Ukrainian Renews Criticism That Led to His Jailing in 1973

A leading Ukrainian nationalist, jailed in the early 1970s for his protests over the “Russification” of the Ukraine, returned to the attack Tuesday, asserting in an article in the Soviet Communist Party’s leading journal that the Ukrainian culture is being squeezed into extinction by the present Soviet system.

Ivan Dzyuba, one of the most prominent figures in the generation of dissident intellectuals who emerged two decades ago, argues in the latest issue of the party journal Kommunist that the continued pressure on Ukrainian and other non-Russian cultures only encourages a strong backlash of anti-Soviet nationalism, putting the country’s political unity at risk.

Dzyuba’s article, reprinted from a Ukrainian newspaper by Kommunist as one of the best political commentaries of 1988, not only underscores the party leadership’s concern over resurgent nationalism around the Soviet Union as a serious threat to the country’s political integrity but supports party efforts to find workable compromises to deal with those tensions.

Vadim A. Medvedev, chairman of the party’s ideological commission, had called senior party officials from around the country to a conference in Moscow on Monday to discuss the resurgent nationalism and inter-ethnic tensions.

Neither problem should be regarded as a consequence of perestroika , President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s broad program of political, economic and social restructuring, Medvedev said, apparently countering widespread criticism of the reforms on these grounds.

“Democratization and glasnost (political openness) had only brought into the light the old problems that had been accumulating for decades because they were neglected and swept under the rug instead of being detected and solved,” the official news agency Tass quoted Medvedev as telling the conference.

“Many party committee and ideological workers today still do not analyze thoroughly the processes and tendencies in this sphere of relations, and do not take timely measures on the outstanding problems.”

While Dzyuba, a literary critic, restricts his argument in Kommunist to language, literature, theater and other arts, the points he makes are the same as those that he documented in his 1965 book “Internationalism or Russification?”

The Russian language more than ever dominates politics, science and even culture in the Ukraine, he writes in Kommunist, and the disappearance of Ukrainian, a related but quite distinct Slavic language, means an inevitable change in the way that Ukrainians think and act.

“When whole sections of the people do not use the Ukrainian language, this is a colossal impoverishment of spoken Ukrainian as a living language,” he says. “It limits its intellectual and spiritual potential and, in the final analysis, it castrates Ukrainian national culture.”

The substitution of Russian for Ukrainian in politics and the social sciences has an even greater impact, Dzyuba says. “Political life at all levels is not conducted in Ukrainian, not to speak of mass political education . . . . All this has led to a significant weakening of the political element in our national culture.”

Soviet economic and social centralization has brought “the emasculation of the real power of local governments, the dying out of popular cultural initiatives and the decline of folk handicrafts.” Ukrainian science has declined with the replacement of Ukrainian by Russian as the language of scientific journals. Literature and drama have similarly been diminished.

Dzyuba makes careful, balanced points, avoiding the flamboyant language that won him the reputation as one of the most fiery Ukrainian nationalists two decades ago--a man whose speeches, according to official press attacks on him at the time, threatened to inflame political passions across the Ukraine.

But the points are precisely those he made in broader form in his book, and Dzyuba makes clear his conviction that the fundamental issue is the same and that the best approach is that laid down by V.I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, who envisioned a federal system of socialist republics based on national territories such as the Ukraine.

A controversial figure, Dzyuba, who is now 57, was arrested in April, 1972, convicted in a closed trial 11 months later and sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation.” He was hailed even by his critics within the dissident movement as a symbol of the Ukrainian opposition.

Dzyuba was suddenly released in November, 1973, suffering from acute tuberculosis, after reportedly recanting while in the custody of the KGB, the Soviet security police.

Accepting a pardon from the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament, he said his book reflected “a deeply erroneous understanding” of the Soviet Union’s ethnic policies and that he intended to write a new book that would “come out against the ideology of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism,” Tass reported at the time. That new book has never appeared.

Dzyuba’s reappearance now on not only the Ukrainian but the national political scene shows again how far the Communist Party leadership has gone under Gorbachev in adopting the positions of many of the older generation of dissidents, such as the nuclear physicist and human rights advocate Andrei D. Sakharov, the historian Roy A. Medvedev and others.

But it also follows a surge of Ukrainian nationalism, which has the party leadership worried. Environmental rallies over the last six months have repeatedly turned into broader political protests. New popular front organizations are being organized in several parts of the Ukraine. And dissident leaders, some like Dzyuba from the 1960s and 1970s, are moving into the fore again.