The Ukrainian 1960s in Names
Authors: Любов Дрофань  
Published: December 2018

The circle of the Sixties, which was never homogeneous, included artists from different fields, such as writers, artists, composers, actors and directors, as well as physicians, physicists, educators, librarians, philologists, economists, and lawyers. The purpose of this study is to expand the range of names of those individuals who stood in the defense of national self-affirmation, to supplement the known facts by forgotten or inaccessible material, create generalizations and evaluate the material in terms of objectivity and impartiality. For this purpose, various materials, in particular little-known correspondence which remains in handwritten form within the fund's institutions, are also subjected to scholarly study, as well as autobiographical memoirs, legal documents, declassified party archives under the heading "Secret", testimonies of eyewitnesses, and documentary lectures. Particular attention is merited by the diary of Peter Shelest, whose mask, as an official Communist Party figure of the day who was forced to justify the Moscow-propaganda position of the right from the highest rostrum, concealed a man with democratic views who was in favor of the Ukrainian-democratic movement, sympathized with the artists and the general Ukrainian elite, was loyal to the opposition, and cared for national economic interests, the thorough study of untapped pages of the past, and Ukrainianization in the field of education.The movement of the 1960s in Ukraine was extremely variegated and heterogeneous, and it is not possible to unite all its representatives into a single whole. But for all the heterogeneity and complete contradictions of the era, they shared political, economic and national conditions in which the promise of freedom — creative, and, consequently, personal — resounded. Moreover, this freedom even had a chronological range — from the period of the "thaw", that is, the XXth Congress of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union), after the report of Nikita Khrushchev on the decadence of the cult, to the introduction of tanks into a democratic and rebellious Prague on August 20-21, 1968, which marked the end of democracy and revival. Artists, resorting to self-sacrifice, striving for the individual expression of the inner being in their own visual and sensual world, feeling the delicious taste and natural need for expression, came forward, first of all, in words, against the social prison environment, ideological restrictions, threats and outright terror, utopian models of "everything for the good of man ", a brutal bourgeoisie and a provincial routine. This inevitably led to social conflicts and neuroses. Unlike the opposition in other countries at this period, the Ukrainian citizen body was also characterized by the accentuation of the national question, which the party leaders tried to erase from the agenda in every way, according to the "general plan" from the time of the empire, completely levelling the nation. The use of mass repressions and psychiatric "sweepers", in opposition to the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and deportation into the harsh regime's camps, caused a storm of protests — open and hidden. Now is the time to abandon the dusty histories on the bookshelves and study the Samvydav (Samizdat) publications which are now being read as important documents of the recent era