As might have been expected, the growth of the Soviet space program and the military-industrial complex did little for the well-being of the population, which in the early 1960s again found itself on the verge of famine. The immediate cause of food shortages was a number of droughts that hit Soviet agriculture. This time, instead of exporting grain as in 1932 and 1933 and in 1946 and 1947, the government decided to buy grain abroad, avoiding a repetition of the disasters of those years. It was a marked departure from Stalin’s times. Khrushchev tried to improve the plight of the peasants and the productivity of collective farms by dramatically raising purchase prices for agricultural products (the price for grain increased sevenfold). He also reduced the individual plots of collective farmers by half, believing that this would free them from extra effort at home and leave more time and energy for work on the collective farms.
But Khrushchev’s well-intentioned policies did not bring the results he had hoped for. He continued to dictate what the collective farms should cultivate and how, promoting the increased production of corn, which could not and did not grow in the places designated by the party apparatchiks in Moscow. His attempt to provide the peasants with more time to relax undermined the production of agricultural products on individual lots. Between 1958 and 1962, the number of domestic animals in individual ownership decreased by more than half, from 22 million to 10 million. The reforms that were supposed to increase productivity and improve living standards in the village made products much more expensive in the cities, where prices for butter went up by 50 percent and meat by 25 percent. Many city dwellers recalled the 1950s as a paradise lost. The peasants preferred the 1960s.
In October 1964, when the members of Khrushchev’s inner circle, including his Ukrainian protégés Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny, removed him from power in a palace coup, few Soviet citizens had anything good to say about one of the Soviet Union’s greatest reformers. They took full advantage, however, of the opportunity provided by his de-Stalinization policies to complain publicly about their ousted leader and his economic initiatives, which had left store shelves empty and driven prices for agricultural products through the roof.
The new leaders, who had arranged the coup partly out of fear that Khrushchev would blame them for economic difficulties and remove them from power, decided to play it safe. They returned to the centralized model of the Soviet economy created in the 1930s by abolishing regional economic councils and reinstating all-union ministries in Moscow as the main governing bodies of the Soviet economy. But they left in place the relatively high purchase prices for agricultural products, turning agriculture from a source of revenue, as in Stalin’s times, into an economic black hole that demanded ever new subsidies. The living conditions of collective farmers, which had never been easy, improved somewhat, but their productivity did not; moreover, the new leaders never reinstated the original sizes of individual plots and continued to suppress personal initiative in the agricultural sector. Like Khrushchev, they made it an official goal to improve living standards for the population but feared the power of private ownership and private initiative.
The ouster of Khrushchev and his replacement as party leader by a less ideologically motivated Leonid Brezhnev led to the scaling down of his “communism tomorrow” propaganda campaign. It also brought about the reinstatement of Stalin-era controls on public debate and a return to political repression. The new leadership signaled the change, of course, by arresting and putting on trial Andrei Siniavsky and Yulii Daniel—two writers who published their works in the West and stood accused of anti-Soviet activities. The arrests came in the fall of 1965, a year after Khrushchev’s dismissal. In early 1966 the two intellectuals were sentenced to seven and five years of hard labor, respectively. The trial marked the end of the Khrushchev thaw.
In Ukraine, arrests began a few months earlier, in the summer of 1965. The KGB targeted young intellectuals in Kyiv and Lviv who had begun their literary and cultural activities during the thaw. An early activist of the Ukrainian dissident movement, Yevhen Sverstiuk, later characterized it as essentially cultural and driven by “youthful idealism . . . a search for truth and honesty . . . rejection, resistance, and opposition to official literature.” While concerned with the fate of the Ukrainian nation and its culture, young intellectuals presented their arguments in Marxist-Leninist terms, pushing the limits of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and “return to Leninism” campaigns. That was especially true of one of the first samvydav (Russian: samizdat, or self-published) texts of the Ukrainian dissident movement, titled Internationalism or Russification? Written soon after the first arrests of Ukrainian dissidents in 1965 by the young literary critic Ivan Dziuba, the treatise argued that under Stalin Soviet nationality policy had lost its Leninist bearings, rejected internationalism, and become hostage to Russian chauvinism.
Despite the growing political rigidity of the regime and its increased intolerance toward any form of opposition, the “Khrushchev thaw” did not end in Ukraine with the first arrests of young intellectuals and continued in some respects until the early 1970s. This was certainly true of the revival of national communism, which found a strong supporter in Petro Shelest, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and a member of the all-union Politburo. The son of peasants from the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine, he had joined the party in the 1920s. Like the national communists of that era (one of whom, Mykola Skrypnyk, was not only rehabilitated but also celebrated in Ukraine in the 1960s), Shelest believed that his main task was not to follow orders from Moscow but to promote the economic development of Ukraine and support its culture. The Ukrainian language was under ever-increasing pressure from Russian: the number of students in Ukrainian-language schools had been falling since the prewar years, with the proportion of students in Russian schools increasing from 14 percent in 1939 to 25 percent in 1955 and to more than 30 percent in 1962.
These figures disturbed Petro Shelest, who presided over the formation of a new type of Ukrainian identity that took pride in the republic’s role in defeating German aggression and in its enhanced status in the union, combining elements of loyalty to the socialist experiment with local patriotism and celebration of Ukrainian history and culture. This new identity was an amalgam of the Soviet identity formed in the 1920s and the national identity that had taken shape in interwar Poland, Romania, and, to some extent, Transcarpathia. While dominant, the Soviet component had to adjust and become more culturally Ukrainian and self-assertive than it would otherwise have been.
The political situation in Moscow, which somewhat resembled that of the 1920s, helped Shelest’s return to the ideas of national communism and his ability to pursue them long after the ouster of Khrushchev. A number of political cliques were fighting for control of the party and government, and the support of Ukrainian party cadres was as essential in Moscow in the 1960s as it had been in the 1920s. Shelest was only too happy to trade support for the Brezhnev group, which was competing with cadres led by former KGB head Aleksandr Shelepin, for limited Ukrainian political and cultural autonomy. The informal deal came to an end in 1972 when Brezhnev, having marginalized Shelepin, decided to move against Shelest. The latter was transferred to Moscow in May 1972 and, while still a member of the Moscow Politburo, accused of nationalist deviations on the basis of his book O Ukraine, Our Soviet Land, which was full of pride in Ukrainian history and the republic’s achievements under socialism.
Brezhnev replaced Shelest with his own loyalist, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who came from Brezhnev’s native Dnipropetrovsk region. The Dnipropetrovsk faction was pushing aside other Ukrainian cadres in Moscow and Kyiv and taking ever greater control of the Soviet party and state machine. Shelest’s departure from Ukraine was followed by a purge of his loyalists and an attack on Ukrainian intellectuals. Ivan Dziuba, author of the “national communist” Internationalism or Russification?, was sentenced to five years in labor camp and five years of internal e
xile for the work he had written back in 1965. Purged from institutions of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were Mykhailo Braichevsky and scores of other historians and literary scholars working on the pre-1917 history of Ukraine, especially the “nationalistic” Cossack era. The KGB was catching up on work it had been unable to complete in Ukraine under Petro Shelest. But repressions could do only so much and last only so long. The next time the Ukrainian party elites and Ukrainian intellectuals established a common front against Moscow, it would no longer be under the slogan of a return to Leninist ideals.
chapter 25
Good Bye, Lenin!
On November 15, 1982, the citizens of Ukraine, along with their counterparts in other republics of the Soviet Union, were glued to their television screens. All channels were transmitting a report from Moscow: the leaders of the Soviet Union, representatives of numerous foreign countries and international organizations, and tens of thousands of Muscovites were gathered in Red Square to bid farewell to Leonid Brezhnev, a native of Ukraine who had ruled the world superpower for eighteen long years. Having been chronically ill for a considerable period, he had died in his sleep a few days earlier. Many television viewers who had known no other leader found it hard to believe that “Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, the indefatigable fighter for peace throughout the world,” as official propaganda hailed him, was gone. His regime of septuagenarians had frozen upward mobility in Soviet society, disappointed all hopes for change, and seemed able to stop time. The operational term was “stability.” Soon the Brezhnev era would become known as the period of stagnation.
In Ukraine, in the course of the two decades from 1966 to 1985, the annual industrial growth rate had decreased from 8.4 to 3.5 percent; in agriculture, which had never done well, it fell from 3.2 to 0.5 percent. Those were the official numbers, which did not mean much in an era of falsified reports. The reality was even grimmer. The Soviet Union was becoming ever more dependent on hard currency from the sale of oil and gas abroad. In the early 1970s, while Soviet and Western engineers were busy constructing pipelines to bring gas to Europe from Siberia and central Asia, Ukrainian gas from the Dashava and Shebelynka fields was taken away from domestic consumers and shipped to central Europe to bring in hard currency. With its gas fields depleted, Ukraine would in time become a gas-importing country.
Khrushchev’s promise to the Soviet people that they would live under communism never materialized, and the regime’s propagandists had completely forgotten it. The standard of living was in free fall, slowed only by high oil prices on the world markets. By the time of Brezhnev’s death, cynicism among both the elites and the general population with regard not only to communism but even to “developed socialism”—the term that replaced communism as the definition of the Soviet social order—had reached an all-time high. As Brezhnev’s casket was lowered into a freshly dug grave near the Kremlin wall, the clocks on the Kremlin towers struck another hour, and the guns fired salvos signaling the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. It would bring an attempt at radical reform, dramatic economic decline, and the political fragmentation of the mighty Soviet Union—a process in which Ukraine would lead the way toward its own independence and that of less decisive Soviet republics.
Among the members of the Politburo who gathered on the podium of the Lenin mausoleum to deliver eulogies for the deceased Brezhnev, one man stood out from the rest. Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the silver-haired party boss of Ukraine, remained hatless on that cold November day in a show of respect. A client of Brezhnev’s for most of his career, Shcherbytsky had special reason to grieve. Before Brezhnev’s unexpected death, there had been a rumor in the halls of the Kremlin that at the forthcoming plenum of the Central Committee he would step down and transfer his powers to Shcherbytsky, ensuring the continuing preeminence of the Dnipropetrovsk faction in the country’s leadership. Shcherbytsky, a native of that region, had been the party boss of Dnipropetrovsk before coming to Kyiv. But Brezhnev died before the plenum took place. The new party leader, former KGB chief Yurii Andropov, had nothing to do with the Dnipropetrovsk clique and would soon go after Brezhnev’s cronies for corruption.
After the funeral, Shcherbytsky would go back to Ukraine and dig in there, trying to survive the uncertain times. In good health at sixty-four, he was a youngster among the members of the Politburo. His immediate competitors were older and in poor condition. Besides, during his years at the helm of the Ukrainian party machine, Shcherbytsky had managed to establish a loyal clientele. He survived Andropov, who died in December 1984, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, who passed away in March 1985. But his chances of rising to the top in Moscow were now a thing of the past. The partnership between the Russian and Ukrainian elites established by Nikita Khrushchev and cemented by Brezhnev was all but gone. The energetic new leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in March 1985, had no ties to the Ukrainian party machine. The son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, Gorbachev grew up in the North Caucasus—a territory with a mixed Russian and Ukrainian population—and learned Ukrainian folk songs as a child. But he was first and foremost a Soviet patriot with no special attachment to any republic except Russia. He saw the client pyramids created by Brezhnev’s allies in the republics as a major threat to his own position and to the reform program that he launched soon after coming to power
The conveyor that had brought Ukrainian cadres to Moscow for the previous thirty years soon stopped functioning. Gorbachev was bringing in new people from the Russian regions. Among them was his future nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. In December 1986, Gorbachev violated the unofficial agreement between the center and the republics that had existed since Stalin’s death—the party boss in charge of each republic had to be a local belonging to the titular nationality. Gorbachev “parachuted” an ethnic Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, into Kazakhstan to replace a Brezhnev loyalist, the ethnic Kazakh Dinmukhamed Konayev. The appointment of Kolbin, a product (like Yeltsin) of the Sverdlovsk (currently Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals) party machine who had no ties with Kazakhstan and had never worked there, brought Kazakh students into the streets in the first nationalist riot in the postwar history of the USSR.
The rift between the new leadership in Moscow and the leaders of Ukraine came to the fore soon after the worst technological disaster in world history—the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located less than seventy miles north of Kyiv—hit Ukraine. The idea of bringing nuclear energy to Ukraine belonged to Ukrainian scientists and economists; Petro Shelest, who wanted to create new sources of electrical energy for the rapidly developing Ukrainian economy, had lobbied for it in the 1960s, during his tenure as party boss of the republic. By the time the Chernobyl nuclear power station went online in 1977, Ukrainian intellectuals, including one of the leading lights of the sixties generation, Ivan Drach, were welcoming the arrival of the nuclear age in their country. For Drach and other Ukrainian patriots, Chernobyl represented a step toward the modernization of Ukraine. He and other enthusiasts of nuclearization failed to notice, however, that the project was run from Moscow, with most of the power plant’s skilled personnel and management coming from outside Ukraine. The republic was getting electrical energy but had little control over what was going at the plant, which, like all Soviet nuclear facilities, and indeed most of Ukraine’s industrial enterprises, was under the jurisdiction of all-union ministries. The plant itself and the accident that occurred there became known to the world under the Russian spelling of the name of the nearest city—Chernobyl, not Chornobyl.
When on the night of April 26, 1986, the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl power station exploded as a result of a turbine test that went wrong, the Ukrainian leaders suddenly realized how little control they had over their own destinies and that of their republic. Some Ukrainian officials were invited to join the central government commission dealing with the consequences of the accident but had little influence there, finding themselves
obliged to follow instructions from Moscow and its representatives at the site. They organized the resettlement of those dwelling in a thirty-kilometer zone around the station but were not allowed to inform the population of the republic about the scope of the accident and the threat that it posed to the health of their fellow citizens. The limits of the republican authorities’ power over the destiny of Ukraine became crystal-clear on the morning of May 1, 1986, when the winds changed direction and, instead of blowing north and west, turned south, bringing radioactive clouds to the capital of Ukraine. Given the quickly changing radiological situation in a city of more than 2 million people, the Ukrainian authorities tried to convince Moscow to cancel a planned parade marking International Workers’ Day. They failed.
As party organizers brought columns of students and workers to downtown Kyiv to begin the parade on the morning of May 1, one man was conspicuously missing from the group of republican leaders: Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. For the first time in his long career, he was running late for the May Day parade. When his limousine finally reached Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street and the focal point of the parade, the Ukrainian party leaders saw a clearly upset Shcherbytsky. “He told me: You will put your party card on the table if you bungle the parade,” said the Ukrainian party boss to his aides. No one doubted the identity of the unnamed “he”—only one person in the country, Mikhail Gorbachev, was in a position to threaten Shcherbytsky with expulsion from the party. Despite the rapidly increasing radiation level, Gorbachev ordered his Ukrainian underlings to carry on as usual in order to show the country and the world that the situation was under control and that the Chernobyl explosion presented no danger to the health of the population. Shcherbytsky and other party leaders knew otherwise but felt they had no choice other than to follow the orders from Moscow. The parade went on as scheduled. They could only shorten it from four hours to two.
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