The Thaw

In March 1953 Iosif Stalin died.⁷ For the next two years there had been struggle for power among the elite. The victor of that inner-party struggle was Nikita Khrushchev.⁸ The new Soviet leader condemned his former patron’s rule of terror and started a liberalization campaign, which came to be known as de-Stalinization or the thaw. The body of Stalin was taken from the Mausoleum, the cities and streets bearing the name of the former dictator were renamed (Stalino, for example, was renamed into Donetsk, Stalingrad into Volgograd etc), his monuments were destroyed.

The thaw was characterized by the relaxation of ideological control in the sphere of culture. The weakening of ideological pressure led to the revival of national cultural life in all Soviet republics, including Ukraine. Some Ukrainian cultural figures, repressed in the 1930s, were rehabilitated. Millions of the Gulag prisoners were released and returned home. The Ukrainian language and culture got a fresh breath and produced such a phenomenon as “the sixties group” (shistdesiatnyky). This group included writers, film directors, artists, poets, composers and other cultural figures who tried not only to glorify the Soviet regime, but also to introduce some non-ideological innovations in their fields of cultural activity. They also tried to renew traditional Ukrainian cultural values and to defend the Ukrainian language against Russification.

The life of peasants was significantly eased during the Khrushchev period. Peasants were given passports and pensions. Their wages increased and were paid monthly instead of yearly as was practiced before. They also started to pay fewer taxes. To enlarge the quantity of grain Khrushchev launched the so-called Tselina program. That was an attempt to solve the food problem in an extensive way. Dozens of thousands of young Ukrainians enthusiastically responded to the Party’s call and went to Kazakhstan, Western Siberia, and Northern Caucuses to cultivate virgin lands.

Khrushchev also tried to significantly improve the living standards of Soviet citizens. He launched an extensive building program. Millions got new apartments in the so-called khrushchevki (the type of an apartment building). Salaries and wages of ordinary people rose substantially. Thanks to Khrushchev, many families were able to buy such unthinkable in Stalin’s time goods as washing machines, refrigerators, type-recorders, and TV-sets. The working week was reduced to 5 days instead of 6.

Since the rate of growth of Soviet industry was the highest in the world, Khrushchev decided to announce in 1961 that the Soviet Union would catch up with America soon and build a communist society by 1980. The Soviet leader did not understand that the West was experiencing a technological revolution which was characterized by quality and not by quantity (as was the Soviet case). Thus, his announcement was purely utopian and produced numerous anecdotes.

In 1954 Khrushchev, in commemoration of 300 year anniversary of the Pereiaslav Rada, transferred Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Ten years earlier in 1944 Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaboration with Germans and exiled them to Central Asia. Thus, by 1954 the peninsula was populated mostly by Russians and Ukrainians. The transfer was based first of all on economic considerations: Ukraine and Crimea were closely tied economically, and it was more efficient and natural to place the peninsula under Kyiv administrative control.

Khrushchev was a very controversial leader. Besides his merits, he is noted for numerous mistakes. He reduced peasants’ private plots (ohorody) by half and thus diminished the number of agricultural products on city markets.⁹ As a result of Khrushchev’s famous corn idea, collective farms were forced to plant corn everywhere. A lot of fertile land was used for corn instead of grain.¹⁰ Thus, the Soviet Union started to import grain instead of exporting it. Taxes were imposed on citizens who kept cattle. That measure sharply reduced the amount of meat and milk in the country. Food shortages appeared in cities and towns. Due to Khrushchev’s atheistic campaign about 50 percent of churches disappeared. Many architectural religious masterpieces were destroyed.

Several inconsistent structural reforms were carried out in industry and the party. These reforms came down into history as Khrushchev’s chekharda. They contributed to a significant slowdown of economic growth at the end of his rule. The most irritating for the party hierarchy was a reform of rotation. The reform put the careers of many party bosses at risk since it did not allow them to occupy important state positions for more than a certain number of years. This reform was designed to enliven the party apparatus but it only scared the party leaders who were afraid of losing their jobs. The party bureaucratic apparatus was also sharply reduced. Thus, it did not look strange that the party elite decided to remove Khrushchev from power. On October 14, 1964, the party plenum forced Khrushchev to resign. Leonid Brezhnev became the leader of the Soviet Union.¹¹

The Brezhnev Era

The Nationality Policy and Dissidents

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. 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.”¹²