Not a Party Journal, but a Ukrainian Journal

After the end of World War II, Ukrainian émigrés outside the Soviet Union had to rebuild from scratch their cultural circles and institutions. Still in the camps where Ukrainians were kept as “displaced people,” those efforts gave birth to the Artistic Ukrainian Movement (MUR) and some early magazines such as Arka, which was published between 1947 and 1948 (Maruniak Reference Maruniak1985; Stefanowska Reference Stefanowska2013). As Myroslav Shkandrij pointed out, MUR was

The MUR group was able to lay the groundwork for the independent activity of émigré intellectuals in the Ukrainian diaspora. They believed that culture was one of the essential elements constituting a genuine nation and that it should develop independently of the wishes and needs of opposing political groups of Ukrainians in the Western world.

These aspirations found expression first in the literary pages of Suchasna Ukraïna (Contemporary Ukraine), published beginning in 1951, and later in the monthly Ukraïns’ka Literaturna Hazeta (Ukrainian literary journal), first published in July 1955. Ukraïns’ka Literaturna Hazeta’s main editor, Ivan Koshelivets, reiterated the libertarian aspiration of the monthly journal in the editorial that opened the first issue:

The first issue of Suchasnist’ appeared in January 1961 as the fusion of the two previous publications Suchasna Ukraïna and Ukraïns’ka Literaturna Hazeta. It is no surprise that, when Koshelivets was able to establish a new monthly journal which would include the two previous ones, the editorial in the first issue stated that the new journal would deal with culture in a broad sense—that is, including politics—and would not print news like a newspaper, but comments and analyses for “the fight for the preservation of the national substance of the Ukrainian people” (Vid redaktsii 1961, 3). The editorial board declared that they did not have common political beliefs and that they would publish articles selected for their intellectual value and not for their political belonging: “it will not be a party journal, but a Ukrainian journal” (Vid redaktsii 1961, 3).

Suchasnist’ was published in Ukrainian in Munich by an editorial board that included members from Germany (Volodymyr Stakhiv and Koshelivets), France (Kyrylo Mytrovych), and the USA (Bohdan Kravtsiv and Bohdan Boychuk). The journal was published by the Ukrainische Gesellschaft für Auslandsstudien, directed by Ivan Hryn’okh and strictly tied to the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (ZPUHVR). Despite this clear connection with a political association, Suchasnist’ did not exclusively represent the positions of the ZPUHVR but provided a forum for a wide range of opinions. This was quite probably also due to the fact that Suchasnist’ was partly funded, through the ZPUHVR, by a secret program of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as has been revealed by recently declassified documents. These CIA files unfortunately regard only the period starting from 1970, but one can nevertheless find in them a lot of information on Suchasnist’ in general and the previous years. The key figure in managing this relationship with the CIA was, as ascertained by Per Rudling, Mykola Ledeb’, who contributed actively in the debate analyzed in this article (Rudling Reference Rudling2017, 160–162).

According to the CIA, Suchasnist’ was “designed to appeal to Ukrainian intellectuals both in the Soviet Union and in the West” and it carried

In the years after its foundation, Suchasnist’ distinguished itself for the high cultural level of its articles and its fair political impartiality, though many articles leaned toward moderately liberal views. Its solid reputation is confirmed by Thomas Prymak who wrote that this journal’s “prestige was firmly established outside Ukrainian circles by the fact that it usually reflected a general democratic point of view, while including various shades of opinion from liberal to conservative within its circle of contributors” (Reference Prymak2015, 221). The extremely high intellectual level of the journal was noticed by CIA agents who noted that “its scholarly appearance and approach—esoteric at times—could use some leavening. More illustrations—sparse at present—light prose and political humor would spice the content, and could sharpen the message on occasion, without violating the intellectual tone.”Footnote ² For these reasons, during the 1960s, Suchasnist’ represented the most prestigious tribune in the intellectual and political debate within the Ukrainian emigration (Luckij Reference Luckyj1985) and hosted some of the most insightful contributions to the debate on the relationship of the Ukrainian diaspora with the Ukrainian SSR.

Two Distinct Viewpoints

To fully understand the meaning of the debate on Ukrainian statehood, one must keep in mind that it developed within the broader debate on the attitude of Western countries toward the Socialist bloc. Between 1961 (the year “a peaceful engagement” was evoked by Zbigniew Brzezinski and William Griffith) and 1966, the debate on the peaceful coexistence of the two blocs was the focus of discussions on foreign policy in the USA. Later, the debate moved to Western Europe, where the German Ostpolitik emerged successfully, while the US administration revised its détente policy (Hanhimäki Reference Hanhimäki2010, 207–212). Moreover, although the political activity of the Ukrainian SSR was confined to the Mission to the General Assembly of the United Nations, since 1960 Soviet Ukraine had intensified its propaganda toward diaspora Ukrainians: Soviet Ukraine founded an Association for Cultural Relations with Ukrainians Abroad (also known as the Ukraina Society), which collaborated with the pro-Communist organizations in the West and began publishing Ukrainian- and English-language brochures and two tabloids (Visti z Ukraïny and News from Ukraine) specifically targeting the Ukrainian diaspora (Motyl Reference Motyl1982, 66–67). Pro-Soviet Ukrainian organizations in Canada and the USA started to host a variety of dance troupes and musical ensembles from Soviet Ukraine, which were a symbolic recognition of their solidarity with their original socialist homeland. One should not overestimate the success of these initiatives, because, as Vic Satzewich points out, despite the financial help from Moscow, pro-Soviet Ukrainian organizations in the West went through an unrestrainable decline throughout the 1960s and 1970s, due to both the postwar economic prosperity in the capitalist world and the actions of nationalist anti-Soviet Ukrainian groups (Satzewich 2002, 112–114).

A reaction from non-Communist Ukrainian organizations had nonetheless to be discussed and put in place. Many authors participated in the discussion about the role of the Ukrainian emigration in the fight for national liberation in Suchasnist’: Ivan Maystrenko, Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Volodymyr Stachiv, Bohdan Kravtsiv, and Pavlo Chernov (Roman Szporluk). However, relatively few contributors specifically reflected on the link between Ukrainian statehood and international politics, and on the role émigré Ukrainians should play in the rapprochement between the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR. The most prolific author in this field was Myroslav Prokop: born in Przemyśl in 1913, he was a lawyer and university professor between the two world wars. Arrested by the Polish government for being a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), during World War II he was very active in the Ukrainian press and organizations. After the war, he was one of the leaders of the ZPUHVR and worked in the Prolog Research Company.Footnote ³

The articles that Prokop wrote in the first half of the 1960s linked the Ukrainian question with the global movement of decolonization. Just as other peoples in Africa and Asia were victoriously struggling to liberate themselves from the captivity of European empires, the Ukrainian people were supposed to struggle against Moscow’s imperialism. The reference to colonialism was one of the favorites of the Ukrainian emigration because the Soviet Union supported anticolonial movements all around the world and was therefore accused of contradicting its own principles when it came to its own empire. Prokop addressed the question of colonialism and Russian-Ukrainian relations in a very original way: in an article published in June 1961, he stressed that Soviet power found many allies also among the captive nations (Ukrainian, Georgians, etc.), who contributed to the conservation of the Soviet yoke. As some Ukrainians too were responsible for the enslavement of Ukraine, not all Russians could be accused of being supporters of Great Russian Chauvinism. Summarizing the movement for the liberation of Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century, he wrote:

According to Prokop, even toward the end of World War II “the Ukrainian and Russian anti-communist circles” looked for an alliance against the Soviet regime, but without success. Despite its captive status during the decades under the Kremlin’s control:

As the international scenario did not seem to include a fast dissolution of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s link with Russia, Prokop was convinced that the only solution leading to Ukrainian statehood was “to be found in the consciousness of both peoples and by the authentic representatives of common interests” (1961, 56). As the forces leading to the decolonization of the Soviet Union were destined to prevail, Prokop wished for an intensified cooperation with other captive nations, like Belarusians and Poles, and even with the Russians, which included elements who were willing to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukrainians against the ruling system of the Soviet Union. Prokop explicitly attacked those circles of the Ukrainian emigration that believed that all Russians were imperialist nationalists, and stated, “exposing Russian chauvinism, we must also fight against chauvinist jinxes in our backyard” (1961, 59). Though in this article Prokop was unable to concretely indicate a solution for Ukrainian independence and for the role the Ukrainian emigration should play in it, he stated that a solution would come only from a careful consideration of the forces at work in the international arena and from choosing the right allies without posing nationalistic vetoes.

This collaborative vision was attacked by the more traditionally nationalistic part of the Ukrainian emigration: the different political evaluations are evident in an article entitled “Ukrainian Foreign Policy from the Viewpoint of an Independent Power” by Roman Rakhmannyi. Roman, whose real surname was Oliynyk, was born in 1918 in L’viv, where he was studying at university when World War II broke out. A member of OUN, he was very active as a journalist, a profession that he resumed after the war, first while living in Germany and later in Canada. Rakhmannyi was a member of the editorial board of the nationalist journal Homin Ukraïny but also of more moderate publications like Suchasnist’ itself from 1964 (Khomiak Reference Khomiak1999, 28). Nonetheless there is no doubt that he represented a more radical position, as the title of his article would suggest. Like his opponent Prokop, Rakhmannyi also recognized the existence of some sort of Ukrainian statehood in Soviet Ukraine, though this recognition seemed to be a tactical move more than a sincere evaluation:

According to Rakhmannyi, it was the sacred duty of the Ukrainian emigration to fight for a Ukrainian state: only outside Soviet Ukraine were Ukrainians free and therefore able to design and enforce a real foreign policy, even before the creation of an independent state.

Rakhmannyi then indulged in an interesting overview of Ukrainian history and the past attempts at building a Ukrainian state: in his opinion, during both the First and Second World Wars, the political leadership made the mistake of trusting foreign allies who in the end were not real supporters of Ukrainian independence. In the lines about World War II, Rakhmannyi utterly condemned the experience of the Waffen SS Division “Galicia” as the most evident example of this kind of mistake. Rakhmannyi was convinced that Ukrainians in the emigration should elaborate their own foreign policy regardless of any alliance; they would thus show their strength and perhaps gain some sincere allies. In this interpretation, the society living in Soviet Ukraine was seen as a passive element, mainly waiting for a liberation that would come from abroad at the hands of the emigration. Despite the absence of real Ukrainian statehood in Soviet Ukraine, Rakhmannyi, quoting Vyacheslav Lypynsky, claimed that in the international political arena it was better to preserve some form of Ukrainian statehood, “even in its more official aspects,” as a means of preserving the unity of Ukrainian lands:

As we can see from analyzing these two articles, in the Ukrainian community there were two opposed factions: using Wsevolod Isajiw’s classification of Ukrainian diaspora political organizations, it is appropriate to say that this debate saw an opposition between “nationalists” and “liberal-nationalists” (Isajiw Reference Isajiw2010, 295–297). The latter, despite condemning Soviet imperialism, favorably evaluated social development in Soviet Ukraine and were looking for allies in the international arena. The former did not consider the Ukrainian SSR a real example of a Ukrainian state and acknowledged its existence only for tactical reasons; moreover, they aspired to place the Ukrainian question at the center of international politics on their own, without subordinating Ukrainian independence to the foreign policy goals of one of the two superpowers. However, these differentiations must be taken with caution, as the Ukrainians of the diaspora divided themselves into a myriad of different political organizations, especially of religious affliation (the Ukrainian Uniate Church). These religious associations in part eventually joined forces with the liberal-nationalists (Isajiw Reference Isajiw2014, 255–256). However, as we shall see later, all the different factions were independent, and only a vague form of coordination was found in the late 1960s.

Scandal at Rutgers University

The different evaluations in international politics were reflected by a contrast in the question of the possible collaborations with Soviet institutions offered by the climate of relatively peaceful coexistence. Though both factions understood that the Soviet Union would use this rapprochement to expand the reach of its agents and to exploit opportunities for propaganda in the West, those who positively evaluated the developments in the Ukrainian SSR were happy to finally have an opportunity to get in contact with their original motherland. Rakhmannyi’s faction thought instead that contact should be avoided and that the Soviets should be offered no opportunity to address the Western public. This difference came to a head in one of the harshest moments of friction, occasioned by a public debate at Rutgers University on April 8, 1964. The local Ukrainian Students Association invited a member of the Permanent Mission of the Ukrainian SSR to the United Nations, Yuri Kochubey, to deliver a speech and answer questions about the role of Ukraine in the Soviet Union. The invitation caused an aggressive reaction by the opponents of contact with Soviet representatives: while various publications attacked the event as an occasion of Soviet propaganda in the USA, the Federation of Ukrainian Students Associations of America declared it a violation of its statute. Because of the polemic, the president of the Rutgers University Ukrainian Students Association resigned, but the rest of the association refused to cancel the event, supported by Taras Hunczak, who was then a professor of history and had been chosen to moderate the event. The meeting took place despite organized protests by Ukrainian American demonstrators, who were removed by a policeman. As reported by a sympathetic article published in the journal Svoboda, the meeting turned out to be a demonstration of the ineptitude of the Soviet speaker and his arguments, but its opponents cried foul and denounced what they called “treason” by a part of the emigration (Slynyk Reference Slynyk1964, 1,4).

Suchasnist’ entrusted Daria Rebet with commenting on the case.Footnote ⁴ Her article is a heartfelt defense of the meeting. She points out that, as it was organized, the conference actually turned out to be a defeat for Soviet propaganda, because the organizers had been able, with this very conference, to attack the USSR and inform non-Ukrainian students about the real conditions of Soviet Ukraine. Rebet condemned the opponents of the event as obscurantists and ignorant, explaining that the new generations of the Ukrainian emigration were naturally interested in their original homeland:

According to Rebet, it was therefore better to organize and plan encounters with the culture of the original land than to leave it in the hands of the Soviet Union. One must admit that Rebet had been particularly perspicacious in imagining the future evolution of the feelings of young American Ukrainian students: between the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, the second generation of the third wave of migration would be strongly influenced by the 1968 student movement and the so-called New Left. In the 1970s, young Ukrainian students in both Canada and the USA became strongly anti-Soviet, but starting from leftist positions, often Trotskyist, and they aimed to link the Ukrainian cause to other causes of liberation such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. However, the analysis of these developments deserves a specific treatment that cannot be included in this article.

One of the reasons for the great controversy the event at Rutgers touched off was that it involved an official representative of Soviet Ukrainian diplomacy: during the first half of the 1960s the USA and USSR were discussing the possibility of opening new consulates and some rumors circulated about the possible opening of a Ukrainian consulate in America. Quite understandably, this would have posed the question of how the Ukrainian emigration would react and the two above-mentioned factions had diametrically opposed opinions on the matter. In the meantime, the development of a new generation of Ukrainian dissent, particularly of the intellectuals and artists known as shistdesiatnyky, represented an additional element of complexity in this already heated debate.

Lobbying in Defense of Dissent

One of the first to address the question of how to deal with the new forms of dissent in Soviet Ukraine was Mykola Lebed’, who had been one of Stepan Bandera’s closest advisors during the war.Footnote ⁵ Lebed’ begins his contribution with a serious condemnation of Ukrainian National Communism: “at the time of the Ukrainian national revolution and [of the creation of] a state, Ukrainian national-communists weakened the front of the struggle for Ukrainian state independence” (1965, 77). In spite of this primordial mistake, Lebed’ noted that over the last decade in Soviet Ukraine the desire for individual freedom had grown, while the awe toward power had decreased. This movement of opposition was growing especially in the field of culture and artistic expression, but also touched the country’s economy and civil life. According to Lebed’, the Ukrainian emigration was experiencing some difficulties in understanding this new movement: “very often, we do not value the people and the opposition these people make in almost every area of life enough, or sometimes we even overestimate it and write more often about ‘revolutionary processes’ or directly about ‘Ukrainian nationalists’ such ‘as we here’” (1965, 80). But the new generation of dissenters in Soviet Ukraine was completely different from nationalists abroad: they grew up under Stalin, believed in Communism, and looked with skepticism at the West and its society. Despite all that, they were animated by an authentic Ukrainian patriotism, as demonstrated by the verses of Vasyl’ Symonenko.

What Soviet Ukraine lacked in order to realize a national revolution was political leadership, because the elite of the Communist party was subordinated to Moscow. Yet, noted Lebed’, “When the goal remains unchanged, method and means change according to the advisability and possibilities of success” (Reference Lebed’1965, 83). To explain how to collaborate with this new form of dissent in Soviet Ukraine, Lebed’ examined the actions of the Ukrainian emigration in the previous crucial moments of Ukrainian history: after claiming the righteousness of the OUN’s actions during World War II, he condemned the inability of the Ukrainian emigration to put the Ukrainian question on the winner’s agenda after both the First and Second World Wars. As in the current situation, it was unthinkable that the dissenters would have risen in revolt against the Soviet power; the better way to help this movement was to fight against the artificial isolation that the USSR had built around Ukraine and that the dissenters also wanted to dissolve. Since the international situation was not determined by the Ukrainian emigration, what the emigration could do, following the example of the Vatican, was to exploit the opportunities offered by peaceful coexistence in order to spread its ideas and build a network of contacts in Ukraine.

Lebed’ acknowledged that the emigration knew too little about dissent in Ukraine, but he had no doubt that only by cooperating with it would the fight for Ukrainian statehood be successful.

If Lebed’s considerations were general and seemed not to be directed at anyone in particular, Prokop named names. In an article published in August 1966, he precisely located the weaknesses of the Ukrainian emigration directly attacking the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and its leader Lev Dobriansky. Though acknowledging that Dobriansky had been a wonderful builder of consensus toward the Ukrainian cause during his first mandate as president of UCCA in 1949–1954, Prokop asserted that, after his second election in 1962,

Prokop condemned Dobriansky’s decision to try to influence the formation of all US foreign policy, subordinating it to the goal of Ukrainian independence, instead of accepting US foreign policy as a matter of fact but lobbying the American government in order to draw attention to the Ukrainian cause. Moreover, Dobriansky had openly and violently condemned Lyndon Johnson’s East-West bridge building policy, because it constituted an unforgivable compromise with enemies like Leonid Brezhnev. According to Prokop, Dobriansky had so alienated the American president, demonstrating that he was unable to understand that Johnson’s real task was “to use the political, economic, scholarly, cultural and other contacts between the countries of the two systems to abruptly activate the ‘export’ of bourgeois ideology” (1966, 91). Prokop went on with a comparison between the attitudes of UCCA and of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) toward Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainian Canadians had understood that building relations with Soviet Ukraine was a question of the international prestige of the Ukrainian cause as a whole, and they had been able to achieve the support of the Canadian government even in their actions against the Soviet Union. The UCCA, on the other hand, was isolated in its refusal of dialogue with the USSR, which was therefore able to develop its cooperation with the USA to the detriment of Ukraine.Footnote ⁷ In his conclusions, Prokop affirmed that “when there is no independent Ukrainian state, the actions of the free Ukrainians [abroad] serve as a surrogate for Ukrainian foreign policy” (1966, 105) and therefore the UCCA, in its decisions regarding international politics, should include more points of view and not exclusively those of one party, and rebuild its relationship with the White House and the State Department. Finally, the UCCA should develop contacts with Soviet Ukraine in order to understand how to concretely help Soviet Ukrainians in their fight for a Ukrainian state.

Dobriansky’s hegemony within the American Ukrainian community and the general favor with which Ukrainian Americans looked to the Republican Party was also due to the latter’s particular ethnic policy and propaganda: in the 1960s, the Republican Party had developed a network of “Nationalities Sections” to involve ethnic groups from Central and Eastern Europe in the party life. Ukrainians and Latvians played an important role in organizing electoral campaigns and this ensured a greater grip of the Republican Party on the electorate of Ukrainian origin. Prokop’s analysis was nevertheless right, as the structure of these “Nationalities Sections” had been imagined just to give the impression that ethnic groups would exercise a stronger influence on the Party, but without granting any real way to participate in the formulation of Republican policies in any field (Zake and Gormley Reference Zake and Gorley2010).

Fighting for Ukrainian Statehood

In the following months and years, piling on Prokop’s accusations, more articles on apparently different topics continued to attack those who opposed contact with Soviet Ukraine. Andriy KaryiFootnote ⁸ in December 1967 stressed once more the need to develop and expand the study of Ukrainian history and culture in Western universities. Karyi’s affirmations were an implicit accusation of the leadership of the Ukrainian emigration, unable to popularize the Ukrainian cause: according to then-recent social polls, American students still believed that Ukraine was an invention of German propaganda. Moreover, Karyi claimed that the efforts of the Ukrainian emigration should not be directed at the institutionalization of Ukrainian studies, but rather at a general reform of the study of Russian history; as epitomized by this label, when studying Russian or Soviet history, Western students and scholars were induced to think that the subject of their study was actually Russia and that the other peoples were somehow subgroups of or included in a bigger Russian whole. A university course named “History of Russia” should become “History of the Peoples of the Soviet Union” and, as Karyi put it in a quite postmodernist way, the subtended theory should be “a historical concept of anti-colonialism, which would oppose the historical concept of Russian imperialism and colonialism” (Karyi Reference Karyi1967, 86).

In February 1968, Lebed’ published a new article entirely dedicated to the Ukrainian intellectual dissenters, the so-called shistdesiatnyky (sixtiers): this was a group of “non-conformist” intellectuals, mainly born in the 1930s and entirely brought up in the Soviet Union. Starting from the early 1950s, on one hand, they looked for new forms of artistic expression and scientific research; on the other hand, they wanted to contribute to the efforts to reform the USSR during the Thaw (Fürst, Jones, and Morrissey Reference Fürst, Juliane and Morrissey2008). They were in favor of a return to the principles of Leninism and, in the Ukrainian case, they also believed that Lenin was the first supporter of an independent Ukrainian national culture. Ukrainian shistdesiatnyky worked for Ukrainization of all spheres of cultural and social life in Soviet Ukraine and, in the first half of the 1960s, they could count on the support of a part of the Communist leadership (Bellezza Reference Bellezza2010). The first repression of these free-thinking intellectuals occurred in 1965, after Brezhnev’s rise to power, but they continued to overtly claim a right to Ukrainize Ukrainian society until January 1972, when a well-organized repression definitely silenced them (Kasianov Reference Kasianov1995). It is, however, understandable that their role as public intellectuals openly supporting a renaissance of Ukrainian culture in Soviet Ukraine made some Ukrainians in the diaspora believe that the Ukraine SSR could become a genuine Ukrainian national state. The Ukrainian shistdesiatnyky, in fact, did not think of themselves as dissenters, but as the best product of Ukrainian Soviet culture.

The task of Lebed’s piece was to illustrate that the shistdesiatnyky were struggling for Ukrainian statehood. It started with a sharp summary of their origins and goals:

The struggle started by the shistdesiatnyky had gained consensus among the political and cultural circles as well as among the wider Ukrainian population, who were struggling for the complete realization of Ukrainian statehood. Lebed’ stressed that these Ukrainian activists were struggling for the status of Ukrainian as a state language, for the establishment of independent international relations between Ukraine and the outside world, and for the institution of a republican state budget independent from the wider budget of the Soviet Union. According to Lebed’, “parallel to the struggle for state rights in Ukraine goes the battle for obtaining and widening civil and personal freedoms” (1968, 119) and the fact that this battle was conducted overtly and with legal means corroborated the cause of Ukrainian statehood. There was therefore no doubt that “the policy of Ukrainian emigration in diaspora should tend to the maximum assistance and support of these new processes of national renaissance, that are occurring in Ukraine” (Lebed’ Reference Lebed’1968, 120). Lebed’ enthusiastically embraced and supported the cause of the shistdesiatnyky in Ukraine to the point of subordinating the political activity of the emigration to the backing of the social processes in Soviet Ukraine.

It is possible to understand some of the reasons for this enthusiasm if one considers that 1968 was the year that the Ukrainian cause finally conquered worldwide attention. Not only were Ivan Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification? and The Chornovil Papers (1968) published in English translation, but the case of the imprisonment of the journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, first reported by Toronto Telegram, became a global scandal (Dzyuba 1968).Footnote ⁹ Yet not all of the Ukrainian emigration agreed with this political turn: in June 1968, Rakhmannyi published an article whose meaning was clear from the title itself, “For What Flag? Reflections on Woe from Wit in Ukraine and Abroad.” Rakhmannyi’s target was the enthusiasm caused by the most famous of Chornovil’s writings, which was named after Griboedov’s comedy. The article started with differentiating the allegedly Ukrainian renaissance from other episodes of discontent toward Communism in Eastern Europe. For Rakhmannyi, the Ukrainian renaissance had none of the revolutionary characters of the ferment in Czechoslovakia or Romania: for example, the Ukrainian leaders of the Communist Party had no intention of acting against Moscow and were agents of Russian imperialism. Moreover, with even more serious repercussions for the Ukrainian cause, the young Ukrainian intellectuals praised by a part of the emigration still believed in Marxism-Leninism:

Rakhmannyi affirms that the political platform of these young intellectuals, precisely because they were Marxists, was “minimalistic” and that it only partially addressed the question of “the great prison of states, which is called USSR” (1968, 110). According to Rakhmannyi, the reforms supported by the shistdesiatnyky would not grant Ukraine full statehood, but only a minimalistic cultural-territorial autonomy, which would vilify the real nature of the Ukrainian nation. It would have been like:

Rakhmannyi concludes by affirming that the real woe from wit of the Ukrainian situation was being unable to see the narrow-mindedness of these freethinkers and the intellectual fault of their ideology. Therefore, the emigration had no reason for making efforts to reconnect with Soviet Ukraine.

From the Ukrainian People’s Republic to a Ukrainian Soviet Ukraine in Three World Congresses

The repercussions of this heated debate for the policy-making processes within the international organizations of the Ukrainian emigration were probably few. This was not due to the political insignificance of the discussion in the pages of Suchasnist’. As Prokop himself reports in his account of the First World Congress of Free Ukrainians (which took place in New York from November 12–19, 1967), the greatest political outcome of this event was to have gathered almost all Ukrainian organizations from around the world and to have shown, for the first time in history, some sort of unity. All Ukrainians living outside the Socialist bloc agreed that the first problem of the so-called emigration was their internal division and their inability to find a common platform for action. Aided by the example of unity provided by the three Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Ukrainian Churches, which all participated in the Congress, the rest of the Ukrainian community found the strength to minimize differences and agree on a lowest common denominator. A shared ideological reference point had been found in the “great days of the Ukrainian national-democratic revolution of 1917 and in the ideals of the Ukrainian People’s Republic,” (Prokop Reference Prokop1968, 73) whose inheritance was cherished by all.Footnote ¹⁰ Although there had been no real political debate and despite the fact that the radical nationalists continued to struggle to conquer all the offices of the new international organization, Prokop asserted that some sort of unity was the first indispensable achievement for any further political activity. The observers of the World Congress of Free Ukrainian Students did not share Prokop’s satisfaction, however. This group pointed out that the Congress had been a political podium for political activists who had finished their education many years before: in this case, the audience, which mainly consisted of Ukrainian students coming from New York and surrounding areas, perceived a strong estrangement from the Congress (Khomiak 1968a).

If the intellectual and political debate had been frozen by the question of unity in 1968, from 1969 the increasing repressions of the dissenters in Soviet Ukraine monopolized the attention of the Ukrainian emigration: even in the pages of Suchasnist’ the articles dedicated to the international question left room for the chronicles of the “pogrom of the intellectuals” occurring in Soviet Ukraine (the discussion would resume after 1972 but with a different character). But the seeds planted by the 1960s debate were nonetheless destined to bear important fruits: on January 21, 1971, a Congress of Ukrainian Free Political Thinking took place in Munich, organized by three members of the Ukrainian National Council:Footnote ¹¹ the Ukrainian Revolutionary-Democratic Party, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Abroad (OUN-Z), and the Ukrainian National-Democratic Union. The task of the meeting was to redefine the role and the activities of the Ukrainian emigration in the light of the reflections of the shistdesiatnyky.

The debaters at the conference agreed on three main points: first, the Ukrainian emigration should understand that the shistdesiatnyky were not crypto-nationalists who were exploiting the question of human rights to foster their national goal, but sincere democrats and therefore that the diaspora should embrace the cause of human rights sincerely as well. Second, Ukrainians abroad must understand that there was no Ukraine other than Soviet Ukraine and therefore collaboration with Soviet authorities was inescapable. Writer and publicist Vasyl’ Hryshko said that a “real liberation policy” with the task of an “independent unified statehood” would necessarily be a battle in Soviet Ukraine: “This position of struggle is first of all in favor of making Ukraine (concretely: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) Ukrainian, and the Soviet Union democratic. Of course, this is not our final goal yet, but it is a step in that direction” (Reference Hryshko1972, 17, emphasis in original).Footnote ¹² Though acknowledging that a Socialist independent Ukraine (such as perhaps the shistdesiatnyky would have wished for) was not the task of the Ukrainian emigration, Hryshko affirmed that fighting for an independent Ukrainian state within the USSR was the first inescapable step toward further liberation. The emigration should find a way to collaborate with the forces in mainland Ukraine and not ignore or isolate them. Third, the Congress reiterated that it was necessary to drop the insistence on Ukrainian nationalism and on Russophobia in order to help the Russian democratic forces in their struggle against the Soviet regime. Mykhailo Dobrians’kyi states, “Our first step in helping Russian democrats is understanding that Russophobia corroborates the Great-Russian chauvinists and weakens Russian democrats” (Reference Dobrians’kyi1972, 22).Footnote ¹³

In the beginning, the reaction of the rest of the Ukrainian emigration, and especially of the most nationalistic groups, was almost completely negative; Ukrainian newspapers and magazines in the USA and Canada condemned the initiative as treason, even those who seemed more sympathetic to a relaunch of the activities of the Ukrainian emigration. Nonetheless, the strategy of embracing the cause of human rights slowly gained consensus among the various associations of the Ukrainian emigration. In a two-year period, even the most nationalistic organizations would join this strategy: the turning point was the second World Congress of Free Ukrainians organized in Toronto from November 1–4, 1973. The decision of the Congress, approved even by the OUN-R of Yaroslav Stets’ko, was to establish an office common to all organizations in New York, whose task was to contribute to the struggle for the defense of human rights in the Soviet Union. This location was chosen because New York was the seat of the United Nations (SKVU 1986, 149–152; on the New York office, 359–360). Therefore, by December 1973, even the most right-wing nationalist organizations of the Ukrainian emigration, those that had opposed collaboration with any subject coming from Soviet Ukraine, decided to embrace the cause of human rights and to join the struggle led by the Ukrainian dissent. They did it partially as a tactical move, but in fact the opinions expressed by writers like Prokop and Lebed’ had been recognized as the most effective way of organizing the struggle for an independent Ukrainian state.

Conclusion: One-way Bridges

The Soviet reaction to this debate and the final change of tactic by the Ukrainian emigration was surprisingly favorable: in the reports written by the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Shelest and later Shcherbyts’kyi), the Soviet diplomats considered this new disposition toward Soviet Ukraine as yielding to the Soviet regime. The minister of Foreign Affairs, Georgyi Shevel’, suggested increasing the opportunities for encounters and collaboration between the Ukrainians in the West and selected members of the Ukrainian Soviet intelligentsia. Shevel’ also suggested intensifying propaganda in favor of the Soviet Union through the Ukrainian associations linked to the Soviet Embassy in Canada and the USA, and to start a Ukrainian language program for those Canadian and American children of Ukrainian origins whose parents wanted them to learn their ancestral language.Footnote ¹⁴

At the beginning of the 1970s, therefore, the Soviet leadership of Ukraine did not consider the recent turn of the Ukrainian diaspora toward human rights as a threat, but as an opportunity to conquer more supporters among the youngest generations of the Ukrainian émigré communities. Just like those who, in the Ukrainian emigration, used to oppose contact with Soviet Ukraine, the Soviets did not consider the bridge building policy as a danger and thought that it would work only one way, from the Soviet Union to the West and not vice versa. The signing of the Helsinki accords in 1975 would put an end to this misconception.

In fact, after the repression of the Ukrainian intellectuals in 1972, the Ukrainians of the diaspora, although disagreeing politically on the interpretation of the Soviet Ukrainian state, found practical unity in the attempt to help their persecuted compatriots. In the 1970s, some of the shistdesiatnyky, like Leonid Pliushch or Valentyn Moroz, became the subject of major international public campaigns: both were released and found refuge in the West. This did not mean that the various factions of Ukrainian emigration acted in a coordinated way; however, they all recognized the importance of internal dissent in Soviet Ukraine and elected it as their main interlocutor in international relations, opposed to the official foreign relations of the Ukrainian SSR.