened in the 1970s, it was particularly in Lviv that Ukrainian identity and nationalism were most preserved and nourished.
Shistdesiatnyky and the Club of Creative Youth
In and around Kyiv State University, where, since the mid-1950s, in accordance with the new signals from Moscow the teaching took place in Ukrainian, and an atmosphere of relative ‘openness’ sprouted, borne by the generation who came to be known as the ‘Sixtiers’ – Shistdesiatnyky/shestidesiatniki or Shistdesiatnytstvo (Bilokin’, 2012). The Sixtiers contained within them several currents of civil and national ideas, as well as strands of philosophical existentialism and literary symbolism and modernism. Their intention was primarily to develop Ukrainian literature and the art scene, not to oppose the Soviet system ideologically (Lisovy, 2010, pp. 310–314; Bilocerkowycz, 1988, pp. 22–42). Non-Soviet expressions and modernization, not anti-Sovietism and opposition, were at the core of the activism of this famous generation.
Klub tvorchoi molodi, the Club of Creative Youth (KTM), formed in Kyiv in 1960 as an organizational outcrop of this new and Ukrainian-inclined generation – although noticeably under the formal leadership of the Party’s ever-present youth organization, the Komsomol (Bilokin’, 2012). Together with the professional Writers’ Union, the Komsomol supported the Sixtiers and the KTM in their ambitions in the same way as the Komsomol Committee at the University of Tartu in Estonia did a few years later with student cultural and national developments (see Chapter 9). Thus, these nationally-minded students enjoyed Party-state protection and could, for some years, organize poetry readings and discussions, and the Komsomol ‘became in some cases a supporter of their cause’ (Tromly, 2014, p. 227). This intertwined relationship continued even after some of the Sixtiers made the first attempts to gain publicity for cultural events without the permission of the authorities (Yekelchyk, 2015, p. 46).
KTM had around 900 members with a couple of thousand people additional loosely affiliated. It included sections for literature, film, theatre, architecture, and music, including a jazz group, something that was highly challenging in the context of the Cold War, as it was music with American roots.2 Readings of banned and persecuted authors took place recurrently, as well as group excursions to historically and culturally important places around the country to prevent the past from falling into oblivion. Similar excursions to preserve national memory took place in other republics, for example, in Russia, Estonia, and Lithuania. In this way, the Ukrainian Sixtiers were provoking the development of a collective memory, in their ambition to strengthen Ukrainian identity and pride. Hiking in rural environments to get to know the Ukrainian countryside and its nature was another of the club’s regular activities. When Ukrainian nationalism developed in the 19th century, it was a rurally based ideology gaining ground among the peasants, and these hikes were a way to reconnect to the nationalistic roots. Importantly, the aim of the KTM was never to see Ukraine liberate itself from the Soviet Union; it was not a matter of opposition, but a purely non-Soviet resistance calling for the creation of a greater space for artistic, linguistic, and cultural Ukrainian-ness and other forms of distinctiveness and individuality.
Ivan Svitlychny (1929–1993), poet and art critic, was one of the organization’s leading figures. By his side (though not romantically) was the artist Alla Horska (1929–1970), who came from a wealthy family in Kyiv and thus financially enabled some of the club’s activities. Young and creative Kyivans met and chatted in the Svitlychny and Horska apartments in Kyiv, on Umanska and Repin streets respectively. (Yekelchyk 2015, p. 49). In this way, Svitlychny and Horska contributed to creating a community among creative practitioners who had previously been isolated or limited to their own particular group. A collective identity among the creative started to develop, as poets met composers, visual artists met architects, and painters met with writers.
An interesting spatial aspect of the Sixtiers’ existence was that they created their ‘own’ Kyiv, of selected cafés, bookstores, studios, and each other’s homes between which they moved; strikingly similar to what Lithuanian free-thinkers and bohemians at about the same time called the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ in Vilnius’ Old Town (Ramonaité and Kavaliauskaitė, 2015). The Sixtiers thus demarcated their own place in the giant city of Kyiv, which they populated, and constructed a special sphere of life, a reality of their own, separate from the ‘others’ in the greater city. Much like in Lviv, cafés became symbolically important institutions for an intellectual and artistic (‘bohemian’) lifestyle, such as the Café Donbass, which was an important meeting place. The café was historically a European public space that encouraged reflection and discussion. Similar to what Jürgen Habermas (1962 [1989]) exposed in terms of the emergence of a bourgeois public in 18th and 19th century Europe, the cafés and the drinking of coffee in Kyiv, constituted a symbol of intellectualism and reflection.
In 1962, Svitlichny went to Western Ukraine and to Lviv, where he established contact with the famous brothers Bohdan and Mykhailo Horyn, the former one of Ukraine’s most famous art historians and still active, while the latter opposed the regime. Thus, KTM established a ‘branch’ in Galicia, symbolically called Prolisok (The Snowdrop), the little white flower which signals the departure of frost and winter. The Prolisok was an important bridge between Kyiv and Lviv (Yitzhak and Finkel, 2011, p. 817).3 This bridge helped to connect Lviv with the capital’s artistic and creative vein. Nationalism and artistry mixed and continued to do so among the Ukrainian intelligentsia and creative professionals.
What began as a non-Soviet activity that pushed the boundaries of the tolerated (in the early 1960s in Ukraine this was a relatively extensive space), however, turned over time into something that became a direct challenging to the authorities. In 1962, KTM presented a list of churches and other historic buildings that were falling into disrepair that the authorities should restore. Les Taniuk, the Chairman of KTM, Alla Horska, and the young and iconic writer Vasyl Symonenko (1934–1963) began investigating the mass executions that took place in Ukraine in the 1930s, thus, rapidly approaching what from Moscow and the CPU’s perspective were highly sensitive parts of Ukrainian history that were better left alone. Symonenko, one of the most prominent young writers in 1960s Kyiv, died of cancer at only 29 years old in 1963; after his death, the KGB tightened its thumbscrews on the Club. Les Taniuk was prevented from continuing as Chairman, and then the KTM was closed down by the authorities in 1964. Devoting themselves to what was considered anti-Soviet opposition with political overtones, the Sixtiers had crossed the line and failed to acknowledge the implicit boundaries of the negotiated space for action.
During the early 1960s, a lot of groups and organizations existed in Kyiv. While the young people in the 1960s became nationalistic, it was also an excuse for youthful behaviour, to create something of one’s own, alternative social spaces, and just to meet. Nothing was as significant as KTM, however, and the generation it represented, the Sixtiers. The basis for their emergence was the change in Moscow’s policy towards Ukraine that the late 1950s entailed, with the rise of the Ukrainian language. The 1960s in Ukraine was something of a second national awakening, but this time not among the peasants but among the students and the intelligentsia. The Sixtiers had not been united by belonging to a common ‘school’ or literary tradition, but by wanting to push the boundaries of what was acceptable and permissible artistically and psychologically (Yekelchyk, 2015). They contained various currents of an overall cultural nature, civil and national, existential, symbolist and cosmic, as well as a modernism with the intention of developing literature and art (Lisovy, 2010, pp. 310–314; Bilocerkowycz, 1988). The Sixtiers thereby contributed to the restoration of poetry as an individual expression and not an ideological one.
The Kyiv show trials
As an act of loyalty to Moscow in the tacit negotiations playing out also between the Centre and the periphery, the CPU began to use more muscle in its dealings with the intelligentsia from the mid-1960s. The ‘demonstrative’ trials that took place in 1965 were part of this, which contributed to the later famous journalist Viacheslav Chornovil going from being a Komsomol activist to opposing the regime. Chornovil’s dismay and distrust of the judiciary was based on his previous strong belief in the Soviet system and that the letter of the law was really applied. When he was called to testify in 1965 in the trials against several of the Sixtiers, he was taken aback by what he perceived as gross violations of Soviet law by the authorities, refused to testify, and was himself convicted. Over time Chornovil became one of the most prominent opposition figures in Ukraine, and also one of the foremost figures during the perestroika era liberalization in the 1980s and in the formulation of the democratic policies of the 1990s until his premature death. He ran for president in the 1991 election but lost to former Communist Leonid Kravchuk. Killed in a car accident in March 1999, which provoked rumours of foul play, Chornovil remained the main symbol of the Ukrainian People’s Front, Narodny Rukh. He was succeeded as the party’s leader by career diplomat and Foreign Minister Hennadiy Udovenko, who describes them both as idealists.4
As a direct consequence of the 1965 Ukrainian show trials and Chornovil’s radicalization, ‘The Chornovil Papers’ were published in 1968 in the United States as a collection of documents that began with a long opening letter from Viacheslav Chornovil to the authorities. This was followed by documentation that he had collected regarding a number of dissidents imprisoned in the Gulag and their treatment. The trials also led two other prominent writers and intellectuals, Ivan Dziuba and Valentin Moroz, to openly criticize the Party-state for its ‘illegality’ in prosecuting people for nationalist activities, for non-Soviet activity, which did not cross the line and become opposition. Ivan Dziuba wrote the acclaimed book Internationalism or Russification? in 1968, which was interpreted by the Ukrainian First secretary Petro Shelest as a critique of the Party-state. The starting point of the book was that the Party betrayed its own principles laid down by Lenin regarding respect for the nationalities of the Soviet Union. Ivan Dziuba’s book was published in the West, which led to the Party-state responding with severe counterattacks, including of a personal nature (Bilocerkowycz, 1988, pp. 26–27). Furthermore, a similar compilation of texts appeared a few years later, in 1971, in the West authored by Ukrainian dissidents including Chornovil and Valentin Moroz. It showed that the authorities’ pursuit of intellectuals was not limited to extremist nationalists (with alleged links to the OUN) but also included members of Komsomol and the Party itself (Browne, 1971). The earlier symbiosis and co-existence between the CPU and the intelligentsia had been replaced by what seemed to be increasingly an open struggle.
The last years of ‘freedom’
The show trials of the mid-1960s did not end the cultural revival in Kyiv, but they increased uncertainty about the boundaries for cultural and national expressions, and what informal agreements actually applied. The cultural climate in Ukraine, in the capital Kyiv, but also in Lviv, changed markedly in the direction of increased vigilance and the restriction of nationalist and artistic expression after the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, for a few more years Kyiv continued to be a major magnet for the intelligentsia of various callings, and the authorities seemed to observe and wait, rather than act. Literary circles continued to be active and folklore expressions were permitted in the centre of Kyiv.
The memories of one of my interviewees illustrates the atmosphere at that time:
When I came to Kyiv, I lived with my very close friend Mykola Matesivych’s family; he was later arrested with me. I lived with his mother and his sister. I was part of the Ukrainian-Kyiv circle. We spoke Ukrainian, and it was challenging at the time. I saw a job advertisement for some organization, it needed staff, and I applied. When they heard my Ukrainian, it was ‘no, no we have already hired someone’. It was dangerous for them to hire Ukrainian nationalists. Everyone who spoke Ukrainian was suspicious, because they could be Ukrainian ‘bourgeois nationalists’.5
Myroslav Marynovych, quoted above, was one of the young people who settled in Kyiv in the early 1970s to take part in the Ukrainian-oriented circles created there during the much more open climate of the 1960s. Marynovych was born in 1949 in the small Galician community of Drohobych, about 100 km outside Lviv, with a Greek Catholic background on his mother’s side. When I interviewed him, he was vice-chancellor of Lviv’s Catholic University but had studied at Lviv’s Polytechnic between 1967 and 1972; right at the junction between the end of the period of a more relaxed climate for national expression and the impending regime consolidation.
Marynovych sought out Kyiv and the nationalist circles there, who teased but did not provoke the system. Paying attention to Christian holidays – Christmas in particular – and Ukrainian traditions such as midsummer, they questioned the traditions of the Soviet calendar. In Kyiv, a singing group had begun performing Christmas carols in public as early as 1961, dressed in classical costumes, affiliated with the Zhaivoronok Choir (Yekelchyk, 2015). Another choir, Homin, led by Leopold Yashchenko, performed on the banks of the River Dnipro (Dnieper in Russian) at the time when Marynovych first came to Kyiv. He decided to join it: ‘[We] sang songs on the hills of Kyiv on the river Dnieper, it was amazing, and I was so impressed by the huge amount of embroidered blouses’.6 The landscape around the Dnieper is magnificent, and it is easy to imagine the feeling that seized the young Myroslav Marynovych when he and others sang for their countrymen in their native Ukrainian language. The embroidered blouses he mentions are a symbol of Ukraine, of the Ukrainian countryside, and the peasant romance that is part of the country’s mythology. The contemporary political figure former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, for example, previously always chose to appear in just such blouses and with her trademark traditionally Ukrainian thick, blonde, braid atop her head. The Homin choir to which Marynovych belonged met for midsummer celebrations (the summer solstice has pagan not Christians origins) outside Kyiv. This was on the verge of what was possible – the security service ‘followed every step’. Yet, it was not dangerous ‘in the sense that I was immediately imprisoned’. The choir was shut down by the authorities in 1971 as part of the persecution of cultural expressions, which again increased.
In 1970, the first, dramatic personnel change took place, which signalled the blowing of new winds in Moscow and Kyiv as the Ukrainian KGB chief, Vitalii Nikitchenko, a pragmatic, moderate person was replaced by hardliner Vitalii Fedorchuk, who was Moscow’s man. First Secretary Petro Shelest was unable to save Nikitchenko. This blow marked the beginning of an extended period of deteriorating relations between the Party-state and the intelligentsia, while the local Party’s relationship with the Centre in Moscow implied submission (Bilocerkowycz, 1988, p. 32). When the Homin choir was shut down in 1971, it was a sign of what was to come: a brutal backlash.
The 1972 purge
The purge that the CPU managed to avoid in the late 1950s when many other republics were affected, hit Ukraine with full force in 1972 and swept through the nomenklatura as well as the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia. At that time there was no longer any protection from former General Secretary Khrushchev to count on as he had been deposed in 1964. Even though Soviet rhetoric romantically depicted Ukraine as a Slavic brother, united with the Russian nation through their common roots in medieval Kievan Rus, this neighbouring republic continued to prove problematic to Moscow. Ukrainian national identity had not waned, and with the injection of the even more vibrant and dogged Western Ukrainian nationalism after 1944, there existed the constant threat of increased anti-Soviet opposition, which Moscow and the CPU had to keep under control.
What Moscow feared most was national communism and a nationally-oriented local Communist Party, which was perceived to have at least embryonically developed in Ukraine under First Secretary Shelest in the 1960s. Shelest fell into disfavour and was deposed in 1972 in a humiliating way with accusations of gross and far-reaching nationalism and being a national communist (Solchanyk, 1983, 1). ‘Not since the days of Trotsky had a sitting member of the Politburo been subjected to such humiliation by official party representatives’ writes Tillett (1975, 2). According to Moscow, in his 1970 book Our Soviet Ukraine, Shelest would have glorified his own Ukrainian nation, culture, and language, and not acknowledged the importance of Russian culture and influence in developing Ukraine into what the republic had now become – a prosperous and well-functioning society (Yekelchyk, 2007, p. 159). The tide had turned and the ‘friendship of nations’ rubric again gained the upper hand.
Petro Shelest’s role and stance has been debated in the literature, but according to Yekelchyk, sources that became available as the archives were opened after the demise of the Soviet Union show that Shelest – along with many others accused of bourgeois inclinations and national communism – remained a convinced Communist throughout. Nevertheless, Shelest saw his role as CPU First Secretary to pursue certain Ukrainian interests in accordance with the policies that Lenin once developed for Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s, including nativization in order to control the ever-present threat of Russian chauvinism (Yekelchyk, 2007, p. 159). In that, he came close to the writer Ivan Dziuba’s critique in Internationalism or Russification? Thus, the interpretation of what was the true Marxist-Leninist line became important in the relationship between the Centre and the CPU, and Lenin’s nationality policy was weaponized in the hands of those who wanted to emphasize the importance of nationalities.
Shelest’s successor, the rigid and Moscow-loyal Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, was given the task of returning Ukraine ‘back to normal’ (Krawchenko, 1983, p. ix). Ironically, both Shelest and Shcherbytsky had entered the CPU leadership at the same time, after Stalin’s death in 1953, and climbed the ranks in parallel. Somewhat equivalent to the powerful purges that took place in Latvia from 1959 to 1962 (see Chapter 2) and in Estonia from 1950 to 1951 (see Chapter 9), Ukraine was now affected by Moscow’s heavy-handed rule. This was a far-reaching purge, perhaps the largest in the entire Soviet Union and the worst since Stalin’s days. According to Solchanyk (1983, p. 9), 37,000 Party members were expelled. The purge of the CPU affected all levels as the intention was to remove all those who supported national communism and to centralize the government towards Moscow once again (Krawchenko, 1985, pp. 249–250).
Universities and regional Party structures were also cleansed. Western Ukraine was hit hard, especially Lviv and its major universities, Lviv Polytechnic and Lviv University, as well as Kyiv. The purge profoundly shook the Ukrainian intelligentsia, followed by a campaign between 1972 and 1974 aimed at undermining history, philosophy, and literature. A series of widespread arrests of writers and intellectuals took place, not least in Western Ukraine, with the intention of highlighting that contacts with the West, the spread of underground publications, and the literary challenge had pushed the implicit boundaries of the ‘silent contract’ with the authorities too far. What had previously been acceptable, in a similar way as the show trials in 1965, now crossed the line. The ‘great pogrom’ or ‘general pogrom’ as it was sometimes called, caused extensive and long-term damage to the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which in the 1960s, albeit with some setbacks, had managed to carve out a space for individuality and creativity (Nahaylo, 1983).
The purges between January and March 1972 and the crackdown on culture and arrests of cultural figures that followed until 1974 profoundly changed the climate in Ukraine, while the pragmatic and moderate voices in the CPU disappeared in favour of dogmatic and pro-Moscow representatives (Nahaylo, 1983, p. 33). In 1976, the ethnic Ukrainian Second Secretary Ivan Lutak was dismissed and replaced by the ethnic Russian Ivan Sokolov (Bilinsky, 1977, p. 169). The important relations between the local Party-state and the intelligentsia entered a long period of alienation, where a certain idealism flourished within parts of the intelligentsia and opportunism mixed with dogmatism within the Party-state.
The intelligentsia responded to dogma with radicalization and some turned to open opposition, including through the Helsinki Group formed in 1976. The Helsinki Group was one of the few clearly oppositional groups in Ukraine, and one of its members was Myroslav Marynovych, who a few years earlier sang on the banks of the Dnipro River in Kyiv. In November 1976, he took a decisive step towards open opposition: he met the legendary dissident Oksana Meshko. For him, this definitely meant radicalization and a transition from non-Soviet to anti-Soviet expressions. Meshko, whose family had been in dire straits since her father was executed in the 1920s, was an important figure in Kyiv’s Sixtiers generation. When Marynovych met her, she was already involved with Mykola Rudenko in forming the Ukrainian Helsinki Group for Human Rights as a direct outcome of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on international security and cooperation.7 The Helsinki Conference inspired the creation of similar ‘Helsinki groups’ in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Lithuania, and in Latvia but not until 1986.
Meshko invited Myroslav Marynovych and his friend to join the group, which they did, well aware at this point that it would involve future arrests. It was open opposition and activism and deemed by the authorities as anti-Soviet activity. The time when national expressions, songs, and embroidered blouses were sufficient was over. The Helsinki Group aimed to draw the attention of the outside world to the fact that Ukraine was not a republic governed by the rule of law, and to prove this through documentation. Thus, the Group drew upon the sentiments awoken by the show trials in the mid-1960s, and the failure by the Party-state to follow Soviet law. Marynovych also met with the Group’s founder, the dissident poet Mykola Rudenko, who explained that the group’s intention was not to operate underground but openly, and to prepare and disseminate information to Western governments about the situation with political rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and of association. Aspects of the rule of law – closer to being purely political than regarding national culture and history – became prominent features of the Helsinki Group. It was in Ukraine that the first arrests and imprisonment for those who participated in Helsinki groups took place. Once the approach of the Ukrainian authorities hardened, repression became one of the worst in the entire Soviet Union:
Since our names and addresses were public, the KGB conducted investigations, both secret and official. If you kept a paper with a name, they found this paper and searched for the named person who had a lot of problems with the KGB. It was really very dangerous and very difficult to work. To prepare materials when you know that your home is inspected every day!8
On 22 April 1977, six months after the Helsinki Group was formed, Marynovych and his friend Matesivych were arrested following a warning when they were stopped on the street and taken to the KGB headquarters. They both lost their Soviet citizenship. According to Marynovych, the ten founding members were all arrested, including Rudenko. What began for Marynovych as a commitment to Ukrainian culture known to the authorities but tolerated, led to an activity unacceptable to the Party-state that was branded as anti-Soviet. The increasingly harsh climate in Ukraine in the 1970s led to a high personal price for a person like Marynovych and others who participated in the group.
The publication of the Samvydav (Russian: samizdat; literally self-publication) magazine Ukrainian Herald (Ukrains’ky visnyk), which was a counterpart to the Chronicle of Current Events (Khronika tekushchikh sobytii) published in Moscow, began in 1970 and lasted for two years. The main person behind this was Viacheslav Chornovil. The Chronicle mainly covered Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Lviv, Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Tallinn, Gorky, Novosibirsk, and Tashkent and focused on human and national rights from a legal perspective (Reddaway, 1975). The intelligentsia’s opposition in Ukraine shifted under increasing pressure and diminishing symbiosis with the Party-state from existential – nationalist, artistic, and creative – to opposition which was mainly expressed in demands for the rule of law and respect for freedoms and rights. That it was Chornovil himself who primarily ran this publication was no coincidence, it was precisely the legal abuses he witnessed at the trials of poets and dissidents in the mid-1960s in Kyiv that made him cross the border into opposition. The publication of events in this form – as well as the even more widespread Chronicle in Moscow – was also a reaction to the lack of uncensored information, which was in short supply in the Soviet Union.
This anti-Soviet activity – what I term opposition – that was partly triggered by the CPU’s crackdown in a cyclical dynamic of reactions and counter-reactions, has been analysed both in domestic Ukrainian historiography and in the international literature. In Ukraine, it was only after independence in 1991 that it became possible to publish on this subject at all, but since then a body of literature in Ukrainian has emerged. One of the first works was Yuriy Zaitsev’s ‘Dissidents: The Opposition Movement of the 1960s–1980s’, published in 1992. During the 1990s, several books on the same subject appeared: Yuriy Kurnosov’s Dissent in Ukraine: From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the historian Hryhoriy Kas’ianov’s Dissidents: The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Resistance Movement from the 1960s to the 1980s, and Anatoliy Rusnachenko’s The National Liberation Movement in Ukraine: From the mid-1950s to the early 1990s. During the 1960s, the intellectual renaissance and nationalist activity had been concentrated in Kyiv. After the CPU became less favourable towards the intelligentsia and more dogmatic under Moscow’s pressure after 1970, Lviv became the centre for the continuation of non-Soviet activities by the intelligentsia.
Lviv: non-soviet expression in the 1970s and early 1980s
Although the thumbscrews were tightened throughout Ukraine in the 1970s, the situation in Lviv and Western Ukraine was still such that cultural arenas for non-Soviet activity survived, albeit in more cautious forms than before. True to its spirit Lviv continued to be a place of discussion, philosophy, and literature, and ‘liberal’ communists were extremely important in this. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that in Western Ukraine the 1970s was also mainly a decade when the intelligentsia’s activities were ‘completely focused on culture and the majority did not want to engage in politics’.9
The relationship between the Party-state and the intelligentsia in Lviv shaped the scope and expression of the latter’s activities, and that relationship also seems to have been somewhat more symbiotic rather than polarized even in the 1970s, indicating that the regional authorities in Lviv were less dogmatic and more pragmatic than in Kyiv. That is, of course, not to say that the social climate was permissive:
There was a harsh atmosphere prevailing when I arrived in Lviv in the 1970s, and after 1972 when the great repression started. I graduated from the university in Ivano-Frankivsk and a person came to search my apartment, from security, from the KGB.10 I remember that day very well, 4 April 1972. It was a long control [check], it lasted from eight in the morning to eight in the evening. I think somebody reported me because I had a good library with older books and manuscripts.11
Yet, Lviv continued to be a special place during the Soviet era; for example, the city bordered on the comparatively more open and ‘liberally’-governed Poland. Moreover, Lviv was influenced by its Habsburg history through its European, richly decorated architecture, its ‘Austrian’ cafés, and elusive but important spirit as a cultural and intellectual metropolis. The unusual blend of grandeur and intimacy that often characterizes European cities also prevailed in Lviv. Similar to Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, alleys crossed the historic centre, which was the opposite of the wide avenues and the monumental style that existed in many other Soviet cities as an expression of central planning and the regime’s quest for omnipresence.12
Nevertheless, determined efforts to Sovietize the city during the post-war period resulted in extensive industrialization and a great deal of architecture that bore resemblance to that found throughout the Soviet Union (Amar, 2015, p. 12). Industrialization challenged (Åberg, 2000, pp. 287–288) but was not able to seriously change the city’s identity, which meant that intellectual curiosity continued to permeate many social environments (Hrytsak, 2000; Amar, 2015, pp. 185–220). Lviv continued to be a European outpost in Soviet Ukraine and a crossroads where several ‘Europes’ met: the vanished Austrian Central Europe, the rebellious Polish Catholic, the French existential, and a streak of Anglo-Saxon popular culture. It is telling that the French philosopher and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre explicitly stated that he wanted to visit Lviv, which he did in 1966, and that his analytical philosophy was developed, among other things, with inspiration from Lviv.
The historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, inhabitant of Lviv, describes the city as both characterized by its Austrian history and a creative environment, closed in its limited networks but at the same time with open elements and public spaces. He highlights the complexity of Lviv, which still greets the visitor today:
Lviv is a city of social circles, here there are many circles that overlap, artistic, film, literature. They are private but also institutionalized. You cannot live here without actually being part of these circles, while in Kyiv, for example, it is not the same. The distances there are too great. This is a Habsburg place; this is how [the] Habsburg [Empire] was governed and the cafés are where these social circles often meet. [In] public places.13
‘A cultural environment and centre of social networks’ is a similar description by Ihor Markov, who believes that it is a tradition that dates back to the Habsburg era and was challenged, but did not die out during the Soviet decades.14 The connection to the Habsburgs is part of the search for Lviv’s identity, which continues to this day. Orest Dull chooses to describe Lviv as a format around various social circles and networks that defined attitudes and values.15
The geographical distance to the capital Kyiv is considerable, which made Lviv into a world of its own, and if anything, the contacts with Moscow and the Russian nationalist circles there and in Leningrad were sometimes greater than those with Kyiv. At the same time, the bridge between Kyiv and Lviv was important to the intelligentsia during the open period of the 1960s as mentioned previously, and as relations between the Party-state and the intelligentsia became more polarized in connection with the purges of 1972–1974. A special atmosphere left its mark on Lviv during the post-Stalin decades that followed.16
Polish influences
As a border city, many of Lviv’s inhabitants could at least partly understand Polish, similar to the situation in Tallinn with Finnish language television. Relations between Western Ukraine and Poland were marked by both rival nationalisms, painful memories of what took place during the war years, and at the same time centuries of coexistence. In the aftermath of the war, Galicia and Volhynia were ripped away from the Poles in the most brutal way imaginable, but in the post-Stalin decades in Lviv, many in the intelligentsia were dependent on the intellectual breathing space that Poland created. Unlike anywhere else in Ukraine, it was always clear that Western Ukraine continued to be part of Europe, of Central Europe, even though the territories in question were now part of the Soviet Union. This was largely due to proximity to Poland, and Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Romanian influences, and occasional extensive cross-border contacts, sometimes encouraged by the authorities, sometimes discouraged. The black market trade in jeans, cigarettes, make-up, and vinyl records, the influx of magazines and translated literature were an integral part of Lviv’s existence (Risch, 2006).
Although Poland was under Moscow’s control, it was at the same time relatively open and ‘liberal’ in comparison to the Soviet Union. From the 1940s, the Polish United Workers’ Party was less ideologically pure than was the case in many other places and there were professional technocrats with progressive reformist ideas in its upper echelons (Gryzmala-Busse, 2002). Intellectually, Poland was the only Communist country with an independent sociology tradition and a humanities tradition that survived even the worst atrocities of Stalinism (Szporluk, 1975, p. 4). Mass protests were common long before the trade union movement Solidarity surfaced in 1980, and a spiritual counterweight to materialism, the Catholic Church, enjoyed strong popular support. The proximity to Poland thus played a role for Lviv: ‘Centrally located kiosks, the city bookstore Friendship (Druzhba), the Library of Foreign Literature, the Intourist Hotel in the centre and subscriptions through the local post office became important sources of Polish-language media for the Ukrainians in Lviv’ (Risch, 2006, p. 116).
For Taras Luchuk, who grew up in Lviv in the 1980s and 1990s, the Polish language, as for many others in the Lviv intelligentsia, became a decisive factor in his own intellectual development. Luchuk, who today teaches Polish literature at the Ivan Franko University in Lviv and is a translator of Polish, has no Polish roots but a father who was a passionate reader. At home, his father had a library with hundreds of Polish translations of Western literature. When Taras was six years old, his father began teaching him to read Polish, even though he could not yet read Ukrainian:
At the time, I did not understand his idea, but I think he wanted to open up a world of Polish translations for me. They had to sell Polish literature because it was a friendly country. And compared to the Soviet Union, Poland was a freer, liberal country. So, there were Polish translations and only Polish – not Czech, not Slovak, not Bulgarian of course – only Polish.17
Taras’ father Kino Polonia had his Kino Polonia in his bookshelves; but once it became possible to freely visit Poland after 1991, he never went. He no longer needed Poland as an alternative, inspiring reality. Access to Polish literature and culture became a window to Europe, that is, to Polish and Catholic Europe (Lewytzkyj, 1980, p. 209). Polish literature, unlike Soviet and Russian literature, was marked by strong Catholicism reminiscent of spiritual and ideological alternatives to Soviet socialism, and by contacts with Western Europe and the United States, which was possible for many Polish writers (Brown, 1975, p. 124). Poland had a large exile population in the United States as a result of extensive emigration, including in Chicago. These influences may have contributed to the strong position of the underground Greek Catholic Church in Galicia. Contacts with Poland also helped, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, to carve out and strengthen a particularly Soviet Ukrainian identity, not least in Galician Lviv (Wojnowski, 2015).
The Lviv university scene
Lviv became a magnet for young Galicians from the surrounding countryside with intellectual and artistic ambitions during the post-Stalin decades. Already during the Stalin era, many members of the intelligentsia moved to Lviv to replace the Poles and Jews who were either deported or had been killed. These people had been educated elsewhere, they were ‘from the East’, often from Kyiv, but were gradually coloured by Lviv’s strong traditions which were ‘closely connected with artistic trends in interwar Central Europe’ (Risch, 2006, p. 108). A Ukrainian-dominated, new, intelligentsia thus emerged and replaced the old, Polish-dominated one, where Ukrainian nationalism with its roots in the peasant population (the variety primarily inspired the OUN) mingled with Central European philosophical, literary, and artistic traditions.
How did these members of the intelligentsia demonstrate the Ukrainian-Central European identity that emerged in Lviv’s university environments and social circles during the last decades of the Soviet era? One of those who moved to Lviv was the poet and writer Yuriy Vynnychuk, who was born in the much smaller Galician town of Ivano-Frankivsk. In Lviv, he came to frequent the literary circle dominated by Mykola Riabchuk, the writer Hryhorii Chubai, and Viktor Moroz. They met at home in regular meetings where Polish translations were read and literature was discussed ‘between friends’. This was in post-1972 Lviv, when the couple Irena and Ihor Kolonets who were both well-known writers had been arrested and sentenced to prison; fear spread quickly in the city. The literary circle around Riabchuk and Chubai, however, continued to meet in each other’s homes, and Vynnychuk rented a house outside Lviv where sometimes 20–40 people met.18
Another participant in the literary life of Lviv of those years was Taras Vozniak, who is now the editor-in-chief of the Independent Cultural Magazine ‘Ї’ published in Lviv. Vozniak was a student at Lviv’s Polytechnic University during the second half of the 1970s and came into contact with some of the literary circles in the city. He describes three ‘flows’ of literature: the official one, one of Western translations made in Moscow and then circulated more or less openly, and finally, the Polish and Czechoslovak literature that many in Western Ukraine with the proximity to Central Europe could access and read. The texts were philosophical and existential, but fiction also attracted minds such as Prague-born Franz Kafka. Political elements were not included though, and economic themes were not considered interesting at all. Vozniak himself translated into Ukrainian the works of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, who was a central part of Lviv’s cultural past and thus banned. Schulz was an original Polish interwar writer, with a touch of magical realism (something reminiscent of Kafka). As Vozniak noted, ‘There was an interest in banned literature and in authorship such as Kafka and Joyce, and then we discovered that some writers from this region were very similar. Bruno Schultz lived in Drohobych. It was intellectual anti-Sovietism but it was not political’.19
The university environment in Lviv was important. The two most famous and ancient universities in Lviv, where students and teachers had met for centuries of learning and discussion, remained. Lviv State University or Ivan Franko University, founded in 1661 by the Polish King Jan Kasimir II, was a classical university, with Latin as the language of instruction, where the first faculties were theological and philosophical, and later expanded to medicine and law. Eventually, during the Polish interwar period, the Faculty of Philosophy was divided into two: the humanities and mathematics. Ivan Franko University was located in the building where the local political power, the Diet, gathered when Galicia was under Austrian rule, close to the famous Lviv opera house erected during the Habsburg era (see Sands, 2016, pp xxvi–xxvii).
The magnificent Lviv Polytechnic, established during the Habsburg era in 1816, became a prominent university for science and technology, and also for languages.20 Both Ivan Franko University, with its more humanistic and legal profile, and scientifically-oriented Lviv Polytechnic are centrally located in the heart of historic Lviv, universities that for students and teachers during the Soviet 1970s emphasized the continuity of independent thinking, and contributed to the creation of ties back in history. At the same time, Ivan Franco University was more conservative and traditional and pushed boundaries ‘because the teachers put young writers in touch with medieval Ukrainian literature that was far more interesting than the official one. But the university was not an opposition in any way’.21 Ivan Franko University with its humanities orientation was more of an interest to the authorities than Lviv Polytechnic, where there was, as a consequence, a little more freedom. Those who were considered unreliable, another example is the now well-known intellectual Mykola Riabchuk, were not allowed to study the humanities; yet privately, in their self-education, literature and philosophy played an enormous role.
Some of the informal networks and non-Soviet groups in the 1970s were established at the Lviv Polytechnic not Ivan Franko. Vozniak participated in such a circle that met in a basement inside Lviv; they drank wine and talked literature. These groups often had contact with each other. Similar groups were also linked to Lviv Polytechnic, for example, Sebaritis in the late 1960s and Zaskreboze. What was their relationship with the security police, the KGB? Vozniak was never questioned but was ‘unreliable’ because of his background. His father had been deported to Magadan, Siberia, and because of that, he could not study at Ivan Franko University – ‘It was not possible with such a father to study the humanities and social sciences. That is why the majority who participated in such circles did not study at Ivan Franko but at Lviv Polytechnic’.22
Another one of those who studied at Lviv Polytechnic was Orest Dull, a student there from 1977 to 1982. One of his teachers, Marian Klemkowski, became the central figure of an informal circle where he introduced the students to theatre, music, contemporary art, and world culture. About twice a month, they met in Klemkowski’s small apartment, drank tea or coffee (never alcohol) and listened to music and discussed. Dull remembers the meetings fondly: ‘It was important for my soul. When I was with my grandmother in the Hermitage in Leningrad and saw the Impressionists, I forgot everything else. Same thing here. It connected me with creative forces’.23
The choice to frame it all with coffee or tea instead of alcohol was symbolically important as it had been for the Sixtiers in Kyiv who met at Café Donbass. Not to get drunk was to distance oneself from the Soviet culture of the time and to drink coffee was something European, cosmopolitan, just like the café culture and the coffee houses that had characterized Vienna and were still to be found in Lviv. Dull emphasizes that these were non-Soviet activities but not anti-Soviet: ‘Non-Soviet means that it is outside the state, autonomous, anti-Soviet means that it is protest and opposition. Ihor Kolonets was anti-Soviet and imprisoned, but I was never imprisoned or threatened’.24
Orest Sheika, who was a Komsomol member and former art student in Lviv, initiated something reminiscent of the Estonian Kodulinn (Hometown) heritage movement (and the Russian ‘Homeland’) (see Chapter 9) when he published a call to gather for Subotnyk (volunteer work on Saturdays) in the Komsomol newspaper Molod Ukrainy (Youth of Ukraine). They were to gather at Lviv’s large Lychakiv Cemetery to clean up old tombstones. Thus, the idea was born of an organization that would preserve Ukrainian culture. Through the Komsomol students and young people were able to use the vehicle of the Party to actively supported national expressions – it was not a contradiction but rather a symbiosis between the Party and the students.
There were other activities outside the immediate university milieus taking place during these years. In the mid 1970s, a Cinema Club, Kino Klub, was started in Lviv by Eduard Eliensky, showing quality movies in a cinema hall close to the Greek Catholic St. George’s Cathedral in central Lviv. European directors such as Fellini, Bergman, and Antonioni, were popular among the intellectual crowd who visited and discussed the films.25 Kino Klub gathered many of the culturally interested in Lviv and ‘almost all of them were later among them who founded Narodny Rukh’.26
The 1970s in Lviv was also home to a local hippie movement that moved around central Lviv with characteristic long hair and bohemian dress code (Risch 2005; 2011). Overlapping but not coinciding was the rock scene, inspired by the West and bands such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and others. Rock music strongly appealed to the young generation, igniting emotion and longing for a life that was not grey and predictable – ‘Once we listened to Elvis Presley and I turned around and saw my friend’s mother cry as she listened’.27 It was not only the young who were moved.
Conclusion
What kind of attitudes and strategies dominated the CPU during the post-Stalin decades when the important relations between the local and central Party and the intelligentsia shaped the political practice that subsequently became dominant in Ukraine? The CPU went from relatively pragmatic in the 1960s to dogmatic in the 1970s and into the 1980s. During the Ukrainian liberalization in the first half of the 1960s, the relationship between the Party-state and the intelligentsia was of a nature almost reminiscent of symbiosis, where the boundaries between the two were neither clear nor needed to be demarcated. From the mid-1960s onwards, however, the relationship became increasingly characterized by polarization. The Party closed the KTM and thus puts an end to the activities of the generation of the Sixtiers, and began simultaneously prosecuting prominent people from the intelligentsia for what was not opposition but non-Soviet activities with nationalist expressions; shifting from ‘negotiation’ a few years earlier to repression becoming the accepted practice.
For that process, the local Party’s relationship with the Centre in Moscow played a considerable role, as did Moscow’s reprimand at the beginning of the period, after Stalin’s death in 1953, that the Ukrainian nation was given too little space, which led to extensive changes in another direction. This relatively tolerant attitude lasted until the end of the 1960s, encompassing mainly nationalist currents but not those that aimed at protecting human rights (with their strikingly more open political connotations of ‘bourgeois’ freedoms).
In 1979, the CPU once again wanted to re-establish a functioning relationship with the intelligentsia, and while welcoming back the pragmatists among the intelligentsia, the outright opposition, including the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, were still vigorously persecuted. The 1980s became something of a new opening culturally and intellectually. After 1985, when politics, participation, and open criticism were suddenly permitted in the Soviet Union, the CPU quietly and repeatedly negotiated with the Ukrainian intelligentsia about where the necessary boundaries for freedom of thought, pluralism, and individuality would go. The ‘cranes were released’ at last. In Ukraine, a liberalization awaited that few had dared to hope for or dream of.
The initial nationalist orientation pushed by the Popular Front (Narodny Rukh) was, however, overtaken by the old networks of the CPU and the nomenklatura. By the end of the 1990s, Ukraine had already developed a system of oligarchs, a super-rich elite who owned the political sphere. It is a system that has been challenged on several occasions over the years, during the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Euromaidan and ‘Revolution of Dignity’ in 2014, and most recently through the election of the ‘Servant of the People’ TV-star and entrepreneur Volodymyr Zelensky as President in 2019. Yet, this oligarchic-nomenklatura holdover has always prevailed and constructed a tightly interwoven system of politics and economics, which does not benefit democracy or a well-functioning state.
Notes
1 Interview by Li Bennich-Björkman with Iryna Storyvyt, member of the Lviv intelligentsia, lecturer at Lviv Catholic University, in Lviv, 28 June 2016.
2 Les Taniuk, ‘Ukrainian National Movement’, Virtual Museum of the Dissident Movement in Ukraine, 20 April http://archive.khpg.org.ua/en/index.php?id=1114000753 (accessed 13 August 2019).
3 Zakharov, Y. (2005) ‘History of Dissent in Ukraine’, Virtual Museum of the Dissident Movement in Ukraine, 21 September. http://archive.khpg.org.ua/en/index.php?id=1127288239.
4 Interview by Li Bennich-Björkman with Gennadiy Udovenko, Chairman of the Committee for Human Rights, Minorities, and Ethnic Relations in the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament), in Kyiv, 13 January 2006.
5 Interview by Li Bennich-Björkman with Myroslav Marynovych, folklorist, member of the Ukraine Helsinki Group, and vice-chancellor of Lviv Catholic University, in Lviv, 3 February 2015.
6 Ibid.
7 Mykola Rudenko (1920–2004) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, philosopher, and dissident.
8 Interview with Myroslav Marynovych, in Lviv, 3 February 2015.
9 Interview by Li Bennich-Björkman with Yuriy Vynnychuk, poet and writer, in Lviv, 2 February 2015.
10 A Galician town with a multi-ethnical historical legacy of Ruthenian (Ukrainian), Polish, Armenian, and Jewish inhabitants.
11 Interview with Yuriy Vynnychuk, in Lviv, 2 February 2015.
12 The architecture of dictatorship (and democracy) contains noteworthy signals. The importance of architecture is revealed, for example, in how Russians who visited the Baltic republics during the Soviet era perceived them as ‘the West’ and as a Soviet ‘foreign’ country (Vardys, 1975, p. 159) and gazed upon Riga’s Gothic Spiers, Tallinn’s Old Hanseatic City, and the Baroque Churches of Vilnius. This was something different from what was encountered in other parts of the Soviet Union - but also found in Lviv.
13 Interview by Li Bennich-Björkman with Yaroslav Hrytsak, member of the Lviv intelligentsia and professor in history, Lviv Catholic University, in Lviv 10 February 2015.
14 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Ihor Markov, co-founder of the Lion Society in Lviv and a social anthropologist, in Lviv, 10 June 2015.
15 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Orest Dull, in Lviv, 9 June 2015.
16 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with ‘Igor’, in Lviv, 31 January 2015; Interview with Ilya Seminov (Lemko), founder of the rock group Supervoijku, in Lviv, 10 October 2015, see Grabowicz, 2000.
17 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Taras Luchuk, university lecturer in Polish, translator and member of the Lviv intelligentsia, in Lviv, 3 November 2015.
18 Interview with Yuriy Vynnychuk, in Lviv, 2 February 2015.
19 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Taras Vozniak, Lviv Polytechnic student, Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Ï’ newspaper, in Lviv, 2 February 2015.
20 During the Nazi-German occupation, several of the professors at Lviv Polytechnic were shot dead. Polish dominance in the university ceased altogether with the deportation of the Polish population of Lviv from the end of the war. Instead, the Polish teaching traditions were re-established at Wrocław University of Technology (where some of the Poles were moved) and at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice.
21 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Volodymyr Tsybalko, poet, in Lviv, 9 June 2015.
22 Interview with Taras Vozniak, in Lviv, 2 February 2015.
23 Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Orest Dull, in Lviv, 9 June 2015.
24 Ibid.
25 Interview with Volodymyr Tsybalko, in Lviv, 9 June 2015; Interview by Li-Bennich-Björkman with Eduard Eliensky, founder of Kino Klub, in Lviv, 15 February 2015.
26 Interview with ‘Igor’, in Lviv, 31 January 2015
27 Interview with Orest Dull, in Lviv, 9 June 2015.
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