Before and After the End of History

Making of Modern Ukraine 18

The theme of this lecture is normalization: how it came to seem that Soviet power in general, and Soviet power in Ukraine in particular, came to seem eternal in the 1970s.

People with connections to Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, struggled for power. Having consolidated power in 1964, Brezhnev sought after a formula that would justify a Soviet Union where the Stalinist transformation was complete but nothing like communism had actually been achieved.

Brezhnev (pictured below meeting Nixon) sought a world where the Soviet Union would seem eternal and unquestionable, and where national questions would cease to matter. The borrowing of technology from the West replaced any attempt to reform the Soviet system. Marxism was no longer of serious interest. Political legitimacy was to be claimed form the past: by a russocentric nostalgia for the victory of the Second World War.

Brezhnev, who changed his own passport nationality from Ukrainian to Russian, undertook a new form of russification in Soviet Ukraine. Ukrainian culture mattered as folklore to be kept in private life; Ukrainians themselves were to merge in a larger russophone culture of administration designed to keep the system going.

History, in other words, was over. Although of course it wasn’t! This lecture also describes new forms of Ukrainian dissident politics, the political ideas of the diaspora, and the beginnings of Ukrainian-Polish reconciliation.

Reading:

Rudnyts'kyi, "The Political Thought of Soviet Ukrainian Dissidents"

Yekelchyk, Stalin's Empire of Memory, chapters 5-7 and epilogue.

Ivan Dzyuba, "On the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Murders in Baby Yar" (and accompanying materials), in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Antony Polonsky, eds., Polin, vol. 26, 2014, 381-389.

Terms

Marxism, dialectics, consumerism, nationalism

collectivization, Holodomor

Khmelnyts'kyi

Sobornist

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in USA 1943

Babyn Iar, Baby Yar, Kyiv

Brest 1596, Uniate Church, Greek Catholic Church

Andrii Sheptyts'kyi

Nikita Khrushchev

Treaty of Pereiaslav 1654

Ivan Dziuba 1965 "Internationalism or Russification"?

Leonid Brezhnev 1964

Great Fatherland War

Petro Shelest, V. V. Shcherbyts'kyi

1975 Helsinki Final Act

Ukrainian Helsinki Society 1976

Myroslav Marynovych:

CIUS Alberta HURI Harvard

Milena Rudnyts'ka

Ivan Rudnyts'kyi

Edward Gierek

Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik

Kultura

Jerzy Giedroyc

Stanisław Stempowski

Bunt Młodych, Polityka

Józef Czapski

Juliusz Mieroszewski

George Shevelov, "Youth of the Fourth Kharkiv"

Borys Levyts'kyi, contemporary USSR

1959 book "Executed Renaissance" 1000 pages

Juliusz Mieroszewski, ULB, geopolitics