Although the new leadership in Moscow quickly reversed many of Khrushchev’s decentralizing measures, it initially showed greater sensitivity toward the non-Russians. The seeming retreat in Moscow’s nationalities policy, connected with the leadership’s preoccupation with the succession struggle, facilitated the three main trends that characterize the Shelest era in Ukraine: the growing cultural revival, greater assertiveness by Kiev’s political elite, and the development of a large-scale dissident movement.
The cultural revival was built on the hard-won, though necessarily limited, achievements of the de-Stalinization thaw. It was spearheaded by a younger “generation of the ’60s” (shestydesyatnyky) who, without the formative firsthand experience of Stalin’s reign of terror, experimented with themes and forms that at times provoked the ire of the preceding generation. More proscribed figures from the past were rehabilitated as literary scholars, and historians explored previously forbidden topics. New journals and serials devoted to Ukrainian history made their appearance, and monumental encyclopaedic publications were launched. Such efforts came under severe attack from party ideologues and the conservative cultural establishment. Announced publications failed to appear, published works were withdrawn from circulation, and numerous works of art were destroyed. Plans prepared on the ministerial level in Kiev for a partial de-Russification of higher education were never implemented.
Nevertheless, the cultural achievements were unparalleled since the Ukrainization period in the 1920s. They were made possible by the support of influential segments of the party leadership, most notably Shelest himself. In addition to supporting Ukrainian culture, Shelest defended the economic interests of Ukraine, pressing for a larger share in the U.S.S.R.’s allocation of investment and greater republican control in economic management. These efforts were aimed in part at strengthening the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Ukrainian population. During Shelest’s tenure, Communist Party membership in Ukraine grew at a rate double the all-union average to reach 2.5 million by 1971.
From its embryonic beginnings in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the dissident movement continued to develop under Shelest. In 1965 the first arrests and trials of 20 dissidents occurred; profiles of these dissenters were circulated clandestinely, and their compiler, the journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, was also arrested and imprisoned. The national dissent movement grew rapidly thereafter. It took the form of protest letters and petitions to the authorities, the formation of informal clubs and discussion circles, and public meetings and demonstrations. Increasingly the materials prepared by the dissidents were circulated through samvydav (“self-publication”—the Ukrainian equivalent of Russian samizdat), some of which made its way abroad and was published. An outstanding work in this regard was Ivan Dziuba’s “Internationalism or Russification?”; it was translated and published in several languages. Throughout the 1960s, however, reprisals for dissident activity were generally mild.
Beginning in 1970, there were signs that the relative permissiveness of the Shelest regime was drawing to a close. The head of the KGB in Ukraine was replaced. Harsh rhetoric about “anti-Soviet activities” and “bourgeois nationalism” increased; tribute was paid to “the great Russian people.” In 1971 Brezhnev’s protégé and Shelest’s rival, Shcherbytsky, was elevated to full member of the Politburo. Between January and April 1972, several hundred dissidents and cultural activists were arrested in a wave of repression that swept Ukraine. In May Shelest was removed as Ukraine’s party leader, succeeded by Shcherbytsky. Shelest continued for another year as a member of the Politburo and a deputy prime minister in Moscow, but in May 1973 he lost all his remaining party and government positions.
Ukraine under Shcherbytsky
Shcherbytsky’s promotion marked an important step in the consolidation of power in Moscow by his patron, Brezhnev, and a turning point in Ukrainian postwar politics. Shcherbytsky survived in office 17 years until his resignation in the fall of 1989, a few weeks before his death—long after the death of Brezhnev in 1982 and well into the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Personnel changes in the party and government followed gradually after Shcherbytsky’s accession to office; many of them involved the removal of Shelest’s supporters and the promotion of cadres associated with the site of Shcherbytsky’s (and Brezhnev’s) earlier career, the Dnipropetrovsk regional Communist Party organization. The most significant occurred in October 1972: Valentyn Malanchuk, who had previously conducted ideological work in the nationally highly charged Lviv region, was appointed secretary for ideology. A purge in 1973–75 removed almost 5 percent of the CPU members from party rolls.
Arrests of national and human rights activists continued through 1972–73. The bulk of samvydav literature was now produced in labour camps, and much of it made its way abroad, where it was published. Following the signing of the international Helsinki Accords, with their human rights provisions, in 1975, the Helsinki Watch Group was founded in Ukraine, headed by the poet Mykola Rudenko; by the end of the 1970s, its members were almost all in concentration camps or in exile abroad. The expirations of political prisoners’ sentences were increasingly followed by rearrest and new sentences on charges of criminal activity. Incarceration in psychiatric institutions became a new method of political repression.
Political repression was accompanied by a broad assault on Ukrainian culture and intensification of Russification. Immediately after Shelest’s fall, the circulation of the most popular Ukrainian periodicals was substantially reduced, and most of the new journals and serials started under Shelest ceased publication; a general decline in Ukrainian-language publishing and education continued during Shcherbytsky’s tenure. For two years after his appointment as secretary for ideology, Malanchuk supervised a purge of Ukrainian scholarly and cultural institutions, with numerous expulsions from the Academy of Sciences, universities, editorial boards, and the official organizations of writers, artists, and cinematographers. The general trend was unaffected by Malanchuk’s unexpected removal in 1979, which may have been a concession to the disaffected cultural intelligentsia, whose cooperation was needed in the upcoming celebrations of the 325th anniversary of the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” that year and the 1,500th anniversary of the founding of Kiev in 1982.
Ukraine’s economic performance continued to deteriorate throughout the 1970s and ’80s. The rates of growth declined, and serious problems beset especially the important ferrous metallurgy and coal mining industries. Agricultural production was adversely affected by a series of droughts, a lack of incentives, and excessive centralization in collective farm management. Soviet energy policy increasingly emphasized nuclear power, and in April 1986 one of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine, at Chernobyl just northwest of Kiev, suffered the worst nuclear accident in history. Dozens died in the immediate aftermath, and tens of thousands were evacuated. An estimated 5 million people were exposed to elevated levels of radiation, and hundreds of thousands received doses that were sufficient to increase the risk of various cancers. Decades after the accident, the incidence of thyroid cancer remained sharply higher among residents of the Chernobyl area than among the general population. Nevertheless, and despite changes in the top leadership in Moscow since 1982, Shcherbytsky remained securely in office.