The Brezhnev Era

The after-Stalin cultural liberalization, which produced the revival of national cultures in all Soviet republics, frightened the Soviet leadership. During the Brezhnev reign a new party program was introduced which emphasized the importance of the Russian language for the integration of the Soviet peoples. Party theoreticians spoke of the diminishing significance of borders between Soviet republics; they also popularized the theory of “fusion of Soviet nations” that would be accompanied by the disappearance of national languages. The aim of that fusion was to create a new Russian-speaking Soviet man (homo Sovieticus), popularly known as sovok. Thus it is not surprising that Russification was spreading substantially. Many Ukrainian cultural figures, who continued to glorify Ukrainian culture and tried to protect the Ukrainian language from Russification after the end of the Khrushchev thaw, were accused of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and dismissed from their jobs or sent to prisons. A similar attack on intellectuals was conducted in other Soviet republics as well.

This attack on national rights of Soviet republics was one of the reasons for the emergence of the so-called dissident movement. This movement appeared in the Khrushchev period but got momentum during the Brezhnev period. Several small clandestine Ukrainian dissident groups secretly issued their own magazines and newspapers generally called samizdat, where they criticized the Soviet Union’s policy on civil and national rights of its citizens. The most prominent of the dissident groups was Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) founded in November 1976 in Kyiv. The aim of the group was to monitor Moscow’s observance of civil rights. (In 1975 the USSR signed the Helsinki Accords according to which it was to respect the civil rights of its people). The first dissident Helsinki Group was founded in May 1976 in Moscow. Similar groups also sprang up in Lithuania, Georgia, and Armenia. The leader of the Ukrainian group was the writer Mykola Rudenko. In general it included 37 members. The UHG tried to acquaint Ukrainian society with the International Declaration of Human Rights and to collect evidences of the Soviet Union’s violation of the civil rights of its citizens. Though the group tried to work legally it was severely persecuted. (The UHG was the only dissident group in Ukraine which tried to work openly). About three-fourth of its members were imprisoned with sentences ranging from ten to fifteen years. The rest got permission to emigrate. In general, during the 1960s and 1970s practically all dissident groups were repressed. Many of their members were incarcerated in mental hospitals or sent to labor camps in Siberia. The Ukrainian dissidents made up the majority of all the Soviet dissidents (about 75 percent). The Ukrainian dissident movement did not enjoy wide support among Ukrainians, however. Due to communist propaganda efforts many citizens of Soviet Ukraine considered dissidents to be foreign agents or “fanatical Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.”