Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1980

J. Frank Harrison taught at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

This is a detailed study, using original sources, which shows the rise and fall of national aspirations in the second largest of the fifteen republics which make up the USSR — the Ukraine.

The author shows that the modern tendency in the Ukraine, certainly since Shcherbytsky became party boss there in 1972, has been to repress national feeling. Great Russian chauvinism, fearing opposition and disunity from that half of the Soviet population who are not Russians, has been promoted to the disadvantage of the minority nationalities. Like other ethnic minorities in the USSR, the Ukrainians seem to have been given the choice of either integrating with the Russians or becoming second-class citizens. Meanwhile, those who openly challenge this line are harassed or arrested by the KGB.

We see also that this denial of national aspirations, expressed particularly in the promotion of the Ukrainian language in literature and education, has not always been the case. When Khrushchev was promoting destalinization and economic decentralization in the fifties and early sixties, there was a broadening of republican autonomy in political matters, and a stressing of the uniqueness and richness of the Ukrainian language and cultural tradition. With Shelest as party boss in the Ukraine (1963-1972), the Ukrainian Communist Party seems to have promoted Soviet patriotism without repressing Ukrainian national pride (expressed in literary and cultural activities). However, with Brezhnev the centralist dominant in Moscow, the Russifiers gradually gained the upper hand — along with those who wanted to keep the lid down on free expression.

This is a rich book, dealing with that great variety of policies and policy-changes that have occurred in the USSR since the death of Stalin — from the particular perspective of Ukrainian politics and society. The prospective reader should be warned that a basic knowledge of Soviet power structures is a prerequisite to the proper appreciation of the information and analyses given here. Nevertheless, it is a fine book.