How Ukrainian Poets of the 1960s Influenced the Foundation of the Ukrainian Nation State
Ukrainian writer-dissidents
of the 1960s, known as the “Sixtiers” or “Shistdesiatnyky,” awakened a national
consciousness and articulated a cultural identity that was foundational for the
creation of the Ukrainian nation state. Following the 1956 political thaw
under the new First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
Nikita Krushchev, in the 1960s Ukraine experienced a tidal wave of creative
literary output focused on Ukrainian cultural independence from Soviet Russian
dominance.
The Shistdesiatnyky
were dedicated to honesty and telling the truth. According to Olga Bertelsen in
The Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s, “the
1960s were characterized by the rise of lyric confessional poetry, evidence of
the emergence of a new type of subjectivity, openness, and intimacy. Poetry
seemed to help overcome the individual and collective tragedy of cultural
disruption caused by Stalin’s terror. The unprecedented popularity of poetry
under Khrushchev is remembered by many who attended large concert halls, public
squares and even stadiums … Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv became cultural centres
where thousands of people stood in lines for hours to acquire tickets for
poetry evenings.”
After enduring decades
of Soviet repression of Ukrainian culture and history, in the 1960s Ukrainians
started conceptualizing themselves as a nation. The truthful, moving literature
being published by the Sixtiers in their own language was resonating with
people. The Shistdesiatnyky’s focus on Ukrainian cultural freedom, prominent use
of the Ukrainian language, and a Ukrainian national sentiment served as a
foundation for the sovereign nation to be created thirty years later. Leading
up to sovereignty, writer-dissident leaders had spearheaded Ukrainian Human
Rights’ groups and had input into the Constitution. They later held leadership
positions in the new 1991 state.
In the 1960s, the
writers wanted to expand creative freedom and defend Ukrainian national
culture, undoing the complete russification of Ukrainian society. The cultural
blossoming involved a new poetic sensibility that emphasized evocative
metaphorical imagery, experimentation with rhythm and modernized folk forms. In
1961 poet Ivan Drach’s poem “Knife in the Sun” was published in Kyiv’s
Literaturna Hazeta”, and received sharp criticism for its stark departure from the
Soviet-enforced socialist realism technique that demanded all art serve the state.
Ivan Dziuba’s book “Internationalism or Russification”, published in 1965,
compared theoretical socialist internationalism with real russification
occurring in the Ukrainian SSR, incurring sharp criticism from Soviet
authorities.
Many
writer-dissidents were imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for their works,
and the Ukrainian national movement became clandestine, with writers strongly
opposed to Soviet repression both morally and ethically. The Shistdesiatnyky
became known as political dissidents, although their core was comprised from a
group of young writers and artists including Ivan Drach, Vasyl Stus, Vyacheslav
Chornovil, Levko Lukhianenko and Ivan Dziuba.
Many influences
affected the ebb and flow of the Shistdesiatnyky’s journeys from writers to
dissidents to political activists. Changing political leadership in the USSR
dramatically influenced the fates of the activist-writers. The national
movements in neighbouring countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia affected
the Ukrainian cultural underground in the 1960s. The Ukrainian national
identity had been developing for thousands of years and didn’t develop in
isolation in the 1960s. During both the Cossack Hetmanate in 1708 and within the Austrian Empire from 1867 to 1917, Ukrainian national sentiment and the quest for freedom had
developed throughout different regions of present-day Ukraine.
During the
short-lived thaw in the 1960s, Khrushchev made overtures to promoting the
development of Ukrainian culture and making concessions. The works of many
earlier Ukrainian writers from the 1930s and 1940s were restored, as were
Ukrainian literary classics by writers such as Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko,
Lesia Ukrainian and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky.
But the issue of
Russification continued to trouble a growing number of people in Ukraine, and the
freedom to utilize the Ukrainian language in Ukraine remained a problem. There
were far fewer books published in Ukrainian within Ukraine than were published
in Russian. “The number and circulation of newspapers in Ukrainian were
conspicuously low between 1954-60, especially in urban areas. The scarcity of
Ukrainian periodicals contributed to the unhindered Russification of Ukraine’s
urban-dwellers and widened the gap between the predominantly Russophone cities
and the countryside.”
Additionally,
Khrushchev’s school reform allowed parents to choose whether their children
would be educated in Ukrainian or Russian. This caused enormous dissatisfaction
in Ukraine, since it increased Russification. A university education and a good
job necessitated strong knowledge of Russian, therefore parents in non-Russian
republics chose Russian education for their children so they would have a good
future.
The sudden
flourishing of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s breathed life into the
Ukrainian past. Nationalist sentiment had been building over centuries but had
been suppressed. After the death of Stalin and following the 20th congress of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the sudden Soviet-sanctioned openness
to Ukrainian culture created an opportunity for national consciousness to rise
to the surface again.
Before the
1960s, Ukraine’s battles with Russia occurred over centuries. Since the 8th
century, past rulers oversaw the vast Kyivan Rus, of which Muscovy was a small
province in the northeast. After Kyivan Rus was attacked by Mongols in the 12th
century, Ukrainians found themselves under either the Polish Lithuanian
Commonwealth or the fast-expanding Muscovy. In the 17th century
during Ukraine’s Cossack Hetmanate, when the Great Northern War broke out
between Muscovy and Sweden, Ukraine was again caught in the middle.
During that era,
the Cossack State in Ukraine was run by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who made agreements
with Muscovy to fight in its battles and aid in the construction of St.
Petersburg, where many Cossacks had perished. Rather than continue being an
ally of Muscovy, Mazepa thought twice about continuing the Cossacks earlier
service to Peter the Great. He felt that Ukraine had suffered long enough
serving Muscovy’s military escapades and he wanted to be protected by Sweden -
while in an alliance with Poland. The result was that the Cossack State turned
away from Muscovy and fought for Sweden.
Czar Peter I
retaliated in 1708 by attacking Hetman Mazepa’s capital, Baturyn, where he had
between 13,000-15,000 people slaughtered, erasing the centre of Cossackdom from
Baturyn forever. In 1709, the Swedish army and Mazepa’s Cossack army were
defeated by Czar Peter I’s Muscovite army at the Battle of Poltava - after
which Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire. This was a huge setback for
Ukrainian self-determination that had developed during the century-long
existence of the Cossack State.
The fermenting
of Ukrainian national consciousness continued uniquely by region. From the late
1700s to the early 1900s, Ukrainians living east of the border between Austria
and Russia were allegiant to the Russian Empire, and Ukrainians living west of
it were allegiant to the Austrian Empire. As a result of the partitions of
Poland in the late 18th century, Galicia fell under Austria, and Kyiv, Volhynia
and Podolia west of the Dnipro River fell to Russia. There were vast
differences in how these two empires treated their ethnic minorities, with the
Hapsburgs’ subjects being allowed to develop a civic society and be active
politically - and the Russian Empire’s subjects being oppressed under absolute
monarchy.
The Austrian
Empire allowed religions other than their own Roman Catholic religion, and the
Byzantine Greek Catholic Church (like Orthodoxy but loyal to the Pope), was
centred in Lviv. The Austrian government set up a seminary in Lviv, as was Lviv
University which served students in the Ukrainian language. In the Russian
Empire, by contrast, Czarina Catherine II declared only Russian language
teaching and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukrainian lands. Ultimately, the
Ukrainian revival that took place east of the Dnipro River in the Russian
Empire was led by the Ukrainian intelligentsia, inspired by the Ukrainian
peasantry, and infused by the prevalence of Ukrainian Cossack traditions from
the Cossack Hetmanate’s century-long rule in Ukraine.
By the late
1960s, the blossoming Ukrainian cultural movement was forced to continue
underground. After the Khrushchev-led de-Stalinization that produced the
Shistdesiatnyky, re-Stalinization occurred very soon after. The thaw was
replaced by a new freeze, causing the Ukrainian writers of the 1960s to
self-publish (samvydav) or have their works published abroad (tamvydav). The
revisionists, under Stalin, lost to the Stalinists who wanted to control
cultural production in the USSR. Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was
politically challenged by Ukraine’s intellectuals’ outcry of anti-colonialism.
The writers’ hopes for freedom were quickly repressed by censorship and KGB
control. The backlash was severe and the Sixtiers movement became a clandestine
dissident movement, with writing secretly self- published and many writers
jailed and tortured.
A KGB report
revealed that over 6,000 people were investigated between 1967-1971 and 87 were
prosecuted. Of those convicted, 67% were Ukrainians and 92% were under age 45.
The charges were anti-Soviet propaganda promoting Ukrainian independence, as
well as charges against nationalism.
In 1965 some of the Sixtiers
writers delivered speeches in opposition to the arrests of writers that had
started at that time. Literary critic Ivan Dziuba, poet Vasyl Stus, and
journalist Viacheslav Chornovil all gave public speeches at the screening of
Serhiy Paradzhanov’s new film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors at the Ukraine
movie theatre – which led to more political arrests and the eruption of
dissidence in Ukraine.
One of the most
powerful poems that achieved popular status in Ukraine in the 1960s was Ivan
Drach’s Knife in the Sun, part of which portrayed Ukraine as a mother
lamenting the loss of her sons:
And she
began to dance.
The devil
wind
spun around
the black table.
Her three
sons wept
from their
bloodstained frames.
One died
near Berlin, one in a snowdrift
somewhere
near Warsaw, and the third
officially
by his own hand,
during the
black terror of thirty-seven.
And their
mother danced on the holy straw,
danced round
the planet, round the table:
O sons,
little sons,
precious
little cucumbers,
little
mop-headed boys,
my own
little songbirds.
Hitler
wanders over Ukraine,
props a
handmill on his knee:
how can I
crush you all
and still
escape from Stalin?
According to
Simone Attilio Bellezza, “These lines … were among the most contentious, along
with those dedicated to Taras Shevchenko.” Later Drach worked as an editor and
screenwriter, and was the first leader of Rukh, the Popular Movement of
Ukraine, in independent Ukraine - as well as a member of the Verkhovna Rada
(the parliament of Ukraine.)
In 1956 after
the Ukrainian undoing of Russification had been unleashed, the Communist Party
of Ukraine did not associate any tie between the Ukrainian national sentiment
in the literary flourishing and the Hungarian and Polish rebels in their own
countries. But Kyiv university students supported the rebels and perceived them
as struggling against the effects of Stalin’s personality cult in Hungary and
Poland. Students in Kyiv and Kharkiv drew parallels between the plight of
neighbouring countries and their own, protesting both the Party’s policy
towards universities as well as the disrespect towards Ukrainian culture
expressed by Russians in general. In 1956 some Kyiv State University students
wrote a letter to Khrushchev expressing their protest and mistrust of Soviet
rule. Overall, the Soviet authorities did not respond positively
to insubordination.
“Through these
publishing initiatives the major samvydav texts became available to readers in
the capitalist world. The influx of such publications could not help but garner
attention and resulted in the translation and publication of nearly all of
these writings in English, French and other languages, sometimes within the
same year as their publication in Ukrainian… The Soviet government was worried
about Moscow’s international reputation, and its concerns about Ukraine
heightened as the Czechoslovakia crisis progressed.”
With
Czechoslovakia’s and Ukraine’s deep cultural ties, western Ukrainians enjoyed a
great deal of information about events abroad that came through the
Czechoslovakia broadcast “Presov Radio” which was in Ukrainian and uncensored
during the Prague Spring for several months.
Changes in
Soviet leadership curtailed activities of the Ukrainian underground movement,
and the treatment of Ukrainian political prisoners worsened over time. To
counteract the repression the Shistdesiatnyky experienced in Ukraine, there was
a strong diaspora connection through the Baltimore-based publication Smoloskyp,
and the Munich-based journal Suchasnist’ both of which published
Ukrainian dissident documents, propagating the literature and plight of
Ukrainian Sixtiers-turned dissidents in the West. Ivan Dziuba’s book Internationalism
or Russification and Viacheslav Chornovil’s text for Woe from
Wit were both published outside Ukraine, spreading a great deal of
awareness abroad.
Since Ivan
Dziuba was a central figure in the Sixtiers dissent movement, he was attacked
by the official Soviet press in 1969, which said there’s a “danger posed by
Ukrainian nationalist propaganda from abroad”, alleging its ties to Nazis and its
manipulation of Soviet life to paint it negatively. Another prominent Sixtiers
writer, Vasyl Stus, responded to the official critique by writing a letter
disseminated by Samvydav that condemned the official censorship of Ukraine’s
most talented writers.
In 1969,
Chornovil and a mathematician Leonid Pliushch were founders of the first
Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR, which appealed to
the United Nations for international debate and assistance. They asserted that
being arrested for the expression of one’s beliefs was in contradiction to the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil
and Political rights that the UN General Assembly had adopted and the USSR
government had ratified.
Pliushch was
imprisoned, psychologically tortured in prison, and finally exiled from the
Soviet Union in the late 1970s. In 1972 a wave of arrests included Vasyl Stus, Viacheslav Chornovil, and Leonid
Pliushch, as well as the intense interrogation of Ivan Dziuba. Stus later died while being incarcerated, and is one of the writers from the 1960s
Ukrainian dissident movement who is celebrated as a national poet martyr in
Ukraine.
From the first
poetry readings in Ukrainian urban centres in the 1960s, the imaginations
of Ukrainians were sparked by fresh ideas of truth, ethics and Ukrainian
national identity. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the
establishment of Ukraine as an independent country tapped into those same
democratic rights and freedoms that the Sixtiers had awakened earlier.
The identity
that the Shistdesiatnyky built focused on artistic freedom, the use of the Ukrainian
language, the availability of accurate historical material about Ukraine, and
the freedom to express and develop the Ukrainian culture. Some of the fruits
that came to bear from the writing and activism of the Sixtiers included Levko
Lukhianenko’s participation in writing the Declaration of Independence,
Vyacheslav Chornovil’s establishment of the Ukrainian Party “Rukh”, Ivan
Dziuba’s prominence as a Ukrainian dissident and ongoing activism following the
publishing of “Internationalism or Russification” in the West, and Ivan Drach’s leadership of Rukh and
membership in the Verkhovna Rada - the parliament of Ukraine.
Bibliography
Bellezza, Simone Attilio, The Shore of Expectations: A
Cultural Study of the Shistdesiatnyky, University of Alberta, Canadian
Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb402850001.001.
Bertelsen, Olga, In The Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s
Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2023. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=6862920
Hundorova, Tamara, Ch. 13, The Ukrainian Underground:
Aesthetics, Resistance, and Performance, pp. 277-302, Lipovetsky, Mark (ed)
The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197508213.013.49
Magocsi, Paul Robert, Ukraine, The Land and Its Peoples,
Second, Revised and Expanded Edition, Chapter 16 Khmel’nyts’kyi and the
Uprising of 1648, Chapter 20 Mazepa and the Great Northern War, University
of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, London,
Yekelchyk, Serhy, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation,
Chapter 2, Imperial Bureaucrats and Nation Builders, Chapter 9, Ukraine Under
Stalin’s Heirs, Oxford University Press, 2007.
