Unlikely Dissenters: Origins and Development of the Ukrainian Human Rights Movement from Khrushchev to Gorbachev

This project sheds new light on the origins and development of the Ukrainian dissent in the Soviet Union from the time of Khrushchev (in office 1953/54-1964) and until the USSR’s disintegration (1991). Interest among Western historians in the origins of Ukrainian dissent has been modest, even though Ukrainian intellectuals comprised almost half of the political prisoners in Soviet labor camps and established one of the largest dissident groups in the USSR. Those historians—both Western and in the post-Soviet Ukraine as well—viewed Ukrainian intellectuals as anti-Soviet activists who sought Ukraine’s secession from the USSR. This research shows how future dissidents’ criticism of the Soviet regime was actually in line with the views and policies shared by more progressive groups within the Soviet establishment during Khrushchev’s Thaw. Both sides envisioned the de-Stalinization course leading to a more open union with the constitutionally guaranteed rights and cultural freedom within national republics. My dissertation argues that the regime’s persecutions in the 1960s–80s, with its exceptional harshness in Ukraine, contributed to the radicalization of future Ukrainian dissidents. In this case, overt ‘imperial’ measures to shore up a uniform identity across different localities only served to create and buttress the varied, oppositional identities that the ‘empire’ sought to suppress.

My argument is based on the extensive personal materials of Ukrainian dissidents, their personal and official correspondence, interviews, and documents from KGB archives. Apart from published and manuscript materials, I interviewed ten former dissidents in Kyiv and Lviv. Utilizing sources both from the Soviet period and those produced retrospectively in post-1991 Ukraine, my research demonstrates how Ukrainian intellectuals of different backgrounds and dispositions to the Soviet regime, became one of the most dynamic and united dissident movements in the USSR. My project contributes to the studies of human rights by showing how Ukrainian dissidents advocated for their rights and protested the authorities’ abuses of power by relying on the Soviet constitution and Leninist teachings—not challenging them. This is the story of young intellectuals’ pursuit of personal and cultural freedom which inadvertently turned into anti-colonial resistance. My research depicts the relations between intelligentsia and the regime in which the former started viewing the latter as oppressive, imperial and unable to fulfill its promises in the 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation shows how decades of persecutions alienated these intellectuals from the regime and turned them into open dissidents. Despite composing a small minority of the Ukrainian postwar intelligentsia, dissident ideas did not vanish in prisons and camps but became mainstream during the late 1980s and in post-1991 independent Ukraine.